Both women claim that after they hired the lawyer and began meeting with him, they began to suspect something other than privileged conversation was going on. They couldn’t remember large parts of the meetings, and one said she also started to notice certain physical symptoms and disheveled clothing afterward. That one went to the police, and also started recording her conversations with the lawyer. (It may seem odd that she kept interacting with him, but he was handling a child-custody case for her and so it’s plausible that she may have been reluctant to change lawyers in mid-stream.) She recorded one phone call that “began with a discussion about normal legal matters and then turned into questions about where [she] was and whether she was alone.”
Well … maybe he was just worried about preserving the attorney-client privilege?
Apparently not. “[He] then began to use ‘code’ words that induced [her] to enter a trance-like stage [sic].” He then made 12 transcript pages worth of highly explicit suggestions, which seems like a lot, and finally told her not to remember anything but the legal matters they discussed. “The conversation ends with a few pages of legitimate conversation about [the woman’s] case,” so I guess he could bill her for that part, at least.