Doctor held in sex abuse cases

A prominent California child psychiatrist who created a controversial sex-education program and treated scores of youths referred to him by schools and social services programs was arrested Thursday evening and accused of sexually molesting former patients.

Dr. William Ayres, 75, a former president of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, was arrested without incident at his home in Northern California, said San Mateo Police Capt. Mike Callagy. He was charged with 14 counts of lewd and lascivious acts on children under age 14. The alleged victims are male, Callagy said, and are now grown men.

Ayres was being transported to the San Mateo County Jail at about 7 p.m., where he will be held in lieu of $1.5-million bail, Callagy said.

Ayres, who has practiced in the San Mateo area since the 1960s, was considered a leading expert in numerous facets of child psychiatry. At one time, a former associate said, he was considered “the leading adolescent psychiatrist in Northern California.”

He was trusted by officials who administered social services, many of whom sent child after child to be treated by him. He served on a Bay Area commission on children and families and received a lifetime achievement award five years ago for his work on behalf of children.

A tall, charismatic man, Ayres also generated a fair amount of controversy during his career. He wrote and narrated a widely disseminated, 15-part educational television series for pre-teens on sex and relationships called “Time of Your Life,” which was praised in some quarters as an honest and nuanced portrayal of love and sex and lambasted in others as overly explicit.

The series reached some 100,000 public school children and became a focal point of a raging debate over sex education in the late 1960s that spilled into the courts and Legislature. By today’s standards, much of the text seems almost quaint; it described how a man and a woman who are preparing to have sex typically lie “very close to each other and usually in a bed.” But some parents were outraged; one mother complained at a public meeting that the series was “teaching 9-year-olds how to ‘do it.’ ”

The 14 charges do not mean there were 14 victims, Callagy said; some alleged victims’ cases warranted more than one charge. Callagy declined to reveal how many individual cases the counts represent. But he said there were “several” victims whose cases could be brought under the limits of statutes of limitations -- laws that incorporate the age of the victim and the year of the alleged offense -- and “multiple victims” whose cases were too old to qualify.

The older cases will be important, he said, because some of those alleged victims are expected to testify if the case goes to trial.

“What’s so tragic about this case is that these parents trusted this doctor to treat their children,” Callagy said. “He violated that trust and violated these children. That is reprehensible.”

Ayres’ attorney did not return a phone call seeking comment.

When Ayres was taken into custody at his home his family was not present, Callagy said. Ayres’ former colleagues said he is married with two adult children. Ayres’ former associates said they were deeply disturbed by the allegations.

“It’s a very disturbing situation when a physician takes advantage of the trust that he has,” said Hugh Wilson Ridlehuber, a retired child psychiatrist who lives in Burlingame and once worked in the same San Mateo group practice as Ayres. “I always thought of it like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, because physicians have access to the insides of people. A dentist can examine your mouth.... A psychiatrist can examine your inner thoughts.”

Ridlehuber also said he was concerned that cases like this one could hurt the “standing of psychiatrists in the community.”

Ayres’ arrest comes nearly two years after the doctor, without admitting wrongdoing, reached a confidential settlement in a lawsuit brought by a former patient who said he had been molested as a patient in the 1970s, when he was 13.

That case, in part, prompted the criminal inquiry that resulted in Thursday’s charges.

Numerous law enforcement agents -- including the San Mateo Police Department and the U.S. Department of Justice -- spent more than a year investigating Ayres’ conduct.

A “special master” was appointed by a judge to oversee the delicate complexities of the case, particularly the confidentiality issues raised by looking into Ayres’ former patients. Eventually, officers were given the names of 800 former patients -- all now men -- who were treated by Ayres as boys or young teenagers, officials said.

Officials have stressed that the high number of patients they attempted to contact does not mean that there were that many victims.

One alleged victim, a 48-year-old electronics technician in the San Diego area, said in an interview that Ayres gave him a physical examination during one session and fondled him. Ayres then asked him if he masturbated, the man said; the man said that he replied that was “none of his business.”

The man said he has been told he may be called to testify in the case against Ayres, but no charges were brought in connection with his alleged fondling, which occurred too long ago to fall within the statute of limitations.

scott.gold@latimes.com