Oral History Interviews of Therapists, Survivors, the Accused, and Retractors. Also available in print in

Elaine Pirelli, Survivor Who Remembers Being Impregnated

Elaine Pirelli, a 38-year-old Nebraska mother of five, believed that she was impregnated by her father three times, but she repressed the memory of it all until four years before our interview. She was nine the first time and had a miscarriage, but when she was ten, she now recalled actually delivering a baby boy. To prove it, she showed me a picture of herself at ten, smiling and happy, holding an infant. She believed her parents made her give it up for adoption two weeks later. The final pregnancy occurred, she thought, when she was 15. She had, however, always remembered that her older half-brother sexually abused her.

As Elaine spoke to me, some of her children wandered in, complaining, as children will, of being bored. They had heard all of this before. Elaine spoke in a monotone without much emotional content about the most unspeakable matters. “At first,” she said, “I would shake and cry when I told this story, but now I've told it so many times, I'm just angry and determined to keep telling it the more my parents deny it.”
I had always remembered that my brother Frank molested me. He was four years older than me, from my mother's first marriage. He would sneak into my room at night. I remember intercourse mostly, from the time I was four or five until I was 14 or 15. I never told anyone when I was a child. At 16, when I started therapy, I told them, but no one seemed to think it was that important.

I always felt protective of Frank, because my father would hit him sometimes. I didn't see it as terrible molestation at the time, but the way a child would. I felt guilty that my father was paying more attention to me, and Frank was being left out. Somehow I felt it was my fault, because I was the first child from my parents' marriage.

There was a lot of tension in the household growing up, looks of anger in adults' faces. When my father would come home, sometimes my mother would allow him to kiss her, and sometimes she'd keep her back to him so he couldn't. They had arguments about my mother going to therapy, which cost $2 a session. I was woken up in the middle of the night once when she screamed, “You're just like my father! You won't let me have $2 a week for anything.” They didn't really argue in front of us children, though.

I didn't have any friends, wasn't loved or cared for by anyone. I never felt really loved by my father or mother. My mother always seemed angry with me. Oh, she would take us to the movies, and we'd go for ice cream on Saturday nights, and my father would take us trick-or-treating on Halloween, but there was no real love behind it.

My father's mother lived right behind us. She had a pond, and we would go swim there. I liked her because she baked cookies. It wasn't like great love or nurturing, but she was my grandmother, made soap bubbles for us, never hit us or swore at us. I always knew I spent some nights there, but I blocked out that she was one of my perpetrators, too. I've retrieved memories of group sex with her, my father, and my uncle at her place. I remember being around three, about tall enough to reach my father's kneecaps, and I was naked and so was he. I still can't see it clearly today, but there were some other naked people. I call them dream memories. When I first had this one, I woke up almost throwing up. Then I had the memory of this occurring.

I've always had a hard time holding jobs, from high school on. I couldn't work outside the home. I was a file clerk, a waitress, worked in a tree nursery, and every time I would last three months or so and then feel too overwhelmed to talk to people. It would build up and build up, and everyone thought I was a schmuck because I couldn't hold a job. Then a friend of mine moved in with us late in high school, and she took over my parents. I became the outsider. They loved her because she could hold a job, she was responsible, and I was like the problem. She lived with us for a year and a half. She doesn't believe me now, that I was abused by my father.

After high school, I went to dental assistant's school for four months. I was drinking pretty heavy, and I met my husband Sam in a bar. We decided to get married. I felt miserable right on the honeymoon. It didn't have anything to do with Sam. I just felt cruddy, didn't feel good about myself.

My weight has always gone up and down. I felt fat, even though I was on the thin side when I got married. If anything, we tried to have sex too often, hoping it would fix something. It annoyed him that I was always depressed.

When I was 32, I started calling a parental hot line for help. I was still having trouble with my marriage and feeling lousy about my life. I had four kids by then. I must have said something to the hotline people besides telling them about my brother Frank, because they thought maybe I was more sexually abused than I thought. They thought maybe my father had molested me, too. I would say, “I think my father did molest me,” then I would block it out again. I'd say, “Where did that come from?” I just said it to them on the phone sometimes, spontaneously.

I thought I was going crazy or having a nervous breakdown, because I had heard as a child growing up that women had nervous breakdowns, not men. I was afraid to “lose” my mind, that it would go somewhere. One day I was looking out the window, and I said aloud, “It's okay to wake up now, Elaine.” That was the beginning of my memory process. For the next four years, working with three different therapists, I had memories and nightmares of all different perpetrators. The pregnancy memories didn't come until about three years into the process.

I had a dream one night that I was fishing with my father by a pond, and there was a tunnel, and halfway through the tunnel, there was a naked baby, and I got through to the other side, and it seemed like I had made it through. Dreams are symbols, like cave man drawings. I had the pictures, but not the words. It was a slow process of putting together fragments. I didn't want the memories to be true at first, to have had a childhood like that. I remember thinking, “I wish someone would tell me I had a brain tumor, and that's why I have all these strange thoughts and dreams.” I felt angry that this was taking over my life.

But then after a while, it seemed like I was understanding the process better, feeling more control over it. I could tell when a memory was trying to poke through into my consciousness. I would be dizzy for a couple of days, almost falling over sideways. Now I don't get those feelings any more, so I think most of the memories have surfaced.

My first pregnancy was at nine. I was making lunch for school, and I remember laying on the couch in the living room. It's hard to remember that specifically, but I believe the miscarriage came out still in the sac, and the cord was still up inside of me, and I didn't know what it was. I opened the sac, and it kind of resembled a baby, but it didn't, and I dropped it. I called my father to help me. He was getting ready for work. He wrapped her in a towel and took her out back to the oil drum where they burned trash, and he told me to bum it.

That's one of my hardest memories. It took me an awfully long time to piece those dream memories together. I was in a self-help survivors group at the time, and it helped to have the support of people who had gone through the same things, to hear validation.

My parents say the child in that picture is a foster child. I know it wasn't because I remember having him. When I confronted my mother about all this, she said, “I don't want to have been married to a man like that. Your father did tell me to leave you alone with him a lot.” Later she just denied everything. She was back in denial. When I confronted my father with the photograph, he said in this evil, drawn-out, sing-song voice, “That wasn't your baby.” I said, “That kind of crap doesn't work with me any more.” Then his personality was different. “Oh, that baby, that was a foster child.”

[Elaine had attempted to find a paper trail, either for her baby, a foster child, or the abortion she thought she had at 15, but had been unable to locate anything relevant.]

I finally found an eyewitness for my baby. Just a few months ago, I located an old neighborhood playmate. She said she thought she remembered a baby, and she would try to work on the memories. It took her a week or two. I said, “Think about it and write about anything at all, even if it doesn't seem important to you.” She remembered that I was fat and that I said I was married to my father and I was going to have a baby. She said, “You can't do that, you're too young,” and I got mad and scratched her face up real bad, and she went home bleeding. Her mother remembers her face being scratched.

My friend didn't know if she believed it at first, either, because she had blocked it out, too. Now she recalls that she came to the house, saw my son, and I told her, “This is my baby, I named him Johnny.” She thought my mother had had him. His umbilical cord was still attached. She thought he had pooped out of his belly button, because she was a child of ten.

Why did I always remember the sex abuse with Frank but not with my father or the others? That's a good question. I guess maybe because Frank was not so threatening, because he was a child instead of an adult, and because I cared about him. [At the end of the interview, Elaine's husband Sam joined us.]

Sam: I'm sort of uncomfortable listening to all of this. It brings up a lot of old feelings. At first, the memories were hard for me to even grasp as true. You know, they seemed so unbelievable. I thought maybe she was crazy. It was very confusing and hard to deal with. You know, I expected to grow up, get married, be head of the household, get a full-time job, and have the all-American marriage. This kind of thing had never come into my life. She had already told me about Frank, though, and had started me realizing that there's more to life than I thought there was.

The first few memories were really hard to listen to, but I finally felt like I believed. But then I went through the same process every time she'd have a new memory. At first it was disbelief, then I'd come to accept it. But I just didn't want to deal with it—it was too much— and at some point I remember thinking, “I wish it would just stop.” A couple of years ago, I was just sick of hearing about it. Now I feel like it's just a part of our lives, something that Elaine does, and I really respect it, the work she does. I think our marriage is much stronger now.

– • –

Melinda Couture, Sexual Abuse Survivor and Wife of Accused Father

I heard this story quite by accident, while interviewing Melinda Couture, 59, the wife of an accused father. During the course of our conversation, she told me how, before the accusations came out, her daughter had told her to read The Courage to Heal. “I thought maybe she wanted me to read it because I had been molested as a child.” Then Couture told me the following story, an interesting account of the spontaneous return of a long forgotten memory.
I was in therapy in the early 1960s, when a lot of issues had come up for me. Sometimes I would go home from a session and write about things to get them in perspective. I was home writing, when I remembered this incident and was just blown away. I told my psychiatrist, and he kind of nodded. He didn't seem too alarmed by it.

The incident happened in the '40s when I was 12. There weren't any sex abuse hotlines in those days, and it wasn't something you talked about. I told no one. I remember thinking about it a long time. I almost told my best friend, but then thought, “Nah, we'd have an argument and she'd blab.” It was my 22-year-old brother-in-law who molested me. He had been drinking, and my sister had left the house briefly. It was a Saturday afternoon, and I was washing dishes at the sink. He sidled up to me and started asking if I knew what breasts were for. I felt very uncomfortable, but I told him, “Yes, they're for nursing babies.”

He continued this suggestive, inappropriate questioning. I was dumbfounded. If I could have gotten angry and swatted him with a dishrag, it would have been okay. But I froze into a kind of compliance. He was saying, “Boys want to pet, but don't let them do this,” as he gave me a free home demonstration, reaching up underneath my shirt to touch my breast. It probably lasted only a few minutes at the most. I heard a door slam, and everything stopped. I was so thankful. It never happened again. For another 15 years, until I was 27, I forgot about it until that night when it suddenly came back to me. I thought, “How the hell could I have forgotten that?”

It wasn't all that traumatic. He didn't reach between my legs or anything. That one incident happened, and I forgot it, but I never forgot the verbal harassment from the same person that went on constantly. He was a real boor and later turned out to be an alcoholic. It was like he was always trying to get a rise out of everybody. He thought he was so clever. He did the same sort of verbal stuff to my younger sister. She'd get more angry; I would just get annoyed.

– • –

Sally Hampshire, Incest Survivor Who Always Remembered

Sally Hampshire, 49, always remembered how her father molested her. She did not come down firmly on one side or the other of the repressed-memory debate, though she did believe that false memories could be induced. At the same time, she had read many of the self-help books and absorbed their jargon. She wasn’t certain, for instance, that her father didn't molest her “preverbally;” she complained of violated “boundaries,” and she spoke of “dissociating” during the abuse. Nonetheless, like many others who had always known they were incest victims, she had neither nurtured her rage nor defined her life solely in terms of sexual abuse, as painful and confusing as it was for her. She had even made an attempt to establish a healthy relationship with her father.
Sure, there were good parts to my childhood. I was close to my siblings. My mother never spanked us, never yelled at us. She was not a doormat, but she had been raised in a Pentecostal home, only becoming a Presbyterian when she married my father. So she had this deeply ingrained Biblical idea that the male is the head of the house and the authority in all things. But Mom was a lot of fun, outgoing, active. She also had a lot of problems with her weight, up and down, up and down, with very dysfunctional eating habits.

My father did not physically abuse us. I do have one memory of Dad losing his temper and tearing into my brother, but that kind of stuff didn't happen often. I was always aware that he emotionally picked on my older sister and younger brother, but he hardly did it to me. I was his favorite. Dad told me last summer that he had hesitated to marry my mother because of her volatile, chaotic family, and he was afraid it was genetic. He thought my brother and sister had more of that personality, so he constantly corrected and badgered them.

I got most of my nurturing from my father. He held and cuddled me. When he bathed me, I remember complaining about the way he washed my genitals when I was five or six. I think my father began to manipulate me early in life, handling me very sensually. It wasn't until about ten that it dawned on me that this might be something wrong. My breasts began to form. He'd put his hand under my shirt and pretend to be tickling me, and he'd touch my budding breast and say, “Oh, my goodness, what's this?” That's the first real abuse I consciously remember.

He insisted that it was okay to walk into my bedroom or bathroom any time he wanted, and I hated that. I had no privacy. His excuse was that this was perfectly normal, that too much modesty was a negative thing. This was a very vivid part of my childhood, no respect for my boundaries.

My sister and I shared a room. He fondled her, too. We had twin beds, with two desks in between. He'd talk to me gently and stroke my breasts as he spoke to me. Eventually he sucked on them. This was in the dark. My sister and I didn't ever talk about it until we were both married. I was 14 when he first fingered me. I just froze. What you do is, you know internally that this is wrong, yet it's your father, and he told me, “This is what fathers do to teach their children about sex.” As time went on, it was like, “You and I have such a special love,” that was my father's favorite line. My sister had a more assertive, aggressive personality and could put him off more. I was the caretaker, took care of the emotional needs in the family.

The abuse was very confusing to me. He never exposed himself or asked me to touch him. He only attempted to give me pleasure. I didn't even realize until much later that I got off easy compared to many other incest victims. I was ashamed for years to tell my story. I would dissociate, zone out, I would try to shut my body down. I knew that my body was responding and it felt good, and I felt it shouldn't be responding.

Dad would continue to come into my bedroom, but the older I got, the more careful he got about it. He would walk into the bathroom while I was bathing, when no one else was home. He only touched me at night, though. I didn't really recognize the consequences until I got married. Sometimes at night, when my husband reaches out to me, I jump. When he touches me in certain ways, I freeze. I kept talking myself through it, and I found relief by drinking.

When I was in college, at age 19, I had a serious boyfriend, Jack, and I decided I wanted to lose my virginity to him. We went to a romantic, secluded cabin, and we got hot and heavy, and suddenly he jumped up and said, “No, we can't do this!” He was a good Catholic. Then he said it was getting too serious and we had to break up. I was devastated. When I went home, it happened that only my father was there. Dad was very sensual, lovey-dovey, non-sexual but very erotic, even his hugging. I told him about Jack, and he was very sympathetic, pulled me onto his lap in a chair to comfort me. He didn't try to molest me, he just came across as caring, concerned, and thoughtful.

The next morning, I woke up and he heard me stirring and called out, “Why don't you come crawl in bed with me?” I hesitated, then went and got in bed. He hugged me and stroked me sexually. He had an erection. That was the first time I was physically aware of it. I was getting very aroused and thought, “I have to get out of here.” I went back to my room and masturbated, which I always did after he fondled me. I thought, “This is sick.”

It began to dawn on me that if I didn't get away from him, I would begin to initiate. A year later, my mother joined a fundamentalist cult, and my father was overseas, but he was coming back for Christmas. I was so scared and terrified, I thought I was becoming demon-possessed. Certain things the minister said stirred things up. On Christmas Eve, I went to talk to the minister and his wife, and I told them about my father. I was shaking all over and trembling. I could hardly talk. They were very sympathetic and asked if my mother knew this. I said no. They said, “You need to go home and tell your mother.” I said, “I can't, she'll divorce him.”

But I did tell my mother. She looked at me and said, “Oh, my God, I suspected something like this.” I felt the whole world drop out from under me. She had known and not protected me! My God, I thought, she has abandoned me also. Betrayed me. It was like I was outside up above the house in the dark night, looking down at myself talking to her in the bedroom. Talk about numb! I went numb for about ten years.

My mother never talked about the abuse after that night. But she moved into my bedroom and arranged for me to move into someone else's house when he came home, and she divorced him. I had to bury my feelings of guilt for breaking up the family.

I wanted to have a healthy relationship with my father, but for years I didn't see him, and I only wrote polite letters, telling him what my children were doing, stuff like that. Finally, I went to see him and said, “Dad, I have to talk to you about the past. I have to know why, when we had such a good relationship, when you were such a good father, why did you do that?” He said, “You know, sometimes people just happen to be born father and daughter, but the love transcends it.” I was just sitting there with my mouth hanging open. He said, “I never meant to harm you.” He was sorry, but he was still making excuses. He couldn't say, “I abused you, that was incest.” I was just sitting there bawling.

But I finally felt in control. Until I confronted him, there was a part of me that was afraid of him. That's the complexity of an incestuous relationship. It was so sensual, and he was the source of the nurturing and cuddling I knew. I said, “Dad, can you imagine the friendship we could have had if you hadn't brought sex into it?” It was a breakthrough for me. I've never been afraid again that I would ever give in to him.

Since then, we've grown closer over the years as I continued to probe him. The irony is that I can talk to my father about anything. I have had to learn what's inappropriate, that it's not okay to talk about my sex life with him. Three years ago, he made a comment when he saw me in a bathing suit. He said, “I always liked you in a bikini.” I felt this rage rise up in me. I've always been clearheaded with him, cool and calm. When I got home, I typed a six-page letter, saying “Don't you ever, ever make a statement like that to me again. It shows you still don't understand the whole framework of our relationship.” He called me and apologized and said, “I guess I really don't understand yet when I'm being inappropriate.” He was sincere, but his self-awareness only goes so far.
Chapter 3a: The Accused

I know thou wilt not hold me innocent.

I shall be condemned;
why then do I labor in vain?

If I wash myself with snow,
and cleanse my hands with lye,

Yet thou wilt plunge me into a pit,
and my own clothes will abhor me.

—The Book of Job (9:28-31)

Interviews in This Chapter:
Hank and Arlene Schmidt, accused parents,
and Frank Schmidt, their son

Philip Marsden, British accused father
Bob Sculley, accused father
Julia Hapgood, wife of accused
Dr. Aaron Goldberg, accused father

Harold Brightwell, British accused father
Joe Simmons, accused father
Gloria Harmon, accused mother
Bart Stafford, accused sibling
Rhonda and Paul Hallisey, accused by facilitated communication
It's difficult to convey the horror of being falsely accused. As Franz Kafka's character Joseph K. discovered in The Trial, condemned but innocent people begin to believe they must have done something wrong, especially if the particulars are never specified.¹⁷ Almost all of the accused parents represented in this chapter questioned their own innocence at one point or another. After all, it was their own beloved children who were arrayed against them. Like Paul Ingram, the policeman whose tragic story was recounted in Lawrence Wright's book, Remembering Satan (1994), they thought, “My girls know me. They wouldn't lie about something like this.”¹⁸ Some, like Ingram, fell under the sway of zealous therapists/interrogators and confessed to crimes that they never committed.^19 In this chapter, for instance, Joe Simmons explains how he came to believe that he had been the high priest in a satanic cult that abused his son Johnny. Fortunately, most parents eventually concluded that they did not overtly sexually abuse their children.

Yet when they had been attacked so ferociously, when they had been called a perpetrator and told that they stole their children's innocence, robbed them of their childhood, many accused parents began to believe it on some level. They must have done something pretty bad. As Joe Simmons observed, “One minute, I was a responsible member of the community, trying to be a good father, and the next I'm like Charles Manson.”

When “crunch time” arrives, accused older brother Bart Stafford observed, people often found that their friends and even family members turned on them. People don't want to believe that a completely innocent person could be accused of such an awful crime by his or her children. If that were true, it could happen to anyone—it could happen to them. Thus, in a variation of the familiar blame-the-victim scenario, Job's friends, his supposed “comforters,” enacted this drama long ago. Eliphaz asked Job, “Think now, who that was innocent ever perished? Or where were the upright cut off?” Job understood what he really meant. “You see my calamity,” he told Eliphaz, “and are afraid."²⁰

Yet anyone could be accused of incest without any foundation in fact, given the proper circumstances. The one characteristic shared by the majority of accused parents was that they were—disproportionate to the overall population—mostly middle to upper-class educated Caucasians with the initial ability and willingness to pay for their children's therapy.^21 Aside from that, they did not appear to have a great deal in common. At the FMS Foundation meetings, octogenarians who never spoke about sex with their children sat next to accused parents in their 40s or 50s whose parenting philosophies were completely different. Some were exceptionally close to their children; others were emotionally or physically distant. Some were strict with their children, others permissive. Many remained in intact, secure marriages; others were either long-divorced or tolerated poor relationships. The only common denominator appeared to be a troubled child who sought therapy.

A third of the parents who contacted the FMS Foundation never learned exactly what their children thought they did. Others found out the precise allegations by word-of-mouth or, like the Hapgoods, by snooping. Not knowing what they were supposed to have done was maddening. They were left guessing, wondering whether it was something really awful or only a hug or a look misinterpreted as “emotional incest.” It could actually be a relief to know the worst, to be accused of satanic ritual abuse. At least then they knew they didn't do it—unless, of course, they believed that they, too, repressed the memory.

In many cases, there was a sibling domino effect.^ One daughter retrieved incest memories and told her sisters. Some of them not only believed her, but sought therapy to find their own memories. After all, if the father did this to one daughter, isn't it likely he would have done it to the rest? Indeed, if he was such a pedophile, perhaps he also assaulted his son. That's how Frank Schmidt, whose story follows, briefly came to believe that his father had sodomized him. The cases in which multiple siblings cut off all contact were particularly difficult. Not only had the parents lost more, but observers usually concluded that the allegations must be true. Otherwise, why would several children be saying the same thing? (Of course, even if massive repression could occur, what are the odds of several siblings failing to recall extensive abuse?)

Most of the parents I interviewed oscillate between anger and compassion for their children. With time, they usually understand that their children were not primarily at fault. They had been “duped,” as Arlene Schmidt put it, by their therapists and self-help books. Some, like Julia Hapgood, did not totally forgive their children. “Everyone is responsible for what they do,” she said, admitting that there were days when she hated her daughter. Another bitter woman wrote to me that her daughter had thrown her mother away, and now her daughter didn’t have a mother to come back to, as far as she was concerned.

Certainly, such bitterness was understandable. Therapists and books encouraged accusing children to act as spitefully as possible. Accusatory letters often arrived on special occasions such as Father's Day, Thanksgiving, or Christmas. One mother told me that her daughter had dumped on her on Mother's Day of 1991; the mother later discovered that one of her best friends had received a similar bomb on exactly the same day.

On the other hand, some accused parents appeared to be almost inhumanly compassionate. I didn't have room for Doug Ellison's full story here, for instance, but it was remarkable. The 75-year-old retired clinical psychologist was accused by Flo, one of his four daughters, but he lost all of his children, who believed their sister. Then Flo contracted cancer. She finally agreed to see her father, but Flo died at 38 while he was driving across the country to be by her side. At the memorial service, another daughter passed out photocopied letters from Flo accusing her father of incest, so he wouldn't “get away with it,” as she put it. Despite all of this, Ellison did not blame his children, or even their therapists, whom he saw as victims of dogma themselves. “I don't think anger serves anybody here,” he told me.

It is difficult not to blame therapists, however, especially when so many hurt, bewildered parents sought counseling themselves, only to be given advice similar to Gloria Harmon, whose son Robert accused her of incest: “Acknowledge that Robert is entitled to his feelings, they are valid and he is hurting. Seek to understand what you did and are doing that hurts him.” Either that, or, as with the Schmidts, the therapist gave them John Bradshaw books and encouraged them to discover how they were abused as children.

Many parents were sued by their children in either civil or criminal courts. Because of the enormous legal costs, quite a few cases were settled out of court, even though the parents privately admitted no wrong-doing. I interviewed Elbert and Josephine Wells, for instance, who were 89 and 83 respectively. Their 53-year-old daughter confronted them at her aunt’s 50th wedding anniversary celebration, then sued. They settled out of court, primarily because of their advanced age. “We don't want years of court appearances and stress,” Josephine explained. Other accused fathers, such as Jack Collier of California, refused to give in to false allegations. At great expense, Collier won his case, but he has still lost his daughter.²² Still others lost their cases and found themselves in jail, massive debt, or both.^23

Some parents were so devastated that they could barely drag themselves out of bed every morning. In his 1994 book, What You Can Change and What You Can't, psychologist Martin Seligman offered the bleakest prospects for those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. His prime example was a couple whose 14-year-old son was killed in an automobile accident; the parents could not shake their grief. The mother was suicidal, and the father couldn’t talk about it.²⁴ The situation of accused parents was analogous and, in a way, worse. At least with death comes closure, finality. Accused parents lived with the constant knowledge of loss that was needless, angry, and on-going. It was hardly surprisingly that to meet a couple such as the Schmidts in this chapter. Their lives were, as Hank Schmidt put it, “in the toilet.”

Quite often, it was the wife of an accused father who took the most active role in fighting the therapist, seeking reunion with the child, and declaring her husband's innocence. There are several possible explanations. Perhaps the men were so shattered by the experience that they could not deal with it. Or maybe it's just that males in our society don't generally deal with such emotional issues very well. Finally, it is possible that some wives needed to keep asserting their husband's innocence because they inwardly wondered whether he really did molest the children—a possibility most of them entertained at the beginning, at least briefly.

Some wives did believe the charges, and marriages blew apart. Thus Bob Sculley, who told his story in this chapter, lost not only his daughter but his wife. Another father described to me how he first found out about his daughter's allegations one night when his wife confronted him and said, in a shaking voice, “I know all about you and Lisa.” When he told her he didn't know what she was talking about, she said, “They always deny it.” Although she left him for a while, she eventually returned to the marriage, which continued under strained circumstances. Although their daughter would not speak with her father, she and her mother talked frequently on the phone. Husband and wife did not discuss the accusations.

A surprising number of mothers were accused of incest by their sons or daughters. Gloria Harmon's sad story was, unfortunately, not uncommon, though usually the mothers were brought into the accusations only as the memories expand beyond the father. In reality, evidence from always-remembered abuse indicates that women rarely sexually abuse children.²⁵

Because of the enormous variety of these stories and the number of people affected, I interviewed far more people than those represented here. I wanted to include Fred Orr's full interview, because it demonstrates what this process could do to a marriage, but I will summarize it here instead. Orr's case was not unusual; I heard from many other men whose marriages were destroyed after their wives entered recovered-memory therapy.

For three years, Orr believed that his wife Shauna really harbored multiple personalities because of sexual assaults by her father, brother, and grandfather. He read the section for supportive spouses in The Courage to Heal, Laura Davis' companion volume, Allies in Healing, and tried his best. Orr listened to Shauna's dramatic recounting of therapy sessions, helped her save pickle jars to smash on the garage floor to get out her anger, and even made her a tee-shirt featuring her eight alters (Goodie, Spock, Commando, Ivory, and It, among others). He hated his in-laws, ripping up their Christmas check in self-righteous fury, even though he had heard that Shauna's father was so distraught by the allegations that he often curled up in a fetal position in the corner of a room and wouldn't move. “I figured he was just feeling guilty.”

Nevertheless, Shauna began to turn against her husband as well. “She did these boundary exercises,” he told me. “It started with no sex. Then, it was don't touch, with an invisible line down the middle of the bed. Then it was off to separate bedrooms. Finally, her therapist, a Ph.D. psychologist who ruled her life, told her to get divorced.” In a way, Orr was relieved. “She'd been chopping up wieners with a butcher knife, fantasizing they were her father's penis. You should see the look on her face when she does that. I was glad to get out of that house.”

I also regret not having room for my interview with John and Thelma Sloan, who had lost two daughters, one of whom was a lesbian therapist. “The fact that Laura has a female partner is not of any concern to us,” John Sloan said. “In fact, we like her very much.” Neither daughter had come forward with details of the abuse. Both were very bright, college-educated women in their 30s, loved Anne McAffrey fantasy books, and now talked frequently about boundaries. John and Thelma considered themselves feminists, never physically punished their children, and adopted an open parenting style. Ironically, Thelma was a rape crisis counselor in the early '80s and worked with incest survivors who had always remembered what happened to them. “In some ways the progression to an emphasis on repressed memories is understandable,” she told me. “It was hard at that time to get people to believe that incest was really a widespread problem.”

One of the terrible realities for accused family members was that they could not seem to do anything right. Even the most innocuous attempts at communication were routinely twisted and re-interpreted for their clients by recovered-memory therapists. “Dear Sis,” wrote one sibling, “Mom and I have been thinking about you. Can't wait to see you again. . . . In the meantime, take care of yourself. Love, Sis.” While this may appear to be a benign postcard on the surface, therapist David Calof found sinister hidden meaning in every word. “Take care of yourself,” for instance, he interpreted as a hidden injunction for the client to kill herself.²⁶ It is this inability to break through on any level that was so heartbreaking and frustrating to accused family members.

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