KILLED - Episode 5: The Neighbor

Episode Date: September 1, 2022

The original tale of a trusting patient and his manipulative psychiatrist (now starring Paul Rudd and Will Ferrell) gets shivved by the New York Times. Featuring Joe Nocera and Hugo Lindgren.To submit your KILLED story, visit www.KILLEDStories.com.

It's the summer of 2011, the New York Times magazine, pitch meeting. Staffers of all stripes gather around a wooden conference table to discuss story ideas for upcoming issues. The table is littered with notebooks and laptops, Mugi brand pencil cases and iced coffee sweating dangerously close to teetering piles of books and magazines. The walls lined with framed front pages from across American history, Pearl Harbor, 9-11,

the first black president, at a sense of gravity to the affair. I walked into a story meeting one afternoon at the magazine. I'd used to do that every once in a while. I'll just plop in and make my presence felt because that's the kind of guy I am. But for a veteran journalist like Joe Noceira, it felt a bit like waltzing into the gym on the first day of practice, senior year. Watch and learn, freshman. Joe was a long time business writer, who'd recently been moved over to the papers up at

desk, where he wrote a bi-weekly column about Wall Street, the SEC, and basically any chance he got, the business of sports. In 2007, he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his quote, piercing authoritative columns on business, often spotlighting misdeeds and flaws in corporate culture. His reputation was as a bullish reporter, one who looked after his colleagues, but didn't suffer fools. And on this muggy New York morning, Joe felt like stirring things up.

He'd been mulling a big idea, one that called for the kind of cinematic treatment that only the magazine, with its novella-scale word counts and glossy art treatments, could offer. So when the call went out, for editors to share story ideas for an upcoming issue, Joe raised his hand. It wasn't so much a pinch as it was what the lead would be like. The lead was more or less something like, you know, I bought this house in the Hamptons. And the guy next door was his famous New York psychiatrist. And he invited me to one of his parties. He had three every summer.

I didn't know that at the time. Went to one of his parties, stayed about an hour, so a doctor room, so a Richard kind, few other famous people. And then the shrink invited me and my wife to come over for a drink. So we did that, and it was very strange across between the lockers in Fellini. The walls were just full of photographs of Ike with O.J. Simpson, Ike with Crocschios,

Ike with Quiddit Alcro, who used to claim this patient, Anonana. Then Joe drops the twist to end all twists. Despite the a-list clientele and the pictures lining the walls, the fancy house in the Hamptons doesn't actually belong to the doctor. It belongs to his patient of many decades, Marty. A guy who up until this point, Joe had just assumed was the houseboy. My next line was, would you like to read a story about this?

There was a round of enthusiasm, the finalist. I just thought to myself, this is a story everybody in New York is going to want to read. Period and of story. End of story? Not even close. From Justine Harmon and Audio Chuck, this is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life. Episode 5. The Neighbor

Nearly a decade before the world ever hurt the name, Dr. Eik Hirschkopf, the stranger than fiction psychiatrist in Jono Serra's award-winning 2019 podcast, The Shrink Next Door. And well before Paul Rudd haze the shit out of his client Marty, played by Will Farrell in the Apple TV Plus show of the same name. The New York Times' Jono Sarah was in possession of something far more pure than some down the line Hollywood derivative. He had a good idea. But despite the performatively relaxed nature of pitch meetings, Fives at the New York

Times magazine hadn't been all that great. No one seemed to know what the papers newly installed executive editor Jill Abramsen wanted from the magazine. Print ads were down, and ink stained veterans were taking buyouts left and right. Probably one of the most culturally relevant efforts of the Times that year was a revealing documentary called Page One. All about how dire things felt aboard the SS Grey Lady. It was like everyone saw it. Iceberg right ahead, but just couldn't jump ship.

I think people really felt like we're doing this great stuff and we're just sinking and sinking. Those were the days when there were buyouts once a year. And I remember that I used to get a little bit of stock every year and people would ask me, what should I do with my stock? I had so little confidence in the future of the company that I always saw my stock first day I could possibly. Still, after Joe pitched his story

about a pedigree doctor who appeared to be brazenly committing malpractice in South Hampton, editors couldn't resist freeing up some resources. Maybe readers would like this. Maybe readers would like this. Maybe Jill would like this. The certain sections of the newspaper they would pay you extra if you wrote for them. And the magazine was one of those things. They advanced me $10,000.

The magazine. Joe was off to the races. I started looking into it. And you know, asking Marty, you know, what had happened these 27 years, how had this guy taken a hold of your brain, how had he turned you into his, basically, his man-server, which is really what it came down to. It was a once in a lifetime story. New-wanced, layered, deeply personal, a Jono Sarah's specialty.

I always want to hit the long ball for lack of a, you know, I want to, I always want to write stories that have impact. All my career, I've been like that. You know, he was a thing that was right next door. One of the reasons I really wanted to do it was because, you know, I've had there plenty of therapy in my life. And you're this guy telling this story about therapeutic abuse, and you just think to yourself, holy shit, what would I have done? This is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories

back to life. The first time I met Marty, he came over to my house to invite me to this party. And he said, hi, I'm Marty Markowitz. I work, I work for a very important New York psychiatrist. That's how we described that. I had this ability to figure out which of his patients would be vulnerable to manipulation and then move in for the kill. Over the course of nearly 30 years, during Thrice Weekly Therapy sessions, Dr. Hirschkopf convinced Marty to cut off ties with all family and friends

and inserted himself into every part of his patient's life. He had power of attorney over his estate, and an officer-level role at the Faber Company Marty took over from his parents. He even moved into Marty's Southampton home while Marty crashed in a guest room. At its most extreme, Marty was working for Ike as his personal assistant-slash-houseboy-slash-gofer, even typing up manuscripts for novels Ike hoped to one day publish. The bizarre, abusive, exploitative relationship might have gone on forever had Marty not realized while recuperating from hernia surgery, that the only person left in his life was Dr. Ike,

and Dr. Ike just so happened to be MIA. After three decades, the spell between patient and doctor was broken. As Marty saw it, not only did he have nothing to lose in telling Jonas eraich's story, Joe is his only hope. Dr. Hirschkopf was still practicing and advising other patients. By the time, you know, Marty got to meet the Statue of Limitations was running out and he didn't, he just didn't know that he had any other option. He got some really bad advice

from a lawyer who told him he didn't have a lawsuit, he didn't have any, that he wouldn't win a lawsuit. That turned out, that's actually total bullshit. There are lawyers who specialize in psychiatric malpractice and he would have won hands down. And the Department of Health seemed completely uninterested in doing anything. So here comes his journalist who lives next door and is ready to pounce because he smells a great story. He always viewed me as his instrument of revenge. Killed reached out to Marty,

who originally agreed to an interview and then very politely declined. Marty, if you're listening to this, I want my Blue Yeti USB microphone back. But back then, Marty was an open book. I interviewed him a bunch of times. I interviewed other people. I found other patients who had also been manipulated and my view of views by IKRSCOP to shrink. And believe it or not, I even got a 2R interview with IKIMSELF because he is a star flutter.

And at the time, I was a communist and the op-ed page in New York Times and I was he viewed me as a star. He loved writers. He especially loved writers and he was always inviting important writers to his pen dinner table that he bought every year with Marty's money on my neck. That's all on the story. So I work on the story through 2011 and it took two years. Joe followed the story like a bloodhound.

He even sat down with Ike for a two-hour interview, but the tape broke, which is literally every journalist worst nightmare. The reason he talked to me was because he is a narcissist and he assumed that he could talk me out of this story. And when he realized he couldn't, he went on the offensive and really started threatening lawyers and having all his friends write letters to Jill Abramson who was the editor of the Times at the time and Arthur Sosberger. The papers, longtime publisher and chairman of the company that owns it. I just kept going, go to long, and in our turn in some drafts, and they hired a fancy photographer to go to Marty's house

and take a photograph of him in front of the house, and photographs of him and his sister, and photographs of Marty with some of the evidence that he still had in this basement of his 27 years with I. After two years of dog-it reporting, Joe's 8,000-word piece about Dr. Eich Hirschkopf's nearly three-decade long-grift was scheduled to run as an August 2013 cover story. To Joe, the story wasn't just about a con man and his unwitting picked up.

It was a parable for anyone who has felt powerless. I had, at that point, undiagnosed manic to person, which had come to me really surprisingly late in life. I'd never had it till I was in my mid-50s. And I was thinking and the story was the only thing I was I was holding onto the story for dear life. This thing I thought the story was going to bail me out and make me okay. They closed the magazine on a Friday and the Wednesday two days before the closing the editor of the Times magazine called me and said, Joe, we're holding the story.

The magazine's editor Hugo Lindgren delivered the bad news. Hugo told me, as Jill Davidson, who is the editor of the paper at the time, said that it read too much like a New York magazine story and not enough like a New York time story. And by which he meant it was too much one guy versus another guy and not enough about what's the big picture about psychiatry and abusive psychiatry and you know with their abusive psychiatry. Where this story would kind of be folded into that. That's what they told me. In the words of Taylor Swift, Joe's editor Hugo remembers it all too well.

Well, parts of it. Yeah, there was just a blur of unpleasant meetings around that time. And I just, I would have this image of like, Jill having some manuscript in her hand at chute was saying not nice things about whether it was exactly that one or another one. It's like this sense memory of like, oh, here we go again. The reason I gave it to Jill Abramson was, you know, she didn't read all the cover stories. I mean, you know, we would send her stuff

if she wanted to read anything. She could read anything she wanted. Obviously, we would never keep anything from her. But it wasn't just a standard thing. Like, here's the cover story, you know, does this meet your approval? Because the whole system operated on trust. So we ran things that we thought were good. And sometimes we needed her input or wanted her input or or or or it was sensitive enough that, you know, we needed the full support of the newsroom of her, whatever it was. But in this case, I'm pretty sure that I gave it to her

because I thought she would like it. You know, I was really thinking she'd read it and be like, wow, like this is what I want in the magazine. No, and then turn that. Turn that that was not the case. So I just, I remember holding it and I have no need to defend her on any grounds, but, um, but I will say, you know, she reads a lot of stuff in her job. She's constantly

having to weigh in on a million different stories on many different subjects. If you were just in a negative frame of mind and concerned about other problems and thinking of like all the other and concerned about other problems and thinking of like all the other issues that were going on and you needed to find fault with this, you could, you know, like it's weird and one of the issues it has, right, and it is like the narrator problem. What if Joe had it wrong? Why was he so obsessed with his next door neighbor? A rich white guy pointing his finger at another rich white guy? I don't know. In this climate, what exactly is Joe's deal here? And what's your relationship to these people and how do you know these things and what are the legal

implications of making this pretty amazing charge against a person who had real stature in the world. There were definitely things to talk about in this story. And I mean, that in terms of like, you know, editor to editor, what's going on here, what's deal with this? Like, so in her mind, I assume those things just loomed way larger than maybe they should have. But they're genuine, you know?

Like they come from a real place of like, hey, I gotta protect New York Times from publishing things that cause trouble unnecessarily, right? And also, you know, the big thing about a story like this is like the stakes are pretty low. We're not talking about, you know, smuggling weapons into another country where there are lives at stake. This is like a very distilled, concentrated story that affects relatively few people.

It's not like there's some overwhelming need to get it into print or the world is, it's just a really good story with a lot of head scratching crazy aspects to it. And that's what, as you know, those are great. You look for those, you want those. But if you're in charge of an entire newspaper with all this other stuff, sometimes you'd be like, yeah, don't care. Like, okay, this guy's a bad guy.

I've killed a lot of stories, and it's always unpleasant, and you definitely try not to remember it. And it's just like sad, and people are angry with you, or whatever, it's just bad all the way around. And look, Joe's memory of this, because it was a much bigger deal in his life

than it was in mine, right? So there may be things that he is sure of that I don't see the same way. And I wouldn't get in an argument with him about that. I wouldn't be like, hey, no, Joe, it was really this way because I don't, I don't, I think go back through my emails and chart it all out and be like, okay, it happened this way, that way. And, and it was, it was definitely something that I cared about and wished it had gone a different way, but I, I didn't, it wasn't the end all be all for me the way

it was for him. Joe is not like a real bleeding heart. I mean, he might be now, I don't know, but he certainly was, he wasn't, you know, sitting in my office being like, Hugo, you got to understand. You know, Joseph, the tough old guy. For Hugo, it was just another unpleasant memory in a sea of unpleasant memories. Your story gets killed, you catch a little shrapnel, and you move on. All these things are based on a real level of trust. You know, like magazine journalism is got so many potential pitfalls and problems and people really do abuse the form a lot, right? So for successful stuff, you have to like have a real great level of trust between the writer, the editor, like all the people working on the fact checkers,

everybody, you know, the boss of the editor, all the people working on the fact checkers, everybody, you know, the boss of the whole enterprise, right? You need all those people to be like, well, we all have one clear objective that we all agree on. And in that environment, we did not have one clear objective we all agreed on. So something like Joe's story coming along, you know, it was kind of just, it was kind of collateral damage to somebody's other things. It wasn't just like, oh, a bad decision, an isolation. You know, like, it was a product of a whole situation.

But for Joe and for Marty, whose life literally depended on the story, the kill was catastrophic. This is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life. After the New York Times magazine killed his story, Jono Sarah filed away the manuscript for what he called the house next door. A few years later, he was taken off the op-ed desk and resigned to sports, a move some industry hawks viewed as a demotion. Jo would eventually leave the times

to work for Bloomberg News as an opinion columnist, but he never forgot about Marty Markowitz. What I know is that in the wake of the story, I sank into a depression. It took me a couple of months to pull out of it, at least. And when I felt better, I started making these phone calls. And I didn't find out some interesting stuff. But I just didn't have it in me anymore.

The moment it passed, And the moment it passed in the magazine too, you know, they had let the story go, and you know, they had moved on. Once the story was dead, I put it in my bottom door. Every once in a while, someone would come over to the house, and we'd be having drinks on the back porch and we'd start talking about Marty next door and I'd start telling the story and they would go holy shit so I'd pull it out of my drawer and I'd give it to them and they say oh my god this should be a movie I mean people were just always like bold over by this story I mean it is an unbelievable story. So we get to 2018, and I've shown it probably to 20 people at that point.

And my son, who's in his early 30s, he's an art director for streaming shows. So he calls me and he says, Dad, you need to listen to this podcast called Dirty John. And so I listen to Dirty John, and I call him back and say, it was a great podcast. Why did he want me to listen to it? And he said, because that is how you need to tell your story.

So I took it to Bloomberg and I had no idea that Bloomberg was actually interested at that point in doing a narrative podcast. Nor did I have any idea that Bloomberg was in negotiations with Wondering, the same company that did dirty job. From Bloomberg and Wondering, I'm Joe No Sarah, and this is the shrink next door. Marty Markowitz had his share of problems. Six years after it had flat lined, the story about an abusive doc in the Hamptons roared back to life in a new medium. I go into his office and we looked at each other and he said, okay, why are you here?

Marty liked Ike, and Ike, well. The shrink-next-door podcast launched on May 21st, 2019. Over the course of six episodes, Joe Wove, a riveting tale about how one of New York's most distinguished psychiatrists inserted himself so thoroughly into one of his patient's lives that the patient virtually became his slave. And he says, you know, I don't do that with everybody. Jo's friends were right. It was cinematic. Dr. Ike was a predator, a manipulator, a narcissist, an evil genius. He was valedictorian of his NYU med school class, and Marty, his vulnerable, thoroughly sympathetic victim.

And Marty wasn't the only former patient Joe had on the record. One woman says he forbade her to visit her dying mother on her deathbed. One woman says he forbade her to visit her dying mother on her deathbed. The shrink-next door was the number one podcast on iTunes for three straight weeks and has been downloaded over 35 million times. It was such a hit that within a month of its drop, a complaint Marty had filed with New York's Department of Health back in 2012. His last ditch effort to try to stop Dr. Hirschkopf from practicing after the time's peace was killed was all of a sudden

taken out of bureaucratic limbo. With the fire of a podcast lit underneath them, the agency swiftly filed charges against Dr. Eike Hirschkopf. When we were doing the podcast, Bloomberg, where I then were, wanted to better understanding of what had happened with the story at the times. Because they wanted to make sure that there wasn't anything untold or that I, you know, Marty and I had some kind of financial feel or that, you know, they just wanted to make sure it was clean.

So they called up some people from the time they called up Jill Labrumson and she said, I have no memory of this whatsoever, which I'm sure is true. Because, you know, if she were the editor of the New York Times, this is like a minor blip in the last 10 minutes. I emailed former Times editor Jill Averymson. She wrote me, quote, I've been asked about this before. I remember that Joe's personal dealings with the characters in the story were discussed, but my memory about this story is extremely hazy." Anyway, so they called some people and one of the things they got back, which of course I had never been told, was there was a sense that I wasn't objective enough about what had happened

and that maybe I was too close to Marty who I was sympathetic towards and who was my next door neighbor and I wasn't giving Ike a fair shake and Ike was as I said sending all these letters. As in letters to the newspapers editor and publisher threatening legal action from a renowned doctor with celebrity clients. I don't think the letters are the reason the story was killed, but I do think it created this extra level of caution. It's like if we're not 1,000% sure about this, let's not run it. And I feel like that's pretty much what happened.

It's the kind of story we can't get enough of these days. But back then, Joe says this story about a doctor royally gaslighting his own patient felt like an untested narrative. Too small, too subjective, to strange, not news exactly. It's a very different magazine and a very different newspaper than it was in 2011-2012. And I think the story would have had a much higher likelihood of running today than it did back in 2011. I think in retrospect, they always knew it was going to be dead. But they wanted

to break it to me gently. You know, I've been an editor. I know what it's like to say hard things to people. I don't have any bad feelings towards anybody over this, over this, over this, over this insight. I was going to say, incident, what a weird word over this. I don't even know what they call it, over this thing. It turned out that the podcast was exactly the right way to tell a story because, you know, I had a few of the

other patients' voices in the story and little grips and drabs, but when you hear them in the podcast and when you hear that woman, Jouguga, talk about how I cut her off from her mother and she didn't even say goodbye to her mother when she was dying and she didn't even sit shiva and how now this these were the greatest regrets of her life and I can, you know, basically force her to do all of this. When you hear her you know, basically forced her to do all of this. When you hear her almost crying, which she talks about that, it's heart-wrenching in a way that a magazine story could never replicate.

If it had been a weekly magazine, would I have been investigated by the Department of Health and lose a slice of it? Probably not. Some journalists get presidents to resign. Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, you know, get a sleazy, sleazy psychiatrist to lose his license? I've gotten so many, so many of his ex-patients, even people I didn't know when I was doing the podcast of Ritten to Me and said thank you. You know, that's a sad thing, is that it required a podcast to do this when Marty had been trying

to get them to investigate Ike for, you know, almost a decade. In April of last year, nearly 10 years after Jono Sarah first told his colleagues about the shady doctor taking advantage of his trusting patients. Dr. Ike Hirschkopf lost his license to practice medicine in New York State after a health department panel found he had committed several professional violations, including gross negligence and exercising undue influence on three individual patients.

According to the official findings by the Department of Health, Dr. Ike denied the allegations and throughout the proceedings, quote, showed little insight or remorse, often portraying himself as a victim of his own beneficence. He was fined only $10,000. The committee has determined that to protect the people of the state of New York, the respondents' license shall be revoked. Thank God we got the decision we did because we felt it was the only decision.

And so there was a bit of, you know, justice in this, or a lot of justice in this. And Marty, he's cool. I'm doing absolutely wonderfully. Yeah, life is very sweet to me these days. Marty now splits his time between Manhattan, the Southampton House he's hopefully saged and Thailand. He's in a relationship for the first time in nearly four decades.

Marty could not be happy. He's happy about what's happened with the shrink. He's happy that he was played by Rae Will Ferrell. I'm just excited that Ryan Gosling fell out. Look, there was a moment in the premiere when it was over and people were clapping. Paul Rudd and Will Farrow, who was standing next to each other about halfway up, pointed down at Marty, who then stood up and got a standing ovation. I tell Marty every once in a while, I said, Marty, you had a really shitty 27 years, but the last 10 have kind of made up for it. And not a lot

of journalists will say this, but having this story killed with the single best thing that ever happened to the story. The piece The New York Times effectively paid $10,000 to kill was eventually purchased for 1.25 million. According to public documents, Joe filed with the New York Superior Court just a week after we spoke. He alleged that Bloomberg fired him and then withheld advertising revenue. Bloomberg did not respond to Kills' request for comment. In March of this year, Joe stopped pursuing the case, telling me over email, I dropped it once it became clear that Bloomberg had zero interest in settling and wanted to drag

it out. The company had something I didn't. Money. But Joe's not down and out either. In his post-Bloomberg life, he's actually writing for the Times again. He wrote me, I hope I didn't piss all over them when I spoke to you. I always used to beat myself up because it took me three days to write the lead or four days to write the lead or a week to write the lead. It's like, oh my god, I'm wasting

all this time. But now I know when I take a week to write the lead is because my subconscious is outbinding the rest of the story. That's what's happening. Once I get the lead right, I know where I'm going to go for the rest of the thing, and I can actually write the rest of the story. Do you always have an ending in mind? No, I don't always, but sometimes the ending will come to me like halfway through. And then I go, I go right the ending immediately,

and then I go back and fill in to get to that point. I've been doing this for 40 plus years. So, I have a few tricks. I have a few tricks.