She Made Me Do It
Until 2019, when he attempted to kill one of his students, Michael Barisone was a leading rider and trainer in the horse-handling sport of dressage. Today, he still owns a dressage farm in Loxahatchee, Florida, twenty miles inland from Palm Beach. This part of the state, drained by a grid of canals and centered on the village of Wellington, is the winter capital of America’s equestrian world. Barisone’s operation is relatively modest: there’s no high hedge, no entrance arch. On five acres, he has a stucco house that’s connected to a barn; white-fenced paddocks shaded by palms; and an outdoor riding ring. Along one end of the ring is a common neighborhood fixture: an eighty-foot-long mirror. Barisone, who’s in his early sixties, with a big Will Ferrell chin and a muscular build, can hold a conversation about his own good judgment, and the iniquity of his enemies, while riding a horse and monitoring his own reflection.
In dressage competitions, horses follow a short sequence of bouncing walks and trots, pirouettes and figures-of-eight. It’s an exhibition of control. A horse should do as it’s asked, in a way that projects noble interspecies harmony. Although dressage people have sometimes hoped to broaden their sport’s appeal by calling it “horse dancing,” that may create false expectations. In dressage’s usual form, one discrete movement follows another in a compulsory sequence. There may be a kind of flow, but there’s no sustained rhythm. Competitive dressage less resembles dancing than it does a D.M.V. road test—or floor exercises, if every gymnast had to do the same thing.
Barisone learned dressage during a middle-class childhood in far-upstate New York, and soon excelled at it. In the first of several meetings that I had with him last winter, in Loxahatchee and in New Jersey, he said that, given his ability, he “should have” competed in ten Olympic Games, going back to the eighties. It’s easy to sympathize with an athlete’s disappointments, but Barisone’s narrative of near-misses spans decades. He did represent the United States at the Beijing Olympics, in 2008, as the designated backup for a three-person team. He didn’t ride.
But when Barisone proposed to me that for twenty years he was the dressage equivalent of a major-league-baseball player, that seemed fair—with the caveats that there’s no league and no real audience. He competed at a high level; his income derived from selling horses he’d trained, and from coaching amateur dressage enthusiasts—his “ladies,” as he tends to call them—and their horses, along with a handful of Olympic-level professionals. Barisone and his former wife Vera Kessels followed the migration patterns of their people. They spent winters in Loxahatchee and summers at their other farm—since vacated—in western New Jersey. Barisone sat on dressage-world committees; he was, he told me, a “revered” member of the dressage community. In a 2012 episode of “The Colbert Report,” Stephen Colbert was shown riding in breeches and tails while Barisone, holding a whip, walked alongside him. Colbert’s horse was persuaded to piaffe—to trot in place, knees up, in a way that’s required in advanced dressage competitions. Barisone recently proposed that he was, at that moment, “the most famous horseman in the country.”
In Barisone’s Loxahatchee kitchen there is a dark-green safe the size of a vending machine. It used to stand in his office on the New Jersey farm. He has never seriously contested the idea that, on August 7, 2019, he took a handgun from the safe and drove a few hundred yards, to a house on his property where Lauren Kanarek, a thirty-eight-year-old student of his, was boarding with her boyfriend. He shot her twice.
“I did everything right,” Barisone told me, a number of times, during long conversations held, over several days, at his kitchen table in Florida. His dominant tone was one of astonished resentment. He has the manner—and the abundance of files in Bankers Boxes—of someone struggling to correct a great miscarriage of justice. One could mistake him for an inmate preparing an appeal in a prison library. As we talked, I sometimes found it disorienting to remember that Barisone is a free man. His fiancée, Lara Osborne, usually joined us at the table; there were dogs and cats underfoot, in a sunny house with no mortgage and several pickup trucks out front. Now and then, a neigh carried through the kitchen’s French doors.
In 2022, Barisone was tried in New Jersey for attempted murder. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity. This was a remarkable verdict. Fewer than one per cent of Americans charged with felonies plead insanity, and the great majority of those who do have previously been hospitalized with a serious psychiatric condition. Barisone had no history of serious mental illness, and by the end of 2023 he had no such illness, according both to his own account and to the State of New Jersey.
This rare court-sanctioned narrative—sanity, criminal insanity, quick reversion to sanity—might seem like tremendous luck, given that he faced a decade or two in prison. But this isn’t how Barisone has experienced his freedom. It wasn’t surprising to hear him mourn what he’d lost since shooting someone in the chest twice. But it was striking to hear how fiercely he resented having lost anything at all. (He has lost time and money, and he can no longer compete in dressage.) “I want my dignity back,” he told me. “I want my reputation back.”
The first time I called him, he said, of the case, “You’re going to find it is a John Grisham novel combined with ‘Fatal Attraction’ combined with ‘Yellowstone.’ ” Barisone’s story has its evident hero, and its villain is Kanarek, his victim. In this presentation of events—a “scum of the earth” client, in his words, and a terrific guy who snapped, as anyone would have—Barisone has enjoyed near-universal support from the dressage community, and beyond. In much of the online discussion about the case, including in the forums of The Chronicle of the Horse, a long-established magazine, commenters have identified two victims, not one, and have almost always found Barisone’s victimhood the more compelling. A woman was shot, but a man was driven to shoot her, because she was annoying, and at times belligerent, in person and on social media. Kanarek has been widely scorned as a dressage interloper and as an embodiment of contemporary ills: a bullshitter, an entitled troll.
Barisone read me a note that he’d received after his acquittal, from a woman he didn’t know, who called Kanarek a “giant of wickedness.” The letter started, “Thank you for showing the rest of the world that good people can survive this kind of horrible torment and come out the winner.”
For Barisone, such regard isn’t enough. It doesn’t reset everything to how it was before he met Kanarek. “I will get to Trump,” he told me. “And I will get this undone. Watch me.” Since the shooting, Barisone has filed six lawsuits, and at least one more is being prepared. Last summer, about two years after a psychiatrist submitted to a court that Barisone bore “no ill will” toward Kanarek, Barisone filed a claim against the United States Equestrian Federation (USEF), for failing to punish her; it called her behavior “disgusting,” “abusive,” and “vulgar.” It also disparaged her riding ability and noted her acknowledged history of drug use. Barisone, meanwhile, was described as a man of substance; the document included his former financial assets and his dressage-competition results.
In Florida, Barisone imagined his vindication. He told me, “If this goes right—if I can make another team, a World Cup, a World Championship—I will be the biggest comeback story in the history of sports.”
On the day of the shooting, Kanarek was sitting alone on the porch outside the farmhouse where she was then living with Robert Goodwin, her boyfriend. The house was the first building that would be seen by a visitor to Barisone’s Hawthorne Hill Farm, in Morris County, New Jersey. A minute or so farther up a gravel road, just over a hill, stood a cluster of other buildings, where there was a clubroom, some bedrooms, horse stalls, and an indoor riding ring.
Kanarek, the eldest of three sisters, grew up in Livingston, a wealthy commuter town an hour’s drive east. In her late teens and twenties, she’d gone through what she described to me as “a bad patch of crazy things.” She didn’t finish college; her sisters began corporate careers in New York City. It’s clear that relations between Kanarek and her family had sometimes been strained, but her father, Jonathan Kanarek, a retired Wall Street equities trader, said in a recent call that there was never a rift. In a tone of disappointed acceptance, he brought up both her former drug-taking and a period, sometimes mentioned by Barisone and his allies, when she worked at a strip club. By 2016, Kanarek, who was then living in Greensboro, North Carolina, with Goodwin, a contractor, had revived a childhood enthusiasm for riding and taken up dressage. Jonathan called the sport “a great thing that led her out” of drugs. He and his wife, Kirby, helped out, both financially and by providing quotidian oversight, including of medical appointments.
In the spring of 2018, Lauren Kanarek paid for a month’s training at Barisone’s farm in Florida; she then began shuttling her two horses, seasonally, between his farms, as part of an arrangement that included lodging in New Jersey. In August, 2019, she and Goodwin were staying in the farmhouse’s second-floor apartment. It had its own ground-level entrance, which opened onto the porch; from there, steps led down to a concrete patio.
At about 2 P.M., Barisone’s silver Ram truck appeared over the brow of the hill and pulled up by the patio. A few weeks earlier, relations between Barisone and Kanarek, which until then had been largely accommodating, and sometimes even playful, had suddenly turned fractious. They’d fallen out, in part over the care of her horses, but the dispute had skipped any intermediate stage of adult discord—say, pissily polite e-mails or form-letter threats of eviction. Each had begun working to destroy the other’s reputation. But this had been playing out largely at arm’s length, in the form of Facebook posts and duelling 911 calls. So Barisone’s appearance at the farmhouse unnerved Kanarek. In a recent conversation, she recalled feeling a rush of adrenaline. She went back indoors.
Goodwin was on the phone with a lawyer whom Kanarek had retained the previous day. He handed her his phone and went outside. Barisone, who Goodwin later said looked “sorrowful,” asked him, “How do we fix this? I don’t want a war.”
Goodwin said that they should let their lawyers handle things, and turned away. But Kanarek wanted to add that any resolution of their dispute had to include paying Goodwin for construction work he’d done on the farm, originally in a barter agreement. While she was still on the line with the lawyer, she approached Barisone.
In her memory, she and Barisone were standing just feet apart on the patio. Barisone is six feet three. Kanarek, who weighs about a hundred pounds, is five feet four. She had often taken a combative tone—in messages addressed to family members, or to old enemies, or to new ones she’d found among Trump supporters on Facebook. On this patio, a few weeks earlier, she’d had a pivotal confrontation with Barisone, arising out of a disagreement about horse feed. He’d loudly complained, and she’d also complained. In such situations, she told me, “I’m going to stand tall and yell back at you and take you by surprise.” (After the confrontation, she wrote to Goodwin and her father, “I said some pretty TRUE and fucked up things that literally silenced him for a full minute.”)
According to Kanarek and to the testimony of Edward David, the lawyer on the phone, there was no verbal combat this time. Kanarek told me that she hadn’t even begun to speak when Barisone drew a gun from somewhere.
“I didn’t even know it was a real gun,” Kanarek recalled to me. “I’m seeing that it’s pink—camouflage pink and black.” Perhaps it just shoots BBs, she thought. She remembered saying, “Oh, my God.” Barisone fired. “It was immediate—boom, boom,” she told me. “It didn’t sound as loud as you would think.”
She dropped the phone. “I could see two complete holes in my shirt,” she told me. The holes were about two inches apart, above her left breast, near where a crocodile might be on a polo shirt. According to her account, Barisone then shot “at Rob’s head.” The bullet missed, and Goodwin retreated inside. Kanarek, laughing at her own description, recalled the “Superman moment” that followed: Goodwin seemed to fly back outside, horizontally. Goodwin is shorter than Barisone by about seven inches, but he also has a muscular build. He careened into Barisone and put him in a choke hold. During all this, one of the couple’s dogs yapped and bit at Barisone.
Kanarek told me that her bloody hands made it a struggle to call 911. When she got connected, she said, “I’ve been shot in the heart.”
On the recording of the 911 call, there’s a lot of barking, and some grunting from Goodwin, who says into the phone, “A man came here with a fucking gun. I’ve got him detained right now.” He also shouts, “Get that fucking dog inside now!” Goodwin has to be talking to Kanarek, which suggests that he hadn’t processed what had just happened. Kanarek hadn’t collapsed, and she could be hyperbolic when talking about ailments and injuries. (She’d recently written in a text that a spider bite had left her “150% incapacitated.”) But, as Kanarek tried to help debilitate Barisone by beating his head with a phone, Goodwin saw two exit holes in the back of her sweatshirt.
Kanarek recalled feeling dizziness, and pressure in her chest: “I’m, like, ‘How do I put a tourniquet on this wound that’s on my chest?’ I was literally thinking, Do I have tampons?” She couldn’t breathe properly. It felt like “being in a pool and stuck under a raft that someone was on.”
The line to the 911 dispatcher was still open when, after about five minutes, a police officer, Derek Heymer, arrived at the farmhouse. Kanarek, who remained conscious, told him, “I’m shot—please help me.”
Other officers arrived, and Kanarek was treated with chest seals. Barisone, handcuffed, began to say, “I had a good life,” to no one in particular. The judge at his first hearing detected in this statement a fatalism that made him a possible continuing threat to himself and others—although the refrain could also have been interpreted as an expression of affront. Later that afternoon, Barisone, while being treated for a broken arm and other injuries at a local hospital, complained, “They destroyed my life.”
In an emergency operation in the same hospital, doctors opened up Kanarek’s chest. They clamped her aorta, to keep her alive—she’d lost about half the blood in her body—before repairing her lungs. Today, Barisone claims to have no memory of the time between being in his office up the hill and waking, the next day, with one arm shackled to a hospital bed.
Barisone recently described the equestrian world, whose respect he craves, as “an incestuous cesspool of filth.” Judges and administrators are venal and corrupt; horse dealers are “shysters.” He told me, “I didn’t go into dressage for the love of the game.”
Barisone said that his riding prowess had its roots in grievance. He and his sister grew up in what he called a “ramshackle shithole” of a house, outside Rochester. His father was a technician at Xerox. His mother—whom he described with loathing, and with frequent reference to her obesity—had ridden horses during a childhood that was more prosperous than her married life. She opened a commercial horse barn on their land. According to Barisone, this drained the family’s resources and forced him into riding. By his early teens, he said, she was bullying him into teaching others to ride, and into breaking “junk” horses that she brought home. He recalled asking, “Can’t I do Little League?” Barisone was scornful of his father’s meekness: “He didn’t say to her, ‘Are you fucking kidding me? Get your fat ass out of here. You’re not treating this kid this way.’ ”
Barisone came to take competition seriously, he claimed, as a form of rebellion: “I finally said, ‘You know what? You’re going make me fucking ride? I’m going to ride.’ ” He also became skilled at training horses of all temperaments. “Some are narcissistic, some are difficult, some are tractable,” Barisone told me. “They can be manipulative. They can be condescending.” Gil Merrick, a former dressage trainer who was once the USEF official in charge of the sport, and who cemented a friendship with Barisone when they travelled together to the Beijing Olympics, recently said that he “didn’t know a single person who didn’t respect Michael.” He admiringly contrasted Barisone’s training instincts with more “froufrou” approaches. “It’s not that he doesn’t love the horses—he does—but he’s realistic about it,” Merrick said. “These are animals. . . . They’re going to submit to us.” A dressage horse has to trust its rider, but, “basically, your horse doesn’t like anything but being in the pasture eating grass,” Merrick explained. “He’s in the ring because you put straps on his face, a saddle on his back, and you’ve got spurs on your legs, and when you touch the spur on his side he thinks mountain lions are about to break through his rib cage.”
Barisone didn’t attend college and has only ever worked with horses. (As a hobby, he restores trucks and muscle cars.) By the second half of the nineties, he was competing in major overseas dressage competitions. A brief first marriage dissolved. In 2000, when he was in his mid-thirties, he married Kessels, a Dutch dressage rider. They built a house and a barn on a plot in Loxahatchee that he bought; they also set up the New Jersey operation, on fifty-four acres bought by a retired lawyer. The company was called Barisone Dressage; he shared training duties with Kessels—and, later, with Justin Hardin, a longtime employee. Some clients paid a monthly fee for the farm to board and train their horses. Barisone also taught lucrative multiday dressage workshops, or “clinics,” around the country. “Absolutely love his style,” a clinic student wrote online in 2013. “You do have to be willing to put up with a certain amount of ‘when I was at the Olympics’ stories.”
Barisone told me that by 2018 he was billing more than seven hundred thousand dollars a year. But by then he was also negotiating a divorce from Kessels. When we spoke, Barisone projected breeziness about the breakup, and he always described Kessels, who died last year, as “a great lady.” But it was clearly difficult for the couple to divide their assets without dismantling the business. Barisone likes to be recognized as unusually skilled at fixing things—drywall, fencing, a 1969 Chevelle, a weird horse—but he couldn’t control a drawn-out legal process. Privately, he complained that Kessels was being “defiant.” During the breakup, he was given prescriptions for Xanax, to treat anxiety, and an antidepressant. (He has acknowledged combining Xanax with alcohol, which is firmly discouraged.) He had some sessions with a therapist whom he’d seen around the time his first marriage ended. After his divorce from Kessels was finalized, he texted Mary Haskins Gray, a dressage rider who had become his girlfriend. “I got clipped 965k,” he wrote. “Hard to feel good.”
When Kanarek became a client of Barisone’s, in March, 2018, she began paying him about five thousand dollars a month, which helped. Today, she and Goodwin live in Florida, just a few miles from Barisone. In one of my recent phone calls with her, which had similarities to my conversations with Barisone—myth-building, conspiracy claims, overconfidence in dubious legal “proofs”—she included herself in the category of people who “ride for a living.” This was surprising language. The sport has never brought her income. At the time that she was paying Barisone, she also added to her collection of horses, at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars. In addition, she was supporting Goodwin and paying for vets, farriers, horse transportation, show fees, and saddles. (Jonathan Kanarek described himself to me as the effective guarantor of these costs, if not always the ultimate payer: his daughter, he said, has had other financial sources, including a bequest from an uncle.)
Dressage doesn’t demand youth or a particular body type. One competitor at the Beijing Olympics was sixteen; another was sixty-seven. A rider can buy accelerated progress in the form of a “push button” horse that’s been highly trained by someone like Barisone. And, in part because dressage is expensive, the competitive circle is small. You meet your heroes. Any hobby can start to feel like a vocation, but if an adult student of financial means had daydreams, during her first dressage lesson, about competing internationally, this would be less absurd than someone having the same fantasy while learning to ski. And if this dressage student posted a video of her ride—in horse attire, with some French in the hashtags—it might seem more like an accomplishment, to untutored friends, than the beginner’s ski lesson.
According to Merrick, the former dressage official, a peculiarly high percentage of relatively advanced amateur riders believe, firmly and falsely, that Olympic competition is a real possibility. He referred to the dressage trainer’s challenge of working with clients whose wealth brings a “high sense of entitlement.” He said, “They lash out—‘I spent the money. I’m showing up. Why isn’t this working?’ ”
Barisone recalled the first time he saw Kanarek: “My head is spinning. This has got to be a joke. This woman, she’s hopeless.” Her horses were “garbage.” Barisone’s scorn sounded forced. He regularly worked with middling riders, and Kanarek seems to have been about as competent as one would expect after a few years of training. Privately, she blustered about how fast she expected to ascend dressage’s levels—the sport’s equivalent of martial-arts belts—and in 2019 her Facebook profile picture showed her with the sport’s biggest star, Isabell Werth, a German who has won medals at seven Olympics. But Kanarek wasn’t delusional about making the Olympics. Barisone may have registered a disconnect between her investment of time and money in the sport and her skill, but, as he put it to me, “in this business, we’d all be broke if we weeded out bullshitters.”
After Kanarek’s first month in Florida, Barisone invited her to New Jersey for the summer. He then invited her back to Florida, and then, in 2019, back to New Jersey. He didn’t draw up a lease for the apartment. He didn’t run a background check or ask for references. Later, when Kanarek added two horses to the two she already kept with Barisone, he accepted Goodwin’s construction work on the farm as payment for their keep. Barisone is now committed to a “Misery”-like narrative of being preyed on by Kanarek from the start. More believable is that a trainer certain of his ability to control things took on a client who didn’t care to be controlled.
These arrangements were brokered by Jonathan Kanarek. He and Barisone clearly got along, and they seem to have concurred on the question of how once dashing men of a certain age should do business together. In a text that Jonathan sent to Kanarek and Barisone a few weeks before the shooting, he proposed, in a spirit of peacemaking, that “Michael and I just wanna conduct business professionally and have happy lives. Aggravation from daughters, girlfriends or wives will not be tolerated.” (Soon afterward, Jonathan—at a meeting to introduce Kanarek and Goodwin to his old acquaintance Edward David, the lawyer—joked about his wife’s irresistibly “slutty” Texan accent. A recorder in Goodwin’s pocket taped the meeting; Goodwin says that the recording was accidental.)
A year after Barisone shot Kanarek, Jonathan introduced himself by e-mail to a prominent dressage rider. “Michael and I made agreements with only a handshake,” he wrote appreciatively. “He always tried to be true to his word.”
One day, Barisone and I went out for lunch in Wellington. On a looping drive, we passed new gated developments and older horse-oriented estates built on a country-club scale. Gesturing across a large tract of land, he said, “My old friends the McPhails bought the whole thing.” Then: “That’s for sale—fifty acres. That was owned by Mary Alice Dorrance Malone, the heiress to the Campbell’s Soup fortune. She just passed away. . . . Her son-in-law is a friend.”
As Barisone drove, he also recalled his agitated state of mind on the day of the shooting. Because of Kanarek, he said, he had become tearful and distracted. That morning, in a Home Depot, he’d had a moment of big-box ennui: he’d wandered blankly, half searching for smoke alarms, then left with nothing.
He and Mary Haskins Gray had returned to New Jersey that April and moved into the farmhouse’s ground-floor apartment. Gray’s children, not yet teen-agers, sometimes came to stay. Kanarek and Goodwin moved into the apartment above.
Kanarek had come to feel, with a little justice, that she couldn’t always rely on Barisone’s handshakes. She’d had to press him about living arrangements for that second summer; she’d shown frustration about the amount of training time Barisone was giving her, and about her access to a horse of Barisone’s that she liked. (She eventually bought it.)
Put another way—and this is evidently how Gray saw it—Kanarek was always complaining. She’d fallen out with Hardin, Barisone’s lieutenant. She could be self-dramatizing and accusatory; she was often late to scheduled rides.
Gray, who did not respond to interview requests for this article, clearly wanted Kanarek to leave the farm. By the spring of 2019, there had been at least hints of something that became clearer in the days before the shooting, and very clear when the legal process gave lawyers access to mounds of private electronic communications: Kanarek and Goodwin were a mess. Many people would have hesitated before taking them on as tenants, housemates, or clients. Barisone had allowed them to become all three. Goodwin had a history of drug use, and has acknowledged a relapse during this period; Kanarek, who at the time repeatedly messaged Goodwin about his abuse of crack, became frantic when he once disappeared overnight from Hawthorne Hill. Kanarek, a former heroin user, now took Suboxone to ease cravings. She was once charged with assault, following a bar fight, although she had no convictions. She was sustaining a vicious long-term feud with a woman in New Jersey whose child had drowned; Kanarek had called the woman a murderer. She talked to her own mother with contempt.
Her social-media output could look unrestrained in its tone and quantity. A post from that spring was signed, in a self-celebrating flourish, “#BiPolarNarcissist.” (Kanarek told me that for decades she has taken Seroquel, a medication most frequently prescribed to treat bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, but she said that she has used it only to treat insomnia.) One day not long before the shooting, her father texted her about something she’d posted on Facebook the previous night. She insisted that she’d posted nothing, but eventually acknowledged that, although she hadn’t posted, she’d maybe “replied to 160 people.” (Ambien and other medications were to blame, she said.) Her forgotten replies included a pugnacious nine-hundred-word message about the Barisone situation: “Names will be named, threats to me will be revealed.” According to Merrick, the former USEF official, dressage typically attracts riders who like “order and discipline.” Kanarek and her family seemed to be running an experiment in whether immersion in dressage can deliver a person from disarray.
In conversation, Barisone often implies something his online supporters assume to be true: that, long before he shot Kanarek, he had told her, clearly and often, to vacate his facility, and she had refused. In fact, as Barisone acknowledged to me, he had protected Kanarek’s right to stay when Gray had urged her to go during a meeting at the farm that spring. He recalled saying,“Let’s not get into things that cause us all kinds of problems.” According to Kanarek, Barisone told Gray, “Please shut the fuck up.” (Barisone denies using those words.)
Barisone told me that his pliancy toward Kanarek and Goodwin sprang from fear. He was being forced to harbor “terrorists”; he was a beaten spouse. Barisone was surely being more candid when, in another conversation, he framed his approach very differently: “Why ruffle feathers?” He worried that Jonathan Kanarek might sue him for something or other, and he didn’t want new legal fees. He could make this work.
Kanarek told me that Gray’s antagonism, at the meeting and at other times, positions her as the ultimate instigator of the shooting. “Part of me feels badly for Michael,” she said. “Which is insane for me to even think, because he has no remorse whatsoever.” Her father has spoken similarly. Shortly before the shooting, he texted Barisone that “everyone in the business knows your girlfriend has emasculated you.” Later, in his e-mail to the prominent dressage rider, he wrote, “There is no way Michael shoots anyone without being cajoled, tormented and tortured by his ‘girlfriend.’ ” This commentary is a mirror of how Barisone’s fans talk on the Chronicle of the Horse forums: responsibility for his violence must lie with a disobedient woman.
A couple of months before the shooting, Barisone and Kanarek were still living in the same building and still in friendly communication. In mid-June, Kanarek texted Barisone that her mother was about to visit, and added a face-palm emoji. Barisone texted, “Lucky you,” and Kanarek replied, “Please shoot me.” Barisone went on to describe his own mother: “Peg was evil. Fat-ass 300lb, asexual, angry, lesbian pig.” He recalled learning of her death, in 2015. “They called me about 5 minutes after Peg croaked,” he wrote. “I felt nothing, had a beer, and went on my first date with Mary.”
During this period, Kanarek was still praising Barisone. “He’s good at finding the human in the horse,” she wrote to relatives. She quoted him comparing one of her horses, approvingly, to a gay bodybuilder “who hands out flowers to pedestrians as a good deed on his free time.”
In the second week of July, things changed. Kanarek and Gray had an argument about the feed being given to Kanarek’s horses. Kanarek reported this to her father, who sent Gray an e-mail suggesting that to intentionally misfeed Kanarek’s horses might be a crime. Three days later, on July 12th, Barisone and Kanarek argued about this on the patio. He told me that he instructed her to “cease and desist,” and that, instead, she got in his face. Barisone was astonished and affronted. The following day, he texted Gray, “I will just make it so miserable to be here that they will beg to go elsewhere. . . . Watch me.”
From then on, he was focussed on Kanarek: he and Gray scanned her Facebook history; he asked a private detective to do background checks on his guests; he contacted the woman whose son had drowned, and told her that Kanarek should “rot in hell.” He complained about Kanarek to USEF officials, and told Gray that he hoped to get Kanarek banned for life from competitive dressage.
Kanarek, for her part, posted about Barisone and Gray on Facebook, first in the barely veiled form of a parable about a king and an “imposter” queen. The queen’s “open attacks on ME will not result in execution,” she wrote. “Instead, it will result in the same ending Humpty Dumpty endured . . . ‘All the king’s HORSES & all the king’s men—couldn’t put Humpty together again!’ ” Soon afterward, she posted that “EVEN a one time Olympian can be cut down to size. Even by someone like me. Maybe, especially by someone like me. Deep pockets & nothing to lose.” (This was part of the forgotten post that Kanarek’s father asked about.) These posts were surely unpleasant for Barisone to read, but it’s hard to see them as “manifestos” underlying a master plan, which became Barisone’s contention. They’re a preening, Ambien-inflected extension of an ongoing argument in which both sides engaged in displays of dominance. As Jonathan Kanarek put it to Edward David, the lawyer, Lauren “can out-crazy anybody. You’re better off pissing off a Colombian drug-lord.” Kanarek’s late-night posts also hid the fact, evident in quieter communications, that she knew she’d have to leave the farm before long.
Barisone and Gray moved out of the farmhouse and into the building with the clubroom, up the hill. They had to sleep on the floor, because Hardin and a few stable hands had the bedrooms. On July 31st, Barisone called 911, saying that Kanarek had been loudly threatening him. He said, of her and Goodwin, “They’re scumbags and I want them warned.” He called 911 again the next day and falsely described Kanarek and Goodwin as squatters. He hired a neighbor as a security guard. Ruth Cox, a horse-world friend, drove up from North Carolina. In her truck, she had a pink-and-black handgun.
During the first week of August, Kanarek started keeping a digital recorder in her locker, close to the horse stalls, on a voice-activated setting. In public and private messages, she tauntingly referred to things she’d overheard. “Now that your girlfriend has promised not to leave you, you should have your permission slip to conduct business as promised,” she wrote to Barisone, adding a blushing “whoops” emoji. (Barisone hired a debugging company but did not ask it to inspect the locker area.)
On August 2nd, Kanarek called in a formal complaint about Barisone and Gray to the U.S. Center for SafeSport. That body, established in 2017 in response to the crimes of Larry Nassar, the Michigan physician who serially abused young gymnasts, can investigate misconduct, including nonsexual misconduct, in any Olympic sport. Kanarek complained of racist and sexist jokes, harassment, and intimidation. She wrote on Facebook, “I’m being bullied by a 6’ 3 man. Bullied to the point I’m afraid. It’s very complicated—I’m not sure of what I can say here—but it seems as if Safe Sport was created exactly for this reason.”
On August 3rd, Barisone made a third 911 call, this time about a Facebook post. Kanarek also called 911, to report a suspicious vehicle and a possibly threatening conversation recorded by the device in her locker. The same day, Gray pointed out to Barisone, via text, that he had still not told Kanarek, “We’re evicting you.” This was true. After learning that an eviction might take weeks, he’d turned instead to the local police and the equestrian bureaucracy; he was clearly astonished that these bodies didn’t act immediately on his command. (In an e-mail to Sonja Keating, USEF’s general counsel, Barisone warned, “If this turns out in a disaster, which is imminent, someone will be responsible.”)
In the week before the shooting, Barisone did allow his sometime lawyer Steven Tarshis—also a friend and a dressage client—to speak with Jonathan about a negotiated exit for Kanarek, and they had exchanges that both men described to me as cordial. But, within days, Barisone had ended these negotiations. He described his thinking to me as “There’s no deal to be made! Get out!”
On August 4th, Barisone called 911 again. The next day, SafeSport announced that George Morris, one of America’s biggest equestrian stars, then in his early eighties, had been banned from his sport. Morris, a former show-jumping Olympic medallist who’d become a well-known trainer, is gay, and in a memoir published in 2016 he’d estimated that his sexual partners numbered ten thousand “and counting!” The equestrian world had long recognized his preference for younger men. The ban, which shut down Morris’s training business, followed a SafeSport investigation of sexual misconduct, years earlier, involving teen-agers. (Morris has denied wrongdoing.) Barisone, in his kitchen, has a George Morris action figure that used to voice the blunt riding advice for which Morris was known. These days, Barisone and Morris have dinner in Florida regularly, and the conversation tends to turn to injustice. As Barisone put it to me, “It is a war on white men, both straight and gay.”
On the day of the ban, Morris and Barisone spoke by phone; Barisone commiserated with Morris but primarily shared his own distress, about Kanarek. That afternoon, Barisone drove to a police station and asked to speak to the chief. The chief wasn’t available to him; nor was his cell number. As Barisone later put it in a lawsuit, officers paid him no deference: they were “stone-faced” and “pushing out their chests.” Barisone’s rhetoric today moves seamlessly between anger over not being taken seriously as a victim of abuse and reluctance to recognize abuse in the actions of powerful men. Talking about a former Olympic show jumper who was convicted of sexually abusing a minor, Barisone described the crime as an “apparently consensual, albeit illegal, affair.”
On August 5th, Tarshis privately apologized to Jonathan Kanarek for Barisone’s handling of the conflict, then e-mailed Lauren to say that she and her horses had to be off the property in two days. Tarshis threatened eviction proceedings, although no eviction complaint was ever filed. (As Tarshis explained at trial, Barisone “did not want to start eviction—he wanted to scare her into leaving.”) After Kanarek received this letter, she and Goodwin wrote to town authorities, describing “VERY DANGEROUS & illegal” conditions at the farm. The day before the shooting, officials representing the local health, construction, and fire-prevention departments all came to Hawthorne Hill Farm, unannounced, to inspect the property. Because there were code violations, such as missing fire extinguishers, everyone who had been sleeping in the clubhouse building could no longer do so. They laid out mattresses on the front porch. That night, Barisone paced around the building, patrolling.
Early in the afternoon on August 7th, Barisone saw a minivan pull up outside the clubhouse. Vanessa Medrano-Cortez, a caseworker for New Jersey child-protective services, introduced herself. “The lady said, ‘I’m here about a report of child abuse,’ or something like that,” Barisone told me. “And, of course, I knew right away. She turned us in! ”
Medrano-Cortez asked to talk to Gray alone. They went into Barisone’s office. Within minutes, Barisone had interrupted them twice. On a third interruption, he asked them to use another room. He kissed Gray as she left. Barisone recalls telling himself, “I can’t breathe, and I’m thinking, Call somebody, call somebody. I need help, I need help. There is no one going to step in to save us from these monsters.” It was like “somebody had a tourniquet around my neck.”
Barisone told me that he had no memory of taking Ruth Cox’s gun from the safe, and proposed that he’d surely gone to the farmhouse “peacefully.” Barisone seems to have spoken a little differently in his meetings with Steven Simring, a forensic psychiatrist retained by his defense. Simring has reported that Medrano-Cortez’s arrival set Barisone on a path of remonstrance; it “precipitated his arming himself to defend himself, driving down, and having a confrontation.”
Barisone is writing a memoir. In his kitchen, he read from its opening, in which his self-portraiture fuses victimhood and pomp. The shooting, he writes, would “make headlines across the nation, as well as around the world.” It goes on, “The man who I had been died shortly after 2 p.m. that afternoon, a casualty of mortal wounds suffered in the age-old conflict between right and wrong. . . . Had an autopsy been performed, it would have revealed the cause of my death to be a shattered dream and a broken heart.” The book’s working title is “Pure Evil.”
Barisone’s trial, delayed by the pandemic, began in March, 2022, in a courthouse in Morristown, New Jersey. He faced weapons charges and two counts of attempted murder; he’d previously turned down a plea agreement for a ten-year prison sentence. Cameras from Law&Crime, a streaming service, were set up in the courtroom.
Denied pretrial release, Barisone had been held in a local jail for two and a half years. He told me that Gray had broken off contact with him shortly after his arrest. Lara Osborne, a dressage rider whose teen-age daughter had been working at Hawthorne Hill in 2019, became a regular visitor and helped organize a GoFundMe for him; before long, they’d come to see themselves as a couple.
In jail, Barisone read through tens of thousands of pages of discovery documents, much of which comprised Kanarek’s postings and electronic communications. He became a reference service for his attorneys, and when Simring, the psychiatrist, asked for a digest of what he’d found, he cut out passages and glued them together. Deprived of scissors, he’d grown a long thumbnail. In Barisone’s telling, staff and fellow-inmates were awed by his diligence. He quoted a corrections officer saying, “We’ve never seen anything like this!”
On the day Kanarek nearly died, Susan Wachowich, the writer of DressageHub, a widely read and widely disparaged blog, posted an image featuring a celebratory cake and the words “Michael Barisone is my hero!” Posters at The Chronicle of the Horse began, with only a little more decorum, to pick over Kanarek’s online posturing and history of disputes. Kanarek, who was intubated for more than a week, was discharged from the hospital at the end of August; she almost immediately joined the Chronicle conversation.
She stuck to her preferred social-media register of snark and thrown elbows. This sometimes read oddly, given her circumstances, even if her central riposte—“Imagine being shot in the chest twice”—had unanswerable force. In one of her first posts after the shooting, she wondered if her detractors were envious of her good horses. She also said, of Barisone’s farm, “If my goal were to cause trouble I could do that for a much cheaper price than what I was paying.” Later, her parents began posting; her father used the handle Inigo Montoya, for the Spanish swashbuckler in “The Princess Bride.”
When I talked to Kanarek, she was sheepish about some of this material. After e-mailing me a note of thanks that she’d sent to police officers that September, she wondered if she should have waited to write it until she was no longer taking pain medication. (“I’m regretting the ‘police officer’ emoji!” she wrote to me.) But she never stopped commenting about the case online, on multiple forums. Today, a Reddit persona frequently writes about the shooting in Kanarek’s voice, with intimate knowledge of her life and with access to discovery material. This persona has repeatedly claimed not to be Kanarek, but Kanarek acknowledged to me that this was her handle; she added, unconvincingly, that she shared authorship with someone.
Given Barisone’s tales of his lawyerly industry in prison—and an account he gave me of using the barber services offered by an inmate who was later convicted of beating a three-year-old boy to death—his appearance in the courtroom was surprisingly chaotic. He was unshaven. His uncombed, graying hair nearly reached his shoulders. The knot of a yellow tie dangled below the collar of a baggy shirt. He rarely seemed to wear his glasses when the jury was in the room. He maintained a gargoyled expression of horror—eyebrows up, mouth pulled way down—and frequently pressed balled-up tissues against his eyes.
His lead trial attorney, Edward Bilinkas, a dapper New Jersey man then nearing seventy, had the courtroom delivery of a schoolteacher trying to hush nonsense at the back of the class by raising his own voice. Lauren Kanarek, he proposed, might well be “responsible for this tragedy.” She’d plotted against Barisone and terrorized him with endless social-media provocations, including “incessant” posts about guns and “going to war.” She’d accused him of “sexual abuse of his girlfriend’s small child.” Long before the shooting, people at Barisone Dressage had urged her to leave. Barisone’s subsequent pleas to the police and to dressage authorities had been ignored. He’d been forced to flee his own home, his “castle.” According to Bilinkas, “Every man, woman, has a breaking point.”
As for what happened on the patio that day, Bilinkas told the jury that Barisone had been subjected to a “horrific beating” and bitten repeatedly by a dog. And—Bilinkas was now at full volume—the jury would hear a recording of Goodwin yelling, “Don’t move, I’m going to fucking kill you!” (In fact, Derek Heymer, the police officer who first arrived on the scene, had shouted this at Barisone.)
This all sounds like the start of a self-defense argument—imminent threat, castle under siege—but a self-defense acquittal would be possible only if the judge eventually included that option in his jury instructions. And that was unlikely. After all, Barisone had driven to the crime scene with a loaded gun that he didn’t usually carry.
Bilinkas had another strategy. When the shooting occurred, he said, his client had been suffering from a mental disease so severe that he hadn’t known what he was doing was wrong. Largely through the medium of Facebook, Kanarek had driven Barisone mad.
I recently discussed Barisone’s case with Michael Perlin, an authority on mental disability and the law, and a former professor at the New York Law School. The case, he said, was “the outlier of outliers,” to the point that it resembled the insanity case of popular myth: a well-funded client, psychiatric experts in furious courtroom disagreement, and a swift escape from justice. Perlin has spent decades trying to dismantle this myth. In truth, he said, an insanity defendant, if successful, typically spends far more time in a psychiatric facility than someone convicted of the same crime would have spent in prison. Insanity defendants are disproportionately low-income, their cases rarely reach a jury, and there’s usually no dispute about the diagnosis, which is almost invariably schizophrenia. As Perlin put it, the typical case involves a defendant who, after assaulting a victim unknown to him, says, “God told me that I should hit the third woman I see crossing Lower Ferry Road wearing a purple sweater.”
Two defense witnesses for Barisone—Simring, the forensic psychiatrist, and Charles Hasson, a psychologist—testified that, at the time of the shooting, Barisone was suffering from delusional disorder; he had experienced a sustained psychotic fantasy about Kanarek’s dangerousness. (He was also depressed, they noted.) In the kind of delusion case that typically reaches the courts, someone arrives at an unfounded belief—about being poisoned by a co-worker, say, or deceived by a spouse—and sticks with it to the point of violence, even as everyone around them begs them to see that they’re wrong.
But delusional disorder is defined as something experienced for at least a month—not as a breaking-point response to indignities, to use Bilinkas’s language. Neither Simring nor Hasson could say when the delusion had started. In fact, in late June, 2019, Barisone was still exchanging jokey texts with Kanarek—unseen by the jury—in which he proposed that she think of Goodwin’s “manhood” to estimate the dimensions of an air-conditioner filter she needed to buy. (“Hahahahahahaha!” she responded.) There was also no sign of anyone trying to talk Barisone out of his distress about Kanarek, when it came. Everyone shared it.
And, if Barisone was psychotically deluded, how was the jury meant to understand the defense’s central framing, which was that Kanarek had cruelly tried to harm Barisone? He hadn’t imagined being bugged; he had been bugged. Bilinkas had urged Kanarek, on the witness stand, to agree that she’d hatched a plan to “destroy” Barisone. Perhaps unwisely, she replied, “At some point, yes.” It was surprising, then, to hear Simring claim that Barisone had developed a “core false belief” that Kanarek had “an elaborate plan to destroy him and kill him.” This fear, he said, was “outlandish.”
The jury was being asked, in effect, to endorse the old saw about even paranoiacs having real enemies. But there didn’t appear to be evidence that Barisone, despite having come to despise Kanarek and to fear her recklessness, actually believed that she was deadly. The defense’s argument seemed to depend—with circular convenience—on the act of violence itself, and also on evaluations of Barisone done months or years after the shooting, by which time he was living in a cell, stewing in discovery documents. When I recently asked Hasson, the psychologist, for evidence of Barisone’s delusional thinking, he referred both to his client’s seeming fearfulness on the day before the shooting and to the fact that, at the end of 2021, Barisone compared Kanarek to Nikolas Cruz, the mass murderer who committed the Parkland, Florida, school shooting.
A witness giving psychiatric evidence about a defendant’s state of mind is largely unconstrained by the rules of hearsay. Barisone didn’t take the stand, and Simring, who at a later hearing called Barisone a “gentleman,” almost became his proxy. (Simring declined to be interviewed for this article.) Before the jury, Simring endorsed Barisone’s claim that he had done “everything in his power” to resolve the conflict, and wrongly proposed that a private message Kanarek had sent to a friend a week before the shooting—“They know a war is coming”—was a public post that could have worsened Barisone’s state of mind. Simring also suggested that Kanarek’s allegedly scary posting had gone on for more than a year, although her online aggression toward Barisone lasted for about three weeks. And while Simring acknowledged that he’d barely read beyond the few dozen pages of material thumb-clipped for him by Barisone, he claimed to know that, in the thousands of pages of discovery documents, a “vast number” of Kanarek’s electronic communications were similarly threatening. They weren’t. Barisone’s edit of this material was bound to mislead. For example, Kanarek had repeatedly posted about guns she kept in North Carolina. But these posts primarily look like an effort to establish a liberal-badass persona with standing to take on Trump-supporting gun nuts. And she repeatedly posted about any number of things, including avocados and “Game of Thrones.”
Simring’s written report, like Bilinkas’s opening statement, suggested that “someone had reported allegations of sexual abuse” against Barisone. This wasn’t true. In court, Medrano-Cortez, the caseworker, explained that after her office was contacted by SafeSport she visited the farm to check if Gray’s children were neglected—not sexually abused. (The investigation quickly found no neglect.) The visit was surely prompted by SafeSport’s call with Kanarek, but there’s no evidence that Kanarek made any claim about the children besides noting that they were often on a property she had described as run by irresponsible people.
In a cross-examination of Simring, Christopher Schellhorn, from the Morris County prosecutor’s office, highlighted some of these errors. And a psychologist testifying for the prosecution challenged the delusion diagnosis. But the defense had given the jury permission to show sympathy for an apparently hounded man, and to embrace ideas about the inevitability of “snapping” that, however dubious, shaped the trial as well as thousands of comments about it. In truth, most people never reach violent breaking points. To take Kanarek as an example: this wasn’t her first feud, but no other adversary had shot her.
Barisone looked like a wreck, and it was easy to find Kanarek off-putting. In court, she seemed distracted and unserious. Her victimhood was all wrong: on the stand, she seemed to be scoring points in a continuing quarrel, not describing shocking violence. On the Chronicle of the Horse forums, there was talk of her false eyelashes. Her several long scars from her hospitalization were not visible. One wonders how Barisone’s defense would have been different if he’d used a gun that wasn’t pink, or used a tire iron instead of a gun, or had left Kanarek severely disabled, or dead.
On April 14th, the jury rendered a verdict. Barisone’s knees buckled under him on hearing that he was not guilty of trying to kill Goodwin—and that, in the shooting of Kanarek, he was not guilty by reason of insanity. Barisone would be held by New Jersey, but only until a judge ruled that it was safe to release him.
Jonathan Kanarek was at home, twenty minutes away, with Lauren, when the verdict came. “It was devastating,” he said. Christopher Schellhorn, the prosecutor, recalls returning to his office and sitting alone for maybe half an hour, “just trying to digest what had happened.”
The jury members, drawn from a relatively conservative county, haven’t spoken publicly about the trial. But remarks made by David, the attorney and Kanarek family acquaintance, perhaps point to some of the thinking in the jury room. The day before the shooting, Kanarek and her father met with David in his office. She talked in a scattered way about her dispute with Barisone, then left the room for a few minutes.
David turned to Jonathan. “We did not do the right thing for our children,” he said. “We gave them everything they ever needed, ever wanted—”
“Certainly that,” Jonathan said.
“—to create this high-strung, intolerant, demanding person who loses the ability to reason and rationalize. They’re people who have to win all the time! We created type-A personalities.” He then added, with apologies to what he called the “MeToo age,” that it was weird to see this in young women. “We’re guys,” he said. “They’re not supposed to be like that.”
One day in Loxahatchee, Lara Osborne and I drove to a nearby dressage show. Barisone didn’t join us; his suspension from the sport, which began soon after the shooting, denied him access to USEF-sanctioned events—even a quiet Saturday-morning show that, without us, would have had no spectators. A show of this kind is like the non-élite part of a marathon; riders were competing largely against their own expectations, not one another. “That was a very bad piaffe,” Osborne said at one point.
It was a relief to take a break from Barisone and his files. Osborne, who’s in her mid-fifties, and who sells horse tack and clothing, is fully committed to Barisone’s cause, but she doesn’t share his intensity, and she occasionally allows herself an ironic eyebrow raise when his rhetoric overheats. She has set her phone to play the “Law & Order” theme when Christopher Deininger, Barisone’s lead civil attorney, calls about one lawsuit or another.
I asked her if she ever encouraged Barisone to make peace with his current fate, and to stop calling for, say, the imprisonment of one of the detectives who investigated the shooting. Barisone had told me, “I don’t want to be the fucking guy who has an asterisk next to his name forever. I don’t want the asterisk!”
Osborne and I were standing beside the ring. “This is all that Michael knows,” she said. “How do you just walk away? This was his life. It wasn’t just that he was a competitor. He was a coach, a mentor. He was a pillar of the community.”
At the time of Barisone’s trial, much of the dressage community clearly supported him. His subsequent litigation is surely eroding that support. Merrick, the former dressage official, said that, though he understood Barisone’s desire to rebuild his former life, “if he thinks it’ll happen by smearing Lauren, it’s not going to go well.” He added, “People really will walk away from him. He’ll be kind of forgotten, and then I don’t know what a guy like Michael does.”
Osborne told me, “If he just turns tail and walks away, she’s destroyed him and she wins. Why would you give in to that?” But, she conceded, this was “not his best life.”
Barisone is the kind of man who, when asked, in passing, if he knows how to fly a plane, answers, “I could. But I don’t. I mean, I understand aeronautics.” In one of our conversations, he referred to himself as a “he-man.” Whole days passed without Barisone allowing Osborne to finish a sentence. His recollections often take the form of dialogues in which interlocutors meekly acknowledge his overwhelming rhetorical advantage.
One might hesitate to call this narcissistic, if that term hadn’t been used repeatedly in mental-health assessments of Barisone in recent years—though not in those presented to the jury in 2022. Ann Picardo, Barisone’s former therapist, told Hasson, the psychologist, that she’d found her client to be “grandiose” and inclined to make “pompous speeches.” Barisone, she said, “wanted to be around people who sucked up to him.” Soon after the verdict, Barisone was sent to the Ann Klein Forensic Center, in Trenton, where he was seen by Joanna Bajgier, a psychiatrist. She identified no delusional disorder but saw possible signs of narcissistic personality disorder (N.P.D.) That fall, Barisone was transferred to the Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital, in Morris County. Anthony Gotay, a psychiatrist, also saw no delusions, and gave him diagnoses of N.P.D. and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.
Barisone was entitled to regular hearings at which a judge would weigh the risk of releasing him. At the second of these, in May, 2023, Gotay described people with N.P.D. as requiring “excessive admiration.” They have, he said, an “arrogant demeanor that basically they are better than other people.” According to Gotay, Barisone liked to say that he should be running group meetings at Greystone, not merely participating in them. Gotay also said that when Barisone talked of the shooting he claimed to have “handled the situation perfectly.”
At the hearing, Hasson—who hadn’t mentioned narcissism at the trial—didn’t disown his earlier diagnosis but seemed to be describing the crime in a new way. “He had a narcissistic personality disorder,” he told the judge, and was “placed in a very toxic circumstance.”
By definition, people with N.P.D. are prone to distorted thinking—about their virtues, their specialness. And there’s a strong correlation between N.P.D. and violence. Barisone might be said to have experienced a narcissistic injury—an intolerable challenge to his inflated sense of self—when Kanarek pushed back, starting in mid-July, and said “pretty TRUE and fucked up things” about him. But, in the eyes of most courts, the characteristics that combine to indicate N.P.D. don’t amount to a mental illness. That is, N.P.D. is a description of who you are; it’s probably a problem, but it’s not a disease, and not a criminal defense. Prisons are filled with people who have antisocial, borderline, narcissistic, and histrionic personality disorders—so-called cluster-B disorders.
Barisone has never fully embraced the delusional-disorder diagnosis that kept him out of prison. In our conversations, his usual framing was about good and evil, not catastrophically warped thinking. He didn’t quite disown the verdict—“I agree with the jury that it was impossible for me to rationally know what was going on. I agree with that”—but he complained that the judge, Stephen J. Taylor, had denied him the chance for a straightforward not-guilty verdict. Had Barisone been allowed to bring up every unbecoming fact about Kanarek, he told me, “I would have walked out of the courtroom a free man.” He seemed most wedded to the idea of a former mental illness when he described a planned lawsuit that, he predicts, will undo his dressage ban and, in the process, overthrow the SafeSport system. Among other restrictions, Barisone is barred from teaching USEF members. He made the case to me that, given his past psychiatric condition, revealed in his attempt to kill a student, restricting his access to students is a clear violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Barisone’s suspension became a permanent ban last December. A SafeSport investigation had found evidence of sexual harassment and “emotional misconduct.” The report detailing this is confidential, but Barisone and Jonathan Kanarek both told me that the sexual-harassment finding is not connected to Lauren. (In Barisone’s dismissive description, it’s about “off-color jokes” that he made before 2019.) The misconduct charge, however, addresses Barisone’s treatment of Kanarek and Goodwin.
At the Greystone facility, in 2022 and 2023, Barisone was no longer the dramatically dishevelled figure he’d been in the courtroom; he now carried himself as a clear-eyed man of principle who was absurdly out of place, like a dissident in a Soviet psikhushka, or Jack Nicholson’s character in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” (In our conversations, he gestured at both.) Barisone had a point. He might or might not be dangerous, but he was almost certainly not mad. A 2026 study of a state psychiatric hospital whose admissions are largely involuntary found that the average patient was taking three psychotropic medications. Barisone was taking nothing. He began a legal action against the hospital and its doctors while still there, alleging that his N.P.D. and O.C.P.D. diagnoses were “fabricated.”
Speaking in Loxahatchee, Barisone recounted one of Gotay’s colleagues bringing up the N.P.D. “You’re telling me that, because I’m incredibly driven and success-oriented, that makes me mentally ill?” he recalled asking her. “Ma’am, I’m an Olympic athlete! Have you ever had an Olympic athlete in here?” To represent the doctor, Barisone adopted a small, stupid voice: “No, no.”
He was released in November, 2023, nineteen months after his trial. He now must keep regular appointments with a court-sanctioned psychologist, and must return to New Jersey for further hearings about his state of mind.
To spend time with Barisone is to have the occasional old-fashioned thought about the redemptive potential of prison. I never heard him express compassion toward Kanarek. His acceptance of responsibility for her injuries is severely truncated: “The overwhelming likelihood is, yes, I held this thing”—Ruth Cox’s gun—“and, yes, I pulled the trigger.” He aligns himself with other men tarnished by “weaponized” accusations, in particular those whose innocence is at best uncertain, and in whom narcissism may be evident: Donald Trump; George Morris, the show jumper; Brett Kavanaugh; Lance Armstrong.
Tarshis, Barisone’s lawyer, who has an image of a horse on his business card, has decided to let his USEF membership lapse, so that he can keep training with Barisone. He rides at the Loxahatchee farm most days. He was at the kitchen table one morning when Barisone was describing to me the simple life he claims to want. This would involve working on his old cars, but also—as if a throwaway thought—winning a prestigious dressage show and then giving media interviews afterward. “Get my blue ribbon, go to the press conference—‘Thank you, everybody’—and come home with this lady,” he said. He was looking at Osborne. “I don’t care about being famous anymore.”
Tarshis, clearly unpersuaded, said, “Wait, stop.”
We had dinner that evening at a local country club with an equestrian clientele. At a table in the middle of the room, Barisone recounted that, nearly a year before the shooting, Goodwin, during a discussion about a dressage show, had “smashed” him against a wall and warned him that if he didn’t do whatever Goodwin wanted, or if he dared go to the police, Goodwin would kill him. This was hard to believe (and Goodwin later called it a lie). Barisone’s proposition was that everything that followed—months of living and working together, silly texts—was done in the shadow of that threat.
At trial, Barisone presented himself as the victim of scheming. That account failed to convince everyone, but it must also have frustrated him; he was claiming to be a dupe undone by a chaotic female client. As he has worked on his memoir, he seems to have found a new approach, involving a kind of B-movie gangsterism.
Tarshis, though not a part of Barisone’s trial team, has been involved in the case from the start, and he filed the 2025 suit that accused Kanarek of vulgarity. But he was clearly hearing about this scene of allegedly pivotal violence for the first time. He seemed confounded, and tried to reset the conversation.
Tarshis, with Barisone looking on, said, “Michael’s a contradiction. He’s a big, powerful, strong guy. Appears to exude confidence. You see how he takes over a room. Nobody can even talk!” But, he went on, “he is incredibly insecure.”
Tarshis described Barisone as he had been in the summer of 2019: “Given the status that he enjoyed in the sport, I think there was a part of him that did not want to admit defeat” by evicting Kanarek.
“You’re a hundred per cent wrong,” Barisone said.
“Let me finish.”
“Couldn’t be more wrong.”
Tarshis went on, “I think he—without realizing it—may have been concerned that if he kicks them out, especially these people, they’re going to be bad-mouthing him all over the place.”
“Not even remotely,” Barisone said. Only “the victim of a terrorist,” he said, could understand what he went through. He returned to the wall-slamming.
“Why didn’t you call me?” Tarshis asked.
“Steven, you don’t do that as an abuse victim!”
Tarshis was still puzzled—he was having to rewrite a story he thought he knew well. “Why didn’t you go to the police?”
“I’m a chickenshit. Conflict terrifies me.”
Tarshis asked him when he first contacted the police.
“Thirty-first of July, 2019,” Barisone said.
“That was the first time?” Tarshis asked.
Tarshis had a few more questions, but Barisone was done.
“Steven, zip your mouth,” he said, sharply. “Zip your mouth.” ♦