By that day two years ago, marriage for Jacqueline and Gregory Johnson had become merely a cure for happiness. Estranged and embittered, the Johnsons were mired in a typically messy divorce, but with an atypical cause: Jacqueline's breasts. Greg, a Kirkland plastic surgeon—an "artist," as he called himself, who specialized in re-sculpting women's breasts—had operated six times in three years on his wife's, making them bigger, smaller, bigger, smaller, and then bigger again. When he was done, the reluctant Jacqueline, uncomfortable with their size, wanted them reduced. Greg refused. When she went to another doctor, Greg filed divorce papers.
Now, as their attorneys watched, the couple faced off in the Everett law office where a deposition was being taken in the case of Johnson v. Johnson. Wavy-haired Greg, then 45, baby-faced in his oversized glasses, was under investigation by a state medical board for allegations of malpractice; it had previously questioned him on the death of one of his patients. Within a year, he would be accused of criminal rape, convicted of felony assault, and sued by a dozen of his former breast-enhanced, tummy-tucked Eastside clients. By 1998, the medical board's file on Johnson would be bulging with 24 allegations of malpractice (20 of them remain open investigations today). But even then, in 1996, some women had questionedthe way he touched and kneaded their flesh during exams, crowded their space when they undressed, and the strange vaginal discharges that lingered hours after they emerged from the anesthesia of four- to six-hour operations performed by a doctor who liked to work alone. One woman would later recall how Johnson's unseemly bedside manner startled her when he ran his hands over her bare breasts after an operation, saying, "Beautiful, beautiful." Still others wondered where they suddenly got that case of genitalherpes.
For the moment, though, the Johnsons were concerned with their two small children, preschoolers, and Greg's third, older child by a previous marriage. Greg had moved out of the family home in Everett, temporarily taking the kids. Jacqueline wanted to know when they'd be back. Greg's temper rose. Once they had been lovebirds, flirting in the hospital corridors where they'd met. But, as a transcript of their conversation that day shows, this was no longer Bill and Coo talking.
"Fuck you," Greg said.
"Are you going to bring the children back?" Jacqueline asked again.
"Man, I am—you are such, you are such a worthless piece of shit."
"Are you going to bring the children back?"
"And I am going to throw your fucking sister out of [the family home] tomorrow. You understand what I am saying?"
"Yes, I do. Are you going to bring... "
"I'm going to make your life miserable..."
To hear Jacqueline recount it, miserable was already the operative word in her life. In court papers, she describes her eight-year marriage to Gregory Alan Johnson as a dream-turned-nightmare—their happy courtship years dissolving into such frequent martial discord and abuse, she claims, that she can't remember it all: Gregory the control freak, sending her to the kitchen to make him a steak the day she came home from the hospital after giving birth, or insisting she sign a prenuptial agreement and saying he wouldn't marry her until she obtained a college degree. (She eventually did.) "One time we were being romantic on the couch when all of a sudden my husband's action began to feel like an exam," Jacqueline told the divorce court. "That is when my husband told me that he thought I should have liposuction before our second child, or I might need a tummy tuck. He has always been concerned with my appearance and critical of me."
Then there was Gregory the drinker, beginning when he passed out in the hotel on their wedding day, Jacqueline says, and continuing when he was arrested for drunk driving while their divorce was pending, prosecutors say (the charge was later reduced). Jacqueline recalled Greg often passing out at home—"I have gotten so tired of dragging him from one room or the other to bed," Jacqueline told the court, "that I started leaving him lay wherever he passed out."
There was Gregory the name-caller, too: "He hit me in the stomach in front of our daughter and told me I was 'shit for brains,'" Jacqueline recalls in a court declaration. And there was Gregory the hothead, tossing plates of food that left dents in the wall and threatening her life: "He started making comments that he would have to find someone else, someone younger, smarter," Jacqueline says, recalling a night in bed. "That is when he told me he was going to kill me when he was through with me and if I wasn't scared, that I should be. I was scared."
And there was Gregory who gave his wife herpes, she claims, and as compensation "offered me $20,000 and told me to use it to finish school." (Some of Johnson's patients would later tell King County prosecutors that they believed they'd contracted herpes from Johnson's alleged sexual assaults; Johnson's attorney denies that allegation.) "I tore the check in half," Jacqueline continues in court papers. "A short time later, I had my first outbreak of herpes. It was so painful it hurt to even walk. He apologized and told me he would take care of me. Through the years when Greg wanted sex, even if I was suffering from an outbreak of herpes, he would insist, even if it was painful for me."
