NO SHRINKING VIOLET
Suit: Therapist 'seduced' me out of $250K
This was more than a Freudian slip!
A Union Square psychologist manipulated a hedge funder into believing he was “trapped” in his marriage and then “seduced” him, an explosive lawsuit claims.
The in-office liaisons went on for 10 years, with the traumatized Wall Streeter paying cash at the end of each appointment — which his therapist-turned-lover called “mistress money,” according to the shocking Manhattan Supreme Court suit filed Tuesday.
By the time the patient finally walked away from “treatment,” he claims he had shelled out $250,000 in sexual payments alone.
Michael Pollack. 46, began seeing analyst Heidi Kling, 58, in 2008 for anxiety amid a turbulent stock market. The businessman — whose wife is from India — had also survived the trauma of the Nov. 26, 2008, terror attack in Mumbai, where he and his spouse were visiting her family.
The father of two claims the shrink “fostered” his emotional dependence on, and “idolization” of, her and romanced him with constant emails. After just six months, he confessed to friends that he was developing an “erotic interest” in her.
Pollack and Kling’s frequent messages included sharing Hindu verses about desire, with Kling pointing out that for Sigmund Freud, desire was “forbidden, unconscious wishes.”
“I wish I could make you my God and have you take away my suffering,” Pollack wrote to his sexy new guru.
Meanwhile, Kling, who charges $300 a session, allegedly painted Pollack’s spouse — with whom he shares two kids — as “difficult to love,” “extremely rigid,” and “highly controlling,” he claims in court papers.
The fantasies between therapist and patient turned physical during a 2011 appointment, where Kling allegedly sat next to Pollack, “took [his] hand in hers, and initiated sexual contact. The sexual contact escalated, and continued in every, single session thereafter,” according to the lawsuit.
The sex sessions were costly in more ways than one, Pollack alleges.
The cash he handed over sometimes reached “thousands per week when [Kling’s] husband, Marty, was out of work,” Pollack claims in the suit.
He estimates he paid $50,000 for the three years of therapy with Kling before their relationship became intimate, along with a quarter of a million in “mistress money,” according to the suit.
Using an account his wife didn’t have access to, Pollack would take money out of an ATM near Kling’s East 16th Street office, and then play shrink to his therapist after finding her agitated from “arguing with her husband, her children, or a third-party,” Pollack says.
Pollack spent most of the appointments “soothing and comforting” her, before she finally spent 10 minutes asking about him. Then they would do the deed, he says.
Professional ethics prohibit psychologists from having sex with patients, according to the American Psychological Association.
During the decade-long entanglement, Pollack also was seeing a second therapist — Kling’s mentor, Joseph Newirth, 79, of Great Neck, LI, who he claims encouraged the carnal sessions, saying they were helping Pollack “grow emotionally,” according to the litigation.
But by August 2021, Pollack began “to feel enormous internal pressure to make a choice between Dr. Kling or his wife.”
When he broke things off with Kling, Newirth allegedly shouted, “You were a f--king robot before you met her. She opened you up, gave you life.”
“I had PTSD. It was erotic transference!” Pollack spat back, according to court papers.
The state Department of Education, which licenses psychologists, has no misconduct cases against Kling or Newirth on file.
A spokeswoman said the law prohibits the Education Department from confirming or denying if complaints had been filed against an individual.
Pollack accuses Kling and Newirth of negligence and is suing for unspecified damages.
He claims that he now “struggles with how much time he lost with his family while he was consumed by his devotion” to the psychologists.
Neither Kling nor Pollack returned messages seeking comment. Newirth could not be reached.