(Photo by Darren McCollester/Getty Images)
Are you caught up on the wild scandal swirling around Harvard Law professor Bruce Hay? If you haven’t, I’ll give you a minute to catch up — I’ll wait. Anyway, Hay is currently suspended from teaching at Harvard after he got embroiled with two women, Maria-Pia Shuman and Mischa Haider. Hay claims he was picked up by Shuman and that relationship — while he was still married to Jennifer Zacks — led to a paternity kerfuffle, confrontations with Shuman and Haider that led to the police being called, and Hay even says Shuman and Haider orchestrated a complex scheme where they moved his family’s stuff out of their house, created fake lease documents, and moved into the house themselves.
Now New York Magazine has a follow-up to that story where they’ve identified six other men who had strange interactions with a Frenchwoman they believe was Shuman, that reveal a pattern. According to the article, Shuman made a habit of trying to come on to men around the Harvard Law campus using the same pickup line that got Hay:
On Friday, April 17, 2015, a third-year Harvard Law School student named Jordan, who asked that we not use his last name, was walking down Massachusetts Avenue near the law school’s Wasserstein Hall late in the afternoon. (Shuman’s apartment was across the street from HLS.) Jordan says he was bound for the T to Boston to meet up with friends and see comedian Hannibal Buress perform when Shuman’s delivery of the “attractive” line caught him off guard. He said, “Thank you, I have a girlfriend” — which was true — and continued walking, only to find that she was following him, wanting to continue the conversation. She said, “I’m attached, too. Here’s my number if you change your mind.” She said she was only going to be in town for a few weeks, if he wanted to get together — no strings attached. Jordan brushed her off with another polite thank-you and continued on, even as she asked if he had somewhere to be. He says he was surprised by her persistence and told her, “Yes, I do,” and headed for the train. When he got to Boston, he immediately called a friend about the encounter. The friend confirmed their conversation to me via email, recalling it because it was so strange and, in part, because she was French and the friend and Jordan have a passion for Richard Linklater’s films about an American man’s longtime love affair with a Frenchwoman.
Other men that spoke with New York describe similar pickup stories. One additional law student even described a similar paternity story where Shuman claimed he was the father of her son, the same as she did with Hay. Though it should be noted none of the other tales that were dug up are nearly as intricate as Hay’s.
There’s also some background provided by friends of Shuman that tries to shed some light on why she and Haider do what they are alleged to do:
In fact, the friend says, Shuman always had a serious boyfriend. But it wasn’t until she met Haider that she became obsessed with men. “She changed when they became friends. I noticed in the last couple of years of knowing her that there was a serious preoccupation with men. I don’t know why — she had nice boyfriends, long-term relationships, and she was now suddenly single and she was out there trying to meet up with a lot of guys, with a use-them-and-abuse-them kind of feel to it,” says the friend. “She had never been like that before. I assumed it was like she was young, free, and single. She and Mischa were both very obsessed, something about going out and picking up men and finding hot men and wanting to hook up with men. It was just off.” After reading the New York story, the friend was reminded of one of their last conversations. “I remember she said, ‘I love corrupting these really Waspy Bostonian guys.’ The impression I got was, if she picked up a guy, told him he was really hot, went back and slept with him and then discarded him, she felt like, ‘I’m in control, I’m so powerful, I used him, I tossed him aside.’ She liked the idea of corrupting what looked like these innocent, nice guys.”
Looks like Hay was perfectly positioned to get caught up in Shuman’s games.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).