My life was wiped out in Chicago — at least all that mattered in it. No big deal for a city that has wiped out many lives, I suppose, but my demise didn't come at the hand of some zoot-suited mobster. Mine was a judicial murder in the Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. The blunt instrument striking me down on June 25 was in fact directed at my husband — I was only collateral damage.

During the past few years, newspapers and television producers by the truckload have asked me in vain to talk about "it." "It" for them being the delicious story of the rise and fall of a big wheel in society and business. "It" for me meaning the brutal destruction of my husband's accomplishments, reputation and freedom, as well as our life together, his company and with it virtually all shareholders' equity by a combination of press and judiciary merrily dancing together to the music of the times.

So what you ask. What does it matter if one well-off elderly white woman with too many pairs of expensive shoes now finds her social life largely limited to visiting her dearly missed husband in a U.S. federal correctional institution. Should be interesting material for her as a writer. But I'd tackled the real issue in my writing when commenting on changing fashions in crime and criminal law long before I married Conrad: if the rich and well-connected cannot get justice, what chance for anyone else? What chance for the orange jump-suited, marginalized young men I saw shuffling in front of the judge in Chicago, silent while their court-appointed attorneys negotiated their freedom away in that tight little legal world where a client's fate never disturbs the bonhomie between lawyers. If ostensibly privileged defendants like us can be baselessly smeared, wrongfully deprived, falsely accused, shamelessly persecuted, innocently convicted and grotesquely punished, it doesn't take much to figure out what happens to the vulnerable, the powerless, the working-class people whose savings have been eaten up trying to defend themselves: they land, finally, in the 8:45 a.m. courtroom parade that takes place all over "America the Free," the country that "wins" 90 per cent of cases and imprisons more people than any other in the world.

Every wife says her husband is innocent. Every convicted man has a tale of how the system is rigged. I have always suspected some tales were true. Now I know. Let me tell you a little about life in the fast lane down.

My husband, Conrad Black, took 30 years to build his company into the third-largest newspaper company in the Western world. He did it his way — and his way was a good way to run a railroad. As the 20th century drew to a close, my husband's strategy in a rapidly changing market was resulting in profitable divestments in Canada as well as in the United States, earning shareholders nearly US$2 billion in capital gains. Then, a large New York institutional investor saw even more profit in hijacking the gravy train. Along with a few smaller investors, the dissidents began a campaign to wrest control of the company from Conrad, break it up, and sell parts of it for a quick profit.

The corporate rebels started planting stories in competing newspapers with false accusations of management misdeeds at the Hollinger group, ranging from simple greed to fulminating extravagance to outright corruption and thievery. Our newspaper competitors lapped it up and amplified the defamatory fantasies. We were, it seems, a delicious target. After months of daily faxed pages from newspapers around the world, I stopped reading about my sex life, real or imagined, my conspicuousness in dress, true or false, and my plastic surgery, revealed by me or made up by reporters. I hadn't a clue what relevance such tripe had to do with the accusations against my husband or why it interested ostensibly serious media commentators, but this was the process of demonization.

In any event, were I the clothes-crazy, sexual predator so disliked by the Globe's Margaret Wente and Maclean's Peter C. Newman, and were my husband the arrogant and pompous caricature of the books and films depicting him, what then? Would this justify the twisting of due process by the legal system? Would it make unnecessary the proper scrutiny by the press of public facts and filings? Is this a sufficient reason for silence even now when the essential emptiness of this bitter hunt has been established in a court of law? If Dreyfus had been a loud and vulgar Jew instead of an officer and a gentleman Jew, would his case have been any the less important or his persecution less unjust?

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