The Nanny Who Moved in and Wouldn’t Move Out
Manhattanites with money come to Hillsdale, a town of 1,800 about 20 minutes east of Hudson, when they want to slow down. About ten years ago, Jamie Carano Nordenström and her husband, Philip Nordenström, two consultants in their late 30s, bought and restored a neo-Colonial farmhouse there; it was meant to be a weekend home, but they liked the peace and quiet so much that they eventually moved in full time. In the summer of 2024, Jamie gave birth to their daughter. The couple wanted their baby to be raised “at least” bilingual — Philip is Swedish — but they struggled to find au pairs willing to come to Hillsdale. They settled for a nanny. “Guest house is provided,” the couple’s ad on the website Nanny Lane read. “Candidate could spend partial weekends upstate.”
A woman named Barbara Molnar answered the call. “Hello, I speak German,” she messaged Jamie. “I understand you are looking for a Swedish-speaking candidate. However, I am a mature reliable very experienced nanny with four children of my own and two grandchildren… I am a professional nanny. Have a wonderful day!”
Jamie invited Barbara over to meet the baby. It seemed like a natural fit. Barbara was easy to be around: smart, kind, professional, and “definitely, absolutely in love” with children and babies, Jamie said. She was tall and strong; Jamie, petite and suffering from postpartum complications, had been struggling to even pick up the baby. She hired Barbara to work 18 hours a week for $25 an hour with the option to work more if she wanted, which she often did. She read German books to the baby and baked teething biscuits from ground almond and spelt. At 58, Barbara was an experienced mother, and the first-time parents appreciated all the advice they could get.
Still, when Barbara asked them if she could move into the guesthouse mentioned in the ad, the couple was hesitant. Barbara was only part time, and they were still holding out hope a care agency would send them full-time help. But Barbara, a divorcée, said she was uncomfortable in her current living situation. Her adult children lived in the city, and she couldn’t afford better housing. Jamie, a Democrat and member of the Hillsdale town board who had run on affordable housing, didn’t ask questions. She didn’t charge the nanny rent, either; she didn’t need the money, and she didn’t want her to have legal status as a tenant. She redecorated the guesthouse, adding new beds, a swivel chair, a standing desk, storage bins, and a mini-fridge, and hired a cleaning service to tidy up a few times a month.
Barbara moved in that December. Jamie told her it was a no-pet household, but after getting settled, Barbara confessed that she had her dog with her in the guesthouse. The Nordenströms were taken aback — Hudson was a big yellow Labrador — but reluctantly accepted the situation. Not long after, Barbara asked if her youngest son, a teenager who she said was a boarding-school student, could visit for Christmas break. Around mid-January, Jamie noticed he hadn’t left.
It was a strange situation, Jamie told me, but she and her husband were the kind of people who would try to make any guest comfortable in their home. Philip played chess with Barbara’s son in the back garden on Sundays, and the couple sometimes paid Barbara to cook for them. She bought fine specialty foods, made classic French recipes like quiche and boeuf bourguignon, and at times appeared to have more in common with those who owned weekend homes in Hillsdale than she did with the domestic workers they employed. In addition to German, she spoke conversational Italian and French and said she’d lived all over Europe. Barbara told them she used to run a successful restaurant chain with her ex-husband, with whom she shared her first three children. The father of her fourth child, she said, was a deadbeat. By Barbara’s account, everything had taken a turn when her ex-husband and his associate stole millions from her years ago. She was usually joyful but grew sullen when speaking about her past. Jamie tried to change the subject when things got too personal.
More cracks formed in the arrangement. Jamie noticed that Barbara didn’t pick up after herself in common spaces or after her dog defecated in the house or garden. Barbara took walks with the baby over property lines, without neighbors’ permission, but she always said “Yes, of course” when Jamie asked her to stay closer to the house. Once, a woman who had attended a local pottery class with Barbara told Jamie she’d introduced herself as the family’s neighbor instead of their nanny. “An odd comment,” Jamie thought, but she didn’t say anything to Barbara. It wasn’t until the summer that she realized something was really wrong.
One evening in early June, the Nordenströms arrived home after a trip to Sweden and saw strangers’ cars parked on their front lawn. A bunch of teenagers were swimming in their pool and hanging out on white chaise lounges, and Barbara was nowhere in sight. “Where is Barbara?” Jamie asked. “Sleeping,” one replied.
As the Nordenströms carried their suitcases out of the car, Barbara emerged from the house. Jamie told her the party was over and that they’d talk about it tomorrow. Walking around inside, Jamie noticed that both of her fridges were full of hamburger meat and there was no room for their groceries; dog hair had clogged up the wet-and-dry vacuum of the main house; and her bedroom sheets, which she normally hangs to dry, were soft, as if put in the dryer. She was fairly certain the teens had used the outdoor sauna as a changing room. Exhausted, Jamie went to bed but awoke to the sound of pots and pans banging in the kitchen. “Barbara,” she thought, and went downstairs to confront her. Instead of apologizing, Barbara got angry. She accused Jamie of embarrassing her son in front of his friends. “The whole situation was so bizarre,” Jamie told me. “We didn’t really know what to do.”
When Jamie fired Barbara, she asked her to tell the Nordenströms what support she needed to transition from the guesthouse, offering to pay out her regular hours through the end of the month and help with her rent at a new apartment. Instead, Barbara threatened to stay through October. Though she’d never paid rent, she invoked her tenants rights, as if she’d memorized a script. “You don’t know the law,” Barbara said, suddenly hostile. “This is my home, my furnished apartment. This is my designated parking space.”
This wasn’t the woman the Nordenströms had known before. “We knew, at that point, that she had engaged with us to gain access to our home,” Jamie said. She started digging into Barbara’s history to search for any red flags online criminal-background checks would miss, looking up past addresses and contacting individual court clerks to ask for any eviction or housing-court records. She had her attorney run an electronic-records search and started cold-calling Barbara’s old landlords. “Everyone said she was dangerous, to pay her off.”
A landlord in Chatham, about 20 miles north of Hillsdale, said Barbara and a man she was with had rented his place for seven months in 2018 and paid the first, second, and last month’s rent with checks from a Canadian trust — the rest bounced. Though they trashed the place, they left when they said they would. A lawyer for another landlord, in the neighboring town of Ghent, said the two owed about $27,000 when eviction proceedings began. And a retired bonds trader in Vermont said Barbara didn’t keep up with her rent during the two years she lived in an apartment he owned there. His wife got to know Barbara well, but the relationship broke down. Barbara reported the couple to the fire marshal, the health inspector, and the state’s Human Rights Commission, claiming the couple discriminated against her for being on public assistance and that the wife had called her fat and told her to walk more. “You know me,” the landlord’s wife recalled Barbara telling her when she asked why she’d say something like that. “I’ll do anything to keep a roof over our heads.” The dispute went to trial, and eventually the landlord agreed to pay Barbara an undisclosed sum to move out of the apartment. When she left, she broke appliances and left mountains of garbage outside. There was a hole in the wall of her son’s room, and the words “thanks for putting us on the street, you greedy old hag!!! I’ll send you a postcard” were scribbled in blue pen on the living-room wall.
Jamie was terrified. Barbara had spent eight months living with the family and caring for her child, but now Jamie didn’t know who she really was, what she was capable of, or whether she was even fluent in German.
The Nordenströms had reached out to a lawyer who confirmed that, by law, New York State considered Barbara a licensee, an occupant who lives in a residence without paying rent or having an oral or written rental agreement in place, just by the permission of the homeowner. In theory, this would make it easier to get Barbara out, because that permission had been revoked. But the couple could still be accused of illegally evicting her if they did anything a court might consider pressuring her to leave, meaning they could not shut off utilities, change locks, or even lock the doors to their own home, allowing Barbara to come and go as she pleased.
On June 25, their lawyer drafted a ten-day notice to demand Barbara vacate the property. That day, Jamie spotted Barbara pulling out of the driveway with her son and decided to serve her in person. She started recording on her phone and walked out onto the dirt road, where she says Barbara saw her and accelerated in her direction, hitting the brakes less than ten feet away from her. “Barbara, Barbara, don’t run me over!” Jamie shouted. Barbara rolled her window down and took the notice. Jamie reported the incident to the sheriff.
The next day, two of Barbara’s adult children came to visit her. Jamie called the police and reported Barbara for aiding in trespass. When the sergeant showed up on the property, Jamie walked with him to the guesthouse and started recording. Barbara’s son, Francesco Granato, told the officer the family was just there eating pie for his mother’s birthday. He’d wanted to talk to the Nordenströms about her living situation; as far as he knew, his mom was a rent-paying tenant getting cornered by two people of greater means and resources. “What are your means?” Jamie asked Granato, who drove a Porsche. “Why don’t you help your mother?”
That weekend, Jamie began texting Barbara demanding that she move her car out of the driveway. Days passed, and the car did not move. Jamie called a tow truck. “I am interviewing for several jobs and once that is secured, I promise you, I cannot get away from you and this place fast enough,” Barbara texted Jamie. “You are now night and day, 180 degrees from the kind and generous person you were when we started.”
Soon, the women found themselves in a standoff. The ten-day notice period came and went, and still Barbara remained. The Nordenströms put more cameras up in the main house and the woods, facing the public road. Barbara’s son put one up inside the guesthouse. The Nordenströms filed an eviction petition at the town court, in which they called their ex-nanny “a professional con-artist, with a well-documented history of ingratiating herself with well-off individuals, unlawfully occupying their property in bad faith, and then refusing to leave and abusing the protections afforded by eviction laws.” The couple also complained about Barbara’s 12-year-old dog to the local dog control. Barbara, they said, consistently violated the town’s Article 1 leash law; her Labrador damaged the patio, swam in the pool, harassed the family, and endangered the baby by walking around unleashed. They included screenshots of Barbara walking into the woods with her dog, whom security cameras caught peeing on a Tupelo tree.
The Nordenströms usually threw a big Fourth of July party for their neighbors and friends. This year, because of the nanny situation, they settled for a smaller daytime event. At the party, an unwitting friend of Jamie’s and her husband wandered into the guesthouse to use the bathroom. Barbara and her son weren’t home, but he got an alert on his smart home app. An officer showed up to investigate amid the dancing kids and neighbors tucking into barbecue.
“I video tape and am recording everything including your guests entering my house,” Barbara texted her former employer. Jamie replied: “Your house?”
About a week later, Jamie told Barbara she would be doing inspections of the guesthouse twice a week, Mondays and Fridays at 9 a.m. She said she wanted to check for carpenter-ant damage; the wood was old and had been infested before. Though Barbara was legally allowed to be present for them, she and her son made themselves scarce, and Jamie texted her lengthy reports afterward: The guesthouse entryway reeked of fried meat, decaying food, and smoke. “You left your soaking wet filthy dog blanket dripping water on my rug and WOOD floors,” Jamie texted. “Why would you do that?” On another occasion, Barbara hadn’t cleaned up water from an overturned vase and soaked Jamie’s linen tablecloths and napkins. “It is very clear that you continue to cook and light objects on fire,” Jamie texted Barbara when she spotted her lighting candles in the window. Legally, Jamie wasn’t allowed to take back items from the main house that Barbara had brought into the guesthouse. But she documented them and texted Barbara to ask her to return them: brass candlesticks, beige coffee cups, flat white bowls, knives, and Tiffany glass.
The Nordenströms avoided Barbara by staying inside the main house and keeping away from the parts of the house Barbara could see them from, such as the kitchen. Barbara and her son, meanwhile, spent their days milling around town and returned only at night. Occasionally, they slept at a friend’s in Ghent. When they did catch each other’s eyes through the windows, Jamie says, Barbara behaved erratically, slamming doors and speaking loudly. In late July, Barbara reported Jamie to the police for locking her out. “Hi Barbara,” Jamie texted her. “Please stop making false police reports in an effort to continue to harass us. You locked yourself out of the ground floor room that you unlawfully occupy in my house … Just stop.” Barbara doubled down. “STOP HARASSING ME,” she wrote back.
All summer long, sheriffs, court clerks, judges, and neighbors got pulled into the feud. Some saw a woman of means trying to drag down an older woman with nothing. Hillsdale was a liberal town with private schools that attracted “progressive, affluent people” who cared about being on the right side of issues like affordable housing. Who would want to side with even the approximation of an evil landlord? To others, the Nordenströms had tried to do the right thing and Barbara seemed like a grifter, floating through the lives of the well-to-do, taking as much hospitality as she could. “We were willing to support her elsewhere,” Jamie said, clipped and cautious about every word on the record. “She just didn’t want to be elsewhere.”
By August 6, Barbara still hadn’t left, and at a hearing at the Hillsdale town courthouse that day, a judge formally issued a warrant for her eviction. Barbara had until September 10; otherwise, sheriffs — who were sick of making calls to the house — would forcibly remove her. Barbara planned to leave by August 31. By that date, she hoped to be settled in an Airbnb.
The Nordenströms started sleeping at a neighbor’s on some nights. Other families — worn down by the nonstop stress, and “certainly under stress, your relationship is tested,” Jamie says — might have paid her off at any cost or even moved away, but Jamie and Philip remained a united front, assured that the whole thing was simply too absurd to go on forever. Jamie assumed the bulk of child-care duties, which interfered with her ability to get back to work. She worried constantly about Barbara getting loud and hostile in front of the baby, which she claimed Barbara had once done after arriving late for work. But her worst fear was that Barbara would one day come in and take the child away. “We made a decision at the beginning that we weren’t going to give into her extortive practices,” she told me. “We weren’t going to let her take over our home.” (“Jamie has the lead on this with my full support. No further comments,” Philip replied to a request for comment). The couple hired a private security detail in mid-August to stroll the property for up to ten hours at night.
One Friday morning, Jamie had put the baby down in the nursery and headed to the guesthouse for one of her inspections when she saw Barbara’s car pull up. The ex-nanny and her son got out and walked quickly toward Jamie. “Unbelievable,” Barbara yelled across the lawn. “You literally went in my house. You went in there without asking.” The interaction got heated; Barbara asked her where the baby was — had she been left inside alone? — and followed Jamie with her phone, taking a video. Jamie headed to the family courthouse in downtown Hudson. That evening, a sheriff arrived to serve Barbara with a temporary order of protection. The document had three terms: Barbara was to refrain from controlling, monitoring, or interfering with electronic devices on the property; she was to refrain from harassing, intimidating, or threatening her former employers; and she was to surrender any firearms. Failure to obey the order meant mandatory arrest and up to seven years in prison for criminal contempt.
On August 31, Barbara cleaned the space, packed up her things, left the brass candlesticks, and headed to an Airbnb. A video captured by the Nordenströms’ camera shows Barbara dragging a dog bed across the lawn to her car, throwing up the sign of the cross.
A few days later, Jamie peered through the windows of the empty guesthouse with a sense of relief. Before long, however, she noticed a strong odor emanating from the cottage, palpable all the way to the Tesla charger in the driveway. The cleaners arrived a few days later, and Jamie showed them inside. At first glance, it seemed Barbara had actually tidied up. A stack of folded sheets and down comforters sat in a neat pile on top of the mattress. Upon closer inspection, it was all soaked in urine, as were the sisal rugs on the floors. There was so much it had soaked through the floorboards. There was no way it could have come from a dog, Jamie thought. The cleaners told Jamie it had been happening for months, but not wanting to upset her, they kept it quiet. Jamie plans to hire an environmental cleaning company to deodorize the space; her usual service couldn’t do the job.
“You’d think we’re in some kind of war over here. This is freaking Hillsdale, New York. There’s no reason for people who are supposed to be educated to behave like this,” Barbara told me when I met her in Hudson in September. She suggested a restaurant that had a nice garden where she could bring her Labrador, and when I arrived, she was cheerful and invigorated. She talked at a clip as she pored through folders of documents she had brought that detailed past wrongs against her. “My friend George Goldsmith — he wrote Children of the Corn — he always says, ‘The most insane stories are the most true.’”
Once upon a time, she was the one who had housekeepers and au pairs. “I’ve lived in castles and probably had more things than you have,” she imagines saying to Jamie. Before the guesthouse, Barbara had lived large on Park Avenue and with wine scions in France. She’s six feet tall and blonde and wears the designer clothes from her old life. The rich still confuse her for one of them. “But they smell me,” she says, tossing Hudson a cookie as he wanders around the back patio, “and I’m not.” She talked to me like she had something to prove. After everything the Nordenströms had told me about her, she assumed I might take their side: “The babysitter always goes down, right?” But after months reviewing court documents, family photos, and copies of several forged checks, I found that the contours of her story turned out to be true. In her own words, hers is the tale of a “woman unbroken,” dragged into quicksand by tough Italians and inhumane landlords and prevailing no matter how deep they sink her.
She grew up in a middle-class immigrant family in New Jersey, the child of a German mother and a Hungarian father who built a life as an East Orange landlord. “They just wanted me to marry some rich Hungarian guy,” Barbara says, “and live the life of a housewife, whatever.” She attended Parsons in the ’80s, intending to be a fashion designer. She said she was scouted as a model and worked for the Parisian fashion house Guy Laroche and designed men’s underwear with paisley prints. Barbara says she once designed a coat Neiman Marcus wanted to acquire, but the fabric needed to manufacture it was too expensive. “I would’ve been a millionaire,” she says, if only someone had loaned her the $65,000 she needed to purchase cashmere from Loro Piana.
She was hanging out at the Palladium in 1986 when she met a well-connected construction worker. Let’s call him Giovanni. He later introduced her to his friend, a fellow construction worker named Pasquale Fabio Granato. Granato and Barbara eventually got married and worked together in the restaurant business; they had three children by 1995, when he opened Serafina Fabulous Pizza, the stylish Italian joint that would soon become a celebrity watering hole. The business was an overnight success. “He was a poor guy from Southern Italy who became the king of New York overnight,” Barbara says, “and he just went completely out of his mind.” After an argument at their summer home in Cutchogue one night, he violently assaulted her, threatening to kill her and squeezing her face and neck. Barbara went straight to the police and filed for a temporary order of protection against Granato. (Granato did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
They divorced in 2001; in the settlement, Granato agreed to support Barbara and the children with a few thousand dollars a month for the rest of Barbara’s life and put them all up in a house in Westport, Connecticut. He later wrested custody away from Barbara, sold the house, and enrolled the kids in school in Switzerland and Italy. Barbara traveled between the States and Europe to visit them. During a trip to Paris, she met a French wine scion with multiple châteaus in Saint-Émilion and had a son with him. That relationship soured, too; Barbara is currently suing him for nearly $5 million in child support and damages.
In 2009, Barbara and her sons, then 2 and 15, moved to Miami, where Granato had rented them an apartment. One day, she happened to run into Giovanni in the building’s parking garage. They became close again and moved in together. When a judge awarded Barbara a $2 million divorce settlement in 2015, she said Giovanni helped her manage it. Three years later, Barbara says, she tried to make a withdrawal from the account and discovered there was only $1,200 left. Barbara worked with the FBI on the case to no avail.
With no money and nowhere to go, Barbara and her youngest son dipped in and out of homelessness for months. They slept in cars and inexpensive hotels and, for a while, stayed with Giovanni, though he never gave them back the money. (She says she had to keep him close for the FBI investigation.) He was the one, she said, who had rented the houses in Chatham and Ghent and put her name on the lease behind her back, and she said she had paid for Chatham in all cash. (“Forget about it,” Giovanni said when reached for comment for this article.) As for the couple in Vermont: Those allegations moved her to rage. That landlord worked on Wall Street and cheated people. Yes, she left garbage outside because they had never given her trash receptacles. Yes, the appliances were broken because the landlord’s wife never fixed the oven. Maybe it was her son who scribbled that message on the wall. No, she didn’t tell the Human Rights Commission that the wife called her fat — Barbara told them that she’d called her overweight. Yes, she’d do anything she needed to do to keep a roof over her head, “but that doesn’t mean I would hurt someone, or lie.” And, she says, she’d paid them in full.
After they left Vermont, Barbara and her son stayed with her eldest daughter, who ran a holistic horse ranch, at her home upstate in Athens and finally wound up in Hillsdale, where they stayed with Barbara’s old friends, Vera and Leland Lehrman. (Leland, the grandson of the Rite Aid founder, is director of the MAHA Institute, a think tank started this spring to advance RFK Jr.’s health initiatives.) She’d known the couple for years — their sons were good friends who went to kindergarten together in Ghent and now attended the same high school in the Berkshires. It was a warm, nontraditional house with a piano in the kitchen, but things were cramped. Living there, Barbara says, made her son depressed.
When Barbara first moved in with the Nordenströms, she liked Jamie, whom she found kind and elegant, even if she could be very particular about certain things — the main house, the guest house, the baby’s clothes, her food, the marble changing table, and the flowers in the garden all had to be white. Jamie (who, by the way, says there were also pink and purple flowers) seemed to respect Barbara’s age and expertise with children, calling her “the nanny extraordinaire.” “I felt safe with her,” Barbara said. By December, Barbara said, she was working full time and had negotiated her hourly rate with Jamie up to $40. According to Barbara, $15 of those went toward her rent. (Jamie denies such a negotiation ever took place. “Forty dollars an hour is absurd. Twenty-five is super-generous, especially in our area and especially in a situation where housing is provided.”)
Jamie bragged about Barbara to her friends and presented her son with dozens of white tulips after his school play. She told Barbara she and Philip were happy to have company and, on Christmas, gave Barbara a card hoping for “many more” holidays together. The neighbors were fine with her walks across property lines. And she didn’t sneak anyone in: The Nordenströms knew her dog was moving in and adored her son — in fact, Barbara said, it was actually Jamie’s idea to throw her son a pool party to celebrate the end of the school year.
So why throw the pool party when the Nordenströms were away, why not tell them? Well, Barbara was only trying to be considerate. “Oh, let me just do it now before they come home,” she thought, “so they don’t have to deal with a bunch of kids.” She cooked spare ribs and invited a handful of her son’s friends over. “I just wanted to give my son one happy day, for him to feel teenage and normal.” Barbara says she was inside the guesthouse, giving the kids privacy, when she heard the Nordenströms screaming outside. That night, she sent the couple an apology text. She truly believed, given their connection, that the gathering had been okay, she said, and assured them the house and space had been honored, the kids had stayed outside.
Jamie called Barbara in for a meeting two days later. “She said I broke her trust, I’m a liar, I’m a deceitful person. I said, ‘Okay, if you want us to leave, then we’ll leave.’” When the Nordenströms fired her, Barbara felt discarded. One day she’d been Mary Poppins, teaching the baby how to sit up, and a single mistake — “She never said you can’t have anybody over when we’re not here. So how would I know that?” — had turned her into the dirt under Jamie’s clear-jelly-sandaled foot. Barbara says the only real support the Nordenströms offered was to pay her rent if she moved into subsidized housing an hour away, but her son, who was no longer in boarding school, went to school nearby and the drive there and back every day wasn’t sustainable. Summer nanny jobs were all taken by then, and Barbara had nothing saved. What she needed was time, at least until October, to get on her feet. But Jamie was on her case, uncovering her housing history and calling up Vera Lehrman to complain about her. “How far is she willing to go?” Barbara wondered. She was sick and tired of defending herself against lies and exaggerations.
It was one thing for Jamie to fire her or even to kick her out. It was another, she felt, for her former employer to destroy her as she had been destroyed before. There were just five or six kids at the pool party; a mere 14 ground burgers in the fridges Jamie said was full. She’d only ever used the couple’s sauna with their permission; Philip even showed her how to turn it on. It was Jamie who put the candlesticks in her house, and no, she never tried to run her employer over — she was going five miles per hour and hadn’t expected the woman to practically throw herself on the hood (“I did not throw myself on the hood of her car. That is completely false,” Jamie said). That time she was accused of banging pots in the kitchen, she was washing a single pan; she was just a loud talker, and the family started acting “all paranoid.” Yes, you could say she’d been “fresh” with Jamie sometimes, but she’d been an excellent nanny, and now the order of protection would show up on background checks when she applied for gigs. “I’m going to be completely discredited and slandered,” Barbara said, and things had been hard enough the past several years she had spent adrift. “Now I’m almost 60 years old. If you don’t let me work, how will I survive?”
For the record, she doesn’t know how to respond to the urine in the guesthouse, a disgusting, upsetting allegation. Certainly it wasn’t her dog; he held his bladder on international flights, and Emirates staff loved him. “Maybe it was a bear.”
Barbara had moved out, but the women weren’t done with each other. In August, Barbara filed a wrongful-termination lawsuit against Jamie, who responded to the “baseless and frivolous AI-generated” suit with a filing arguing Barbara was mentally unstable. Jamie wanted to extend her temporary order of protection to the maximum possible window, and a court date was set for mid-September. “It’s like we lost this summer of our lives,” Jamie said before the hearing. She told me these types of situations happened to wealthy people the Nordenströms knew, CEOs and executives too stigmatized to say anything about it. That’s part of why she wanted to create a record of her situation — to protect others and draw attention to a system designed to protect Barbara’s rights over her own. Plus Barbara appeared to be staying in the area, and when Jamie’s daughter grew up, she’d have to tell her that the woman existed. “I still fear that she might come back,” Jamie says. “Or try to interact with me or my daughter.”
In court, the judge, who’d just wrapped a hearing about a truant high-schooler, wasn’t sure why any of us were there. “This is getting kind of silly,” he told the room. Barbara, now represented by a court-appointed lawyer, had moved out and changed her address. The last time she’d received mail at the Nordenströms was when she lived there. “What relief,” he asked Jamie’s lawyer, “is your client still seeking?”
Protection from harassment, Jamie’s lawyer replied, as Barbara was staying in the area despite having no connection to it. Wasn’t she free to live anywhere? The judge didn’t question Jamie’s feelings of fear, but imposing more restrictions on Barbara was another matter. Still, he wanted to give everyone a little relief. He set a hearing date for January, at which point he hoped neither side would be “thinking of each other anymore.” And so he would keep in place the order of protection on the former nanny. But, he added, so too would he place one on her former employer.
Jamie reddened, visibly distraught. She hadn’t done anything, her lawyer told the judge; this was another example of Barbara’s continued harassment. As a clerk handed out identical paper orders, he read out the terms: no assault, no communication, no identity theft, surrender all handguns and pistols. Barbara didn’t have any, she told the judge. Jamie paused. Her household did. (They’re gifted vintage heirloom guns, she tells me later; the few times she’s gone shooting, it’s been in the English countryside outside London. “I don’t support the NRA.”)
Court let out, and Barbara walked around downtown Hudson. The mutual orders felt like an unanticipated victory; she had thought Jamie would come out on top.
Being a nanny was thankless work, but Hillsdale was a magical place where so many people were kind to her. She’s been working as a private chef in the area, and says she is launching a pediatric sleep training business called The Snooze Lab next month. She’d try whatever she needed to survive, as she’s always done. But as she searches for jobs, she worries about the influence of her once-gracious host. “I have this client who’s a really big-deal fashion designer who loves my food, and he has this beautiful house up in Monterey” — Massachusetts — “and I’m like, Oh my God, what if she gets to him?” After all, Jamie had her whole circle of wealthy friends. “What if she went through her contacts and wrote an email to every one — ‘Oh, have you ever come across this woman, Barbara Molnar?’”
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