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Annals of Law
OCTOBER 4, 2010 ISSUE

The Scholar
She was brilliant. Was she also a fraud?
BY JEFFREY TOOBIN

Rachel Yould studied at Stanford and Oxford, but, in

recent months, she has shuttled between safe houses for
victims of abuse.
ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN RITTER; PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY THE
ANCHORAGE DAILY NEWS / MCT / LANDOV

F
ew American college students in the mid-
nineteen-nineties showed as much promise as
Rachel Hall. In 1994, Glamour named her one of its
Top 10 College Women. “Rachel Hall is a Truman
Scholar, former White House intern, licensed
massage therapist, onetime Virgin Islands lifeguard,
varsity rower and chair of the United Nations’ Global
Federation Youth Cabinet,” the magazine wrote. “A
double major in Japanese and international relations,
Hall recently transferred from UC-Davis to Stanford University. Her future plans
include a graduate degree in Japanese and a career in international relations.” The
following year, Stanford endorsed Hall’s application for a Rhodes scholarship. Hall’s
grades at both schools were “literally perfect,” Peter Stansky, a history professor and the
chairman of Stanford’s Rhodes panel, wrote. “Ms. Hall is a very polished and mature
candidate who has had a wide variety of experiences from which she has very
intelligently managed to learn prodigious amounts.” Hall won the Rhodes.

Lean and fit, with pale skin and a cascade of strawberry-blond hair, Rachel stood out,
even on big campuses. “Rachel was the most remarkable student I ever had,” Joyce Moser,
who taught Hall in a seminar on literature and the arts her first year at Stanford, said.
“Rachel wrote an imitation of Plato’s Republic that I still have. It was so good that I kept
it for fifteen years. Each of the students had to do a presentation, and Rachel did one on
eighteenth-century music. She turned off the lights and put candles all over the
classroom. She put Mozart on softly in the background. She had images to go with it. It
was the closest thing you could do to create an eighteenth-century environment in a
seminar room. She was just an unforgettable student.”

In recent months, Rachel Yould (her married name) had been living an itinerant
In recent months, Rachel Yould (her married name) had been living an itinerant
existence in Anchorage, where she shuttled, often in disguise, between safe houses
established for victims of domestic violence. A group of local women, mostly domestic-
violence survivors, cared for Yould; her “safety team,” or Team Rachel, as the group was
known, insisted that outsiders who wanted to meet her first sign a confidentiality
contract, so that her father, who she claimed had abused her, could not find her. Yould
saw her husband once a week, and her “big outing,” as she put it, was a weekly trip to
church.

On September 10th, Team Rachel escorted Yould to the federal courthouse in

Anchorage, where she was treated not as a victim but as a perpetrator. There she was to
be sentenced by Judge John Sedwick, of the U.S. District Court, for carrying out a
complex scheme to defraud the governments of Alaska and the United States. Yould’s life
after Stanford had turned into a sprawling saga that unfolded in half a dozen countries
on three continents. Documents relating to her fraud case filled an entire room of the
U.S. Attorney’s office in Anchorage. Before her sentencing, her supporters wrote moving
letters asking Judge Sedwick for leniency. As one family friend wrote, “Rachel is a kind,
loving person and her goal has always been to help others.” A series of domestic-violence
experts, retained by Yould’s public defender, told the judge about the implications of the
abuse that she said she had suffered. Dr. Eli Newberger, who is affiliated with Harvard
Medical School, examined Yould and wrote in his report, “In my forty years of experience
in this area of practice, I have never seen such a heartless and systematic torture of a child
by a parent.”

The prosecution presented a very different picture of Rachel Yould. In a hundred-and-

twenty-page brief, Retta-Rae Randall, the Assistant U.S. Attorney on the case, wrote,
“The case is not about abuse, but about lies and greed.” In another court filing, Randall
wrote that the defendant “claims ‘safety concerns,’ needing a ‘safety team,’ being a ‘victim’
of domestic violence, not only to manipulate the court, but also to defraud agencies
which support true victims of domestic violence. No evidence, not even a proffer, of any
legitimate threat to the defendant’s safety since she arrived in Anchorage in January
2009, has been provided to the court or to the United States Probation Office. Yet the
defendant has been allowed to take up space at a ‘safe house’ for domestic violence
victims, to the detriment of those women who are truly fleeing a present danger and need
a safe place to reside with their children.” The question raised about Rachel Yould is,
then, a simple one. Is she a brilliant, heroic survivor and a victim of injustice—or an
incorrigible con artist?

S
heryl Davis grew up in a small town in Alabama and went to college at Auburn
University. There she met Robert Eyre Hall, and the two were married in 1969,
shortly before he graduated and enlisted in the Army. Hall was assigned to the Panama
Canal Zone, where Rachel Eyre Hall, the couple’s only child, was born, on January 3,
1972. After Robert Hall left the service, the family moved to Glendale, Arizona, where
he attended business school at the Thunderbird School of Global Management. The
family moved to Illinois, where Robert went to work for a company that sold agricultural
products; in 1975, the couple divorced. Sheryl and Rachel moved back to Alabama. “He
was never violent to me,” Sheryl Davis told me, speaking of her ex-husband, “though he
did throw a shoe at me once.”

Hall’s career led him to live, over the next few years, in Puerto Rico, New Jersey, and,
eventually, near Atlanta. Sheryl was a teacher, and she and her daughter moved often as
well; by the time Rachel was in sixth grade, she had lived in six places and gone to five
schools. In 1982, Sheryl married Glenn Denkler, a Vietnam veteran, who enrolled in the
Culinary Institute of America, in Hyde Park, New York. In 1985, after he graduated, the
couple decided to move to Anchorage, where Denkler became a cooking teacher at a
vocational high school, and Sheryl also taught school. Rachel came with them, but, from
the time she was five, she spent a few weeks with her father every summer.

As part of her defense, Rachel Yould wrote an autobiography of sorts, which was
circulated among her supporters. It consists of more than fifty single-spaced pages, and is
composed in her characteristic torrential writing style—an intense agglomeration of
detail and explanation that is evident even in her routine correspondence, which often
runs to thousands of words. “I have no memory of a life without abuse,” the account
begins. “Among my earliest recollections are disjointed montages of heavy breathing and
touching and thrusting and pain and nausea and an unsettling inability to reach that
place inside me from which tears would, for most people, issue forth.” She goes on, “My
childhood was peppered with moments of clarity and desperate cries for help, but they
were fleeting and failed to save me.”

Robert Hall has always denied abusing his daughter in any way, but Rachel’s account is
full of detailed recollections. “I remember refusing to allow a doctor to examine me
during a childhood doctor’s visit to diagnose one of countless urinary tract infections,”
she writes. “I told my mother quietly that it was because of daddy and she conveyed to
the doctor that I was resisting the pelvic exam because of problems we’d had with my
father. I was spared the exam but little else. My mom took no action to investigate my
assertion or curtail my visits with my father, who was no longer living with us at that
time.”

In a letter to the judge, Sheryl described Rachel as an “anxious, emotionally excessive”

child. “She was a loving, gentle child—not a discipline problem—whose angst was early
and internal.” According to her mother, Rachel saw a series of counsellors but never
received a diagnosis. Sheryl says that Rachel never told her of any abuse. “I think Rachel
tried to tell me many times, but she was not heard,” Sheryl told me. “At a certain point,
she just stopped trying.”

The report assembled by Eli Newberger, the medical expert retained by the defense,
The report assembled by Eli Newberger, the medical expert retained by the defense,
includes an account of an incident in Yould’s adolescence. “On one occasion, after Ms.
Yould had a mole removed without first seeking Mr. Hall’s permission, she described
having awakened tied up, and recalled his saying, ‘If you want less flesh on your hip, I’ll
show you less flesh,’ ” Newberger wrote. “Ms. Yould described that Mr. Hall took out a
knife and a second implement with a curved protrusion at the end and ‘started carving,
pulling out this long plug of skin, fat, and muscle.’ She described how strange it was to
feel and then see a part of her no longer being a part of her. Her pain on this occasion
was deeper and more sustained, and she said she bled more than usual. She noted
shivering consistent with shock and persistent bleeding, and lapses of consciousness.”

In a written statement to the court, Yould recalled seeing something in the basement of
her father’s house. “I walked close and stared and then suddenly felt like a cosmic jolt had
just vacuumed all of the air out of my chest,” she wrote. “It was a hunk of desiccated flesh
pinned to the wall and I knew from the approximate size and shape and just the nature
of life in that house that it was mine. It was a piece of me pinned to the wall.”

Yould said that she took refuge from the abuse by

excelling at school. “My elixir was superstar
achievement,” she wrote. “I was a top honors student,
an athlete, and president of everything. I was a
community volunteer, a creator of civic programs, an
advocate of social causes. The crushing pace required
to keep these countless responsibilities aloft, while
destructive to my ailing spirit, rendered life
manageable.” Still, she wrote, she was plagued by “flashbacks,” which sometimes caused
her to drive off the road: “The two realities that I had spent a lifetime cleaving into two
separate people—the bad, scary me that haunted my nights versus the light,
accomplished me that carried me through each day—came crashing together.” By the
time she graduated from high school, her nightmares “had reached new heights as had
the sleep-deprivation and anxiety that would render me persistently ill for years to come.”

During her summertime visits to her father, Yould said, she became close to her
stepbrother John (Robert Hall had remarried), who fell ill with AIDS-related symptoms
in 1990. She learned to perform massage therapy on him, and ultimately began a
program to provide massages to AIDS patients in Sacramento, which is near U.C. Davis.
“When my step-brother was ill with AIDS, I began writing to Mother Teresa as an
outlet for my grief,” she later wrote. “I honestly didn’t know if anyone read my letters, and
I certainly did not expect that they were reaching Mother.” After John died, in 1993, “I
received a letter inviting me to come work in Mother’s Home for the Dying, to care for
her terminally ill patients as I became accustomed to being unable to care any longer for
my brother. I traveled to India for a short time while in college to do just that.”
According to a letter written in 1997 by Brother Vinod, an associate of Mother Teresa,
“Among the hundreds of patients who Rachel has personally diagnosed and treated
during her three-month stay here, I have observed marked improvements. . . . Rarely in
my career have I encountered such dedication to contributing professionally for the
benefit of the poor.” A subsequent job as a massage practitioner at a spa near Sacramento
ended less happily, when, according to her employer, she left shifts uncovered and once
skipped work “due to her visiting a male friend not kidney cancer as she told us.”

Yould always drew extreme reactions, sometimes even from the same people. Peter Duus,
a professor of Japanese history, knew Yould at Stanford. “I felt that there was something
phony about her, not in the sense that she was fraudulent but that she was excessively
insistent in talking about her accomplishments, her skills, and her ambitions,” Duus told
me. “For example, at various times she told me that she had spent a year nursing her
brother through a devastating illness, and that she had been treated for ovarian or
cervical cancer and would never have children. I took her behavior to reflect the fact that
she had lived a harder life than other students had—and was trying to compensate for
that.”

In 1993, Yould’s father agreed to pay for a summer program at Georgetown, in

Washington. “I was not spared what had become my annual hospital stint, but it did not
dull my enthusiasm for the experience,” she wrote of that summer, when she also worked
part time as a White House intern. “Toward the end of my program, there emerged an
acute problem with one of my vaginal glands, a common byproduct of childhood trauma
to the genitalia,” she wrote. “It required immediate surgery and a hospital stay.”

According to Yould, Robert Hall came from his home, in Georgia, to attend the closing
ceremony for the Georgetown program. Hall took his daughter to dinner and ordered
“bottle after bottle of champagne.” Rachel passed out asleep on the one bed in her
father’s hotel room, while he went to sleep on the couch.

“I awoke that night with my father on top of me,” she wrote. She said that he raped her.
The next morning, she returned to her dorm room. “I may well have remained sitting in
that dorm room for more than two days without moving. I lost all sense of time. The
only sensation of which I was aware was the life bleeding out of me.” She went on, “My
reverie was broken by a summer Resident Adviser knocking to inform me that my
airport shuttle had arrived. I had packed before the ceremony and followed my escort
compliantly down the corridor to the van, not having even showered since the rape. And
off to the airport I went.” She next saw her father in Georgia, the following year. During
that encounter, she later said, “he took a vise and chiseled out a treasure map onto me so I
saw every time I get undressed where he is going to stab me.” Father and daughter have
not seen each other since the mid-nineties.
Y
ould won the Rhodes in late 1995, but delayed going to Oxford for a year, because
of health problems, which she later described as “unpredictably intermittent bouts
of significant pain.” Notwithstanding the health problems, Yould entered and won the
Miss Anchorage pageant in 1996 and also took a summer internship, as part of her
Truman scholarship, at the Pentagon. This was extended with an unpaid consultancy,
which included a trip to Japan. Brett Yould, her boyfriend, joined her in Washington; the
pair then hoped to be hired as paid consultants. When an offer was not forthcoming,
Rachel wrote a lengthy letter to a superior at the Pentagon, reflecting a remarkable sense
of entitlement:

Clearly, there are situations when age is not an inherently relevant criterion
for capability assessment. Just as I struggle with the complexities of possessing
a genius-level IQ, medically certified photographic memory, and fluency in
several Asian languages at such a young age, Brett grapples with being a
recognized computer genius in an industry that considers age a factor.

Rachel and Brett met as high-school classmates in Anchorage, and they started dating
when both were home on breaks from college. “We saw each other at a cotillion reunion
dance during my freshman year,” Brett told me. “We danced to ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ We
were instantly head over heels for one another.” Brett had majored in psychology at
Colorado State University; he had a job in computer training. Cautious where Rachel
was bold, besotted but also bewildered by Rachel, Brett was content to live in her
shadow.

Rachel and Brett spent some time in Portland, Oregon, in 1996, and Rachel later told the
police that she began receiving “obscene phone calls from Robert Hall several times a
day.” She said that during those calls her father told her that he was watching her and
that she could never get away. One day, according to Rachel, there was a break-in: “The
lock on my baby chest had been broken and someone had rifled through all of my baby
memorabilia. The only item stolen from the sizeable unit, which contained a variety of
valuable items, was an Elvis Presley album. Elvis Presley is Robert Hall’s favorite
musician.”

At Oxford her academic progress was, for the first time, less than meteoric. She studied
with Professor Arthur Stockwin, who was then the director of Oxford’s Nissan Institute
of Japanese Studies. (He is now retired.) As Stockwin testified in a deposition in
England as part of the fraud case, Rachel Yould began her Rhodes by taking a master’s
course in Oriental Studies to improve her Japanese, because her skills were not “quite up
to the level required.” (She was not fluent in Japanese or any other Asian language.)
Yould was pursuing a doctorate, with a dissertation on Japan and the Internet, but
Stockwin was unhappy with the first chapter she submitted. “I wrote to her that I was
rather alarmed by the indifferent quality of the chapter,” he testified.
Brett had followed Rachel from Washington to India and then to Oxford, with an
interlude spent doing construction work in Alaska. “My life really got pushed to the
background,” he said. Eventually, he also became a student at Oxford, where he earned an
M.B.A. According to Rachel, there was still no respite from Robert Hall’s calls. Brett
remembers just one phone call from him in Portland, and one at Oxford from someone
who could have been Hall.

“I was waiting for Rachel to finish her D.Phil., but she has always had a hard time
finishing things,” Brett Yould said to me. “She told me, ‘Professor Stockwin says I need to
go to Japan for one year, and then I promise I’ll be finished.’ I enrolled and studied
Japanese for one academic year and then started teaching English. I waited for her to
buckle down and finish.”

Yould never completed her doctorate; she didn’t even submit any more chapters. The
couple married in 2000 and moved to Japan the following year, with a Fulbright
scholarship to support her dissertation research. Though still technically a student,
Rachel at this point in her life turned her attention to a kind of entrepreneurship.

R
achel Yould was a student for a longtime. It took her five years to get a college
degree (three at Davis, two at Stanford). The Rhodes Trust paid for three years at
Oxford, rather than the customary two, and she stayed on for a fourth at her own
expense. What was supposed to be a single year in Japan turned into about seven. The
criminal case against Yould is based on the way she financed her education.

Most student-loan programs have lifetime borrowing limits, and Yould started to run up
against them toward the end of her time at Oxford. In 2001, when she applied for a
student loan of ninety-five hundred dollars from the State of Alaska, she received only
three thousand five hundred and fifty, because she had reached the sixty-thousand-dollar
lifetime cap. Later, Yould reached the limit in other federal student-loan programs—
sixty-five thousand five hundred for subsidized Stafford loans and seventy-three
thousand for unsubsidized Stafford loans.

“I may not be Mr. Right, but I know Mr. Right, and

maybe if you sleep with me it will make him jealous.”

As her student-loan sources dwindled, Yould began

trying to obtain a second Social Security number.
She made use of a little-known program within the
Social Security Administration called Harassment,
Abuse and Life Endangerment (HALE), which is
designed to assist survivors of domestic violence.

“The basic rule has always been that you only get one Social Security number for life, but
“The basic rule has always been that you only get one Social Security number for life, but
back in the nineteen-eighties we started to bend that policy for victims of domestic
violence,” Jessica MacBride, who leads the group that handles number-assignment policy
at the Social Security Administration, said. The rationale for the HALE program is that
a parent or spouse would know the victim’s Social Security number and could use that
information to track her movements. “You need a credible third-party report that you are
endangered, like a police report, in order to get a new number,” MacBride said. Since
1998, about five thousand people have taken advantage of the HALE program to obtain
new numbers.

Yould applied for a new number under HALE in 2001, while she was in Japan. (She said
that her father’s harassment continued by telephone there; Brett recalls no such calls in
Japan.) Also in this period, she enlisted Michael Brain, a lawyer in Anchorage, in pursuit
of a restraining order to prevent her father from contacting her; she cited this effort to
support her HALE application. The Alaska state judge in the case denied Rachel’s
request on December 19, 2002, ruling that, because Robert Hall lived in Georgia, and
Rachel was in Japan, he had no jurisdiction. Still, on August 7, 2003, she was formally
granted a new Social Security number.

Though Yould was in Japan, she was still on the books as a student at Oxford, and she
needed a way to pay her fees there. (The Fulbright paid her about forty-one thousand
dollars a year, but only for her first three years in Japan.) So, starting in 2003, she applied
for loans under her married name, and using her new Social Security number. Over the
next three years, she went into a kind of borrowing frenzy. In September, 2004, Rachel
Yould sought two hundred and forty thousand dollars in a “consolidation” loan from
Sallie Mae, which asked her to submit an updated loan application and income
verification for her co-borrower—Rachel Hall. As prosecutors later noted, “Yould re-
submitted the application signed by her on September 29, 2004, and by Hall on
September 30, 2004, using distinctively different handwriting.”

In 2004, Yould commuted to Washington for an unpaid fellowship at the International

Institute for Strategic Studies, a well-known think tank. She used that position as a
vehicle to secure more loans. With the application for one loan, in October, 2004, Rachel
Yould submitted a pay stub showing that her co-signer, Rachel Hall, had earned
$251,131.97 from the I.I.S.S. in the course of the year. According to a deposition by an
I.I.S.S. administrator, “The whole payslip is false and inaccurate. Rachel Yould was never
given any wage at all from IISS or IISS-US.”

In all, during the period from 2003 to 2006, Yould obtained more than six hundred and
fifty thousand dollars in fraudulent loans. She used some of this money to buy a condo in
Anchorage; she and her husband rented it out as a source of income. “I asked Rachel,
‘How much have you taken out in loans?’ ” Brett told me. “It was upsetting to me. And
she’d blow me off and say, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ ”
The amount of the loans far exceeded Yould’s tuition bills. Much of the money, it
appears, went to fund a business venture, the Oxford International Review. The O.I.R. was
a student publication that had been dormant when, in 2001, Yould revived the name. She
appointed herself editor-in-chief. With the help of research assistants recruited from
Oxford and the ranks of Truman Scholars, Yould, who was then based in Japan, spent
2004 and 2005 flying to different countries to interview prominent people for the O.I.R.
(“Rachel was gone about eight months of every year, doing interviews all over the world,”
Brett said.) The list of subjects included Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright, Hamid
Karzai, Norman Schwarzkopf, Wesley Clark, Elie Wiesel, David Gergen, and dozens of
others. Yould listed many of the people she interviewed as members of the O.I.R.
Advisory Board.

The result, which was not published until 2008, is a singularly peculiar publication.
Yould’s O.I.R. consists largely of transcripts of interviews (which were mostly out of
date): a thousand and thirty pages, in a volume that weighs more than five pounds. The
bulk makes the O.I.R. almost unreadable, and it appears that no more than a dozen
copies were printed. “She had very big plans for O.I.R., and I don’t really understand
what those plans were,” Brett told me. “She just blew it way out of proportion. I saw it as
a scholarly journal, but then she wanted take it further into an organization where
students from around the world had a chance to get together and share thoughts. I didn’t
get it.”

The financial arrangements surrounding the O.I.R. were opaque. Yould used a California
firm to set up an offshore company, based in the British Virgin Islands, to act as a for-
profit adjunct to the nonprofit O.I.R. publication. She explained in an e-mail to the
California firm that Oxford “is very strict with the use of its name in publication titles. . .
. Should the University ever challenge our right to produce under this title, we feel we
would be better positioned as a non-UK entity to engage such potential challenges.” By
2007, the United States Postal Inspection Service, which investigates many fraud cases,
had started to examine Yould’s finances.

The theory behind the government’s prosecution was that Yould never really intended to
be an academic and that she used the O.I.R. and its for-profit affiliate to build a
worldwide consulting business. In fact, she seems to have made only halfhearted attempts
to work as a consultant, though she was finally taken off the student rolls at Oxford in
2006. The Youlds lived modestly. To all appearances, Rachel was motivated less by greed
than by a kind of undifferentiated longing for status and acceptance. She won fellowships
and attended conferences hoping to win more fellowships and attend more conferences,
in an endless loop of résumé-building.

Even knowing that the government was tracking her, Yould made a series of outlandish
claims, in order to find a sponsor to pay a twenty-thousand-dollar fee for her to
participate in the Clinton Global Initiative conference, in New York, in September, 2008.
In e-mails to representatives of HSBC Bank and the Emirates Foundation, Yould wrote
that the O.I.R. had been selected by the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, to
“administer the U.S. portion of his recently announced multi-billion-dollar fellowship
program for Iraqi graduate students.” This was false, and no one paid her fee, but Yould
went to the conference anyway. Officials from the Clinton Global Initiative later pressed
her for payment, without success.

One day around this time, while Rachel was on the road, a certified letter arrived for her
in Japan. Brett opened it. “It was a target letter, saying that she was suspected of
committing fraud,” he said. “She was in the U.A.E. at the time, and I called her right
away. Rachel was often so busy and stressed out on the road that she sometimes didn’t
return my calls or e-mails. And she gave me the silent treatment for about a week. And I
got pissed off and I said to her, quite frankly, ‘If you don’t answer me, we are going to
have serious problems.’ ” Finally, Rachel called and explained that the letter referred to a
misunderstanding that had since been settled.

It was more than a misunderstanding, of course, and Rachel and Brett soon returned to
Alaska, to face the investigation. Rachel Yould was indicted by a federal grand jury in
March, 2009, on ten counts of fraud relating to the student loans and, later, on five
charges relating to the purchase of the Anchorage condo. On April 1, 2010, Yould
pleaded guilty to the first ten, and in June she pleaded guilty to the remaining charges
against her.

T
hroughout the summer, I spoke often by phone with Valerie Harris, a freelance
anti-domestic-violence campaigner and crime buff who had been advising Rachel
Yould. (Harris became interested in criminal law while following the case of Scott
Peterson, who was charged with killing his pregnant wife.) Through the efforts of Harris
and others, Yould’s case became something of a cause célèbre in domestic-violence circles,
and several activists submitted letters on her behalf to Judge Sedwick before sentencing. I
went to Alaska in August and, one morning soon after my arrival, Harris told me to go to
the lobby of my hotel, where I would be met and taken to see Yould.

Paige Hodson, the leader of a small organization called Alaska Moms for Custodial
Justice, and a domestic-violence survivor, was waiting at the wheel of an S.U.V., with a
non-disclosure contract for me. After I signed the paper, promising not to reveal where
Yould was, Hodson drove a circuitous route to arrive at another building. We entered
through a side door and went into what looked like a downscale corporate apartment,
with generic furniture and without personal touches. There were seven people inside.

“That happy little cloud floating over the Unicorp Building? I want that.”

Rachel’s mother, Sheryl Davis, and stepfather, Glenn

Rachel’s mother, Sheryl Davis, and stepfather, Glenn
Denkler, were seated at a dining-room table. They
recently retired from their teaching jobs in
Anchorage and live in Washington State. (As a
gesture of support for his stepdaughter, Glenn
Denkler adopted Rachel, shortly before her marriage;
her full name is Rachel Eyre Denkler Yould.) There
were four people from the domestic-violence
community: Hodson; Dara Carlin, from Hawaii,
who has studied the HALE program; Paul Stanley
Holdorf, a retired attorney, who did an analysis of Yould’s finances for the defense; and
Sharon Vaughan, an activist from St. Paul, who accompanied Yould to depositions in
Japan and England.

Rachel Yould sat in the middle of an L-shaped sofa. At thirty-eight, she looks
remarkably similar to the college student photographed in Glamour sixteen years ago:
clear-skinned, with the same long strawberry-blond hair. She speaks in a serene,
confident murmur that recalls a late-night FM disk jockey. She cuts, in all, a strikingly
charismatic figure, and her supporters seemed unable to keep their hands off her—
stroking, patting, kneading, embracing her as she told her story.

“We think that my case is the only time a federal court has ever approved a safety plan
for a defendant,” she told me. “The court is not aware of my location. Only the probation
officer assigned to my team knows where I am. Most members of the team are not here.
There is a bond between us, and my life is managed by the safety team. I check in every
day. They manage secure transit for me, they know where I am at all times, they arrange
safe housing for me. I’m on my eighth move since the indictment. I can’t stay in a
domestic-violence shelter, because that’s the kind of place that would be staked out.”

As for why Yould still needed elaborate security precautions a decade and a half after she
last saw her father, she told me that his harassment was continuing through proxies. Just
this summer, she said, she was in a coffee shop in Anchorage with one of her escorts. “A
man came up to me and took my picture and said, ‘Daddy says hello,’ ” Yould told me. I
asked whether I could speak with the security escort, and Yould demurred, saying that he
was out of earshot at the time of the incident, and, besides, the escort had been having
health problems lately. Even under close questioning, Yould never admits error or
ignorance; she is a compulsive, if not always persuasive, explainer.

In a phone conversation with Yould, I asked her more about the charges. “This is not an
abuse-excuse case,” she said. “I am not saying I did this because I was abused. The
argument has always been that no crime was committed.” Yould said her problems were
the fault of the HALE program. “This is about a flaw in the program. You have debt
under the two names. The first difficulty is, how do you transfer the old debts? How do
you figure out how to pay the old debts? They don’t guarantee the old academic
credentials. You have the student-loan debt, but you may or may not be able to transfer
the degrees. They give you a letter that says call if you have any questions, but there’s no
manual, no rule book, no intergovernmental coördination at all. You get ad-hoc advice.”
In short, the heart of Yould’s defense was that she thought she was allowed, under the
HALE program, to use the new Social Security number to apply for the loans above the
lifetime cap and to use one name as a co-signer for loans to the other.

“I pled guilty because it became clear that there was no way for me to have a fair trial,”
Yould said. “The judge ruled that I couldn’t discuss the abuse or the violence or the
harassment. It’s impossible to discuss this case without talking about how we got into
this program.” In addition, she said, there were documents in the case that proved her
innocence but that could not be retrieved. “My e-mails magically disappeared,” she said.
Actually, Judge Sedwick had never ruled that the domestic-violence evidence would be
completely off limits. Yould pleaded guilty before Sedwick made any rulings about the
scope of evidence that would have been allowed in a trial.

There is, in fact, very little evidence to corroborate her claims of abuse and harassment,
especially in recent years. Yould has said that she was repeatedly hospitalized—in
Washington, D.C., and Portland, Oregon, and at Stanford, among other places. In one
submission to the court, she said that in the autumn of 1995 she experienced swelling in
her right kidney, which temporarily ceased functioning, “once again due to the previous
abuse perpetrated by Robert Hall. I was informed that the crimp in my right ureter,
manifest from a previous blow to the back, could not be treated and might result in
intermittent bouts of renal failure throughout the course of my adult life. I was
hospitalized for a week at Stanford University Medical Center.” It is true that Yould was
hospitalized at Stanford for four days in 1995, but it was for removal of a kidney stone.
As the government noted in the sentencing memorandum, “Her history reflected in the
medical records from Stanford Health Services (the only medical records disclosed by the
defendant to date) at the time of her admission does not include a report by her of any
injury to her kidney from previous physical abuse.” In all, Yould’s defense team produced
records of just two hospitalizations, both at Stanford, one for the kidney stone and the
other for serious allergies.

Yould said that the reason for the lack of records went back to her attempt to file a
restraining order against Robert Hall, in 2002. “I was going to lay it all out for the court,
but he had it thrown out on the basis of venue,” she told me. “I made the decision to get
rid of it all, all the records. Why do you keep this gross stuff ? My lawyer, Mike Brain,
advised me that no court would ever take jurisdiction of the case, so I made the decision
to get rid of it.” That does not explain why Yould did not track down the hospital records
after she was indicted. And Brain told me he never saw any documentary evidence that
Yould had been abused, and never advised her to get rid of any records. “As a general
proposition, as an attorney, I would never say to destroy a document,” Brain said. “I can
say that categorically.”

The prosecution never specifically charged that Rachel Yould invented all the abuse
claims; rather, the Assistant U.S. Attorney limited herself to asserting that Rachel was
never in any danger from her father while in Anchorage. To be sure, Dr. Newberger, the
defense expert, who examined her last March, concluded that various scars on Rachel’s
body were consistent with abuse. Clearly, though, a strong current of skepticism about
the abuse runs through the government presentations in the case. For example, the
government gave the judge photographs of the swimsuit competition in the Miss Alaska
contest, which took place in 1996, after, according to Rachel, her father mutilated her
hip; in the photographs neither hip shows any marks.

Brett says that he recalls a dime-size scar on Rachel’s hip, but no other notable marks on
her body. He stands by Rachel’s claim that her father abused her. “I have wrestled with
that over the past year,” he said. “I don’t know what it’s like to have been abused, to have
been beaten up and raped. A lot of people say to abuse survivors that their fears can’t be
warranted, and then they wind up dead.”

R
obert Hall vividly remembers when a pair of police officers knocked on the door of
his home, outside Atlanta. “It was late 2002, the middle of the night, and I was
very sick,” he told me. “They came to serve the papers on me that Rachel was trying to
get the restraining order in Alaska. We invited the cops in, and my wife and I sat there at
our kitchen table and read all those pages of the things she said about me. I had never
heard her claim any of that stuff before. It was unbelievable. I never laid a hand on that
child.”

Hall acknowledges that he has had a complicated passage through life. Now sixty-two
years old, he has been married and divorced four times. He had a drinking problem, and
at the time the police came he was awaiting a liver transplant, which he later underwent.
He retired about three years ago, after thirty-six years with the agricultural-supply
company. “Without drinking, Bob is a normal person,” Andrea Pena, his fourth wife, who
was divorced from him this year, told me. “But once he had a drop of alcohol he was
different. He never hit me, but he tends to throw things around when he drinks.” Money
is tight these days, and Hall is currently trying to sell his house. But he is emphatic that
he never abused, much less raped, his daughter.

As Hall recounted it, his relationship with his only child followed a depressingly familiar
trajectory for families riven by divorce: “She and her mother were very good at cutting
me out of things. I never knew what she was doing. I had no input on where she went to
college. All I did was pay up.” In 1990, Hall went to Rachel’s high-school graduation, in
Anchorage—his only visit to Alaska—and she stayed with him for some months in
Georgia during a year off before she went to college. “Her mother was more lenient than
I was about certain things, and I started to get irritated that her room was a mess—really
unsanitary,” Robert told me. “She wanted to go to massage school in Atlanta. I had
agreed to pay half her college fees, but I wasn’t going to pay for that. Her mother paid for
the massage school.”

“Damn, he’s seen us. Now we’ll have to act all

compassionate.”

Around this time, Robert’s stepson John was given a

diagnosis of AIDS. In its December, 1996, issue,
Good Housekeeping ran a profile of Rachel, called “A
Sister’s Loving Touch,” which chronicled how she
flew to Atlanta to be with her brother after the
diagnosis. “Within days she had enrolled in a
massage-therapy school so she could provide him with daily comfort,” the article said,
and Rachel was quoted as saying, “Massage gave us a way to talk when there weren’t any
words left.” Robert Hall said that this portrayal was fictional. “She said she cared for
John, gave him massages, and that’s a total lie,” Robert said. “She saw him once the whole
time he was sick.”

In some ways, Robert’s accounts of his life with Rachel match hers. He said that he did
pay for her Georgetown summer program in 1993, and travelled to Washington for the
closing ceremony. Moreover, he did take her to a dinner where liquor was served and
then shared a hotel room, and a bed, with her. On the crucial issue—whether he attacked
her—their versions diverge. “We were staying at the Courtyard, in Virginia, and when we
got back to the room I tried to sleep in the love seat, but I couldn’t sleep. So I slept over
the sheets of the bed, fully clothed, while she slept under them. The next day, we got up,
we cleaned out her apartment in Georgetown, and I delivered her to a couple of her
mother’s friends. I thought nothing of it.”

Their contact diminished, though, and Rachel started making veiled comments about her
father to his family. “Rachel called our home once in the spring of 1995, and I spoke to
her on the phone,” Cathy Cahill, who was married to Robert Hall at the time, told me.
“Rachel knew I had two daughters, and she told me I should be very careful about
leaving them alone with Bob. She just said, ‘You’ll find out why.’ I was extremely shocked
and dismayed. Bob was never anything but appropriate with my daughters.” (This was six
years before Rachel began her efforts to get a new Social Security number.) Rachel also
got in touch with her father’s sister, Peggy Neill, in 1991 or 1992. “Rachel called me and
said that she was having problems with Bob’s and my brother”—Rachel’s uncle—“that he
had in some way compromised her, making advances,” Neill told me. “She told me I
should watch out for my two girls around my other brother. It was nonsense. Rachel was
always very dramatic.”

The final breach between father and daughter concerned a subject that has preoccupied
Yould through much of her adult life—student loans. “She told me she needed me to co-
sign a loan for her for her last year at Stanford,” Robert Hall said. “She said she’d make
the payments, but she just needed me as a co-signer. But when the paperwork came I saw
that it was only my name on it. I asked her, and she said it didn’t matter, she’d still pay it.
It was for something like sixteen or eighteen thousand dollars. I wasn’t seeing her. I didn’t
really want to do it. But I said, ‘What the hell, she’ll pay it.’ So I signed it. That’s what
you do for your kids. Well, she never paid a cent of it back. I was stuck paying the whole
thing. I had no legal recourse.” (Cathy Cahill, then Robert’s wife, corroborates this.)

Robert Hall was interviewed several times by the Postal Inspection Service. By now,
paternal feeling has largely yielded to bitterness. “Rachel has always been a bit of a
conniver and used to having things her way,” he said. “I feel like I’ve been taken
advantage of in a very malicious way. She claimed that I was stalking her, calling her in
Japan. I wouldn’t even know how to call Japan if I wanted to. She has not been part of my
life for years. She is making me out to be some ogre, and I’m just an average, normal
guy.”

B
efore Rachel Yould’s sentencing, on September 10th, Rich Curtner, the federal
public defender in Alaska, who represented her, asked Judge Sedwick for a sentence
of probation. Randall, the prosecutor, sought five years in federal prison. “Yould is a
sophisticated liar and manipulator who justifies her conduct by blaming others,” Randall
wrote.

About two dozen of Yould’s supporters settled into the benches behind the defense table
in Judge Sedwick’s courtroom. Brett was there, too. For the first six months after he and
Rachel came back to Anchorage, as Rachel moved between various shelters, he made an
effort to stay in touch. “I’d make her food and take it to her wherever she was,” he told
me. To return to Alaska, Brett gave up a marketing business he had started in Japan and
eventually took a job in a plumbing-supply warehouse in Anchorage. “We saw each other
once a week for a while, then about once every three weeks,” he told me. “Finally, about
six months ago, I told her I couldn’t do it anymore. I said, regardless of the outcome, I’d
be seeking a divorce. She had her support team. She didn’t need me. I was exhausted, I
was worn out, and it was time for me to rebuild my life.”

Hall’s supporters in the courtroom were virtually all members of the domestic-violence
community. Except for her family, Rachel had almost no one there who knew her as a
person rather than as a cause. Over the years, Rachel made dozens, if not hundreds, of
contacts at Stanford and Oxford, and in Japan, as well as during her fellowships and
internships; the absence of such people was noticeable. With ferocious intensity, Rachel
strove first for accomplishments, then merely connections, and, finally, just status, and she
made no lasting friends along the way.

In her statement to the judge, Yould seemed almost to acknowledge that her isolation,
whatever its cause, might have been at the root of her problems. “I don’t know that
anyone could regret these circumstances more than I,” she said, in precise, almost elegant
diction. “The violence and stalking I’ve suffered are not actually the hardest experiences
I’ve endured. The most difficult thing for me is the isolation brought on by living a life
that most people seem unable to relate to or understand. It’s a very lonely experience.”
She continued to portray herself as a victim. “The truth of this case, as I perceive it, is
that the Harassment, Abuse and Life Endangerment program is endangering women
like me through the reckless provision of instructions meted out by poorly trained and
largely unsupervised field officers and government contractors.”

Blaming HALE was no more successful with the judge than it likely would have been
with a jury. The defense argument that Yould “was so dependent on hearing guidance
from Social Security bureaucrats,” Sedwick said in court, “borders on the ludicrous.”
Indeed, the judge said, “it would be risible in the case of a Stanford University graduate
to believe that that had happened. But this woman is more than just a Stanford
University graduate. This woman has achieved great distinction because she is
exceedingly bright. She can figure out what the rules are—in fact she did. But she
thought she found a way around them. It was very convenient to have that second Social
Security number.”

The judge could come up with no more than a theory of why Rachel’s life took such a
bizarre series of wrong turns. “I think what really happened is that Ms. Yould became
enamored of the idea that she could have a prominent role, have great stature, in the
international academic community. Indeed she already had it,” he said. “But she wanted
to keep it, she wanted to pursue it, she wanted to embellish it, she wanted to make it
better. And, as a consequence, she became willing to take the unlawful steps, which she
took, in pursuit of that goal.”

In the end, as with most criminals, the reasons for her behavior mattered less than the
conduct itself. Judge Sedwick sentenced Rachel Yould to fifty-seven months in prison,
and ordered her to pay restitution of almost seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars to
lenders, and also to former employees and venders of the O.I.R. Her lawyer asked the
judge to let Yould remain out on bail pending her assignment to federal prison. The
judge said no, and Yould went straight from the courtroom to jail, to begin serving her
sentence that afternoon. ♦
Jeffrey Toobin has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1993 and
the senior legal analyst for CNN since 2002.