Law Schools

Amy Chua Keeps Inviting Reporters To Her Home As If That's Not Exactly How She Got Into This Mess

It's hard to fix a situation if you don't grasp the situation in the first place.

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Amy Chua (Photo by Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images for TIME)

A few days ago, Business Insider put out an article explaining how the situation facing Yale Law School’s Amy Chua is “complicated.” Which it’s not really, but whatever.

New York magazine followed up with another Chua deep dive — which is fantastic because it provides significant space to exploring the Rubenfeld allegations getting glossed over by a lot of the Chua talk — followed closely by the New York Times profile. A busy week!

But the best thing about reading the results of three different interviews — all admittedly a product of a conscious strategy to speak out in her own defense — is reverse engineering the professor’s strategy through the similarities with each article. Though you don’t even have to dig far into each to find the roadmap to folly she’s decided upon. Just look at the beginnings of each of these stories.

Amanda FitzSimons began the article with this image:

Amy Chua answered the door of her New Haven home wearing yoga pants and a Myrtle Beach T-shirt that had a curlicue bachelorette-party font now considered cheugy.

Irin Carmon’s piece for New York began:

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“It’s supposedly haunted,” Amy Chua says brightly as she ushers me into the cavernous antechamber of the New Haven home she shares with fellow Yale Law School professor Jed Rubenfeld.

The New York Times article never says anything about heading up to Chua’s New Haven home, but the picture featured in the middle of the article is captioned, “Prof. Amy Chua at her home in New Haven, Conn. Credit…Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times” so a trip was definitely made.

Business Insider, New York, and the Times all in a row? It’s like she’s running Disgraced OCI up there. Are they all on 15 minute windows too?

But it’s such a display of her lack of self-awareness.

Professor Chua, beleaguered by accusations that she uses invitations to her home as a means to build loyalty among a clutch of Yale Law students tries to take control of the narrative about her by… inviting journalists to her home. It’s presented as a small bit of color in these stories, but it’s so important as one reads all three together — when she’s told by her daughter that she needs to publicly defend herself, her approach is “bring people to the house.” Yeah, that is an interesting choice when you’re trying to convince the school that you don’t compulsively hold court in your house!

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It doesn’t end with the house call approach. Every author takes slightly different angles, but, again, it’s the similarities in all the stories that stand out because it’s the similarities that come directly from Chua. She’s the common denominator and her consistent spiel is what gets reflected in all three.

  • She never hosted “parties,” she just had a few people over for “counseling”: While the contemporaneous texts cast considerable suspicion on this, it’s also completely beside the point. The crux of this controversy is not that the scale of her parties, but that she apparently agreed not to keep using her house as a social hub and then… went ahead using her house as a social hub. The school doesn’t care about parties or meetings, they care that there’s allegedly a breach of an agreement that could’ve been completely avoided by saying, “Yeah, let’s go get coffee and sit down in the park.”
  • She’s a sympathetic underdog: There’s a lot of background about how Rubenfeld was the scholarly star and Chua the plucky underdog who became famous in his shadow. Oh, so much talk about Rubenfeld’s stellar credentials! Almost as if Chua was trying to piggyback the Rubenfeld redemption tour off this incident. But it also underscores how little she understands why Yale had a problem with the idea of hosting students at her house.
  • She’s done everything in the service of helping people… that the school wouldn’t: It’s probably not accidental that portraying herself as the underdog works as a thematic bridge to another pillar of her defense: her work is focused on helping underprivileged students. As I’ve said before, no one’s suggesting that this wasn’t good work or even important work in pushing back against institutional elitism. But good intentions aren’t really the point here — she’s trying to sell “her good, Yale bad” for obvious reasons.
  • There’s no due process here: She was “blindsided” and treated “like a criminal,” the stories recount. Though to take the criminal analogy to its logical conclusion, this is much more like being treated as a parolee. When her husband was suspended for two years for sexual harassment, there was a full-scale, independent investigation. We’re now getting indication that this inquiry was the source of Chua getting grounded as a social host as well. The due process happened, this is where folks already crosswise with the law get held to heightened standards.
  • This is is all retribution for sticking up for Brett Kavanaugh!: All three pieces allude to the idea that Chua is being “canceled” for her support of Brett Kavanaugh. There are quotes from Chua in the pieces suggesting that outrage at her stems from the public defense of Justice McKeggerton. Celebrating succor from Megyn Kelly flirts with embracing “national cancel culture martyrdom” — to quote the New York story — but let’s not sign Chua up for Substack just yet. She seems to want the benefit of blaming her woes on everyone but her without the ignominy of having to rely on Naomi Wolf as her only follower. On the other hand, Rubenfeld is using his down time to push anti-vaxxer causes so maybe the couple is aiming for that demographic.

Taken together with her insistence on bringing everyone to Castle Grayskull to bask in her power, Chua’s painting a pretty clear picture about how she got here. She can’t quit the idea that influencing people is all about holding court, she doesn’t grasp either the issue the school has with her socializing nor the gravity of the fallout from Rubenfeld’s situation, and it’s all everyone else’s fault because she’s taken an “edgy” position.

Controversy can sometimes strike people randomly. And sometimes controversy strikes people who just can’t help themselves.

How ‘Tiger Mom’ Amy Chua became the pariah of Yale Law. A complicated story of booze, misbehaving men, and the Supreme Court. [Business Insider]
The Tiger Mom and the Hornet’s Nest [New York]
Amy Chua Controversy Exposes Divisions At Yale Law [New York Times]

HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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