The Free Press
In January 2011, Yale Law School professor Amy Chua was in the middle of her book tour, in her hotel room in Seattle, when an email came in from the future vice president of the United States.
Her book—Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother—had just come out, and she was getting pummeled in the media for demanding that her daughters get straight A’s and play the piano or violin. She was called the “worst mother ever.” There were death threats.
“I’m not a crier, but I was so depressed,” Chua told me. “I was there by myself—I had bodyguards—and I get an email from J.D. Vance.”
The first-year law student had a question about his upcoming exam in Chua’s Contracts class. She had been mentoring Vance and quickly replied.
“Three hours later, probably after a beer, he writes me another email, and he’s like, ‘You know what? I should be studying, but I’m so curious about all this furor, so I went to Barnes & Noble, and I read it,’ ” she said, referring to her book. “He’s like, ‘I do not know why this is controversial.’ ”
Then, he told her, “You remind me of Mamaw”—Vance’s grandmother, who raised him with the same tough love that courses through Tiger Mother.
Vance added that he “felt a little bit bad” for giving her the impression that he came from an intact family, saying things were “more complicated” back home. He attached a document to the email, “and it’s the opening of Hillbilly Elegy,” Chua said, “and even though I was in trauma about my own situation, I read this thing, and I said, ‘J.D., you have to write your own book.’ ”
Which, of course, he did.
Chua connected Vance with her agent, and in June 2016—just over four months before Donald Trump was elected to the White House for the first time—the book was published. Progressive America loved it. They thought of Vance as their in-house anthropologist, the man who could explain these sad, strange people who had just voted for The Great Satan.
“She helped create the origin story for the person who’s the future vice president of the United States,” a former student, who is now an attorney in New York, told me. “That’s classic Amy Chua.”
Tiger Mother made Chua a celebrity—transforming her into the greatest superconnector in the Ivy League. She symbolized everything that Americans once associated with our elite institutions: initiative, excellence, discipline, perseverance—meritocracy.
Which, in retrospect, made her an obvious target.
While Chua didn’t set out to attack the emerging, more mediocre, more illiberal campus—with its emphasis on safe spaces and trigger warnings and microaggressions and all the other inanities we now associate with so-called elite universities—her book undoubtedly alarmed those who had helped bring this campus into being. Those who subscribed to the new ethos, those who enforced its values. To the enforcers, Chua was not just wrong but offensive, even “dangerous.”
Over the next decade, Chua was accused of all species of impropriety: racism, misogyny, grooming. Her critics eventually trained their sights on her husband, fellow Yale Law professor Jed Rubenfeld. That prompted a two-year investigation into Rubenfeld, who was ultimately suspended for two years for allegations of verbal harassment, unwanted touching, and attempted kissing—all of which, he said, he “absolutely, unequivocally, 100 percent” denies.
Many professors—many human beings—would have been undone. But Chua has somehow emerged from her inquisitions stronger, more famous, more infamous.
She has been vindicated.
On Inauguration Day, she’ll be in Washington with her husband—as special guests of the vice president-elect.
It’s not just J.D. It’s not just her former students who clerked for eight of the nine current Supreme Court justices (as well as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, when Jackson was still a district court judge). It’s not just that her daughters have graduated from Ivy League schools.
It’s that the ideas that Chua was pilloried for are suddenly back in fashion.
“I definitely feel that, as a whole society, more people than expected are tired of feeling terrified for saying stuff,” Chua told me.
It was early evening, and we were in the turret of Chua’s apartment, on the fifteenth floor of a prewar building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, enveloped by the sparkling, sprawling cityscape. One of her dogs, a Samoyed named Mac, wandered in and out. Chua was speaking in her characteristic allegro clip. “She’s a person of almost superhuman energy,” her Yale Law colleague and longtime friend Tony Kronman told me.
It was that energy, coupled with a seemingly boundless hunger for new people, that defined Amy Chua. Vance, Kronman said, “was only the tip of the iceberg.”
There’s also Vivek Ramaswamy. Chua told me she had helped him write his 2021 manifesto on corporate America, Woke, Inc., and she also helped promote it, calling Ramaswamy “breakthrough brilliant and arrestingly original”—which laid the groundwork for his GOP presidential bid in 2024, making him something of a favorite second choice for Trump loyalists. (Rubenfeld also advised Ramaswamy on the constitutional-law sections of the book, Chua said.)
But Chua’s Yale Law mentees aren’t just Republicans. They come from both sides of the political aisle and include the progressive reporter Ronan Farrow and Democratic congresswoman-elect Maggie Goodlander, who’s married to Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan. Chua has also taught the Mozilla Foundation’s executive director, Nabiha Syed, and Usha Chilukuri, who became Usha Vance, and sat in the front of the class while her future husband sat in the back. Chua’s classes were always oversubscribed, several sources told me. There was always a line of students waiting to speak with her at her office, on the third floor of the Sterling Law Building, which was built in 1931 and is meant to look like it was built in 1131.
“She helped create the origin story for the person who’s the future vice president of the United States,” a former student told The Free Press. “That’s classic Amy Chua.”
“It’s across the board—left wing, right wing,” Chua said of the students she’s advised. “I get a lot of immigrants.” She said she is also close with federal judges and Supreme Court justices of all political stripes. That includes the conservative Brett Kavanaugh, who Chua helped 10 of her students—eight of whom were women—land clerkships with. As well as Sonia Sotomayor, who has been dubbed the Court’s “most liberal” justice and attended the Washington, D.C., book party for Chua’s first novel, The Golden Gate.
“She has become the most important adviser and mentor of students at the Yale Law School in the entire time that I’ve been on the faculty, which is going on half a century,” said Kronman, a lifelong Democrat.
When I asked Chua to describe the people she mentored, she said “authentic.” She meant they weren’t like the other strivers, those who arrived on campus knowing how to play the game. Chua’s future mentees arrived on campus knowing nothing—in Hillbilly Elegy, Vance famously recalled being at a fancy dinner and not knowing which utensil to use for which course—and she helped them find out who they were meant to be. She didn’t care what that was, so long as it was real.
Daniel Markovits, also a Yale Law professor, told me Chua is “a spectacular talent spotter” who loves original thinkers, but not because of “an abstract commitment to free and open inquiry.”
Elina Tetelbaum agreed with that. In the late aughts, Tetelbaum, who calls herself “a liberal” and “good friends” with Ramaswamy, was Chua’s student. Tetelbaum stressed that Chua likes people “who are not ideologues, who have interesting personal stories.” When I asked her if she had been close with Chua at Yale, she said she had just returned from Chua’s daughter’s wedding.
“She has a unique gift of understanding the pulse of the nation,” Tetelbaum went on. “She didn’t mentor J.D. Vance because he was a conservative. Rather, she saw a person with a voice and a story that would resonate.”
Also, she was the quintessential outsider, and she identified with him.
Chua spent her first seven years in West Lafayette, Indiana, where she was “practically the only Asian kid” in her whole school, she said. Then, her family moved to California, where her father was an electrical engineering professor at UC Berkeley. Once again, she found herself mostly alone—one of the few hyper-ambitious kids at El Cerrito High School, a pretty rough “majority minority” school that was recently ranked 533 out of 2,616 California high schools.
In the mid-1980s, she met her future husband, Jed Rubenfeld, at Harvard Law School, where they became friends with future Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan. (Chua and Kagan remain close.) Chua and Rubenfeld, who is now a constitutional law scholar at Yale Law School, have two daughters, Sophia and Louisa. Tiger Mother was born in the late aughts, when Louisa, also known as Lulu, then 13, started rebelling against her mother. “I literally wrote it in a moment of crisis, when I just was fighting so much with my younger daughter, and I thought I was going to lose her,” she said.
Chua, 62, wrote the book in two months, and called it a kind of “therapy.”
Given the backlash to Tiger Mother, she spent the next several years staying out of the spotlight. She wrote a book with her husband, The Triple Package, about why some ethnic groups flourish economically and others do not. (Time, dismissing the book, said it was emblematic of “the new racism”; other publications followed suit.)
Then, in July 2018, Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to replace Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court. Several of Chua’s former students who had clerked for him asked her to write an op-ed endorsing Kavanaugh, and she obliged. On July 12, “Kavanaugh Is a Mentor to Women” appeared in The Wall Street Journal.
In September, a Palo Alto University psychology professor, Christine Blasey Ford, accused Kavanaugh, in a Washington Post interview, of pinning her down, groping her, and stifling her attempt to scream while at a small gathering of high school students in the 1980s.
Suddenly, the media was portraying Chua and her husband as having groomed female law students for a lecher who’d been nominated by the most lecherous president ever, Donald Trump. The Guardian—relying on anonymous sources—reported that Chua told prospective clerks that Kavanaugh would choose women who conveyed a “model-like femininity.” Rubenfeld reportedly told one female student: “You should know that Judge Kavanaugh hires women with a certain look.”
It didn’t help—at least when it came to optics—that Chua’s daughter Sophia, a Yale Law graduate, was poised to start clerking for Kavanaugh, who was a judge in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit at the time. Heather Gerken, Yale Law School’s dean, issued a statement voicing “enormous concern” about “allegations of faculty misconduct.”
At the same time, Chua developed “a minor infection that turned into sepsis,” as she put it. After undergoing a nine-hour surgery, she spent the next three weeks in Yale New Haven Hospital and “nearly died,” she told me.
“I had eight tubes in me, including one going down my throat, and I wasn’t allowed to eat or drink for three weeks, and was only allowed the occasional ice chip,” she said. “When I was released, I was in a wheelchair, had lost all my hair, couldn’t walk to the end of my driveway, and was addicted to Oxy.”
In late September, about the same time she was released, she blasted out an email to her Yale Law colleagues saying the grooming allegations were “outrageous” and “100 percent false.”
“I’ve done so many crazy things,” Chua told me, “but, like, that is just dumb advice that I would never actually give, to dress like a model to go interview for a conservative.”
She acknowledged, when we spoke, that she could be “unfiltered,” that she did offer advice on how to dress when interviewing with a conservative Supreme Court justice—“I would always say, ‘Dress conservatively’ ”—but that the idea that she prodded young women to embrace their inner sexiness was just “spin” and “completely false.”
Several Yale professors were drafting a letter in opposition to Kavanaugh’s nomination and approached Chua to join them. “They wanted me, since I knew him, to say something bad that would derail the nomination,” she said.
On September 21, 2018, 47 Yale Law School professors—a majority of law school faculty—published the open letter to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, urging them to hit pause on the nomination. Chua refused to sign.
“I wasn’t trying to be brave or stand out,” she said. “For me, it was a very personal decision. I just don’t turn on my friends. It wasn’t, ‘Did you think it happened or not?’ I was like, ‘I’m just not going to denounce him.’ ”
“This is exactly what they did in the Cultural Revolution,” Chua said. “The terminology was so similar—it was like ‘denounce,’ you know? You could just see everybody folding on the faculty. It was just like lemmings—we all have to sign this thing, and I just don’t like signing things, the weakness.”
Then, on October 6, 2018, the Senate voted—50 to 48—to approve Kavanaugh. One Democrat, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, who recently became an independent, supported Kavanaugh. Republican senator Lisa Murkowski voted present.
For Chua, it was a gratifying, albeit fleeting, moment. What she didn’t know was that soon she would be embarking on “a long fight for survival.”
In April 2021, while Yale, like many other campuses in the age of Covid-19, was still locked down, a handful of anonymous students accused Chua and Rubenfeld of hosting boozy dinner parties at their New Haven home and, in the words of one former student, “crossing the line”—making impolitic comments, defending Kavanaugh. It was pretty vague.
It wasn’t just that the dinner parties were a violation of the university’s Covid policy—a big no-no. It was that they seemed to buttress the earlier, Kavanaugh-related insinuation—that Chua and Rubenfeld were groomers, that there was something creepy or unsavory about them.
Thus was born Dinner Party-gate. The scandal fed off earlier allegations that Rubenfeld had sexually harassed students, which led Yale in 2020 to suspend him for two years. (Rubenfeld was unavailable to comment for this story.)
A lawsuit filed in late 2021 by two students against the law school—asserting they were penalized for not corroborating the allegations lodged against Chua—seemed to support that, although the suit was dropped in 2023.
Ultimately, Yale gave Chua a slap on the wrist, barring her from teaching her “small group”—a contingent of 15 or so first-year students. Chua pledged not to drink with students (all of whom are permitted by law to drink).
“I took our house off the market and thought to myself, ‘They will have to drag me out of this place dead.’ ” —Chua on her decision to stay at Yale Law after a smear campaign.
Kronman said the whole thing was a bad joke born of residual anger over Chua’s refusal to jump on the anti-Kavanaugh bandwagon. “At the time,” he said, “to the witch-hunting zealots of the Yale Law School faculty and administration, it looked like a high crime, and it had about it the air of unreality that is almost, I imagine, what people who lived through the McCarthy witch hunts felt, the people who got scared and didn’t quite know what to do, and afterwards, they said, ‘Did that really happen? Was it as crazy as it really seems?’ And the answer is, ‘Yes.’ ”
Chua felt more alone, more like an outsider, than ever before, and she thought about leaving Yale. In fact, she and her husband briefly put their house in New Haven on the market, she told me. “I was literally afraid to walk down the halls of the law school,” she said in an email. “Not physically afraid—I am literally never physically afraid—just filled with dread and paranoia.”
Chua recalled Irin Carmon, a reporter at New York magazine, asking her why she didn’t just leave Yale “if everybody hates you.”
In an email, Chua said: “That was the moment I CHANGED MY MIND! I was, like, BECAUSE I’m not going to be pushed out.”
She added: “I took our house off the market and thought to myself, ‘They will have to drag me out of this place dead.’ ”
Now Vance is on the cusp of being sworn into the second-highest office in the land. Ramaswamy is poised to run the new Department of Government Efficiency, with Elon Musk. Kavanaugh is writing a memoir, which is due out in the next couple years.
Chua wouldn’t tell me how she voted. When I asked, she said, “I mean, I’m still very close to J.D. and Usha—I’m an independent. I’m a genuine independent.”
She added that she thought the free exchange of ideas was making a comeback. “I really think the tide turned in 2023 and 2024.”
I asked if that was because of the election.
“No, no,” she said. “It’s because donors spoke out, and you can see what’s going on with who’s getting the presidency of universities.” She was referring to the exit of Harvard’s Claudine Gay and the University of Pennsylvania’s Elizabeth Magill, both of whom resigned after delivering disastrous remarks before Congress about antisemitism on campus.
But it wasn’t just the universities. Trump’s election win has signaled a sea change. Last week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a video saying Facebook was getting rid of its fact-checkers while pledging to “restore free expression.” Musk, having transformed Twitter into X, has cracked open the progressive mono-discourse that once smothered stories and bolstered The Narrative. Now, there is no narrative. We are turning away from the cancellations, toward a guardrail-less, Wild West marketplace of ideas.
“People are self-interested, so they pivot,” Chua went on, laughing uneasily. “People have pivoted back to free speech.”
