After a while, his parents came to visit every now and then. In 1985, when Val was 9, Alla, who had remarried and moved to New Jersey, got custody of her and her new husband, William Broeksmit, adopted Val. (Alla Broeksmit declined to comment on her son’s death.)
Val was expelled from Dublin School in New Hampshire at age 13 for several violations, but he managed to get through Rocky Mountain Academy, a school for troubled teens in northern Idaho, graduating from college in 1999. Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania. †
He moved to New York, where he took courses in film and television production.
In addition to his mother, there are two more stepsisters, Alessa and Katarina, from his mother’s second marriage.
For five years, Mr. Broeksmit dangled with the documents he had found through his stepfather’s e-mails. An article Mr. Enrich wrote about errors in Deutsche Bank’s financial reporting for The Wall Street Journal in 2014, before joining The Times, led to a three percentage point drop in the bank’s share price, raising its market value by more than $1 billion fell .
The investigation into the bank continues. It has already agreed to pay millions in fines for violating accounting controls and concealing corrupt payments.
Although whistleblowers are often dismissed as “selfish, corrupted, reckless and crazy,” Mr Enrich later wrote in The Times, “regardless of their motivations, all of them have used classified documents to change the course of history.”
