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at a convention in Las Vegas,
ends up with a prostitute in
his hotel room, and leaves
the name tag he was wearing
all day on the counter. The
prostitute googles him, finds
out how much he’s worth and
then extorts him. That
happens.” A lot, it seems,
given Weisberg has just
flown in from Las Vegas that
morning and is headed there
again after our interview. But
just as common are run-of-
the-mill affairs gone bad.
The latter, says Weisberg,
require more sensitivity.
“When it’s the ‘escortionists’, it’s business.” Emotional
affairs are more difficult. “They know every detail
about the person they’re trying to extort.” Take the
man who had been keeping his lover in an Upper West
Side apartment around the corner from his wife and
kids, or the guy who wanted assistance kicking his
lover of five years out of the property he paid for
(a request Weisberg swiftly declined).
The most typical “mistress whispering” case is a
“sugar daddy/sugar baby relationship,” Weisberg says.
“But it’s not Julia Roberts and Richard Gere. They
don’t ever get married, he doesn’t ever leave his
wife and kids for them. It’s a woman or man who is
sleeping with a guy and has a nice
apartment, gets picked up in fancy
cars and taken to fancy dinners.”
Weisberg typically gets
involved when love, or lust, turns
sour. “They’re in a lifestyle that they
thought was going to last forever
and now suddenly it’s over,” he
explains. Sometimes the lovers
get angry and resort to threats, which run the full
gamut from semi-veiled texts – “I’m sure your wife
would like to know what you’ve been up to lately” –
to sending photographs of a client’s apartment, to
vowing to reveal someone’s closeted sexuality. In
one memorable instance, a spurned lover called
to say they were on their way to a meeting at the
client’s synagogue. “For a religious person, that is
terrifying,” says Weisberg.
Jeremy Saland, a lawyer who regularly engages
Weisberg on behalf of his clients, says men have
routinely spent “multiple six figures” on a doomed
affair by the time they’re looking to extricate
themselves romantically and financially.A
ll this hints at an uncomfortable power
dynamic in which the “other women” and,
to a lesser extent, men, can be acquired
and disposed of at will – a process that’s now
infinitely easier thanks to the proliferation of websites
such as seekingarrangement.com and Ashley
Madison. Wealthy men can find a younger, cheapermodel at the click of a button and Weisberg says he
can occasionally understand why blackmailers
act out of revenge. “Often I’m not dealing with
a professional criminal. Sometimes, not always, I
have empathy for the person who is going through
this horrible situation. I don’t want to come off like
I’m covering for my clients – I don’t condone this
behaviour at all. I’m not the advocate. Both sides
have taken regrettable actions, but my main concern
is to make the criminal course of conduct stop.”
Weisberg seems acutely aware of the power
imbalance – and the fact that the other women and
men, perhaps unfairly, have a lot more to lose. “This
guy might have to go to couples therapy, he may have
to make an embarrassing speech in front of his board
or step down from his company for a while, to atone
for his sins, so to speak. But [the other men or
women] are going to jail and what are they getting
out of that? That’s what I’m there to explain.
You can walk away, you made a mistake.”
As the internet has made “the girlfriend
experience” (an arrangement that blurs the
distinction between genuine affection and commerce)
more accessible, the relationships Weisberg sees have
become far more nebulous than the streetwalkers
and brothels he encountered during his time with
the NYPD. “The cyber world has introduced a lot
of convenience and it’s changed the environment,”
he says. “Now nobody’s anonymous – you can find
out everything about a person, including their
vulnerabilities. In a minute you can find how many
children they have, where they live, their net worth.”
Tellingly, Weisberg estimates only one in 20 of
the clients who come to him about affairs gone bad
are women, and he’s never had a case where a
woman has been extorted for money. Instead,
female clients are usually being forced into a
continued sexual relationship by threats to destroy
their relationships or expose explicit images (revenge
porn). “Those are really ugly, nasty cases,” says
Weisberg. “I’ve had several cases where women were
being coerced into continuing a sexual relationship by
men who were using information about them and
threatening to expose that. Interestingly, that guy
could have extorted her for money just as easily, but
he chose the route of continuing their sexual liaisons.”
In one instance, he worked with a model whose
ex-boyfriend became bitter about being left behind
when her star began to rise. He threatened to reveal
personal details to the media if she ended things. “My
female clientele more comes from men stalking them
... stalkers who have a misconception about what the
relationship was or have had somebody break-up
with them. It’s often a precursor to very violent
behaviour, so I always take that seriously.”
And with that, it’s time for Weisberg to return
to Nevada. “The conventions start and next thing
you know, some guy is getting drunk and letting
somebody into their life they shouldn’t have.”
Evidently, what happens in Vegas doesn’t stay
in Vegas – it winds up on Weisberg’s desk.“THEY’RE IN A
LIFESTYLE THEY
THOUGHT WAS
GOING TO LAST
FOREVER”Herman
Weisberg is
a private
detective
known as
the “mistress
whisperer”.