Chapter 2

The second child of a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Jennifer Cohen grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. When it came time to study a foreign language in high school, Cohen chose Russian. She visited Russia in the waning days of the Soviet empire, working as a camp counselor in a Pioneer youth camp.

After completing a bachelor's degree in Russian languages and literature, Cohen earned a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Ari Goldman was one of her professors.

Ari Goldman   "She was in my first class, and that's a class you don't forget. You remember your first class. I like to think I remember all my students, but I have a very, very vivid recollection of her. She was a young, lively, attractive student who was a real leader in the class. You know, you could see she was destined for great things."

Following graduate school, Cohen took a job with "Good Morning America Sunday," where a segment she worked on earned an Emmy Award. Cohen then took a job with the investigative unit of a long-running syndicated TV newsmagazine.

As the Monica Lewinksy scandal was breaking, Cohen was working up a source on a different story — the trafficking of sex slaves from the former Soviet Union into Brooklyn. The source, Kevin Dillard.

Cohen urged her boss, the investigative unit's senior producer, to put her on the story. He wasn't persuaded. He wanted her in Washington on the Lewinsky story.

Jennifer Cohen [excerpt from Lying Together]   "Covering the president's intoxication with an intern while working at a tabloid would be the end of any journalistic credibility I might have. All the years of graduate school and dues paying would be wasted. I would never emerge from the sensationalized trenches of tabloid TV. I had to save myself. I had to sell him the sex slaves."

She sold him. She had that credit card receipt. Or at least Dillard had the receipt. Or at least he said he had the receipt — the one implicating the Clinton Cabinet official in alleged escapades with a Russian prostitute.

"Sex slaves trafficked into Brooklyn and proof of Clinton administration officials using taxpayer dollars to party with whores." Those are Cohen's words, the ones that got her to Russia.

Jennifer Cohen   "Given the circumstances, given where I was at in my life, the chance to jump at that relationship was really an exit strategy for me to try a whole new thing. And it wasn't just about the relationship — and it's pretty clear in the book — it was also about pursuing a different direction for my career. So I don't regret it. "

Sue Cohen, the author's mother:

"The world looks very glamorous and exciting, and sometimes we make choices that get us into situations that are kind of above anything that we're prepared to deal with. And the situation Jennifer found herself in was one that was extraordinary in all kinds of ways."

Jennifer Cohen   "So many people say that they're so impressed with how fearless I was, and you know, that even though it didn't totally work out it was still a really amazing thing that I did it."

Impressed in retrospect, but reactions at the time ran from dubious to deeply concerned.

When a friend suggested that Cohen slow down, take a deep breath, see Dillard in the context of the many would-be soul mates of her past, Cohen said it was different this time. She had no doubt he was the one.

When weeks later Cohen showed her parents a photo of the man she loved, her mother shrieked.

Sue Cohen   "The first time Jen — she had a photograph of him, I said, 'You have got to be kidding," and that just came out of nowhere for me. So there was a part of me that kind of probably intuitively knew that this was really not the person that I had dreamt about for her."

Months later, when Cohen, sobbing, told her parents the wedding had to be postponed, that she had concealed the truth of her fiancι's condition, that he was drinking, entering rehab, that she was scared, they told her to come home immediately.

That night he slit his wrist in the bathtub. "Let me give you some advice," he says to her. "Go home."

Sue Cohen   "I knew a great deal of what was happening while this experience in her life was going on. And to read about it many years later is not as overwhelming for me in any respect as it was while this extraordinary experience was going on for her — because there were moments that I was fearful for her."

Jennifer Cohen [excerpt from Lying Together]   "Perhaps, I think, those women, the ones whose stories brought me here, the ones who answered innocent sounding classified ads, only to wind up in basement brothels, maybe I am not so different from them. Not to say that my fate is anything like theirs, but there certainly is a sort of wing-and-a-prayer factor at play, both for them and for me. On some level I admire their enthusiastic responses to the opportunities those ads promised, even if they (the women, not the ads) were tremendously naοve. And now, thinking about it, my heart breaks a bit at the tragic sense of trust that they had when they got on the plane. Think about it. How, when your trust is so dramatically abused, can you ever learn to trust anyone or anything again? And without trust, without the ability to jump on planes and fly off on wings and prayers, how can you go forward in life?"

Jennifer Cohen   "I did see some sort of vague parallels that still resonated with me. And it kind of makes me wonder, if I was — if I had been born in some small town in Ukraine and had no money and saw this ad, because of my nature to jump on a plane and go fly into the arms of a man I hadn't seen, would I have been the kind of girl who would have answered one of these ads? You know, 'Waitress wanted in Paris.' Maybe I would have been."

As Cohen's memoir took shape, she grappled with how much of herself, and how much of her family, she should reveal in the pages of a book. Agent Stephanie Kip Rostan recalls that in early drafts that she read, Cohen was reluctant to reveal too much.

Stephanie Kip Rostan   "She had really kept back a lot about herself and a lot about her parents and hadn't really fleshed out that relationship. And I had so many questions when I read the story — like, well, what did they think about you running off to Russia to marry this guy? That's part of the story. But it took her — she struggled with it a little bit before she got it out."