In February, 2017, the novelist Emma Cline received a fifteen-page letter from the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner LLP containing a list of accusations against her. Cline had recently found literary success with the publication of her first book, a novel called “The Girls.” Random House had paid an advance of close to two million dollars for worldwide rights to the book—an extraordinary sum for a first novel—and the Hollywood producer Scott Rudin had optioned the film rights. During the summer of 2016, when “The Girls” came out, it was rare to enter a bookstore without seeing the book’s psychedelic red-and-indigo cover prominently displayed. The novel was a finalist for numerous literary prizes, and Cline landed on various “rising young writer” lists. The Times Book Review pronounced the book “spellbinding.” (Cline worked in The New Yorker’s fiction department in 2013 and 2014, and has published fiction in the magazine. Random House published my book, “Black Edge.”)

In the letter, which also made allegations against Random House, Boies Schiller accused Cline of stealing fragments of written work from a former boyfriend and using them in a draft of her novel. Additionally, the letter said, Cline had spent years improperly snooping on the e-mail accounts of the ex-boyfriend, Chaz Reetz-Laiolo, and two of the former couple’s female friends. The letter alleged that Cline had installed spyware on her laptop computer, which Reetz-Laiolo and the friends occasionally used, and which he later bought from Cline; the spyware recorded the computer’s keystrokes and browser activity. Boies Schiller said it was prepared to file a lawsuit, which would seek an immediate halt to the sale of “The Girls” and the movie production—but it also offered Cline a second option. “We believe . . . that it may be fruitful to engage in a confidential negotiation or mediation to determine whether our clients can reach a resolution with you rather than file our complaint,” the letter said. The names of three attorneys appeared at the bottom of the letter, including that of David Boies, the firm’s founder.

Boies is famous for his role as the lead attorney for the former Vice-President Al Gore during the 2000 Presidential-election vote recount and, later, as the co-lead counsel in the case that established the constitutional right for gay and lesbian couples to get married in California. One of the most powerful and well-respected lawyers in the country, Boies has had a long and celebrated career in private practice and in government; he developed a reputation for integrity and high ideals in a profession that isn’t always known for them. More recently, however, questions have been raised about some of the tactics that Boies has employed when representing men in disputes with women. On November 6th, The New Yorker published an article by Ronan Farrow that detailed Boies’s role representing Harvey Weinstein, who is alleged to have sexually harassed or assaulted dozens of actresses and former employees. (Weinstein has denied engaging in non-consensual sex.) As part of his work for Weinstein, Boies hired private investigators from several different firms who, among other tasks, gathered information—including personal and sexual history—intended to discredit an actress, Rose McGowan, who has accused Weinstein of rape. Boies has since severed professional ties with Weinstein and said that his firm’s involvement with the investigators was “a mistake.” In an e-mail to his firm’s staff that was then leaked to the press, Boies wrote that “I would never knowingly participate in an effort to intimidate or silence women or anyone else. . . . That is not who I am.”

During the months after his firm sent its first letter to Cline, Boies remained involved in Reetz-Laiolo’s case. Attorneys on both sides outlined arguments and counter-arguments in a series of letters back and forth. At one point, Boies Schiller—which represents Reetz-Laiolo and the two women whom Cline had also allegedly snooped on—asserted that the damages caused by Cline’s activity was almost two billion dollars, an amount arrived at by calculating that the spyware that Cline used had resulted in thousands of alleged violations of federal privacy laws. Cline had installed a program called Refog Keylogger on her laptop; Reetz-Laiolo eventually bought the laptop from her, for three hundred dollars, and the software remained on the machine.

Cline’s attorneys argued that the plagiarism allegations were false, and asserted in a letter that Reetz-Laiolo—who was thirty-three years old when the two started dating, while Cline was twenty—had been emotionally and physically abusive toward her, that he had cheated on her, and that she had installed the spyware in order to monitor his behavior and protect herself, not to steal his writing. (In a statement, Reetz-Laiolo said that Cline had made “false accusations of physical abuse against me,” and that she’d offered no defense for allegedly accessing his co-plaintiff’s online accounts.)

On May 26th, Boies Schiller responded by sending a hundred-and-ten-page draft of a complaint that it said it was prepared to file in court if the two sides did not reach a settlement. David Boies’s name appeared at the top of it. Reading through the allegations, Cline was stunned to find a section titled “Cline’s History of Manipulating Older Men,” which purported to illustrate how Boies Schiller would easily discredit her arguments about her former boyfriend’s treatment of her before a jury. “[E]vidence shows that Cline was not the innocent and inexperienced naïf she portrayed herself to be, and had instead for many years maintained numerous ‘relations’ with older men and others, from whom she extracted gifts and money,” the section began. What followed were thirteen pages containing screenshots of explicit chat conversations with lovers, including one in which Cline had sent a naked photo of herself (the photo was blacked out in the letter) to a boyfriend, explicit banter with people she’d met online, and snippets of her most intimate diary entries. All of this material had been recorded by the spyware and remained on Cline’s old laptop, which Reetz-Laiolo now had in his possession.

A letter that Boies Schiller sent along with the draft complaint included even more graphic sexual details and screenshots pertaining to Cline’s romantic relationships. Cline had “engaged in random sexual encounters with strangers she met on Craigslist”; “frequently participated in sexual chat groups in which she, inter alia, posted pornographic ‘selfies’ ”; and “authored pornographic ‘stories,’ ” the letter stated, including images showing exchanges and erotic writings in excruciating detail, all of which also came from Cline’s old computer. Furthermore, the letter argued, because Cline had said kind things about Reetz-Laiolo and exchanged “warm and friendly” e-mails with him both before and after their breakup, her allegations of abuse were obviously false.

The letter went on to state that Cline’s arguments—that she had been abused by her former boyfriend, and that her concern about infidelity was the reason for her cyber-espionage—had “placed Ms. Cline’s sexual conduct directly at issue.” The implications from Cline’s perspective were clear: Cline was to negotiate a significant monetary payment to her ex-boyfriend and former friends right away, or she would be sued through a public court filing, and her most private sexual thoughts and activity would be released into the public realm for anyone to see.

Cline’s attorneys were outraged by what they regarded as Boies Schiller’s attempt to use embarrassing sexual material that had nothing to do with the heart of the legal dispute to push her to settle the case. “I’m not going to speculate about their motives, but it was content that was completely inappropriate and ludicrous, just based on how sexually graphic it was, to put in a complaint,” Carrie Goldberg, who specializes in representing victims of revenge porn and other forms of harassment, and is one of several attorneys representing Cline in the case, told me. “Legal complaints are public record, and, basically, they’re saying, ‘Hey, if you don’t give us what our client wants, we’re going to put this very personal information out into the open, and the whole world is going to know the inner workings of your sex life and your sexual history and every proclivity that you have.’ ”