They married in October 1995 in a small Quaker ceremony on Nantucket. Eight people attended. No Rockefellers were present — a fact that, at the time, she attributed to his account of family estrangement.
The marriage that followed was not, by her own testimony, a comfortable one. After the wedding, she said, he became possessive, controlling, and prone to anger. He controlled the household finances — the finances that she was generating — and did not contribute income of his own. He discouraged her friends. When the family lived in Cornish, New Hampshire — a move he insisted on, requiring her to commute to her New York consulting work — she testified that he would sometimes decline to provide enough food, and that she sometimes went to bed hungry.
He claimed membership in the Trilateral Commission. He claimed a $50 million settlement of his father’s debts. He said he had lost his ability to speak as a child, which explained certain qualities of his manner. He kept a book that he said David Rockefeller had signed — the most concrete piece of evidence for the family connection that she ever saw.
She never saw identification documents. She never verified any of his claims. She testified, years later, that she had “a blind spot” — that she could see clearly in many areas of life and be “pretty stupid in another.” She described herself at one point in testimony as “a stupid wife.”
This characterization, offered by Boss herself and seized on by some accounts of the case, is worth examining carefully. She was not naive in any general sense — she was a Harvard-educated executive at a global consulting firm, the kind of person whose analytical capabilities were applied to complex business strategy at the highest levels. What she had was a relationship that she chose to trust, with a person who had spent decades refining his ability to produce exactly the kind of trust that a specific type of intelligent, ambitious, busy professional might extend to a partner who seemed to be everything they expected.