Reality Winner Has Been in Jail for a Year, Her Prosecution Is Unfair and Unprecedented

By Peter Maass, The Intercept

03 June 18

his is a tale of two defendants and two systems of justice.

Christmas was coming, and Paul Manafort wanted to spend the holiday with his extended family in the Hamptons, where he owns a four-acre estate that has 10 bedrooms, a pool, a tennis court, a basketball court, a putting green, and a guest cottage. But Manafort was under house arrest in northern Virginia. Suspected of colluding with the Russian government, the former campaign manager for Donald Trump had been indicted on a dozen charges involving conspiracy, money laundering, bank fraud, and lying to federal investigators.

A lobbyist who became mysteriously wealthy over the years, Manafort avoided jail by posting $10 million in bond, though he was confined to his luxury condo in Alexandria, Virginia. That’s why, in mid-December, his lawyers asked the judge to make an exception. Manafort’s $2.7 million Virginia home could not provide “adequate accommodations” for his holiday guests, some of whom would have difficulty traveling because of health problems, the lawyers stated. A day later, the judge agreed to the request. Manafort could have his Christmas getaway in the Hamptons.

Hundreds of miles away, another defendant in an eerily related case was not so blessed. Reality Winner, an Air Force veteran and former contractor for the National Security Agency, was sitting in a small-town jail in Lincolnton, Georgia. Arrested a year ago today, on June 3, 2017, Winner was accused of leaking an NSA document that showed how Russians tried to hack American voting systems in 2016. The alleged leak – Winner has pleaded not guilty – came at a time when there was far greater doubt than now about Russian attempts to tip the presidential election. Her case is related to Manafort’s in this sense: While Manafort is suspected of aiding the Russian effort, Winner is accused of warning Americans about it.

As Christmas approached, Winner was going nowhere. Even though she has been indicted on just one count of leaking classified information and faces far less prison time than Manafort, the judge in her case decided she was a flight risk and denied her bail. Winner spent the holidays at the Lincolnton jail, which is smaller in its entirety than Manafort’s Hampton’s estate; its exercise yard, hemmed in by razor wire, is shorter than Manafort’s pool. While Manafort was joined by his family, Winner was marooned with a few other inmates. The only cheery news for her was that for the first time since her arrest the previous June, she was able to eat fresh fruit, thanks to a holiday donation from a local church.

I recently asked Winner’s mother, Billie Winner-Davis, for an example of what she regards as inequities in the government’s treatment of her daughter. She laughed and said, “Let’s talk about Paul Manafort.” On December 17, Winner-Davis had turned on her television and learned of Manafort’s holiday plans. “We’re celebrating because [Reality] got a banana,” Winner-Davis recalled. “He got to go to the Hamptons for Christmas. And he’s got multiple charges and could spend the rest of his life in prison.”

The U.S. government rarely acts kindly toward the leakers it chooses to prosecute — unless they happen to be popular figures like David Petraeus, the former general and CIA director who shared with his girlfriend several notebooks filled with top-secret information; he was allowed to plead guilty to just a misdemeanor charge. It was the Obama administration that ramped up the prosecution of leakers, using the Espionage Act against eight of them. But in most of those cases, such as the ones that involved conventional leaks of single documents or names, the sentences were not long – about two years – and the accused were not confined to jail before their trials.

It is far different in the Trump era. Not only has the president consistently derided the press as enemies of the people, but he has also pushed the Department of Justice to accelerate its crackdown on leakers. Late last year, Attorney General Jeff Sessions proudly announced that the DOJ was investigating three times as many leaks as in the Obama era. Earlier this year, the release of memos written by former FBI Director James Comey showed that leaks were a topic of his talks with Trump. “I said I was eager to find leakers and would like to nail one to the door as a message,” Comey wrote about his February 14, 2017 meeting in the Oval Office, adding that the president “said something about the value of putting a head on a pike as a message.”

A few months later, Reality Winner was arrested and charged under the Espionage Act – the first leak case of the Trump era, the first head on a pike. Two days after her arrest, The Intercept published an article about a top-secret NSA document that described what the agency knew about Russian attempts to hack the U.S. voting system. The Intercept was not aware of the identity of the source who provided the document, though other news organizations connected it to Winner. The document, dated May 5, 2017, described a monthslong effort by Russian military intelligence to hack elements of the U.S. election and voting infrastructure through a combination of tactics that included phishing attempts against local election officials. At the time, the document was the most detailed account to emerge from the Trump administration about the Russian hacking efforts – and it emerged only because someone had leaked it.

Winner was not treated like other government workers indicted in the Obama era for conventional leaks (a separate group from those charged with mass leaks, like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning). Whereas Jeffrey Sterling, Stephen Kim, and John Kiriakou were charged and released on bond, Winner was denied bail and jailed near her Augusta home. Prosecutors claimed she had dangerous views – among other things, they cited a sarcastic remark she’d made about America’s reliance on air conditioning – and they asserted without proof that she might have more documents on a thumb drive (her lawyers have denied it). The prosecutors also said that because she was a translator who spoke Farsi, Dari, and Pashto, she might try to leave the United States. But there had been just one occasion in her entire life when Winner made an overnight visit to a foreign country, her mother told me – a weekend trip to Belize.

One of the punitive flaws of the criminal justice system is that a large number of people are unnecessarily held in pretrial detention. The bail system plays to the advantage of wealthy defendants like Paul Manafort and Harvey Weinstein (who paid his $1 million bond with a cashier’s check), because they can provide the government with fantastic sums; freedom is quite literally for sale, as in a story Anton Chekhov might have written about czarist Russia. The poor and the unlucky are stuck behind bars, punished before their guilt is determined. Defendants who are unable to pay bail have sometimes been held for years without a trial.

The Lincolnton jail usually has about a half dozen or, at most, a dozen female inmates, according to Winner’s mother. Similar to local jails across the country, many inmates have been arrested on drug offenses, and some go through withdrawals while there. Winner has been attacked on one occasion – she ended up with a gash on her head, according to her mother. Billie Winner-Davis also said that her daughter has access to a small outdoor pen for about 30 minutes of exercise a day, though not on weekends – that is the entirety of her time outside.

Strip searches are a routine feature of life. When she is taken to the federal courthouse about 45 miles away in Augusta, Winner is strip-searched after every visit to the courtroom and every meeting with her lawyers, her mother said. She is also shackled at the ankles and the waist (she fell once, and because her hands were bound, she landed on her face, bruising it). The whole process is so humiliating that, according to Winner’s mother, she has asked to not attend the hearings in Augusta unless it is absolutely necessary. Of course, these difficulties are not unique to Winner – across the country, this is what happens all the time to people who are denied bail or simply cannot pay it. “Reality has been through a lot,” Billie Winner-Davis said. “Being in the military for six years, she’s not a soft person. But for her to cry and say, I can’t do this, that she’s treated, she’s not even human any more…” – Winner-Davis breaks off at this point.

As Christmas approached and Reality Winner sat in the Lincolnton jail, Paul Manafort was the recipient of another holiday gift from the judge in his case. He was granted permission to move from his Virginia condominium to a larger $1.5 million home he owns in a gated community in Palm Beach, Florida.

Imagine that you are facing trial but are forbidden from searching for evidence to prove you are innocent. It is a scenario from a totalitarian “Alice in Wonderland” – you may do anything you want to defend yourself except the one thing that might actually help.

That’s a rough approximation of the situation Winner’s lawyers have faced due to a strange twist in her case. She is accused of potentially causing “exceptionally grave damage” to national security by leaking a classified document that, the government claims, contains “national defense information.” NDI is a special designation that the Espionage Act uses for sensitive and closely-guarded information that might harm national security if leaked. But what if the document did not merit this elevated status? What if its disclosure didn’t actually cause “exceptionally grave damage,” or any damage at all?

That’s the key pathway Winner’s lawyers want to follow in her defense, according to one of their latest filings. For a long time, the government has over-classified the avalanche of documents it creates, exaggerating the sensitivity of its cables, reports and analyses. Even Obama admitted that the government has a classification problem. For instance, a State Department official acknowledged in a court filing that the classified report at the heart of Stephen Kim’s case was “a nothing burger.” (Kim, a former State Department expert on North Korea, agreed to a plea deal, rather than risk going to trial and, if he lost, getting a longer sentence.)

But there’s an absurd catch to the over-classification defense that Winner’s lawyers want to pursue, and they have had to fight about it for much of the time she has been in jail.

Early in the case, Winner’s lawyers received security clearances to read the classified document she is accused of leaking. They had to read it in what’s known as a SCIF – a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, which is a secure room in a government building. Outside the SCIF, they were not allowed to disclose the document’s contents to anyone who does not have a security clearance.

Winner’s lawyers have stated in public filings that they needed to search on the internet to determine whether information in the document was known to a large number of government officials or was in the public domain. This was crucial to their effort to prove that the document did not merit NDI status. But because the document is classified, and because researching its contents on the internet could disclose search queries to hackers who theoretically could compromise the lawyers’ computers or access their routers, they were prohibited from Googling key phrases, according to court filings. In essence, Winner’s lawyers were forbidden from finding out if the document was as sensitive as the government claimed.

Of course, the document Winner is accused of leaking is widely reported to be the document published by The Intercept on June 5, 2017. There is virtually nothing about the document that her lawyers can give away because, as reported, the document was published, with a few redactions, by The Intercept. But that didn’t change the restrictions. In the government’s view, a classified document remains classified even after it has been published. Lawyers are still bound by the rules: They may not take any action, such as typing a phrase into a search bar, that might disclose the contents of a classified document even if everyone basically has access to it.

There’s yet another bizarre feature in the classified wonderland of Winner’s case. Just as government officials are forbidden from talking about classified matters on unsecured phone or email systems, Winner’s lawyers are under the same restrictions, according to court filings. But unlike the government’s lawyers, they do not have secure systems at their disposal. This means they cannot chat on their work phones or exchange work emails about classified aspects of the case. They generally have to convene in the same room to talk about the leaked document, and that’s a major impediment because they are dispersed across the country, in Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C.

In November, they filed a motion to lift what they described as “unconstitutional limitations” on Winner’s right to defend herself. The November 27 motion said the defense was unfairly restricted in its ability to “conduct research necessary to gather evidence” and “communicate with one another in a timely and efficient manner.” The restrictions prevented them from having “conversations involving nearly anything of substantive consequence,” including discussing news stories about the leaked document. Their motion argued that the restrictions got in the way of their core effort to determine whether publication of the document “could actually threaten the national security of the United States.”

They apparently have won partial relief. In a hearing on February 27, one of Winner’s lawyers said that after several rounds of negotiations with the prosecution, they had “been able to work out a protocol” on restrictions over internet searches. It’s not clear, from the transcript, what those protocols consist of and whether the restrictions have been lifted or just amended – key parts of the case remain classified. But there was no mention of changing the restrictions on communicating with each other on phones and email, so those crucial impediments seem to remain in place for Winner’s lawyers.

One of the benefits of being rich in America is that you can afford as many lawyers as you need, for as many hours as you need them. While no-expense-spared representation is useful in cases ranging from jaywalking to murder, it’s essential in Espionage Act cases.

That’s partly because these cases are priorities for the government, involving political crimes that touch on issues of loyalty to the nation. The government puts enormous resources into prosecuting and generating publicity about such cases, with senior Justice Department officials often announcing the indictments.

There’s another reason deep pockets are needed. The discovery process is far more complicated when the target of discovery is classified. The government and its intelligence agencies are exceedingly reluctant to share their secrets with outsiders, especially lawyers for whistleblowers. Pretrial work is onerous and frustrating. Winner’s lawyers have requested that the court issue 41 subpoenas, most of them to state and federal agencies; all but one of those requests have been turned down. The defense is appealing.

Legal costs do not matter much to the Manaforts and the Weinsteins of the world; they can shell out millions of dollars in fees without breaking stride. But for pretty much everyone else, such expenses are ruinous. Kim, the State Department official who received a 13-month sentence in his plea bargain, depleted his savings accounts, and his family sold whatever they could, even jewelry and furniture. They raised about $1 million, and the lawyer who represented Kim, Abbe Lowell, absorbed about $1 million more on a pro bono basis. If the case had gone to trial, the costs would have been even greater.

Winner had about $30,000 in a bank account when she was arrested (which the government used against her, arguing that she had the means to flee the country). Her mother has just retired after working for decades as a mid-level manager for Child Protective Services in Texas. Like most people, they could not possibly afford the daunting costs of her defense, which are on a par with Kim’s. In Winner’s case, the Press Freedom Defense Fund, a division of The Intercept’s nonprofit parent company, First Look Media Works, is contributing to the fees.

There is one final, terrible irony to Winner’s case. Last month, a bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee stated that media stories about Russian attempts to hack into U.S. voting systems had played an important role in raising awareness of the threat, because the government’s own internal warnings were inadequate. Though the report didn’t explicitly mention it, the most detailed media story about those hacking attempts was the one published by The Intercept, based on the NSA document that Winner is accused of leaking.

Unfortunately, defendants in Espionage Act cases generally have not been allowed to assert a public interest defense, in which a defendant can argue that an illegal act, such as disclosing a classified document, should be balanced against the public good it achieved. When Winner’s trial starts, prosecutors will probably object, strenuously, to her lawyers making a point the Senate report seems to readily acknowledge: The document’s publication helped make the country more secure.

If her trial begins as scheduled on October 15, Reality Winner will have been in the Lincolnton jail for nearly a year and a half.

Inside the Final Days of Robin Williams

By Dave Itzkoff, Vanity Fair

03 June 18

New York Times reporter Dave Itzkoff details the beloved star’s heartbreaking decline in this exclusive excerpt from Robin, his new biography.

obin Williams’s August 2014 suicide was devastating to those who knew him best—and it also came at the end of a long and difficult decline, as this excerpt from New York Times culture reporter Dave Itzkoff’s new biography, Robin, demonstrates. In the months that preceded his death, Williams faced daunting challenges, both professionally and personally. His film career had stalled, and his comeback sitcom, The Crazy Ones, was failing to find an audience on CBS. He was still harboring guilt about his divorce from Marsha Garces, his second wife and mother of two of his children, and adjusting to life with his new wife, Susan Schneider, whom he married in 2011.

Meanwhile, Williams was also reeling from a cataclysmic diagnosis: in May 2014, he had been told that he had Parkinson’s disease, news that stunned and overwhelmed the once-nimble comedian. Even more crushing than this is the possibility that Williams was misdiagnosed; an autopsy would later reveal that he actually had Lewy body dementia, an aggressive and incurable brain disorder that has an associated risk of suicide.

Here, Itzkoff traces the last few months of Williams’s life. His reporting draws on the perspectives of some of Williams’s closest confidants and family members, including Billy Crystal; his Mork & Mindy co-star Pam Dawber; his oldest son, Zak Williams; his daughter-in-law, Alex Mallick-Williams; his makeup artist, Cheri Minns; and his old friends Mark Pitta, Cyndi McHale, and Wendy Asher. Robin is available May 15.

Why?

It was a question that crossed Robin’s mind more often these days, now that he had put in roughly 35 years as a professional entertainer and more than 60 as a human being.

What did he still get out of doing what he was doing, and why did he feel the compulsion to keep doing it? He had already enjoyed nearly all of the accomplishments that one could hope for in his field, tasted the richest successes, won most of the major awards. Every stage of his career had been an adventure into the unknown, an improvisation in its own right, but there was truly no road map for where he was now. Everything came to an end at some point; it was a reality he accepted and confronted so often in his work, even as he tried to out-race it. What would it look like for him, he wondered, when he wrapped things up and told the crowd good night for the last time? How could it be anything other than devastating?

The work was less abundant than it used to be and nowhere near as lucrative, and so much of it seemed to be focused on finality, particularly in the form of death. In August 2012, he had appeared in an episode of Louie, the cable-TV comedy written by and starring the comedian Louis C.K., that begins with both men meeting at the grave of a comedy-club manager who has recently died, and whom they both privately despised. “When he died, I felt nothing,” Louie tells Robin. “I didn’t care. But I knew—when I pictured him going in the ground and nobody’s there, he’s alone, it gave me nightmares.” Robin replies, “Me too.”

Later that fall, Robin was in New York making a film called The Angriest Man in Brooklyn, another morbid indie comedy, in which he plays its title character, a surly lawyer who is diagnosed with an aneurysm and told he has 90 minutes to live. In one scene, the character jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge into the East River, but he survives, and he is dragged from the water by the doctor who, it turns out, has falsely diagnosed him. When he described the creation of this sequence to David Letterman, the host had asked him if he needed a gamma-globulin shot, and Robin answered, “I didn’t get a shot, and I hope it doesn’t end up, 20 years from now, I’m not like Katharine Hepburn, going, [quavering voice] ‘E-very-thing’s fi-ine.’”

So why did Robin persist in making these films, each one a far cry from the Hollywood features he had once thrived on, and which were lucky to receive even a theatrical release? Why did he continue to fill every free block of time in his schedule with work, whatever work he could find? Yes, he needed the money, especially now that he had two ex-wives and a new spouse he wanted to provide with a comfortable home. “There are bills to pay,” he said. “My life has downsized, in a good way. I’m selling the ranch up in Napa. I just can’t afford it anymore.” He hadn’t lost all his money, but, he said, “Lost enough. Divorce is expensive.”

Robin continued to bounce from one low-budget film to the next. But he finally seemed poised for a professional resurgence when he was cast in The Crazy Ones, a new CBS comedy show that would make its debut in September 2013. The series was Robin’s first ongoing television role since Mork & Mindy ended three decades earlier, casting him as Simon Roberts, the irrepressible, not yet over-the-hill co-founder of a fast-paced Chicago advertising agency he runs with his straitlaced daughter (Sarah Michelle Gellar).

The Crazy Ones seemed perfectly calibrated for the older audience cultivated by CBS, which had a track record for giving new lifeblood to bygone TV stars, while the show provided Robin with distinct opportunities to improvise in each episode. It surrounded him with an ensemble of young actors, who helped to offset the fact that Robin was now gaunter and grayer than viewers were accustomed to seeing, and it paid a steady salary of $165,000 an episode—more in a week than he’d earn in a month working for scale on an independent movie.

But there was an even simpler pleasure about The Crazy Ones. As Robin explained, “It’s a regular job. Day to day, you go to the plant, you put your punch card in, you get out. That’s a good job.”

When the first episode of The Crazy Ones aired on September 26, it was met with lukewarm reviews. Unlike Mork & Mindy, which had been filmed in front of a live studio audience that responded to his every ad-lib with uproarious laughter, The Crazy Ones used a single-camera format that was a poor fit for Robin’s talents. The show played like a movie running in an empty theater, and each joke hung awkwardly in the air as it was met with silence.

Some critics, at least, were gentle in noting that the Robin of The Crazy Ones was no longer the indefatigable dynamo they had come to adore in an earlier era. Others were not so diplomatic, like the one who simply wrote, “Williams seems exhausted. So is this show.”

The ratings foretold a bleak outlook: the first episode of The Crazy Ones was watched by about 15.5 million people, a respectable start that suggested at least a curiosity about the series. But within a month, nearly half that audience had tuned out, and the numbers eroded further with each passing week. It was no Mork & Mindy; the magic was gone.

During the making of The Crazy Ones, Robin lived in Los Angeles, by himself, in a modestly furnished rental apartment. It was a far cry from when he last starred in a Hollywood sitcom, and an even more scaled-down existence than he had established for himself in Tiburon. Robin’s new domestic life with his wife, Susan, was very different, too. Unlike his ex-wife Marsha, who saw it as her responsibility to decorate and maintain their house, to organize dinner parties and surround him with intellectual friends who kept him stimulated, Susan had been accustomed to living an independent life of her own. She traveled widely by herself and with her sons, and she did not manage Robin’s day-to-day affairs and did not always accompany him when he worked out of town.

Throughout this time, Robin’s son Zak was often in contact with Robin’s longtime assistant Rebecca Erwin Spencer and her husband, Dan, who lived in Corte Madera, near Tiburon, and who Zak felt took good care of Robin. “They were very open and did love him very much—they were pretty good about keeping us in the fold,” he said. “I think there was inclusivity up until a point when things started getting a little weird.”

That moment came around the time when Robin went to Los Angeles to start working on The Crazy Ones. “I’m kicking myself for not visiting him during that time,” Zak said. “Because I think that was a very lonely period for him. In retrospect, I feel like I should have been there, spending time with him. Because someone who needs support was not getting the support he needed.”

Starting in October 2013, Robin began to experience a series of physical ailments, varying in their severity and seemingly unconnected to one another. He had stomach cramps, indigestion, and constipation. He had trouble seeing; he had trouble urinating; he had trouble sleeping. The tremors in his left arm had returned, accompanied by the symptoms of cogwheel rigidity, where the limb would inexplicably stop itself at certain fixed points in its range of motion. His voice had diminished, his posture was stooped, and at times he simply seemed to freeze where he stood.

Susan was used to seeing Robin experience a certain amount of nervousness, but when she spoke to him now, his anxiety levels seemed off the chart. “It was like this endless parade of symptoms, and not all of them would raise their head at once,” she said. “It was like playing whack-a-mole. Which symptom is it this month? I thought, is my husband a hypochondriac? We’re chasing it and there’s no answers, and by now we’d tried everything.”

Billy Crystal said that Robin began to reveal some of his discomfort, but only up to a point. “He wasn’t feeling well, but he didn’t let on to me all that was going on,” Crystal said. “As he would say to me, ‘I’m a little crispy.’ I didn’t know what was happening, except he wasn’t happy.”

In the fall, Crystal and his wife, Janice, invited Robin out to see the Joseph Gordon-Levitt comedy Don Jon at a movie theater in Los Angeles. When they met at the parking lot, Crystal said, “I hadn’t seen him in about four or five months at the time, and when he got out of the car I was a little taken aback by how he looked. He was thinner and he seemed a little frail.”

Over dinner afterward, Crystal said, “He seemed quiet. On occasion, he’d just reach out and hold my shoulder and look at me like he wanted to say something.” When the friends said goodbye at the end of the night, Robin burst out with unexpected affection. “He hugged me goodbye, and Janice, and he started crying,” Crystal said.“I said, ‘What’s the matter?’ He said, ‘Oh, I’m just so happy to see you. It’s been too long. You know I love you.’”

On their car ride home, Crystal said he and Janice were barraged by calls from Robin, sounding tentative and expressing his appreciation for the couple. “Everything’s fine, I just love you so much, ’bye,” went one call. Five minutes later the phone rang again: “Did I get too sappy? Let’s see each other soon.”

Before production wrapped on The Crazy Ones in February 2014, its producers made a last-ditch effort to re-invigorate its viewership with a bit of guest casting. Pam Dawber was invited to play a role in one episode, as a possible romantic interest for the Simon Roberts character, marking the first time that she and Robin had performed together since Mork & Mindy, and the first screen role that Dawber—who had stepped back from the business to raise her children with the actor Mark Harmon—had taken in 14 years.

Dawber knew the stunt was something that would only be attempted by a TV series faced with the looming threat of cancellation, but she accepted the role anyway. “I did that show only because I wanted to see Robin,” she said. “Not because I thought it was a great show. I thought it was such the wrong show for Robin, and he was working as hard as he could. The couple episodes I saw, I felt so sorry for him, because he was just sweating bullets. He was sweet and wonderful and loving and sensitive. But I would come home and say to my husband, ‘Something’s wrong. He’s flat. He’s lost the spark. I don’t know what it is.’”

Dawber also drew the conclusion that Robin was experiencing serious health problems, but she felt uncomfortable broaching the subject with him. “In general, he was so not who I knew him to be,” she said. “But I didn’t feel right prying, because I hadn’t been around him. So I did what I could. ‘I hear you have a new marriage.’ ‘Oh, she’s wonderful. She’s so sweet.’”

Despite its retro-TV reunion hook and the increased promotion it received, Dawber’s episode of The Crazy Ones did nothing to stop the show’s continued ratings slide. The next week, its season finale was watched by barely five million people. The following month, CBS canceled the show. Friends like Mark Pitta, who spoke to Robin during this period, believed he was at peace with the network’s decision. “I said to him, ‘How are you doing?’” Pitta recalled. “And he just volunteered it. He goes, ‘Well, my show was canceled.’ I said, ‘How’s that going for you?’ He goes, ‘Well, bad financially. Good creatively.’”

By that time, Robin had already moved on to filming Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, the third film in the family-comedy franchise. That previous winter, he had shot a portion of the movie in London, and now he was completing the rest of his scenes in Vancouver. Though it was the first big-budget feature that Robin had worked on in some time, it was a project that many people close to him had hoped he would not take—it was clear to them that whatever had been afflicting him was getting worse, and he needed to push the pause button on his career until his mystery illness was brought under control.

But what proved more powerful than the pleas from his colleagues and from family members to slow things down—even more powerful than Robin’s desire to sustain his life with Susan and to be a good earner for his managers and agents—was his own desire to keep working through the pain, the one cure-all that had helped him cope with past troubles.

“I don’t think he thought he could blow up what he built for himself,” Cheri Minns, his makeup artist, said. “It’s like he didn’t worry about anything when he worked all the time. He operated on working. That was the true love of his life. Above his children, above everything. If he wasn’t working, he was a shell of himself. And when he worked, it was like a light bulb was turned on.”

By the time he reached Vancouver, Robin’s weight loss was severe and his motor impairments were growing harder to disguise. Even his once-prodigious memory was rebelling against him; he was having difficulty remembering his lines.

“He wasn’t in good shape at all,” Minns said. “He was sobbing in my arms at the end of every day. It was horrible. Horrible. But I just didn’t know.”

Robin was no longer leaving his hotel room at night, and in April he suffered a panic attack. Minns thought that maybe if he slipped out to a local Vancouver comedy club and performed again, it would lift Robin’s spirits and remind him that audiences still loved him. But instead, her gentle suggestion had a devastating effect. “I said, ‘Robin, why don’t you go and do stand-up?’” she recalled. Robin broke down in tears. “He just cried and said, ‘I can’t, Cheri.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, you can’t?’ He said, ‘I don’t know how anymore. I don’t know how to be funny.’ And it was just gut-wrenching to hear him admit that, rather than lie to me and say something else. I think that’s how troubled he was about all of it.”

Susan had remained in California while Robin worked on the movie, but she was in frequent contact with him, too, talking him through his escalating insecurities. Under the supervision of his doctor, Robin started taking different anti-psychotic medications, but each prescription only seemed to alleviate some symptoms while making others worse. When Robin finished his work on Night at the Museum and returned home to Tiburon in early May, Susan said her husband was “like a 747 airplane coming in with no landing gear.”

“Robin was losing his mind and he was aware of it,” she said. Susan said that Robin told her he wanted a “reboot for his brain,” but he was stuck in a looping paranoia that would spin around and around in his mind. Every time it seemed as if he had been talked down from the latest obsession, he returned to it all over again, fresh in his mind, as if he were encountering it for the first time.

A few days after he came back from Vancouver, Robin was stirred from a fitful evening of sleep, gripped by the certainty that some grave harm was going to befall Mort Sahl. He kept wanting to drive over to Sahl’s apartment in Mill Valley to check on him and make sure he was safe, while Susan had to repeatedly convince him that his friend was not in any danger. They went over it, again and again and again, all night, until they both finally fell asleep at 3:30 that morning.

On May 28, 2014, Robin was finally given an explanation for the tangled lattice of sicknesses that had been plaguing him. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative disorder that attacks the central nervous system, impairing motor functions and cognition, eventually leading to death. To Robin, it was the realization of one of his most deeply felt and lifelong fears, to be told that he had an illness that would rob him of his faculties, by small, imperceptible increments every day, that would hollow him out and leave behind a depleted husk of a human being. Susan tried to find some small shred of positivity in the ordeal—at least now Robin knew what he had and could focus on treating it. “We had an answer,” she said. “My heart swelled with hope. But somehow I knew Robin was not buying it.”

Robin shared the news of his Parkinson’s diagnosis with his innermost circle: with his children, with his professional handlers, and with his most intimate friends. Crystal recounted the conversation in which Robin revealed the devastating news to him. “His number comes up on my phone,” he said, “and he says, ‘Hey, Bill.’ His voice was high-pitched. ‘I’ve just been diagnosed with Parkinson’s.’ I didn’t miss a beat. Because of my relationship with Muhammad Ali, I knew a lot of really good Parkinson’s research doctors. I said, ‘In Phoenix, the research center is great. If you want, we can get you in there. It would be totally anonymous. Do you want me to pursue that?’ ‘Would you?’”

“I never heard him afraid like that before,” Crystal said. “This was the boldest comedian I ever met—the boldest artist I ever met. But this was just a scared man.”

Among his associates who knew, there was unease: they were worried, of course, about Robin’s well-being, but also concerned about whether he was in a position to receive the assistance he needed. “I don’t think the people around him knew how to handle it and how to help him,” Cyndi McHale said. “Look, it’s the perfect storm. He had a physical condition that was manifesting. He knew there was something wrong with his brain. And two of his best friends—my late husband and Christopher Reeve—ended up paralyzed in a wheelchair. So he’s thinking, O.K., I’m losing control of my body. There’s something going on in my brain. I think he was just trapped.”

Robin’s children felt that it was now more important than ever to share time with their father. But doing so meant navigating past layer after layer of other people who also had access to him and wanted his attention—Susan; his assistant, Rebecca; his managers—and even this much resistance could discourage them from seeking him out.

When Robin did have time to get together with him, Zak could tell that his father was in anguish, and not only from the strain of his condition. “It was really difficult to see someone suffering so silently,” Zak said. “But I think that there were a series of things that stacked, that led to an environment that he felt was one of pain, internal anguish, and one that he couldn’t get out of. And the challenge in engaging with him when he was in that mind-set was that he could be soothed, but it’s really hard when you then go back into an environment of isolation. Isolation is not good for Dad and people like him. It’s actually terrible.”

Robin’s children had always been a dependable source of some of the purest, most natural joy he had experienced. But when he saw them now, they were also a reminder that he had chosen to end his marriage to Marsha and break up their home; it filled him with shame to think that he had inflicted the divorce upon them, and the shame compounded itself as he came to believe he had taken something perfect and corrupted it.

Even when his children told him that he had no reason to hold on to his guilt and nothing to apologize for, Zak said, “He couldn’t hear it. He could never hear it. And he wasn’t able to accept it. He was firm in his conviction that he was letting us down. And that was sad because we all loved him so much and just wanted him to be happy.”

At home, Susan saw Robin’s condition continue to worsen. When they tried to sleep at night, Robin would thrash around the bed, or more often he would be awake and wanting to talk about whatever new delusion his mind had conjured up. Robin tried many treatments to regain the upper hand over the disease: he continued to see a therapist, work out with a physical trainer, and ride his bike; he even found a specialist at Stanford University who taught him self-hypnosis. But each of these strategies could only do so much. In the meantime, Robin started sleeping in a separate bedroom from Susan.

Robin’s longtime friend Eric Idle, who was in London that summer preparing for a Monty Python reunion show, tried unsuccessfully to persuade Robin to fly out there and make a cameo appearance at one of the performances. “And all the time I was getting e-mails from him, and he was going downhill,” Idle recalled. “Then he said he could come, but he didn’t want to be onstage. I said, ‘I totally get that.’ Because he was suffering from severe depression.” Through their mutual friend Bobcat Goldthwait, Idle said, “We were in touch, and in the end he said, ‘I can’t come, I’m sorry, but I love you very much.’ We realized afterwards he was saying goodbye.”

In June, Robin checked himself into the Dan Anderson Renewal Center in Center City, Minnesota, another Hazelden addiction treatment facility like the one where he had been treated in Oregon in 2006. Publicly, his press representatives said that he was “simply taking the opportunity to fine-tune and focus on his continued commitment, of which he remains extremely proud.” In fact, this rehab stay was Robin and Susan’s understandably inelegant fix for a problem that had no solution. At the very least, it kept Robin cloistered on a campus where he could receive close supervision, and where he could meditate, do yoga, and focus on further 12-step work that, it was hoped, would help him manage his illness.

But other friends felt that Robin had no reason to stay at a clinic for drug and alcohol rehabilitation when he was suffering from an unrelated physical disorder. “That was wrong,” said Wendy Asher. “Robin was drinking when he went to rehab, and this wasn’t that. This was a medical problem. Susan thought everything would be fixed through A.A., and it just wasn’t true.”

July 21 was Robin’s 63rd birthday, but few of his friends seemed able to reach him and offer their warm wishes on the day. Cyndi McHale, who had the same birth date as Robin and had a regular tradition of speaking to him on the day, could not track him down; “I was on the phone with his managers’ assistant,” she said, “and she was just like, ‘He’s not doing well.’ That was a common line. Rebecca was just like, ‘No, he’s not doing well.’ I was really worried about him.” McHale had not seen Robin, either, at a recent birthday party for George Lucas, an event that he reliably attended. “When he didn’t go to that,” she said, “I thought, uh-oh, it’s really much worse than anybody is letting on.”

On the morning of July 24, Susan was taking a shower when she saw Robin at the bathroom sink, staring intensely at his reflection in the mirror. Looking more carefully at him, she noticed that Robin had a deep cut on his head, which he occasionally wiped at with a hand towel that had become soaked with blood. She realized that Robin had banged his head on the wooden bathroom door and began to scream at him, “Robin, what did you do? What happened?” He answered, “I miscalculated.”

“He was angry because by now he was so mad at himself for what his body was doing, for what his mind was doing,” Susan later explained. “He would sometimes now start standing and being in trance-like states and frozen. He had just done that with me and he was so upset. He was so upset.”

The last time that Mark Pitta saw Robin at the Throckmorton Theatre was at the end of July, and the encounter left him cold. “I was scared,” Pitta said, “because it wasn’t my friend. I said, this has nothing to do with his TV show being canceled. He had a thousand-yard stare going. I just talked to him, I said, ‘Man, you’re not going to believe this. Somebody ran over my cat, 20 feet in front of my house.’ And Robin had absolutely no reaction, at all. I was like, uh-oh.”

Later in the theater’s greenroom, Pitta and Robin were mingling with another comedian who had brought his service dog. As Pitta recounted the scene, “I just casually said, ‘Another comedian I know has a service dog. The dog wakes her up when she chokes in her sleep.’ And Robin instantly said, ‘Oh, a Heimlich retriever.’ It got a huge laugh. He just sat there and had a little smile on his face.” When he and Robin left the theater at the end of the evening, Pitta said, “I gave him a hug and I said goodbye. He said goodbye to me three times that night. And he said it exactly the same way. He goes, ‘Take care, Marky.’ He said it three times.”

One evening in early August, Robin made one of his intermittent visits to Zak and Alex’s house in San Francisco, as he did when Susan was out of town. This time she happened to be in Lake Tahoe, and Robin showed up to see his son and daughter-in-law like a meek teenager who realizes he’s stayed out past his curfew; he was always welcome there, but he carried himself with mild discomfort, as if he still needed someone else’s permission to be in their home. At the end of the night, as Robin was preparing to head back to Tiburon, Zak and Alex asked him what it would take to keep him at their house—would they have to tie him up and throw a bag over him?

“Well, that was a joke,” Zak said with a bittersweet laugh. “To be clear, that was a joke. But we didn’t want someone who seemed like he was in so much anguish to leave. We wanted him to stay with us. We wanted to take care of him.”

On the night of August 10, a Sunday, Robin and Susan were home together in Tiburon when Robin began to fixate on some of the designer wristwatches that he owned and grew fearful that they were in danger of being stolen. He took several of them and stuffed them in a sock, and, at around 7 P.M., he drove over to Rebecca and Dan Spencer’s house in Corte Madera, about two and a half miles away, to give them the watches for safekeeping. After Robin came home, Susan started getting ready for bed; he affectionately offered her a foot massage, but on this night, she said she was O.K. and thanked him anyway. “As we always did, we said to each other, ‘Good night, my love,’ ” Susan recalled.

Robin went in and out of their bedroom several times, rummaged through its closet, and eventually left with an iPad to do some reading, which Susan interpreted as a good sign; it had been months since she’d seen him read or even watch TV. “He seemed like he was doing better, like he was on the path of something,” she later said. “I’m thinking, ‘O.K., stuff is working. The medication, he’s getting sleep.’” She saw him leave the room at around 10:30 P.M. and head to the separate bedroom he slept in, which was down a long hallway on the opposite side of their house.

When Susan woke up the next morning, Monday, August 11, she noticed that the door to Robin’s bedroom was still closed, but she felt relieved that he was finally getting some needed rest. Rebecca and Dan came over to the house, and Rebecca asked how the weekend had gone with Robin; Susan optimistically answered, “I think he’s getting better.” Susan had been planning to wait for Robin to wake up so that she could meditate with him, but when he wasn’t awake by 10:30 A.M., she left the house to run some errands.

By 11 A.M., Rebecca and Dan were concerned that Robin still had not come out of his room. Rebecca slipped a note under the door of Robin’s bedroom to ask if he was O.K. but received no response. At 11:42 A.M., Rebecca texted Susan to say she was going to wake Robin up, and Dan went to find a step stool to try to look through his bedroom window from the outside of the house. In the meantime, Rebecca used a paper clip to force open the lock to the bedroom door. She entered the room and made a horrifying discovery: Robin had hanged himself with a belt and was dead.