Sociopath alert: Carly Fiorina

Yesterday "Rifleman" sent a link to Lion of the Blogosphere's post Todd Bartlem on Carly Fiorina. Is she a sociopath? 

Lion linked to this Daily Mail article, in which Fiorina's ex-husband Todd Bartlem is interviewed.

Before I quote Bartlem, a caveat. Ex-spouses are overly prone to accusing their exes of being sociopaths. The majority of women who've written comments on this blog about their exes have said that those exes are sociopaths. In many cases, that's undoubtedly true. But in some cases, it's just someone wanting to vent about her somewhat selfish ex.

At the same time, it's also true that you're more likely to hear an ugly truth from an ex-spouse, just as you are from the proverbial disgruntled ex-employee.

Some of the excerpts from the Daily Mail article, in italics, with my comments in between:

[Bartlem said], 'She's a very calculating person and her risks paid off but whenever I read descriptions about her life there'd always be this bit that she rose from a secretary at a real estate company to the head of AT&T…

'I mean she had a part-time position when she quit law school and she had to have money to pay the rent, so she worked as a secretary to a real estate firm in Palo Alto, but it was incidental.'

Self-mythologizing about one's humble roots and meritocratic rise is typical sociopathic behavior.

From Bartlem's perspective the marriage began to founder as Carly became more and more fixated with power, the corporate world - and Frank Fiorina [a senior executive at AT&T].

He said of her career: 'That became her whole life because of the power thing that went with it, and, at the end of the day, everything got judged according to how useful it was towards allowing her to get ahead.

'I assume Frank was useful.' 

Sleeping one's way to the top is a time-tested sociopathic technique.

"She is pathologically narcissistic and all she cares about is her,’ he said. "Nothing holds together with her.

"I got kind of suspicious of her towards the end of the marriage because she had no old friends. She had nobody that she knew in the past, and I thought, “God that’s kind of weird.”‘

Today Bartlem believes the reason lies in Carly’s ‘modus operandi’ of ‘dropping people’ as soon as they have fulfilled their useful purpose in her life. Certainly it’s what he believes happened to him. ‘I had no utility and that’s what the judgment was,’ he said. ‘If you aren’t useful to her, your time is over….I was heartbroken. It was brutal.’

A complete absence of old friends is another sociopathic hallmark. It means either that she dropped people as soon as they are no longer useful, or that others eventually wised up to her. Either way, a red flag. 

Bartlem claims that when Carly walked out on him she did so without leaving so much as a forwarding address or phone number. A year after the divorce, he claims, she pulled up in the driveway of their former home and calmly said, ‘I will never see you again.’

He said: 'She only had one interest and that was to get ahead. When we were together she didn't have a political bone in her body. 

Coming to politics late is not unique, and ambition is hardly a disqualifer for Presidential candidates; but the fact that Fiorina seems to be doing this purely out of ambition makes her passionately delivered speeches about fetuses seem less than heartfelt. False emotionality is another sociopathic marker.

'The only thing she cared about was herself. I assume that's all she's ever cared about since then. Why else would you subject yourself to the ridicule of trying to run for president?'

In 2005 Fiorina was fired by the board of Hewlett Packard. Her tenure had seen a controversial merger with PC maker Compaq and a company restructuring that resulted in 30,000 people losing their jobs - while she tripled her own salary and bought a $1million yacht and five corporate jets.

She was worth a reported $120 million at the time of her departure.

Being fired as CEO is hardly an indictment of someone's character. Companies prosper and go bust, sometimes for reasons beyond a CEO's control, and Fiorina did have the misfortune to oversee HP during the dot com bust. Ironically, as explained two posts ago, rising through the ranks to become CEO is actually a more likely hint to her character.

And, in my experience, sociopathic CEO's tend to be more acquisitive of other companies: it means they have a bigger empire to rule over.

Sociopaths also tend to like the trappings of wealth, like corporate jets and a yacht, so those purchases are yellow flags.

And sociopaths always seem to have a way of making out very well for themselves, even while the company they're shepherding is cratering.

Plenty of people get plastic surgery these days; but a sociopath is still more likely to get it (see picture above). Yellow flag.

A lot of pundits declared Fiorina the winner of the first "B" debate. She was also given high marks for her performance in the "A" debate four days ago. A big part of the reason for this is that she was so poised and controlled. She didn't appear to be affected by nerves at all: this is another hallmark.

Verdict: although some of Bartlem's statements about Fiorina are subjective, they do mesh perfectly with the known facts about her. Fiorina is a sociopath.