A criminal trial opened in New York last week that, for many in the city, has been hard to think about and impossible to stop thinking about. It has been five years since Yoselyn Ortega, a nanny for a family in Manhattan, stabbed to death two of her three charges, and the trial is to establish if she knew what she was doing. Ortega’s lawyers argue she is not guilty by reason of insanity.
In 2016, the case provided the basis for Leïla Slimani’s best-selling novel, titled Lullaby in the UK and The Perfect Nanny in the US, which opens with a scene of carnage in a Paris flat similar to the one Marina Krim encountered on returning home to her apartment in 2012 to find her children dead in the bath and their caregiver stabbing herself in the neck.
To read coverage of both the book and the original crime is to understand that this is not the story of one family’s tragedy but of the assumed relationship between two women, a dynamic in which many other women are implicated. Before the trial, prospective jurors were asked if they had ever hired a nanny, or themselves acted as caregivers, and many of those who said yes were dismissed. Prosecutors claimed Ortega was motivated by resentment of her employer – by which they meant Marina Krim, not her husband, Kevin.
Two years ago, when the New Yorker ran a piece about the incredibly tough lives of immigrant babysitters in New York, it was headlined “Mother For Hire”, a double meaning in which, once again, fathers in families that employ nannies were left blissfully unimplicated. Meanwhile, reviews of the Slimani novel described the horror of a nanny murdering her charges as “a working mother’s nightmare”.
What has been particularly striking are slips in the care taken to absolve Marina Krim of blame. She is entirely blameless; there is no suggestion she was an improper employer. Nonetheless, the judgments are there. “Though Ms Krim did not work outside the home, Mr Krim’s parents said, they wanted a nanny to help out.” This is a line from an early report in the New York Times and the “though” in that sentence is extraordinary. Marina Krim’s father-in-law also told a journalist that his son’s wife “didn’t have a nanny so she could go out and play tennis – not that there’s anything wrong with that”, but because three kids is a lot of work and she needed an extra pair of hands.
When Marina Krim testified last Friday, defence lawyers quizzed her about demands she made on the nanny, zeroing in on seemingly trivial domestic disputes until, after seven hours of testimony, she started to weep and said: “I’m sorry about this. I don’t understand. I don’t know what she was fishing for.”
The defence lawyers were fishing for blame, and it is a powerful temptation: without blame, what happened is too terrifyingly random to bear; and if we can’t blame Marina Krim for provoking her children’s murder, we will blame her for hiring a nanny in the first place.
• Emma Brockes is a New York-based columnist for the Guardian
