A Bridge Too Far?

Abstract

In 1996 Ron and Pat Book hired a nanny to help manage their fren etic household in Plantation, Fla. Ron is one of the state’s most powerful lobbyists and was tr veling constantly. Pat was consumed with running a chocolate shop she had recently open ed. So they needed a hand tending to their three kids: Lauren, 11; Samantha, 7; and Chase, 4. Th e couple had already cycled through numerous nannies who didn’t work out and felt fortunate to fin d Waldina Flores, who seemed attentive, efficient, and firm-handed. For Lauren, though, Flores’s arrival marked the beginning o f a private horror. One day early on, the nanny asked the girl to spit out her chewing gum. When L auren refused, Flores leaned in, stuck her tongue into Lauren’s mouth, and removed the gum with it. Flores explained herself the next day by saying that was how people behaved when they lo v d each other. Soon she began molesting the girl in bed at night and watching her shower in t he morning. Over time, Flores became more violent. She beat the girl and threw her down the s tairs. Once, when Lauren joked to her father at Flores’s expense, the nanny later confronted h er. “You think you are funny?” Flores asked, according to Lauren. “No. You are s–t.” And then she de f cated on her. Lauren’s parents didn’t suspect anything. Flores was canny bout concealing her abusiveness, and Lauren says she was too pliant, confused, and ashamed to d ivulge what she was enduring. When Lauren’s parents asked her one day if she was interested in any guys in her eighth-grade class, Flores set out to find the girl a boyfriend, hoping to av ert suspicion. She pointed to a kid in Lauren’s yearbook, Kris Lim, and coached her on how to woo h im. Lauren and Kris went out and soon became a couple. As the nanny’s beatings became wors , Kris noticed Lauren’s bruises and asked her how she got them. After lying repeatedly, she ev entually confided the truth to him. Kris urged Lauren to tell her parents, but she refused. It was n’t until Flores threatened to kill Kris that Lauren finally relented. In a session in 2001 with he r psychiatrist–whom she’d begun seeing because of her despondency and loss of appetite–she s hared her saga of abuse. As soon as Lauren left his office, the psychiatrist called Ron Book and a sked him to come in the next day to discuss an urgent matter. When Book learned the news, he felt the world had come undone. “I was spinning, spinning, spinning,” he says. Much of their sessi on focused on Book’s feelings of rage and overwhelming guilt for not having detected his daughter ’s abuse. He fought back fantasies of violent retribution. In the end, he channeled his wrath into the one arena in which he maneuvers so deftly: the corridors of political power. Book’s relentlessness as a lobbyist is legendary. Compact a nd pugnacious, he sports a large diamond-studded ring, wears impeccably tailored Brioni su its, and drives a Bentley V12 convertible and an Audi R8. He carries three cell phones, and during t he legislative session in Tallahassee you can often see him juggling calls in each ear while also whe edling a passing lawmaker. “His drive, especially toward the end of the session, is like a whi rling dervish,” says former Florida