Bad Karma - Softcover

Deborah Blum has been a writer, producer and director working in the film business for most of her adult life. For the last twenty years she's written and directed documentaries for the History Channel, National Geographic and Discovery. Before that she sold ideas for features and produced three of those films. One, called CLEAN AND SOBER, dealt with drug addiction and starred Michael Keaton.

In 1969, when Tanya Tarasoff was murdered, Blum was a sophomore at the University of California at Berkeley. Although she didn't know Tanya or the young man who killed her, she recalls feeling that what happened to Tanya Tarasoff might just as easily have happened to her.

Although it was not until many years later, the incident eventually resurfaced in her life. An article on the front page of the Los Angeles Times reported that the California Supreme Court had ruled, in a landmark case, that doctors or psychotherapists have a legal duty to warn intended victims of patients believed dangerous to them. Such a duty, the court said, was not a breach of the therapist-patient privilege of confidentiality.

Blum was surprised to learn that this precedent stemmed from the slaying of Tanya Tarasoff.
As if compelled, she began to piece together a story from court transcripts, police reports, newspaper accounts, letters, and interviews with the many people directly involved. What she learned made her realize her that not only could she identify with the emotions of the victim, but also of her murderer.

This affecting true crime book by a California film producer tells the story of two young people in the Berkeley of 1968 whose relationship proved to be a tragedy. They were from vastly different cultures: Prosenjit Poddar, a naval architecture student at the University of California, was from India's Untouchables, and knew nothing about young Americans, their attitudes, their dating rituals. Tanya Tarasoff, a junior college student, knew even less about Indian customs. Additionally, their personality problems were acute: he was a single-minded individual whose obsession with his work turned into an obsession for Tanya, while she, immature, insecure and the product of a home dominated by an alcoholic bully of a father, manipulated her power over Poddar, alternately luring and rejecting him. A psychiatrist who treated him predicted violence, but got no cooperation from the police. Poddar was found guilty of killing the young woman and was eventually deported after his conviction was overturned. Photos not seen by PW. (June 30pTHE LIFE OF A REAL GIRL: An Autobi
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.