What Do I Do With This?

The curious case of People V. Wallack

July 29th, 2021

A year and a half into Pandemic! At the Disco and everyone’s gotten a little weird. One third of white-tailed deer got Covid, somehow. Caleb Ganzer, ”a celebrity sommelier with an ownership stake in a popular Lower Manhattan wine bar” started setting fire to outdoor dining sheds. Why? Listen: why not. Bloomberg’s Adam Jackson and Kate Krader report that you can’t afford fish anymore because all the fisherman became carpenters, like the birth of Christianity played backwards. And according to Jason DeParle, pandemic aid pulled 20 million Americans out of poverty, but even the specific people it helped didn’t stop being Americans:

“Without that help, I literally don’t know how I would have survived,” she said. “We would have been homeless.”

Still, Ms. Goodwin, 29, has mixed feelings about large payments with no stipulations.

“In my case, yes, it was very beneficial,” she said. But she said that other people she knew bought big TVs and her former boyfriend bought drugs. “All this free money enabled him to be a worse addict than he already was,” she said. “Why should taxpayers pay for that?”

From time to time I come across information that is Tabs related, but not yet technically a tab. So I’d like to introduce a new blog-within-a-newsletter that I’m tentatively calling:

What Do I Do With This?

On Aug. 25, 2017, the New York Times published one of the most Vows columns of all time, “The Bride, the Groom and the Elephant in the Room,” about the marriage of 27 year old Cynthia Zhou and her groom-to-be Dr. Marc Wallack, then 72 years old. Tabs Discord member @dello got to wondering “hey how’s that marriage going?” and immediately turned up this New York County Supreme Court opinion that seems to bring us up to date. As always when a newlywed is referred to as “defendant,” it’s not great news.

…the two were married on July 30, 2017. A month later, the husband sought a divorce and an order of protection. He alleged that defendant [Cynthia Wallack] had assaulted and menaced him, and had committed criminal mischief. A Family Court order of protection was issued, and defendant was arrested for violating it. 

“A month later” would have been just 5 days after the Vows article was published. So I guess that answers that question. Incredibly, the main subject of this document, which is a judgement on a motion to suppress some evidence, is the tale of Cynthia Wallack and another man, known here only as “AB:”

AB advised the investigator that, beginning in February of 2018, his Facebook account began to receive messages from a Facebook account for a Cynthia Wallack. AB deduced from the owner's Facebook profile that, like AB, she was a 2011 Dartmouth graduate. AB had never met this woman, but observed that they had Facebook "friends" in common. Over the next five months AB received thousands of Facebook messages from the Cynthia Wallack Facebook account. At first he did not reply. Ultimately, he sent three short messages urging his correspondent to seek counseling and to leave him alone…

On August 6th the brother called to tell AB that he had just arrived home to find "Cynthia" on his couch, claiming to be a friend of AB. AB advised his brother to call the police. The police responded, arrested defendant, and issued her a DAT.

Is this definitely about our blisslessly married age-gap couple? 

The names and dates and the detail about graduating Dartmouth in 2011 all line up, so it sure seems to be.

Where’s Cynthia Wallack now?

It looks like this is her Insta, so… near Boston I guess?

Where’s Dr. Marc Wallack now?

The internet has not yet been forthcoming on that.

What happened to go from a wedding in The Times to a restraining order and an arrest in just one month? 

I don’t know! This is really all that shows up when you search for the people involved. It doesn’t seem like anyone covered the divorce or anything else, and this “People v Wallack” filing is from August of 2020.

So… what do I do with this?

No idea, I’m just a humble aggregator. Surely someone out there can report this out and either fill in the story or prove that this is all just a lot of wild coincidence! If only Gawker still existed.

Today in Gawking: Gawker asked a handful of randos like Glenn Greenwald and Miranda July what they think of its relaunch, with no interesting results. It was left to Ryan Mac to ask the obvious people, such as literal and cultural vampire Peter Thiel (“no comment” because he is a coward) and Charles “this fuckin’ guy” Harder, who took the opportunity to plug “the[sic] my book ‘GAWKER SLAYER: The Professional and Personal Adventures of Famed Attorney CHARLES HARDER’.” This fuckin’ guy! And Joshua Benton is not a fan of the thick layer of Topolsky covering the whole thing.

DaBaby had himself a week, and Vulture’s Bethy Squires captured it perfectly in a brief blog post and four updates (so far).

It’s Playdate preorder day. Looks like they’re already taking orders for the 2022 batch. Sorry, I should have sent this sooner. Also, Orbiter Space Flight Simulator is now open source.

ABC News Australia is like “wanna see some sick drone footage of Dead Sea sinkholes?” You know we do, mate.

~don’t be fooled by the tabs that I got~

I’m going straight from this back to the AMA at the Journal Slack, so come AMA if you have A to AM. I’m also on Twitter, could you tell? And subscribe to get into the elite Tabs Discord, where you would have known about the Vows story already.

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