The definition of chutzpah: it’s someone else’s fault. Or some imaginary personality.
Chutzpah of the month # 1:
Diana Williamson, MD, 56, once lauded for her AIDS treatment work including the founding of an AIDS hospital, convicted of defrauding Medicaid out of $300,000 in part by writing about 11,000 phony prescriptions for painkillers (purchased with Medicaid tax dollars) peddled on the street. Williamson, who pleaded guilty, blamed “Nala,” one of her “multiple personalities,” for committing the crimes. Defense lawyer Jonathan Marks explained that Nala was “mischievous, irresponsible, reckless and, as we have just discovered, criminal.” Williamson added that Nala “committed these crimes without telling Diana or the other parts of me about them…. Perhaps it sounds incredible that a part of me could be doing something that the rest of me would not know about.” Just a hunch, but perhaps Williamson didn’t peddle all those pills (she may have taken more than a few herself). The myth of multiple personalities was debunked in the “review of the month” in issue # 67 of TAR.
Chutzpah of the month # 2:
Juanita Cunningham, who filed a wrongful death lawsuit in connection with a police shooting of her son, Samuel Thomas Cunningham III, two years ago, just as the two-year statute of limitations for initiating a civil action was expiring. Cunningham had already stabbed John Jennings and was slashing at his throat when Detective Lou Pasqualetti heard a drunken fight in process, investigated and looked through the front door of the apartment where the fight was occurring. In what Pasqualetti described as a “split-second” decision in a use-of-force report filed after the shooting, he shot Cunningham to save Jennings, whose neck Cunningham was in the process of slashing. Mrs. Cunningham claims her son’s civil rights were violated by the shooting and, though unemployed at the time, he was “strong and healthy at the time of his death and capable of earning a living.” In her lawsuit, she claims her grandson, 17 at the time of the shooting, lost “his parent and the monetary value of the life of his parent [and we] have lost the value of [Cunningham’s] advice, example, counsel and company, and all of the other intangible items of uncountable value that their loved one meant.” Yup, like an entire life on how not to act when the grandson grows up.