Sherron Watkins: The Party Crasher

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For all the dial-up, the meeting proved relatively uneventful. Lay seemed composed but genuinely concerned and said he would have attorneys look into the questionable deals. Though Watkins counseled against it, Lay suggested--and eventually selected--Enron's law firm, Vinson & Elkins, to conduct the inquiry. Nevertheless, Watkins left feeling buoyed. "I felt, 'Oh, good, now he knows,'" she says. "There was a feeling that I had done the hardest thing in my life, but I had carried the torch and dropped it off." For the first time that week, she slept through the night. In late September, even after netting $1.5 million by exercising personal stock options, Lay told Enron employees that "our financial liquidity has never been stronger." By mid-October, the company announced a $618 million third-quarter loss and a $1.2 billion write-off, tied to the murky partnerships that had worried Watkins. On Dec. 2, Enron filed for Chapter 11.

When her name was leaked in early January, Watkins initially felt a rush. "People were high-fiving. They were pumped and said, 'Attagirl,'" she recalls. She signed autographs in Starbucks; her husband Rick jokingly referred to himself as "Mr. Sherron Watkins." Their daughter Marion, 2, ran around the living room squealing, "Mommy's on the news again." One morning a maintenance crew arrived to move her back up to an executive office.

The high was short-lived. Some laid-off Enron employees began blaming Watkins for not taking her concerns to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Others fumed that in late August and October 2001, after writing her memos, Watkins unloaded $47,000 in Enron stock--moves she says were motivated by advice from her accountant and 9/11 jitters, respectively. By far the most intense criticism has centered on Watkins' decision to sell her story in book and movie deals and on the lecture circuit.

But her message is not one of strict self-promotion. In her speeches, she champions the rights of the individual investor and calls for a reformed corporate-governance structure. She hopes her book will "cleanse the resumes of the good people at Enron." And the fact is, she has to make a living. She has always paid most of the bills, and in September, Rick quit his job to spend more time with the family. Now she brings home the only paycheck. And financial worries have led the couple to postpone their plans for having a second child. "Personally," she sighs, "that has been the biggest repercussion."

As deflated as she can sometimes sound, Watkins does not for a moment regret her actions. A few weeks ago, when she was unpacking the boxes she had taken from her Enron office, she happened upon a green sticky-note pad that the firm once handed out to employees. It contains a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.: "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." She smacked her palm against her forehead. "You look at it and you think, 'Oh, my God, look how many people at Enron stayed silent," she says, "That's what they wrote. And nobody listened.'"