What Lisa Knew: The Truth and Lies of the Steinberg Case

by Joyce Johnson

"She was found in darkness - the bruised, comatose first-grader who would never wake up to tell anyone which of the two adults in the small, filthy Greenwich Village apartment had beaten her." On January 30 1989, Joel Steinberg was found guilty of first-degree manslaughter after a twelve-week, nationally televised trial in which his former lover, Hedda Nussbaum, was the star prosecution witness. In this book, Joyce Johnson examines the mysteries still surrounding Lisa Steinberg's death and also addresses the painful question of how she lived, in an account of what is known about her last days and hours, when no one acted to save her.

Genres: True Crime, Nonfiction, Crime, Biography, History

1 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Born Joyce Glassman to a Jewish family in Queens, New York, Joyce was raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, just around the corner from the apartment of William S. Burroughs and Joan Vollmer Burroughs. Allen Ginsberg and Kerouac were frequent visitors to Burroughs' apartment.

At the age of 13, Joyce rebelled against her controlling parents and began hanging out in Washington Square. She matriculated at Barnard College at 16, failing her graduation by one class. It was at Barnard that she became friends with Elise Cowen (briefly Allen Ginsberg's lover) who introduced her to the Beat circle. Ginsberg arranged for Glassman and Kerouac to meet on a blind date.

Joyce was married briefly to abstract painter James Johnson, who was killed in a motorcycle accident. From her second marriage to painter Peter Pinchbeck, which ended in divorce, came her son, Daniel Pinchbeck, also an author and co-founder of Open City literary magazine.

Since 1983 she has taught writing, primarily at Columbia University's MFA program, but also at the Breadloaf Writers Conference, the University of Vermont and New York University. In 1992 she received an NEA grant.

Reviews

[Sonia Gomes]

When officers answered an emergency call at Greenwich Village, New York, they barely could imagine what awaited them behind that closed door.
"Police!" Officer Daluise yelled, "Open up!"
A woman with a battered bruised face opened the door. A man came out of a darkened room carrying a naked child in his arms by the armpits, the little girl, unconscious, bruised and blue was Lisa Steinberg the adopted daughter of Joel Steinberg and Hedda Nussbaum.
On closer search of the filthy apartment, Officers found baby Michael tethered to a play pen. Lisa was brain dead when she was taken to the hospital, her body was covered with bruises, cuts,abrasions, it was apparent that she had been beaten repeatedly, in fact she had been lying on the bathroom floor bleeding for more than 10 hours. Both children were so filthy that the dirt had to be scrapped off them before they could be cleaned.
Closer investigations found that Joel Steinberg and Hedda Nussbaum sharing sadomasochistic games were cocaine addicts involved in pornography.
This was not a ghetto nor a shantytown, this was the house of an eminent lawyer and a former editor and writer of children’s books for Random House. The life they lived was so terrible it defies description and in this house lived two little children so abused, with nowhere to go and no one to turn to.
The pictures of evil we have in our minds are so benign,real evil is much deeper it is in us for we could not help little Lisa and left her in the care of two monsters.

[Allison · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had huge issues with this book. I went into it with a small degree of familiarity with the Steinberg case, and it did a good job of telling the story. However, the author clearly had an agenda: blaming Hedda Nussbaum for Lisa's death. Johnson clearly has no understanding of the physical and psychological effects of years of sustained abuse, and apparently made no effort to learn what those effects might be. I do not mean to say that Hedda was completely without guilt, but she was Joel Steinberg's victim. Johnson is so intent on describing what a despicable person she felt Nussbaum to be, that she almost entirely ignores the evidence that demonstrates Steinberg's guilt. She also completely ignores the psychological issues that Steinberg clearly had, namely that he is clearly a sociopath, and that at that time of Lisa's death, was abusing vast amounts of cocaine, which was having a profound impact on his mental health. Most offensive, however, is Johnson's constant attempts to suggest that Nussbaum was not only responsible for her own abuse, but that she enjoyed it.

Lisa Steinberg's death was a tragedy, and it exposed many defects in the child protection system at the time. One of the most horrifying and(morbidly) fascinating things about this case, was the psychology of Hedda Nussbaum, but Johnson just gets it wrong.

[Peacegal · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was unfamiliar with this bizarre criminal case until I picked up this book. I'm with another reviewer who wished to see images of the people involved; I ended up watching a documentary on the case just for this reason.

What observers may learn from this case of fatal child abuse is to never remain silent and take victimization seriously; so many people failed young Lisa along the way it was appalling.

I do think the author should have avoided trying to speculate what was going on in the Steinbergs' heads; I simply do not think this is possible in their irrational world of abuse and hard drug addiction.

[Aimee Massey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was by no means a pleasant or easy book to read, but it was extremely well-written and well-researched, and while the author does engage in a lot of speculation as to what the three main players in the crime might have thought or felt, nothing she proposes seems very far from the truth.
Some have complained that Johnson wanted to bring down Hedda Nussbaum right from the start, and she may have, but I also believe she was willing to give the woman a fair shot, and ultimately it's Hedda's own words and actions that shatter the carefully-cultivated image of her as a saintly, helpless victim, an image cultivated not so much by Hedda herself but by the many well-meaning advocates and activists who elevated her to tragic-heroine status.
Hedda reminds me very much of Karla Homolka, though Joel Steinberg is hardly Paul Bernardo. Both Homolka and Nussbaum were indisputably abused, but they were just as clearly active, even enthusiastic, participants in the abuse of others, and both were willing to play up their victim status in order to evade punishment for their crimes. Homolka's true nature surfaced only many years after she had been (lightly) sentenced, due to highly questionable tactics by her lawyers during the trial.
Johnson and others closely involved in the Steinberg case believed (at the time the book was written, 1990) that incriminating videotapes of Nussbaum and Lisa Steinberg are still out there somewhere. So far none have surfaced, but Nussbaum herself dropped hints, and other people associated with her and Joel Steinberg have mentioned them, and others were implicated but never charged with molesting Lisa.
Nussbaum has of course written her own memoir, many years after "What Lisa Knew" was published, but she has never truly accepted responsibility for Lisa's death. Throughout her life, even long before she met Steinberg, she was prone to angry outbursts, self-centeredness and a nearly blank personality that she molded to match the expectations of whoever happened to be paying her attention at the moment. This comes through loud and clear in Johnson's narrative and in the many interviews with friends and relatives of everyone involved.
The most disturbing aspect of the whole case is not even what happened to Lisa, though that's certainly terible enough; rather, it's the fact that many, many different people, at every point in her life, knew that there was something badly wrong in the household, and yet very few even attempted to do anything about it. Those few who did try to get help for Lisa were unsuccessful, yet they end up lumped together with those who chose to do nothing at all. And yet most of these passive observers were not evil or even immoral people. They were completely ordinary people like most of us want to believe ourselves to be.

[Katherine Addison · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the many sad things about Lisa Steinberg is that I'd never heard of her before. Her murder is yet another cause celebre that vanished overnight--all those Crimes of the Century that turn out not to be--the major difference in Lisa's case being that she was only six years old when she died in 1987, the victim of a combination of child abuse and child neglect. It's questionable, I suppose, whether her alleged parents (black-market adoption, and they never bothered to get the paperwork done to make it legal) meant for her to die, but one of them beat her to death and they both failed to call an ambulance for possibly as much as 12 hours.

Johnson's major point--aside from the general outrage at the way Lisa was treated and the way that all the adults around her seem to have been struck blind when it came to noticing egregious signs of neglect and abuse--is the way in which Hedda Nussbaum (Lisa's "mother") and her attorneys deployed a set of narratives and cultural beliefs, about mothers, about battered women, to simply shut down any line of questioning that wondered about Nussbaum's complicity--or agency--in Lisa's death. They put it all on Joel Steinberg; Nussbaum testified against him, and that, too, provided a very simple narrative schema, where her role as witness/victim of Steinberg's abuse (and I don't want to deny that Steinberg abused her; they may have had a BDSM relationship, but it was neither safe, nor sane, and while it started out consensual, I'm not sure it stayed that way) precluded her being an abuser herself. Johnson does not believe this narrative and goes to considerable, careful lengths to re-open those thorny questions. Her abhorrence of both Nussbaum and Steinberg comes through very clearly.

This is a very good, very sad book.

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is very obvious from the beginning of this book that the author is very anti-Hedda Nussbaum, so I hope this wasn't intended to be an unbiased account. It didn't bother me, though, since I have always had strong misgivings about Hedda and her role in Lisa Steinberg's life and death. The book was very interesting and gave me a lot to think about.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

So disturbing- hard one to read. I remember the story and at that time I was more sympathetic to Hedda now I think she should have served time.
Again we speak loudly about the value of a fetus than we do on behalf of living children! This book although written over 30 years reaffirms my belief in pro choice!

[Fishface · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a fascinating read, but I think the author took far too many liberties with the limited information we all have on Hedda Nussbaum. Over and over in here there are statements to tghe effect that "Hedda thought this" or "Hedda probably felt that" when we really have no way of knowing.

[Paige Belew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting case, a little hard to handle at times with details of the child abuse.

[Fannie ND · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book was kind of hard and long to read at some point. I think there's way too much details on the life of Hedda and Joel. A lot could have been skipped or writted in less depth and we could have understand the story and the personnality of those two. I also think that there were some irrelevant details on how the trial went and what did the jury do, think, etc. I think the author didn't go that much in depth about the case itself and what may have happened to Lisa. Or at least, there were not as much details on it as there were on Joel and Hedda's everyday lifes.

Beside that, it was a great book that shows how much people "failed" in helping Lisa, how a battered woman can be controlled in every aspect of her life and it did tell us *a bit* on how Lisa suffered during her life with those horrible parents.

[Erinn Aronson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Finally got this from Open Library. Very disappointing. While Johnson is solid on the facts of the Steinberg-Nusbaum case, it is clear that she has formed strong judgments of the those involved in the illegal adoption of Lisa Steinberg. Hedda is evil, jealous and happy that Lisa is a stand in for her long time lover's abuse. Joel is merely "disturbed" and a product of an abusive home. The two sets of biological mothers (Lisa and Mitchell) are savaged or given almost divine grace. Lisa's mother is a tough, smart young woman, agonized whether she should come forward, whereas Mitchell's mother is snobby, beautiful and treats the whole affair as an attention whoring opportunist. Even law enforcement doesn't escape Johnson's judgmental eye. Great book for facts, but nigh impossible to read past the bias

[Jo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Readable and interesting; becomes obvious quite early on that the author hates Hedda more than Joel, and is outraged about Hedda's plea deal. The book is basically what Hedda's prosecution argument would have been, if she'd been prosecuted. To make the argument, the author has to speculate a lot about what goes on in Hedda's head. So it's interesting, but I'm not sure it's true.

[Mariel González · Rating 3 out of 5]

No podría decir en realidad si me gustó o no el libro, me pareció simplemente espeluznante por imaginarme que una pequeña niña pudiera vivir todo como la pequeña Lisa, simplemente me rompió el corazón.

[Jessie Drew · Rating 2 out of 5]

1.5 stars ⭐️ This book was terrible. Idk what else to say. I wish it was the more comprehensive book about Lisa Steinberg that it had promised to be. If you’re curious about this case do not waste your time with this book.

[Adriana Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this over 25 years ago. Hardcore child / wife abuse case in NYC by a lawyer who beat his adopted daughter to death. Harsh.

[Kris Kizer · Rating 3 out of 5]

past read

[Salena Moffat · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm giving this 1 star not because the writing is bad, nor because the heartbreaking case deserves so small a rating, but because of the author's victim-blaming. Hedda Nussbaum was an abused woman for years. Culpable of her daughter's murder she most certainly was. But the author, on pg 346, says "Hadn't Hedda Nussbaum really always had options?"

NO she hadn't. Abused people are absolutely victims. Period. I am so sick of hearing "but she could've just left" or "but it's her choice to stay in the relationship." #DomesticViolence is SOLELY the fault of the abuser.

[Dawn Mackey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was interesting. I had never heard of this case - the main people involved were CRAZY. I wish the book had pictures, b/c I really wanted to know what they looked like - particularly I would have wanted to see pictures that were specifically referenced in the book. I enjoyed the details of the case and the parts analyzing how feminists and others viewed the mother either as victim or perpetrator. I can't believe both of them didn't get life sentences in jail.

[Lauren Childress]

A friend suggested I read this book. I was three years old when this little girl was murdered so I don't remember anything about the case. I found the book a very interesting read.

[Sarca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tells the true story of Lisa Steinberg, the six-year-old who was killed at the hands of her adoptive lawyer father and mother.

[Frances · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent True crime read! The ending leaves you wondering what the real story of what happened to Lisa was....

[Crystal · Rating 5 out of 5]

such a touching story

[Berchele · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sad story.