Lisa Lippiello Shows Grace Under Pressure
Written by Melissa Karen Sances
Photos by Nikki Gardner Photography
Sponsored by Valley Home Improvement
Published in Northampton Living (June 2023)
Downton Valley has a royal feel to it. A long, winding driveway leads to a stately home that rises over the Pioneer Valley. Inside, the “Dowager Room” and the “Isobel Room” nod to two of the most powerful female characters on the historical drama “Downton Abbey.” But the woman behind this bed-and-breakfast home is a contemporary queen.
She rules.
The best thing about Lisa Lippiello is that she is a humble monarch. Before she was a mother, wife and entrepreneur; before she was a managing partner at a law firm in Northampton, she was just a little girl drawn to the ocean. “I have photos of my father racing to the shore because I was crawling through the sand to the water,” she says with a laugh. The water was her happy place; it would be her steady companion as she navigated her parent’ divorce and was tasked with caring for her younger brother.
After skipping the 8th grade, she was a 16-year-old senior at John Adams High School in Queens when she caught the eye of a swim recruiter from Hunter College. If she had enough credits to graduate early, he wanted her to join his squad. Though she had to appeal to the superintendent, she won her first case and was off to Hunter.
She hated not taking her brother with her. Over the years, he had struggled with addiction and was “dabbling on the other side of the law.” But they would reconnect during her senior year of college, when her father asked for a favor. The New York Police Department was recruiting, and he wanted her brother to take the police exam. Yet her brother wouldn’t do it without her. The siblings took it together, but she was the one the NYPD called 3 months later.
A chance to be in the Police Academy thrilled her. “It will be like boot camp!” she remembers thinking. “I was 20 and I always loved pushing myself to my physical limit. Being a cop wasn’t something I’d imagined, but it fed my moral compass to help others.”
In the expansive Downton Valley, a corner of the media room is dedicated to Lippiello’s first career. On the police-blue wall, the Brooklyn Bridge stretches over New York City at night. If her father had his way, she wouldn’t have gone near it. He landed her a sweet gig in the Movie & TV Unit, but she had no interest in guarding production crews. “What was wrong with me?” she asks. “I might be on film now in Hollywood.” But what she wanted was the midnight shift patrolling the most dangerous neighborhoods in Brooklyn.
Lippiello is an animated speaker; maybe it’s the impassioned attorney in her, maybe she is just passionate. But she is almost electrified when she stands in front of what she calls her “shrine” and speaks to her 14 years on the NYPD. Obscure radio codes that she hasn’t used in more than 20 years – like 10-13, or “officer needs assistance” – roll right off her tongue. She beams as she picks up her old patrol box, which is still a working phone. She looks fondly at a photo of herself as a young lieutenant newly pregnant with her daughter Sydney, now 23. That doesn’t mean that there weren’t dark days, including September 11, 2001. Or that as a young lesbian in the 80s and 90s, she didn’t face discrimination in a predominantly male field.
At first, Lippiello didn’t come out to her fellow officers because “I wanted them to respond to my 10-13s.” But as she climbed the ranks, she began marching with the Gay Officers Action League in New York City Pride. It was not uncommon for patrollers who worked the yearly parade to turn their backs when the small group of gay officers walked by. “It was very, very, very hurtful,” she says. “But when I marched my first year as a sergeant and the officers did that, I was able to go up to them and say, ‘Turn around. That’s your brother and sister you are turning your back to.’ They had to obey because it was a direct order. As an older person now, I hope to encourage empathy for diversity in other ways than commands.”
Ultimately, wanting more time with Sydney prompted Lippiello to leave the city for western Massachusetts, where she studied law at Western New England University and had her second daughter Emily, now 17. She envisioned becoming a chief of police or maybe a prosecutor, but criminal defense made the most sense. “Because people don’t come out of the womb bad,” she explains. “There’s a whole lifetime or culture of how they were raised or what they were exposed to that got them into this predicament.” There is also just plain luck. “You can have two people from the same upbringing who have completely different experiences. But we all have a responsibility to do something.”
After a long battle with addiction, Lippiello’s brother passed away. She felt like she had lost a child, but she became even more invested in what she calls “leveling the playing field for everyone.” Today she is a partner at Olin Lippiello, where aside from criminal defense, she handles family court matters, harassment, discrimination and personal injury claims. In a sweet twist of fate, she met her law partner, Nathan Olin, at the start of her career. As a third-year law student, she was granted an externship with a justice in the United States District Court. Olin was the court’s law clerk. The two bonded almost immediately and have remained close for decades. “Sometimes I feel like he’s the brother I didn’t get to grow up with,” she says.
Her second business came to fruition two years ago. Lippiello married Bonnie Sachs in 2017 and they moved into their newly built home in 2018 with Emily; Bonnie’s daughter Talia, now 19; and their dog Charlie. (Like Sydney, Bonnie’s son Eli, now 26, was already adulting.) Friends started calling dibs on the guest rooms for their extraordinary views. The pandemic gave the couple time to fall in love with “Downton Abbey” and think through opening a B&B Home. Lippiello knew how to run a business, and Sachs, an artist, took care of the aesthetics. The goal was to open a space that welcomed all women to Downton Valley and downtown Northampton.
Lippiello’s favorite room at Downton Valley is the “Endless Pool” room, where she spends every morning both training for her next triathlon and catching her breath. The water is still her quiet ally; in her lifetime of fierce service, it has always served her. “It’s the only place where I feel like I am truly alone with who I am,” she says. “The cover photo is like my own cover page of me.”
Ready to go to Downton Valley? Visit www.downtonvalley.com.
