A Harvard Law professor who teaches a class on judgment wouldn’t seem like an obvious mark, would he?
Bruce Hay outside his home in Cambridge. Photo: Jeff Brown for New York Magazine It was just supposed to have been a quick Saturday-morning errand to buy picture hooks. On March 7, 2015, Harvard Law professor Bruce Hay, then 52, was in Tags Hardware in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near his home, when a young woman with long reddish-brown hair approached him to ask where she could find batteries.
By email, Hay and Shuman arranged to have coffee that afternoon, where they bonded over losing parents too young: His mother had died from breast cancer when she was 54; her father, whose prolific catalogue includes “Save the Last Dance” and “Viva Las Vegas,” had died from liver cancer in 1991, at 52, when Shuman was 8 years old.
Hay drove Shuman to the airport early that evening. For the next few weeks, as she traveled to London and Paris, she called and texted him daily — 102 calls that month, according to phone records. A few times, he asked if she would FaceTime or Skype with him, but she refused. He found her resistance strange, but he didn’t press the issue. By this point, she had begun declaring her love for him. “She told me that she never got involved with men and I was this big exception,” he says.
Whether Shuman knew it when she met him, she’d found the perfect mark in Bruce Hay, an authority on civil procedure who’d spent much of his life in the ivory tower. A child of two esteemed professors who divorced when he was 5, Hay had earned his degree from Harvard Law School and, though he leans left politically, briefly clerked for Antonin Scalia.
From left, Mischa Haider and Maria-Pia Shuman, photographed by Hay in 2017. Photo: Courtesy of Bruce Hay. From left, Mischa Haider and Maria-Pia Shuman, photographed by Hay in 2017. Photo: Courtesy of Bruce Hay. Six weeks after they broke off contact, Shuman called Hay to tell him she was pregnant with his baby. She hadn’t had sex with another man in the past year, she said. Hay was stunned; he hadn’t ejaculated during either of their encounters, a side effect of his medication.
They hadn’t been sexually involved since their encounter at the Sheraton Commander in April, but Shuman could be effusive, telling him repeatedly how much she loved him. Other times, their exchanges were tense. In one email, Shuman chastised him for not making himself available to see her. “I made arrangements with my nanny at the last minute to help with the children so I could come see you, and then called you several times in your office with no response,” she wrote.
Hay believed he’d identified a kindred spirit in Haider, so he was sensitive to her emotional state. They confided in each other about their depression and suicidal thoughts. Hay had been molested as a teenager, and he told Haider about the experience and the lingering trauma from it. Hay also struggled with drinking. He insists his friendship with Haider was more familial than romantic: “It wasn’t uncommon for us to say ‘I love you’ in texts. I just offered Mischa as much support as I could.
In the weeks leading up to the January due date, Hay used his publishing connections to help Haider pursue her writing. They began collaborating on projects. “I felt duty-bound to help this brilliant person blossom,” Hay says.
Meanwhile, Zacks had become suspicious about the nature of Hay’s relationship with his new friends. While they were in Paris, she could no longer ignore how consumed he was by the women. “There was anger and crying when I spent hours on the phone with them,” he says. “She thought I was being lured away and that everything was falling apart.” He finally told her he’d been involved with Shuman. Zacks took it as an enormous betrayal.
The same month, Shuman told him she was being treated for a recurrence of cancer. As with the paternity claims, Zacks found Shuman’s cancer diagnosis “fishy,” according to Hay. “She was like, ‘What treatment is she getting?’ I would describe it, and she’d say, ‘They’d be treating it much more aggressively.’ I’d get mad at her: ‘How dare you question these people who are suffering?’ ”
Bruce Hay outside his home in Cambridge. Photo: Jeff Brown for New York Magazine When the women couldn’t reach Hay on his cell phone, they would often call his landline repeatedly and send texts demanding he “Pick up the phone!” Sometimes they would call Zacks — and even once called their oldest son — to try to track Hay down.
The Christmas détente was short-lived. “I think you should tell the dean how you have raped women, how you have sexually abused them, and that now you will be held accountable,” Shuman wrote in February. “I’m going to write her and detail the abuse you have done, and explain how if they have any decency they will fire you.” The fighting was punctuated by occasional in-person meetings among the three, purportedly to figure out a harmonious path forward.
It was Hay’s neighbors who tipped off Zacks with the first clue to Shuman’s “surprise.” “Gosh,” one emailed the couple, “I hope those moving trucks don’t mean you’re leaving us?” Zacks was freaked out, but Hay assured her the women were just using the driveway as a “staging area” for transferring the women’s things to storage.
Zacks, for her part, didn’t waste time when she returned to the U.S. She immediately hired a lawyer to serve Shuman, Haider, and Klein with a notice of trespass. The Hay family moved into an apartment while they began court proceedings to evict Shuman and Haider — and Klein and the kids — who meanwhile continued to hound Hay. “You took ALL my love for you, and TRASHED it,” Shuman texted. “You are pathologically involved in a toxic mess with Jennifer.
Two days after the alleged car collision, Hay hired a civil-defense lawyer named Douglas Brooks. By what Hay insists was sheer coincidence, Brooks turned out to be very familiar with Shuman. Another client of his, a prospective graduate student, referred to as “Richard Roe” in an affidavit Brooks had filed on his behalf, was also alleged to be the father of Shuman’s baby boy born in January 2016.
Hay would soon find yet another case involving Shuman. On the morning of March 13, 2015, when she told Hay she was texting and calling from Europe, she was picking up a young, lanky, blue-eyed CPA on Boylston Street in Boston’s Back Bay, who would go by “John Doe” in court papers. Soon after his lawyer, Howard Cooper, took steps to pursue legal action against Shuman, she claimed to have received a menacing letter with a thumb-drive video that depicted her and Doe having sex at the apartment. Doe recalls that the note said “something to the effect of ‘Better not tell your side of the story, or you don’t know what’s going to happen.
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