Donnelly and Van Antwerp Legal was formed, and according to several people with whom I spoke,the pair shared a spark right off the bat. Sybil Van Antwerp, twenty years his junior, quickly became his collaborator. They worked hand in hand on every case. “It was like they shared a brain,” Elizabeth Donnelly said. “She was his sounding board, his voice of reason. She was his equal. His work wife, they used to call her. I didn’t mind; he needed her.”
In 1971 Guy Donnelly was appointed to the Circuit Court of Maryland in Frederick. Faced with the prospect of maintaining the firm they had built, finding a new partner or finding another firm in the midst of raising her three young children, Sybil Van Antwerp chose the fourth option. She went with him. She left the prestige of their firm and all that money, and fell in behind Donnelly as a lowly clerk. In aWashington Postarticle from the time, the journalist mentioned contacting Van Antwerp for comment and getting her refusal. They closed the firm in short order and she followed Donnelly to the courts as his chief clerk.
“Everyone was shocked,” Watts Doyle, principal attorney at the firm Ridley, Doyle, Mack & Loughlin and a friend of Donnelly’s and Van Antwerp’s said when I reached him by phone in Key Largo, where he is spending his retirement. “It just wasn’t done. As a clerk you didn’t make any money, and she was very successful by then. It really surprised us. Everyone, I mean. But in some ways, it didn’t. You really couldn’t imagine them ever splitting up. Butch and Sundance.” And later, “An opinion from them—it’d be as clean and neat as a pin. If you sat with them for even a short time, you could see they were intellectual counterparts. They were a closed circuit. A duo. He respectedher more than he respected anyone else. People used to say if she’d have been a man, she’d have been the judge. She was brilliant.”
As we reflect upon the tremendous life and work of Judge Guy D. Donnelly, I cannot help but wonder after his lionized clerk. What was the full extent of their partnership, and furthermore, as charming as this perfected collaboration sounds, as idyllic, is a judgeship a position meant to be shared? Or, rather, is not this the nature of the concept of judicial installment, the entrusting of sentencing to an elected or appointedindividual?
Van Antwerp disappears from the public record after her retirement, though it is purported she lives in or near Annapolis, Maryland. I sought a way to reach her, extending every resource, and found no phone number or email address.
Alex Toole
c/oThe Baltimore Sun
300 East Cromwell Street
Baltimore, MD 21230
September 7, 2012
To: Alex Toole
From: Sybil Stone Van Antwerp, subject of your most recent column, OFF THE RECORD
Dear Ms. Toole,
I’d like to start by saying this letter is a matter of personal contact, off the record—don’t even think about putting any of this in your column, bemoaning the already tired subject of who I am. I assure you, there is no audience for this.
Secondly, it seems unlikely that you “extended every resource” in order to contact me, because I’m here at my house where I have lived for many years and my address is a matter of public record. I do not list a phone number, and there is probably no record of my e-mail address, which indicates that is where you stopped.
Thirdly, and now getting to the point. You have made assumptions, and you’re clearly not the first, but as a journalist you ought to know better. The world is different than it was when I was a professional, so perhaps you, in your modern naïveté, cannot fathom what I am about to explain. When I went with Guy to the court, I did not “fall behind him as a lowly clerk.” What Guy and I shared professionally was something like perfect symbiosis. We worked in symmetry to each other. Our shared work was almost seamless. Don’t mistake what I’m saying; we could argue, knock down, drag out fights over a case, but neither of us offendable, both of us ultimately fixated on the law, without strings. Wesavored it, both of us in love with the practice of law (to a fault). Guy and I were equals within the context of our relationship to each other, and I don’t know of another woman my age who was afforded that opportunity professionally. In the seventies, when I was really starting out, it was women as secretaries, or if they climbed up from there, some limited scope of what men were doing, and with an ongoing through line of what is now termed sexual harassment at the very best. I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of my own judicial appointment back then, but I knew what Guy and I had would carry over. You want to know why I forwent prestige and money to become a “lowly clerk”? Because I was not in the practice of law as a means to wealth or fame. Clerking for Guy was not lowly in the least.
I’ll leave your closing questions alone—I feel no need to grapple with your youthful idealism. Additionally, you would not be the first person to speculate if my relationship with Guy extended beyond professional. I assure you it did not, and that is something you’ll have to accept on my good authority. While we made an exceptional pair in legal contexts, personally we didn’t mix. He was, speaking frankly,off the record, rather idiotic socially. He made terrible jokes. He flirted with tall, younger women. He had terrible taste in office furniture, music. He ate like an animal. Honestly, sometimes I couldn’t really tolerate him at all. He’s lucky he found Liz—that woman is as classic as they come.
There is no need for you to write me again, but I’ll close by suggesting you do be careful with your assumptions, Alex.
Regards,
Sybil Stone Van Antwerp
Sybil Vanantwerp
17 Farney Rd.
Arnold, MD 21012
12 Sept. 2012
To: Sybil Vanantwerp, clerk to deceased Judge Guy D. Donnelly
I found the obituary for Judge Donnelly on the internet and an article about you. From time to time I search his name, and this time he died so there is plenty. It says you were “brilliant”, and “respected”, “Butch and Sundance” like a myth. Says your opinions were “Clean and neat as a pin”. This PERFECT JUSTICE. Reading this I felt sick. I remember you. I know you are a cold metal bitch. There is something more important than law and people with their lives do not fit into one box. What you call justice is like an army tank driving through and crushing without mercy, and when it is gone there is only wreckage.
It was easy finding your address, and seeing it on a map. A house near the water, a nice successful life and happy retirement. But I wish you the very worst, it is what you deserve.
Very sincerely,
DM
Ms. Joan Didion
