The story line goes something like this:
There`s this nun, Sister Violet, a kind of rebel nun almost. She stands up to the bishop, who has locked a church-run day-care center out of its building. She sues the bishop-the nun is a lawyer, too-and helps walk a picket line at the day-care door. She wins.
Sister Violet joins the state attorney general`s office and becomes well known for prosecuting consumer fraud cases. She moves on to victims` rights and the rights of the handicapped. She`s tough in court. Her colleagues there start calling her ”Attila the Nun.”
Finally, she decides to run for office. Then, in the overwhelmingly Democratic state of Rhode Island, this Republican woman beats the incumbent man and is elected the first female attorney general in the country. But Sister Violet`s victory carries a high price. The church forces her to choose between her vows and her secular office. She renounces her vows.
Sound like a made-for-television movie? Or maybe a regular weekly series? Stay tuned, because one or the other, or maybe even both, soon could be coming to you over the airwaves.
There really is an Arlene Violet, former nun and now former attorney general, who already has made the spotlight of ”60 Minutes” and the pages of People magazine. She long has had a Hollywood agent, and Frank Cooper remains convinced that his client is hot property, even if voters did turn her out of office after only two years.
Apparently, the editors at Random House think so, too. Just this month they`ve published Violet`s autobiography, ”Convictions: My Journey from the Convent to the Courtroom.” The book is already in its third printing, and Violet is plugging it on her first national tour.
This delights her fans and somewhat amuses her critics. And it causes Violet, sitting in her nondescript Providence law office, to grin broadly and laugh over which actress might play her life story and to admit that ”it`s nice to see yourself portrayed positively in the media for a change.”
”I think I`m one of the most well-balanced persons I know, to tell you the truth,” she said, sitting amid her legal briefs, diplomas and
certificates. (Interestingly, there are no religious icons in sight.) ”I think I take life seriously. But I don`t think I take myself too seriously.” Violet created quite a stir four years ago when, under threat of excommunication, she quit her order after 23 years to campaign a second time for attorney general. Her bishop had not pressed the issue during her initial candidacy two years earlier. But then he said that it came down to holding public office or serving the church and that if she decided on holding office, she never would be able to return to the Sisters of Mercy.
”It`s important to be a Sister of Mercy in reality, even if you may have to forfeit being one in name,” she said in announcing her ”very painful”
decision.
She is not the only member of a religious order who has been forced to choose between religion and politics. Five years ago in Michigan, Agnes Mansour, also a member of the Sisters of Mercy, chose to leave the order after being told she must give up her job as director of the state Department of Social Services, which provided financing for abortions for poor women. And in 1980, Rev. Robert Drinan complied with a church order to give up his seat as a member of Congress from Massachusetts.
As she explains her decision today, Arlene Violet says that ”when the going gets tough, (the church) gets going.” Reforming what she considered a hostile and corrupt legal system just couldn`t be done from the outside, she decided. She had to change it from within.
”What happens is that after a while you begin to feel like you own an issue,” Violet said. ”You don`t expect somebody else to do it for you.”
The bishop probably expected her to back down, and if not for his ultimatum, she`d still be a Sister of Mercy today.
Yet Violet made her choices and then came out swinging. Her opponent tried to pin her as a softie on criminals because of her religious background. Her campaign ads graphically detailed certain crimes and asked listeners to
”imagine how you`d feel” when, as victims of those crimes, they discovered that the perpetrators had plea-bargained their way into reduced or suspended sentences.
The radio spots were ”so gruesomely realistic,” as one reporter later put it, that stations were inundated with calls.
Violet won the race, although it was so close that determining the winner took four days. And she immediately made more headlines. She announced that her office would retry Claus von Bulow, the Newport society figure who was accused of attempting to murder his heiress wife.
”It took a heck of a lot of guts to go forward with the case,” Violet said. Von Bulow, who was accused of injecting his wife, ”Sunny,” with an overdose of insulin, had been convicted at his first trial, but that verdict had been overturned on technical grounds. She easily could have backed off, she said, and blamed her predecessor for losing valuable time by appealing the overturned conviction.
But the new attorney general felt it was a question for a jury. ”Were they going to believe (our doctors), or were they going to believe the other doctors?”
In the end, they believed the defense`s doctors. Unfortunately for Violet, the Von Bulow case was just the beginning of a term in office that would be marked by repeated losses and high-visibility court reversals or dismissals.
By her second year, this self-styled champion of the people was beleaguered. Although she brought a series of charges against a state agency that illegally had provided low-interest mortgages to influential state officials, she also was forced to drop several cases because of purported prosecutorial misconduct.
”She beat herself. She shot herself in the foot repeatedly,” said Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard Law School professor who helped represent Von Bulow in his retrial and frequently tangled with Violet. (Each accuses the other of manipulating the press for publicity`s sake.)
”On the other hand, I have grudging admiration for her,” Dershowitz said. ”She was an outsider. She was trying to fight the system.”
Said Patrick Conley, a professor of history at Providence College, ”She is a highly principled individual, but she didn`t know how to play ball politically. She approached her job as attorney general like a crusader.”
Said Violet: ”The day you try to challenge the system, you`re writing your ticket. It`s a one-way ticket back.”
She expected her tenure to be rocky. She just didn`t expect it to be so short: ”I figured it would take about four years for them to catch up with me.”
Violet is a gregarious woman with short dark hair who wears dark-rimmed glasses and dresses conservatively. She is not above describing the senior citizen she is representing as the ”little darling, I love her to bits.”
The ”darling,” however, comes out as ”daahling,” heavy on the
”aah.” Violet is a native of South Providence and its immigrant, working-class neighborhoods, and she still speaks as if she just came in off the streets.
Her book is titled ”Convictions,” she said, because it highlights the events in her life that showed her convictions and commitment, nurtured by the Sisters of Mercy, to respond to ”unmet needs.”
What is a shame is the way the book reads: breathy, long on gee-whiz and short on introspection. That detracts from the truly unusual path Violet has traveled, from summer-stock productions in high school to the convent at age 18, from marching (as a nun) in support of Cesar Chavez`s boycotts against grape and lettuce growers to living in public housing projects in Providence`s ghetto.
A court-ordered investigation of the office of attorney general that came after Violet`s election defeat in late 1986 cleared her of any wrongdoing.
At 44, she is enjoying life as a private attorney and trying to decide whether to again seek public office. She`s keeping her name in the public mind, in any event. Every weekday afternoon she heads over to WKRI-AM radio station in West Warwick and hosts a radio call-in show, ”Frankly Speaking.” By fall, shooting may begin on that TV movie of her story. There was some discussion of Sally Field playing the lead, but according to Cooper out in Hollywood, Field didn`t want another nun role.
”I don`t care who it is,” Violet says, ”as long as she can laugh.”
