Few American college students in the mid-nineteen-nineties showed as much promise as Rachel Hall. In 1994, Glamour named her one of its Top 10 College Women. “Rachel Hall is a Truman Scholar, former White House intern, licensed massage therapist, onetime Virgin Islands lifeguard, varsity rower and chair of the United Nations’ Global Federation Youth Cabinet,” the magazine wrote. “A double major in Japanese and international relations, Hall recently transferred from UC-Davis to Stanford University. Her future plans include a graduate degree in Japanese and a career in international relations.” The following year, Stanford endorsed Hall’s application for a Rhodes scholarship. Hall’s grades at both schools were “literally perfect,” Peter Stansky, a history professor and the chairman of Stanford’s Rhodes panel, wrote. “Ms. Hall is a very polished and mature candidate who has had a wide variety of experiences from which she has very intelligently managed to learn prodigious amounts.” Hall won the Rhodes.

Rachel Yould studied at Stanford and Oxford, but, in recent months, she has shuttled between safe houses for victims of abuse. Illustration by John Ritter; Photograph: Courtesy the Anchorage Daily News / Mct / Landov

Lean and fit, with pale skin and a cascade of strawberry-blond hair, Rachel stood out, even on big campuses. “Rachel was the most remarkable student I ever had,” Joyce Moser, who taught Hall in a seminar on literature and the arts her first year at Stanford, said. “Rachel wrote an imitation of Plato’s Republic that I still have. It was so good that I kept it for fifteen years. Each of the students had to do a presentation, and Rachel did one on eighteenth-century music. She turned off the lights and put candles all over the classroom. She put Mozart on softly in the background. She had images to go with it. It was the closest thing you could do to create an eighteenth-century environment in a seminar room. She was just an unforgettable student.”

In recent months, Rachel Yould (her married name) had been living an itinerant existence in Anchorage, where she shuttled, often in disguise, between safe houses established for victims of domestic violence. A group of local women, mostly domestic-violence survivors, cared for Yould; her “safety team,” or Team Rachel, as the group was known, insisted that outsiders who wanted to meet her first sign a confidentiality contract, so that her father, who she claimed had abused her, could not find her. Yould saw her husband once a week, and her “big outing,” as she put it, was a weekly trip to church.

On September 10th, Team Rachel escorted Yould to the federal courthouse in Anchorage, where she was treated not as a victim but as a perpetrator. There she was to be sentenced by Judge John Sedwick, of the U.S. District Court, for carrying out a complex scheme to defraud the governments of Alaska and the United States. Yould’s life after Stanford had turned into a sprawling saga that unfolded in half a dozen countries on three continents. Documents relating to her fraud case filled an entire room of the U.S. Attorney’s office in Anchorage. Before her sentencing, her supporters wrote moving letters asking Judge Sedwick for leniency. As one family friend wrote, “Rachel is a kind, loving person and her goal has always been to help others.” A series of domestic-violence experts, retained by Yould’s public defender, told the judge about the implications of the abuse that she said she had suffered. Dr. Eli Newberger, who is affiliated with Harvard Medical School, examined Yould and wrote in his report, “In my forty years of experience in this area of practice, I have never seen such a heartless and systematic torture of a child by a parent.”

The prosecution presented a very different picture of Rachel Yould. In a hundred-and-twenty-page brief, Retta-Rae Randall, the Assistant U.S. Attorney on the case, wrote, “The case is not about abuse, but about lies and greed.” In another court filing, Randall wrote that the defendant “claims ‘safety concerns,’ needing a ‘safety team,’ being a ‘victim’ of domestic violence, not only to manipulate the court, but also to defraud agencies which support true victims of domestic violence. No evidence, not even a proffer, of any legitimate threat to the defendant’s safety since she arrived in Anchorage in January 2009, has been provided to the court or to the United States Probation Office. Yet the defendant has been allowed to take up space at a ‘safe house’ for domestic violence victims, to the detriment of those women who are truly fleeing a present danger and need a safe place to reside with their children.” The question raised about Rachel Yould is, then, a simple one. Is she a brilliant, heroic survivor and a victim of injustice—or an incorrigible con artist?

Sheryl Davis grew up in a small town in Alabama and went to college at Auburn University. There she met Robert Eyre Hall, and the two were married in 1969, shortly before he graduated and enlisted in the Army. Hall was assigned to the Panama Canal Zone, where Rachel Eyre Hall, the couple’s only child, was born, on January 3, 1972. After Robert Hall left the service, the family moved to Glendale, Arizona, where he attended business school at the Thunderbird School of Global Management. The family moved to Illinois, where Robert went to work for a company that sold agricultural products; in 1975, the couple divorced. Sheryl and Rachel moved back to Alabama. “He was never violent to me,” Sheryl Davis told me, speaking of her ex-husband, “though he did throw a shoe at me once.”

Hall’s career led him to live, over the next few years, in Puerto Rico, New Jersey, and, eventually, near Atlanta. Sheryl was a teacher, and she and her daughter moved often as well; by the time Rachel was in sixth grade, she had lived in six places and gone to five schools. In 1982, Sheryl married Glenn Denkler, a Vietnam veteran, who enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America, in Hyde Park, New York. In 1985, after he graduated, the couple decided to move to Anchorage, where Denkler became a cooking teacher at a vocational high school, and Sheryl also taught school. Rachel came with them, but, from the time she was five, she spent a few weeks with her father every summer.

As part of her defense, Rachel Yould wrote an autobiography of sorts, which was circulated among her supporters. It consists of more than fifty single-spaced pages, and is composed in her characteristic torrential writing style—an intense agglomeration of detail and explanation that is evident even in her routine correspondence, which often runs to thousands of words. “I have no memory of a life without abuse,” the account begins. “Among my earliest recollections are disjointed montages of heavy breathing and touching and thrusting and pain and nausea and an unsettling inability to reach that place inside me from which tears would, for most people, issue forth.” She goes on, “My childhood was peppered with moments of clarity and desperate cries for help, but they were fleeting and failed to save me.”

Robert Hall has always denied abusing his daughter in any way, but Rachel’s account is full of detailed recollections. “I remember refusing to allow a doctor to examine me during a childhood doctor’s visit to diagnose one of countless urinary tract infections,” she writes. “I told my mother quietly that it was because of daddy and she conveyed to the doctor that I was resisting the pelvic exam because of problems we’d had with my father. I was spared the exam but little else. My mom took no action to investigate my assertion or curtail my visits with my father, who was no longer living with us at that time.”

In a letter to the judge, Sheryl described Rachel as an “anxious, emotionally excessive” child. “She was a loving, gentle child—not a discipline problem—whose angst was early and internal.” According to her mother, Rachel saw a series of counsellors but never received a diagnosis. Sheryl says that Rachel never told her of any abuse. “I think Rachel tried to tell me many times, but she was not heard,” Sheryl told me. “At a certain point, she just stopped trying.”

The report assembled by Eli Newberger, the medical expert retained by the defense, includes an account of an incident in Yould’s adolescence. “On one occasion, after Ms. Yould had a mole removed without first seeking Mr. Hall’s permission, she described having awakened tied up, and recalled his saying, ‘If you want less flesh on your hip, I’ll show you less flesh,’ ” Newberger wrote. “Ms. Yould described that Mr. Hall took out a knife and a second implement with a curved protrusion at the end and ‘started carving, pulling out this long plug of skin, fat, and muscle.’ She described how strange it was to feel and then see a part of her no longer being a part of her. Her pain on this occasion was deeper and more sustained, and she said she bled more than usual. She noted shivering consistent with shock and persistent bleeding, and lapses of consciousness.”

In a written statement to the court, Yould recalled seeing something in the basement of her father’s house. “I walked close and stared and then suddenly felt like a cosmic jolt had just vacuumed all of the air out of my chest,” she wrote. “It was a hunk of desiccated flesh pinned to the wall and I knew from the approximate size and shape and just the nature of life in that house that it was mine. It was a piece of me pinned to the wall.”

Yould said that she took refuge from the abuse by excelling at school. “My elixir was superstar achievement,” she wrote. “I was a top honors student, an athlete, and president of everything. I was a community volunteer, a creator of civic programs, an advocate of social causes. The crushing pace required to keep these countless responsibilities aloft, while destructive to my ailing spirit, rendered life manageable.” Still, she wrote, she was plagued by “flashbacks,” which sometimes caused her to drive off the road: “The two realities that I had spent a lifetime cleaving into two separate people—the bad, scary me that haunted my nights versus the light, accomplished me that carried me through each day—came crashing together.” By the time she graduated from high school, her nightmares “had reached new heights as had the sleep-deprivation and anxiety that would render me persistently ill for years to come.”

During her summertime visits to her father, Yould said, she became close to her stepbrother John (Robert Hall had remarried), who fell ill with AIDS-related symptoms in 1990. She learned to perform massage therapy on him, and ultimately began a program to provide massages to AIDS patients in Sacramento, which is near U.C. Davis. “When my step-brother was ill with AIDS, I began writing to Mother Teresa as an outlet for my grief,” she later wrote. “I honestly didn’t know if anyone read my letters, and I certainly did not expect that they were reaching Mother.” After John died, in 1993, “I received a letter inviting me to come work in Mother’s Home for the Dying, to care for her terminally ill patients as I became accustomed to being unable to care any longer for my brother. I traveled to India for a short time while in college to do just that.” According to a letter written in 1997 by Brother Vinod, an associate of Mother Teresa, “Among the hundreds of patients who Rachel has personally diagnosed and treated during her three-month stay here, I have observed marked improvements. . . . Rarely in my career have I encountered such dedication to contributing professionally for the benefit of the poor.” A subsequent job as a massage practitioner at a spa near Sacramento ended less happily, when, according to her employer, she left shifts uncovered and once skipped work “due to her visiting a male friend not kidney cancer as she told us.”

Yould always drew extreme reactions, sometimes even from the same people. Peter Duus, a professor of Japanese history, knew Yould at Stanford. “I felt that there was something phony about her, not in the sense that she was fraudulent but that she was excessively insistent in talking about her accomplishments, her skills, and her ambitions,” Duus told me. “For example, at various times she told me that she had spent a year nursing her brother through a devastating illness, and that she had been treated for ovarian or cervical cancer and would never have children. I took her behavior to reflect the fact that she had lived a harder life than other students had—and was trying to compensate for that.”