Mona Gable

Gable never knew her mother when she was well or was told that a lobotomy caused her behavior. She only knew the erratic, unpredictable person who drank and raged and had little impulse control. Now a mother herself, Gable tries to make sense of the surgery and accept the person her mother was versus the person she once had been.

Occidental, a small liberal arts college, has been the subject of two federal complaints over the way it has handled sexual assault cases. The school is currently bitterly divided: faculty and students are fighting for justice, while the administration is battling bad publicity.

Hugo Schwyzer was considered “L.A.’s most prominent male feminist” until his bad behavior exposed him as a hypocrite:

During one student lobbying trip to Washington, D.C., in April 1997, he says he had sex with four coeds, three of them at the same time. This was a period when he was also drinking heavily, abusing cocaine and prescription drugs, and swept up in a stormy relationship with a woman in her twenties.

In 1998, Schwyzer, now divorced from his second wife, would see his destructive behavior catch up with him. After a drug and alcohol binge, he landed in the hospital. He went into rehab and got sober and, he says, initiated discussions with Pasadena City College officials about his past philandering with students. As part of his amends to PCC, he wrote the college’s first policy governing sexual relations between faculty and students, and then returned to the classroom. Schwyzer began carefully building a new story for himself, one that came to be known, mockingly, by his online feminist critics as “Hugo’s redemption narrative.”