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## The Cornish Years and the Controlled Household
The period during which the family lived in Cornish, New Hampshire — roughly from the late 1990s through the early 2000s, as best can be reconstructed from available reporting — was characterized by an increasing degree of control and isolation that Sandra Boss described in her trial testimony.
Cornish is a small, rural town. It has historical significance — the painter Maxfield Parrish lived there, and various American artists colonized the area in the early twentieth century — but it is not a metropolitan center, and for a McKinsey partner whose consulting work was concentrated in New York, it required a commute that was both long and taxing.
He wanted to be there. She made the commute.
The reasons he preferred Cornish to New York or Boston are not clearly established. What is established is that the move increased her dependence on the arrangement — the greater the logistical difficulty of leaving, the harder leaving becomes — and that the isolation from her professional and social networks made her daily life more dependent on him as a social and domestic anchor.
In this period, she testified, he would sometimes not provide enough food. She would go to sleep hungry. The household finances were controlled entirely by him — the finances that came entirely from her income. A woman who earned approximately two million dollars a year in one of the most sought-after professional positions in global consulting could not freely access the money she had earned.
This pattern — earning income and being denied access to it, working in demanding professional conditions and returning to a household where the emotional and physical environment was managed by someone else — is recognizable from the literature on controlling relationships. The controlling partner is not always the one with less power in a professional or financial sense. The control operates in the domestic space and in the register of the intimate relationship, precisely where the controlled partner has often been trained, by professional success, not to be suspicious of their own judgment.