Jean Tatlock (21 February 1914-4 January 1944) was an American psychiatrist and physician, a member of the CPUSA, and the mistress of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Biography[]
Jean Frances Tatlock was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1914, the daughter of a literary scholar. She took courses at University of California, Berkeley and wrote for the Western Worker newspaper of the CPUSA before attending Stanford, graduating in 1941. Tatlock started an affair with J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1936 while raising money for Republican Spain amid the Spanish Civil War, and she introduced Oppenheimer to radical politics and a milieu of leftist intellectuals. Their on-again, off-again relationship continued even after Oppenheimer's marriage to Katherine Oppenheimer, and Oppenheimer was forced to break off their relationship after a final tryst on 14 June 1943, as he could not risk communist associations while working on the Manhattan Project. Tatlock fell into a deep depression, partly due to her belief that her homosexuality was a pathological condition, and she drowned herself in her bathtub in 1944.
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