Jeffrey Toobin

• Born: May 21, 1960
• Place of Birth: New York City, New York

Journalist, lawyer, writer

Jeffrey Toobin is an author who wrote on legal affairs for The New Yorker. Before becoming a staff writer at the magazine in 1993, he worked as a lawyer. He is the author of many books, including Too Close to Call: The Thirty-Six-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election (2001), The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court (2007), American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst (2016), True Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Investigation of Donald Trump (2020), and Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism (2023).

Education and Early Career

Jeffrey Toobin was born on May 21, 1960, in New York City. As an undergraduate at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he wrote for the campus daily newspaper, the Crimson. He served as the Crimson's sports editor in 1980 and as its editorial chair in 1981. After graduating magna cum laude with a degree in American history and literature in 1982, Toobin attended Harvard Law School. He served on the editorial board of the Harvard Law Review and also wrote magazine articles, primarily for The New Republic, on a freelance basis. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1986.

For nearly two and a half years, starting in 1987, Toobin worked as an associate counsel in the federal Office of Independent Counsel, which was then headed by Lawrence E. Walsh. At the time, Walsh was investigating charges that members of President Ronald Reagan's administration had illegally channeled money to support the Contra group in Nicaragua. Toobin assisted in building a criminal case against Colonel Oliver North, the National Security Council staff member who played a key role in the transfer to the Contras of money generated by sales of arms to Iran. (North was initially convicted in 1989 on three counts: obstructing Congress, destroying documents, and accepting an illegal gratuity; however, in 1991, a federal appeals court reversed the conviction.)

Toobin voluntarily left the independent counsel's office in May 1989 and began writing his first book, Opening Arguments: A Young Lawyer's First Case: United States v. Oliver North (1991), which chronicled the investigation.

Walsh tried to block the publication of the book, because he feared that certain information Toobin had included would compromise further investigations and appeals in the case. In 1991, a federal judge, ruling in favor of Toobin, gave Penguin USA the go-ahead to publish. In a New York Times (February 5, 1991) review, David Johnston wrote that Opening Arguments “provides the strongest evidence yet that the United States used its money and influence in Central America to persuade governments there to assist the Contras.”

From 1990 to 1993, Toobin served as assistant United States attorney in the Eastern District of New York, and in that capacity he conducted ten criminal trials and argued eight appeals. In January 1993, shortly after Tina Brown became editor-in-chief of The New Yorker, Brown hired him as a staff writer, and he gave up practicing law. “It's funny,” Toobin has said of his switch from law to journalism. “It's very circuitous. I had two journalist parents—my mother is Marlene Sanders, who is one of the pioneering women television correspondents, and my dad, Jerome Toobin, was one of the founding fathers of public television. . . . So I grew up in this television household and thus, was repeatedly instructed never to consider a career in television. So I went to law school thinking I'd be a lawyer but I always worked on the school paper and I started freelancing when I was in law school. It's a question of my genetic destiny kicking in and that fact that Tina Brown took a chance on hiring me out of the US Attorney's office were really key factors.” (Diane Clehane, Mediabistro, October 10, 2007)

Later Career

Toobin's New Yorker articles have addressed a wide variety of subjects, including the O. J. Simpson trial, the legal difficulties of Martha Stewart, the sudden prominence of Senator Ted Cruz, and ongoing, extensive coverage of the Supreme Court. Never one to mince words, Toobin profiled Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in the February 21, 2014 New Yorker: “As of this Saturday, February 22nd, eight years will have passed since Clarence Thomas last asked a question during a Supreme Court oral argument. His behavior on the bench has gone from curious to bizarre to downright embarrassing, for himself and for the institution he represents.”

Too Close to Call, his 2001 book on the disputed Bush-Gore election of 2000, was a dense look at the complexities of that disputed election. Janet Maslin's New York Times review (October 18, 2001) cited its examination of “the post-election struggle” where “the reader can learn how Mr. Gore nearly called on Erin Brockovich for help (because she had organized a large group of citizens to file a lawsuit). And it notes that James A. Baker III was called away from a prospective pheasant hunting trip in Europe with former President George Bush, Dick Cheney, and the retired Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf when Mr. Baker's Machiavellian services were needed on the Florida front. The little details—when one of Mr. Gore's lawyers declared, ‘You know, I would take a bullet for that guy,’ his colleagues remained notably silent—are welcome in Mr. Toobin's otherwise somewhat remote examination of the fight.”

The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court was Toobin's exploration of the “paradox” of this institution: “Like all their predecessors, the justices belonged to a fundamentally antidemocratic institution. They were not elected; they were not accountable to the public in any meaningful way; their life tenure gave them no reason to cater to the will of the people. Yet the touchstones of the years 1992 to 2005 on the Supreme Court were decisions that reflected public opinion with great precision.”

Toobin's The Oath took as its touchstone Barack Obama's 2009 inauguration and the brand-new administration worrying, as Jack Rakove wrote in the autumn 2012 issue of Bookforum, “whether it really mattered that US Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts had slightly misstated the presidential oath of office at the inauguration the day before. To those who knew the oath—as Roberts manifestly did—something did sound wrong when he stumbled over the proper placement of the word ‘faithfully.’” The inaugural oath was in fact redone, and Toobin's book focused on the “latent conflict between Roberts and Obama, the two stellar Harvard law grads, each committed to his agenda.”

With 2016's American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst, Toobin took on the still publicly fascinating case of Patty Hearst, the heiress to the Hearst family newspaper fortune who had seemingly joined her kidnappers' cause during the 1970s. Examining the case from a lawyer's perspective, he uses the book to explore the common belief that Hearst had been involuntarily manipulated by her captors to take part in their crimes. That same year, his earlier work, The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (1996), served as the basis for the critically acclaimed new, star-studded anthology television series American Crime Story: The People v. O. J. Simpson, which premiered on the FX channel; the show went on to earn several Emmy Awards.

Scandal

In October 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Toobin was on a work-related Zoom call with co-workers at the New Yorker magazine. Believing the camera was off, Toobin exposed himself and began masturbating. However, Toobin’s actions could be seen by the other members of the call. A month after the incident, Toobin was fired by the magazine. He publicly apologized for his behavior. He was also suspended for eight months from his job as a legal analyst at CNN. However, in 2022, Toobin announced he was leaving CNN.

Toobin continued to write, publishing the books, The Investigation of Donald Trump in 2020 and Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism in 2023.

Bibliography

Bookforum Sept./Oct./Nov. 2012

Chicago Tribune p3 Dec. 29, 1996

"Jeffrey Toobin Leaves CNN 2 Years After Exposing Himself on Zoom Call." USA Today, 13 Aug. 2022, www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2022/08/13/jeffrey-toobin-leaves-cnn-zoom/10318888002/. Accessed 21 June 2024.

Fernandez, Maria Elena. "Jeffrey Toobin on Watching His Book, The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson, Come to Television." Vulture, 2 Feb. 2016, www.vulture.com/2016/02/jeffrey-toobin-on-watching-his-book-come-to-tv.html. Accessed 29 Nov. 2017.

"Jeffrey Toobin." The New Yorker, www.newyorker.com/contributors/jeffrey-toobin. Accessed 29 Nov. 2017.

Mediabistro Oct. 10, 2007

New York Times p16 Feb. 5, 1991; Oct. 18, 2001

Selected Books

Opening Arguments: A Young Lawyer's First Case: United States v. Oliver North, 1991

The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson, 1996

Too Close to Call: The Thirty-Six-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election, 2001

The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, 2007

The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court, 2012

American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst, 2016