The following story written by Donna Jossee is NOT the official origin of Harley Quinn (Harleen Quinzel). Some of the material is canon to comics/shows etc. other elements are not. Reporters mentioned are OC and any characters from DC Comics are not owned by the author. This particular telling of Harley Quinn's beginning is based off of the characterization of Harley Quinn/Harleen Quinzel and The Joker by Margot Robbie and Jared Leto. Mentions of violence, domestic, emotional and mental abuse, drug use, non-consensual sexual intercourse and making light of very serious circumstances are made. Viewer discretion is advised.
**Italics - narrator
"All hell broke loose in that court room and I remember looking at the reporter next to me and going, 'what the hell has just happened?!' it changed the whole case! She was helping him, we just didn't know she was on his side instead of ours." — Stella Valmanta, Reporter for GCN Broadcast.
"This story was drop-your-jaw shocking. Never in Gotham history had something so scandalous happen. It was mortifying." — Bernise Willohby, Crime analyst for Gotham City.
"She killed her mother in cold blood and then put the body on her father's grave. When she did that we had a pretty clear idea of the exact extent The Joker had gone to really make her prove herself to him." — Police Commissioner James Gordon, GCPD.
"This was something that was happening right under our noses. She was being so lax and so easy going with a murderous, legally insane criminal and no one knew anything about it because that's how good the two of them were in keeping it hush-hush." — Dr. Joan Leland, former associate of Harleen Quinzel.
GOTHAM CITY CRIME ORIGINS: HARLEY QUINN
In Gotham City, on July 20, 1990, Harleen Francis Quinzel was born at 11:28 p.m.
Evelyn Howard, Harleen's Aunt
"Harleen was a very noisy baby. She tended to cry more than a baby should." Her aunt explained. "My sister, Charolette would often call and complain that, 'oh, the baby's crying she won't stop and Harry's gone and I have to sleep', so I'd go and watch over Harley as her mother rested. I always had the feeling her mother honestly didn't want her, especially when she was a baby. Which was even more sad because children are innocent. She hadn't done anything to her mother to make her hate her so much."
That distaste for her daughter only seemed to grow throughout the years. From going to extremes to make sure Harleen maintained straight A's to threatening her if she didn't score good in gymnastics, Charlotte Quinzel expressed more than enough cruelness to her only child.
Stella Valmanta, Reporter for GCN broadcast
"Charolette and Harry met when Charolette was doing a psychiatric evaluation at Black Gate penitentiary. Harry was there for grand theft and she just so happened to be assigned to him. They stayed in contact and the day he was released from the penitentiary, Harleen was conceived and they married when Charlotte found out but a baby didn't stop Harry from going out every night and doing dirty under the table jobs for spare cash to support his wife and his daughter on. He loved his daughter nonetheless, a hell of a lot more than the child's mother, he just was not home enough to really see how mean his wife could be. Around the age of six, Harleen showed interest in Gymnastics. She was very adamant about joining gymnastics. She wanted to get to the Olympics and really make a name for herself. Her mother didn't want her to do it but Harry was also very adamant about Harley doing whatever she wanted. He wanted her to get everything she could hope for and gymnastics was a start to that. Little did he know Charolette would use that to her own advantage to push Harleen the way her own mother pushed her."
Bernise Willohby, Gotham City Crime Analyst
"We often find and can connect the dots of one person's parents being a certain way and so that person inherits those characteristics whether they're physical or personality traits. Charolette got her ways from her mother, but very lucky for Harleen she mostly inherited her own personality traits from her father and the part of her that was more so like Charlotte only came out when she was angry."
When stakes run high and Harleen gets an injury, she's no longer able to compete and picks up an interest in psychiatry.
Stella Valmanta
"Harleen was involved in a gymnastics injury and she busted her ankle when she was sixteen and it completely ruined her chances of making anything more than a hobby out of gymnastics so she started digging around a little bit and discovered that she was pretty interested in psychiatric care like her mother had been involved in."
Evelyn Howard
"Charlotte was very pleased to hear that Harleen was looking into following her own career path. I remember it being the one time the two of them actually could agree on something. She started helping her look for schooling when Harleen was seventeen, and every school Harleen applied to, I believe there were eleven she applied to, she got accepted into every single one of them. She ultimately chose Gotham University. It was closer to home, more so closer to her father and she didn't want to be away from him and see him less than she already had to be so she stayed within the city and lived at home."
Successful in school, Harleen makes it to medical school with little to no struggle but hits a few bumps in the road during her last year.
Stella Valmanta
"When Harleen was 25, she got a call that completely changed her life for several months. Commissioner James Gordon, who was a detective at the time, contacted Harleen and had her come down to the police station. When she got there, she had to do something no child wants to do to a parent. She had to identify the body of Harry, her father."
James "Jim" Gordon, Police Commissioner GCPD
"There were multiple gunshots to the head, 3 knife wounds, one to the ribs and two to the right thigh. Having to watch Harleen screaming and crying and trying to form words will always be one of the things that I always think about when I think about some of the worst cases we've had. It was horrific. I honestly think her father's death was the beginning stages of her downward spiral."
Dr. Joan Leland, Former Associate of Harleen Quinzel
"There are five stages of grief. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Harleen skipped straight over the first four and just accepted it. She withheld and ignored so much emotion that when she was first presented to a man who could legitimately draw just about every emotion known to man from someone, she just had a mental breakdown."
Regardless of her holding it together, her grades start to slowly suffer, but then drastically change for the better due to something that seems like a mystery to her classmates and even some of her family.
Stella Valmanta
"Her grades went from A's to very low F's and then back to A's in a matter of two weeks. She was very intelligent, very smart, very beautiful and charming and it might have been that she simply worked to get her grades up but a lot of people suspected that she was doing sexual favors for her professors in exchange for her grades. No one really knows. It just depends on who you ask."
After graduation, her mother Charlotte pushes for her to work outside of the city, but Harleen's drawn to the utter thrill of working at one of the most dangerous psych hospitals in the area: Arkham Asylum.
Stella Valmanta
"Her mother wanted her to go explore something outside of the city, away from the city because the times were only getting worse. Crime was at its highest point, it was very ugly but Harleen was very persistent in making sure she stayed exactly where she was and worked at Arkham because Arkham was where the really messed up nut cases were found. They had everything from cannibals who ate their own families to clowns wearing Gucci and smoking Cubans in their cells. Those were the types of people Harleen wanted to get in front of and really learn the nitty-gritty about. Particularly The Joker."
After Harleen started her work, it was clear that she was only there for one reason and one reason alone.
Dr. Joan Leland
"She showed a very startling amount of interest in him. Of course at the time we were very unaware of her original ulterior-motive which was to get The Joker to expose himself emotionally so she could write a book about him and become that doctor that could actually get him to open up and be genuine instead of what he normally did which was put on a theatrical show for whichever doctor was seeing him and then eventually just scare them out of continuing sessions…or he'd kill them. Dr. Arkham, the head doctor at the institute, was very skeptical about letting someone so young and inexperienced to be on The Joker's case."
Rightfully so, within a week of Harleen being on the Clown Prince's case, she comes clean about using him.
Stella Valmanta
"The day that The Joker and Harleen Quinzel Met is the day that everything started falling into place very slowly for the two of them. She was very gorgeous and easy to get along with and he really appreciated beautiful women, he was a womanizer for Christ Sake, one of his methods for getting what he wanted was exuding sex appeal and it worked for him. This was a man who used anything and everything about himself that would get him things. He was a complete narcissist and in his mind if he could get these blonde bombshell of a doctor to let her guard down just for a little while and let him use her and abuse her, he'd be out in no time and that's exactly what he did. He thought he had a one up on her and she though she had a one up on him. They had no idea exactly what the other had in store and that's what made them both very unpredictable to each other. He was constantly on his toes because she would do the opposite of what he expected and she was constantly intrigued because he showed her something no other doctor of his had experienced with him. She told him her intentions to expose him and he really wasn't expecting that from sweet and compassionate Harleen and when he found out she basically manipulated him, although he hadn't spilt his guts on anything worth writing about just yet, he still used that to guilt and twist her to his bidding and she gladly let him do so! Within a few months of being doctor/patient, The Joker decided enough's enough, he wanted more from her and she wanted more from him. So in broad daylight one day, during a session, that thin line between friendly flirting and inappropriate work behavior, was 'heavily blurred', as Harleen claimed on the stand in court but last time I checked, having sex on a desk with your patient who's as evil as they come, is beyond a blurred line. It's down right ethically repulsing and very, very, very illegal."
Their relationship stayed under lock and key from behind the walls of the Asylum, not even doctors knowing the extent of their relationship.
Dr. Joan Leland
"We all knew Harleen and Joker had a very unique closeness. She was very shy and tended to freeze up around him and only him. Harleen was not a timid woman, until it came to her seeing him at any point in the facility. She'd lock up and start scrabbling to find her words and she was just a stuttering mess around him. It was very unlike her to not handle a situation gracefully. The Joker was very taken with Harleen. We, the doctors, talked amongst ourselves. He was being on good behavior and had these extravagant stories to tell her and she just lit up like a Christmas tree anytime he spoke to her. It was like watching first graders with crushes on each other interact. We just thought she's getting close to him so he'll open up more and he's trying to get close to her so he can try to twist his way into her mind and run her off. We had no idea he was doing just that without any intention of letting her go. This was something that was happening right under our noses. She was being so lax and so easy going with a murderous, clinically insane criminal and no one knew anything about it because that's how good the two of them were in keeping it hush-hush."
Stella Valmanta
"There was a huge blow up at Arkham a couple of weeks after Harleen and Joker's relationship started. The entire facility was shut down for a while because somehow Mr. J got ahold of an automatic weapon, his buddies got security clearance into the building somehow and the entire staff and some of the inmates were killed. One doctor out of the 12 that were working that day managed to survive. Her name was Dr. Harleen Quinzel. What a f***ing surprise…uhh, not!"
James Gordon
"We were called down to Arkham after one of the charge nurses called for an ambulance because of how many casualties there were. Apparently her killers thought she was dead and she managed to get to the phone and call before she died of blood loss."
Actual 911 call from Arkham Asylum:
"911 what's your emergency?"
"Oh my god!" A woman screamed as gunshots echoed from the phone.
"Ma'am?"
"There's an ongoing shooting at Arkham Asylum."
"Okay, ma'am, I need you to remain calm okay? Take a deep breath. How many people have been wounded?"
"Everyone!" She replied frantically. "Everyone around me is dead. Please send help, please!"
"Are you wounded, ma'am?"
"Yes!"
James Gordon
"Shortly after we arrived we realized there weren't any witnesses other than the inmates that weren't dead. They weren't speaking up, they were scared to, so the only other option we really had was to check the security cameras and go from there. Obviously there was one woman still kept alive and kidnapped so we wanted to know exactly what was so special about Harleen Quinzel. We rewinded the tapes and found recordings of her's and The Joker's sessions. We weren't coming up with anything plausible until we found one in particular that really gave us an idea of why exactly she was alive."
The following is legitimate footage from Dr. Harleen Quinzel's office and was confiscated as evidence from Arkham Asylum.
Harleen Quinzel sat across from her patient, staring at him as if he'd just saved her life.
"Why're you so smiley?" He asked her and she held back the smile that threatened to curve her lips upward.
"I got your flower's last night." She explained and he smirked.
He noticed she was holding something in their lap and he leaned forward, his straightjacket constraining him more than he appreciated.
"What do ya got there?" He asked her and she timidly pushed a blonde hair behind her ear and perched her glasses further up on her nose.
"I got you a kitty." She pulled a small stuffed animal cat from her lab coat pocket and he grinned widely.
"Oh, how thoughtful." He praised her and she leaned across the table and pressed her lips to his, hotly.
He pulled away for a moment to rest his forehead against hers.
"Will you do something for me?" He asked her.
"Sure, anything." She immediately replied. "I mean, yeah."
He smiled again, kissing her once more with just as much passion as the first one they shared.
"I need a machine gun." He whispered and her eyes snapped open.
"A-A machine gun?"
Stella Valmanta
"A machine gun! He asked for a machine gun and she was very obviously stunned and was weighing her options. She had it in her mind that all he wanted was his freedom. He wouldn't hurt a fly, he wouldn't hurt a soul as long as they didn't come at him first, all he wanted was his freedom. She was naively under that impression and sure enough got him what he needed and gave his posse a copy of her security card so they could get into the building and get their boss out. To look at the facts, to look at the information spread before you as a reporter, you look at this case and all the elements that go into it and can't help but think, 'how does someone so beautiful, so intelligent, so strong and cunning, be so lovesick and stupid enough to believe a word that comes from this monster's mouth?'. The most pathetic and sad part about all of this, isn't the victims of this man's crime, it isn't the victims of Harley's crime, it isn't the fact that he completely changed this woman, it's the fact that she had to have known to some degree what she was getting herself into and she allowed it to happen. She was not an innocent victim in The Joker's game of power, she was a player in the same game and she was determined to win. She just wasn't very aware that he had the whole thing planned before she even became his doctor."
Next time on GOTHAM CITY CRIME ORIGINS: HARLEY QUINN
Dr. Joan Leland
"I sat there and stared at her, not believing she had really just said that about her own mother's death and I knew this was not the Harleen I had been friends with before."
Stella Valmanta
"Apparently the GCPD neglected to check the security footage to see that The Joker had completely fried her brain using electroconvulsive therapy, thus making her somehow even more dependent and attached to him and willing to do all the more work to make him happy."
Bernise Willohby
"The biggest 'screw you' The Joker ever gave the GCPD, as a whole, was sending a voice recording of him and Harleen having sex, and you could hear very visibly that Harleen would shift from herself, to Harley, back and forth the entire time. It was far more sinister and far more heavy. Their enemy was not Harleen, it was The Joker and him alone, and that was hard for them to get into their minds because Harleen was getting pretty mean in her own way."