SHE graduated from Harvard Business School and made almost $2 million a year advising businesses on complex financial matters, but Sandra Boss said she spent most of her 12-year marriage clueless that her husband, whom she knew as Clark Rockefeller, was a German-born impostor.
In two hours of riveting testimony under cross-examination, Ms Boss, 42, a senior partner at McKinsey & Company, said she never saw him with identification cards, never viewed any pictures of him from childhood, never knew his Social Security number, and never met his supposed business partners from a jet propulsion start-up company. She said she believed his claim that he was a Rockefeller and was involved in the Trilateral Commission, or "the Group" as he called it. The commission is a private organisation whose aim is to generate closer co-operation between the United States, Europe, and Japan.
And Ms Boss accepted numerous other fantastic stories, including that his mother was a former child movie star and that he was mute as a child, regaining his speech only after spotting a dog and blurting out his first word in seven years: "woofness".
"There is a difference between intellectual intelligence and emotional intelligence," Ms Boss said in a firm voice, as the lawyer for the man authorities say is really Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter asked how such an accomplished woman could have been fooled.
"I'm not saying I made a very good choice of husband," Ms Boss said. "It's pretty obvious that I had a blind spot. All I'm saying is that it's possible that one can be brilliant and amazing in one area of one's life and pretty stupid in another."
It was Ms Boss's second day on the witness stand in the trial of her her former husband, 48, on charges of kidnapping their daughter, Reigh, 7, for six days last year and fleeing to Baltimore. The prosecution rested its case on Tuesday afternoon. The defence says he was legally insane at the time of the abduction.
Ms Boss, whose poise and confidence rarely flagged during cross-examination by the defence lawyer Jeffrey Denner, said the man she thought was Rockefeller was emotionally abusive. He controlled their finances, she said, even though she was the sole source of income.
Mr Denner said it was unfathomable that she did not leave her husband before January 2007, but Ms Boss said she was afraid of him and feared losing her daughter. She said it was "a complicated marriage to get out of".
Prosecutors say the defendant is a conman extraordinaire who duped countless people with claims of an aristocratic pedigree and tales of remarkable achievements. The defence counters that he suffers from mental illness, including grandiose delusions and narcissistic personality disorder.
Under cross-examination, Ms Boss revealed more outlandish fabrications by her former husband. She said Rockefeller had expressed hopes that he would be appointed to the board of the Federal Reserve for his work with tiny nations struggling with debt. He also told her he used a $US50 million ($62 million) inheritance to clear the name of his father, who had been posthumously accused of embezzling from the navy.
Ms Boss also conceded that "I saw behaviour that made me think that he wasn't all well - definitely. He was obsessive, angry, controlling, and lacked empathy."
In one revealing comment, Ms Boss said she prevailed upon Rockefeller to move house in 2006 so she could obtain "witnesses" to corroborate his alleged mistreatment of her.
She said Rockefeller was regarded as a pillar of the community and a doting father. By moving to Boston, where she worked at McKinsey, "it made it much easier for me to get out" of the marriage and obtain custody.
