The Vanity Fair fiasco exposed a growing rift between Daniels and some in the transgender community over how she was portraying transsexuality in her blog. They felt she was focusing too much on appearances, setting herself up for exactly the sort of treatment she said she received from Maxwell.
Daniels had a falling-out via e-mail with Stanton, the fired city manager in Florida. "She was writing a blog about how great it is to dress and color her hair and wear makeup and it was kind of very tranny," Stanton says. "I was really nervous about this. A lot of people are saying, 'Oh, you look so gorgeous.' Then other people will say, 'My goodness, look at this pervert on the TV. That's nothing but a man in drag.'
ILLUSTRATION BY MATT MAHURIN
PHOTO COURTESY OF LOS ANGELES TIMES
Mike Penner's L.A. Times file photo
Related Content
More About
"It's not about that," Stanton tells the Weekly. "It's about being true to who we are."
Daniels didn't take kindly to the critique, e-mailing back to end the friendship. "I think what I'm doing is correct. If you've got a problem with it, it's your problem. ... I'm a real woman who loves makeup and clothes, shoes. A woman, not a trans-anything who needs to quote-unquote represent some undefined community. For the first time in my life, I'm being true to myself, and my true self loves makeup, clothes, shoes."
As 2007 came to a close, Daniels began dealing similarly with many in the transgender activist community, friends say. She said she felt used by the trans community.
She also was increasingly despondent that the situation with Dillman was not improving.
Winter explains: "So many people were placing her in heroine status, she was starting to feel pressure to live up to her instant reputation. She would say, 'I'm here for a purpose, I should be doing better than I am. Why am I so depressed or lonely?'
"She was really riding a huge crest, but eventually the party settles down and people get back to work, and life gets back to some semblance of normalcy," Winter says. "What you're left with once the confetti settles is realizing you've lost a lot of friends and you're lonely."
Daniels began to withdraw.
She canceled a speech in January 2008 to a Denver transgender conference called Gold Rush and didn't appear in March when she was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award in Los Angeles.
Dr. Bowers knew something was gravely wrong in January when her office contacted Daniels about moving the July 2008 surgery date by a week because of a scheduling conflict. Daniels became disproportionately upset and refused to take further calls from the clinic.
"We were surprised by the degree of disappointment — it was just a week," Dr. Bowers says. "We tried to scramble a few ways to say, 'Look, we can do this, we can do this.' I don't usually call patients at home to apologize, but I did in this case. I sensed something was off."
More alarming to LaCoe, at Easter, Daniels dropped out at the last minute from plans to see a passion play at her church, and her attendance at church fell sharply.
Daniels told people she was too busy caring for her mother, who was in the throes of rapidly accelerating dementia and died that spring. (Penner's father died 12 years ago.)
At the L.A. Times, Harvey sensed a shift. He called Daniels to joke with her about something and she became offended. "I thought, 'Okay, there's a change here,' " he says. "That's when I began to think she doesn't seem as happy as she was."
In April 2008, Daniels took medical leave from the Times, complaining of severe abdominal pain and telling co-workers her mother's decline and death were taking a tremendous psychological toll.
Daniels would never return to the paper. Her final byline appeared on April 4, 2008, less than a year after her first.
By May, LaCoe had realized the extent of Daniels' physical and emotional problems. It wasn't easy to find out. Daniels cut off friends such as Winter largely by not returning calls and e-mails. LaCoe and Diana were more relentless about stopping by her apartment, a turn of good fortune for Daniels, as LaCoe would become her primary caretaker.
"I became aware that Christine was really, really ill in May, when she was having a lot of stomach problems," LaCoe says. "They were taking a toll on her digestive tract. She was constipated, had ulcers that caused her a lot of pain digesting food. She would say, 'I think I'm dying.'"
Daniels was hospitalized in June 2008. Doctors determined that the stress of so many traumas — the devastating Vanity Fair shoot, the paranoia over being used by other transgender people for their causes, an acute loneliness that followed the post-coming-out euphoria, the death of her mother, and Dillman's continuing distance — was manifesting as abdominal pain.
In the hospital, Daniels was diagnosed as severely depressed. Doctors prescribed a regimen of powerful psychotropic drugs that included the antipsychotic Zyprexa and the antidepressant Elavil. LaCoe remembers those drugs because she monitored Daniels to ensure she took them.
Daniels moved in with LaCoe for the summer, and it was in LaCoe's living room that the last phase began in the dismantling of Christine Daniels. The reporter tore up several spiral-bound journals that she had kept while in transgender therapy, gave away her clothes and jewelry to friends and stopped doing anything to feminize herself.
