Careers, Reputations Damaged : False Molesting Charges Scar Lives of the Accused

William Gillett was elected “teacher of the year” seven times by his junior high school students. He was chairman of the Industrial Arts Department. He used to coach football and wrestling. Simply put, he loved teaching.

But Gillett is no longer a teacher.

Although never charged, he was arrested and publicly accused of molesting a student at Yorba Junior High School in Orange. An attorney’s investigation disclosed later that his eighth-grade accuser wanted to “get” Gillett for giving her a low grade.

It worked. The stigma remains.

“I miss working with the kids,” Gillett said recently. “But I doubt if I’ll go back to teaching. Why subject yourself to something like that if you don’t necessarily have to?”

While sexual abuse charges made by children often prove true, across the nation a small but growing number of such accusations in recent months--against teachers, clergymen, day care workers, baby sitters, police officers and estranged spouses--have been found to be false.

Public sentiments run high in child abuse cases, and a finding of innocence or a decision not to file charges often comes too late to repair damage to reputations and careers.

Experts disagree sharply about the moral dilemma that this presents.

“I’d rather be apologizing to the falsely accused and helping him get a fair hearing than to ignore one child in need of help,” said Cynthia C. Tower, a professor of behavioral sciences at Fitchburg State College in Massachusetts, who has written a book on child abuse for the National Education Assn.

But Dr. Ralph Underwager of the Institute for Psychological Therapies in Minneapolis said: “It is more desirable that a thousand children in abuse situations are not discovered than it is for one innocent person to be convicted wrongly.”

The number of reported cases of child sexual abuse has tripled in the last four years. But child protection authorities label 80% of those reports “unfounded,” double the rate of five years ago. Many of the “unfounded” reports may be legitimate, but simply unprovable. Those that are false, however, can be damaging.

Recent changes in trial procedures have made it easier for prosecutors in most states to prove cases of sexual child abuse in court. That has caused some legal scholars concern for the rights of the accused.

As accusations of child abuse grow and gain wider news media attention, the problem is more and more on the minds of adults and children alike, and it becomes increasingly likely that, along with the legitimate cases of child molestation, there will false ones.

Accusations on the Rise

Accusations of sexual child abuse have been rising especially rapidly in Southern California, where the McMartin Pre-School trial of seven teachers on charges of molesting 41 children has been widely followed, and Minnesota, where 25 adults were charged with molesting 40 children in the small town of Jordan. James Rud, 27, was sentenced to 40 years in prison on the charges, but two of the other adults were acquitted, and the charges against the remaining defendants were dropped.

In the atmosphere that publicity about such cases generates, adults who work with children find themselves wondering whether hugging a crying child on the playground, taking students on a field trip or counseling a troubled student in private will make them the object of a bogus accusation.

“Once a case is publicized--whether true or imagined--suddenly we have a rash of these things,” said Joseph F. Kaczannowski, assistant principal at Samuel Gompers Elementary School in Chicago.

Kaczannowski used to invite a few of his students to join his family during the Christmas holidays. He would not consider it today. “You’ve got to be careful even putting a hand on a child’s shoulder or arm as you’re moving kids out of the room in a line,” he said.

A National Phenomenon?

Some attorneys and psychologists believe that false accusations are already a national phenomenon but that most receive only local attention. They say that other instances, because they occur in divorce and child custody cases, never become public.

Last month, Brian Taugher, a special assistant to California Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp, was acquitted on a charge of molesting a 9-year-old girl at his daughter’s slumber party in July.

For years “we didn’t find child abuse when it was there. Now we are in danger of finding it when it is not there,” Taugher said after the verdict. When his case drew widespread publicity, he said, he heard from dozens of people “with various horror stories about being falsely accused of child abuse.”

Gillett, the teacher in Orange, was arrested last May in his front yard, handcuffed and taken to the police station. The Orange Police Department announced his arrest at a news conference and said he was suspected of molesting “more than one” of the girls in his junior high classes.

Twenty-two days later, the district attorney’s office announced that there was insufficient evidence to file charges against him.

“I think if this would have happened a couple of years ago, the whole thing would have been settled right on the school site with the parents, the principal, the student and I,” Gillett said.

‘You Feel So Helpless’

“It’s degrading, and you feel so helpless,” said Gillett, who now works in his brother’s manufacturing business. “It’s like you’re guilty until proven innocent, rather than the other way around. It’s kind of scary knowing that anybody at any time can make an accusation like that.”

Paul Wallin, Gillett’s attorney, has represented 40 teachers accused of sexually abusing students across the country in the last year; none of them have been convicted. He runs workshops for teachers on how to avoid being falsely accused of molesting students.

“Teachers are placed in situations on a daily basis that could lead to disaster,” he said. “I have a file full of teachers who thought this could never happen to them.”

In his workshops, Wallin describes the cases of four of his clients in particular, including Gillett. “All four were excellent, caring, considerate, model teachers. If a kid was crying and needed a hug, they would do it. All four were accused. All four were exonerated. All four of their lives were ruined. And not one of them is teaching any more.”

John M. Roseman, who was a highly regarded elementary school principal, is no longer in the education business.

Roseman was declared innocent of molesting a 5-year-old girl at a Fullerton elementary school when the judge learned that the principal had removed the girl’s underwear only after she told him that she had wet herself. The detective who had interviewed the girl did not include that fact in the police report.

Although exonerated, Roseman was demoted to teaching status and left the school district to start his own business.

“He loved being a principal,” his attorney, Ron Talmo, said. “He was a very content, satisfied principal. It just all billowed up on him.”

Policeman’s Case

Michael Hailey, a sergeant in the Glendale Police Department, is no longer wearing the uniform. He was fired from the force when he was accused of molesting three teen-age boys at a YMCA where he did volunteer work.

He was found innocent of the charges, was reinstated and awarded $80,000 in a settlement from the city. But he chose to leave police work.

“It just wouldn’t be the same,” he said. “I’m glad there’s nothing still hanging over my head. But there are 15 years of my life that have sort of been edited out.”

Many child abuse experts argue that the number of falsely accused adults is a tiny percentage of the total number of cases reported and far fewer than the number of cases that occur and are not reported.

But Walling said: “We should protect our kids, but we can’t be destroying innocent people’s lives in an effort to protect our children. Child abuse is a growing problem. But all the people accused of that crime tend to get lumped together. It’s this rush to judgment that is so terrifying.”

Child Custody Disputes

False accusations of molestation are most prevalent in child custody battles, said Underwager of the Institute for Psychological Therapies, who has frequently appeared as an expert psychological witness in child abuse cases.

“The effect of one spouse making an allegation of child abuse against another is instant custody for the accusing spouse,” Underwager contended. “Usually, the spouse is never charged in criminal court, never allowed to prove his innocence and the net effect is that he is denied any contact with his children.”

The recent focus on sexual child abuse, and indications that much of it is unreported, have prompted most states in the last two years to make it easier to convict abusers. Nearly every state has abolished laws that, in effect, required a witness other than the child victim to support the child’s story.

To avoid traumatizing the victim, several states permit videotaped statements by children to be used as evidence, as is the case in the McMartin trial.

California is one of several states with a tender-years hearsay exception, under which witnesses can, in some circumstances, testify about things that the young accuser told them. In ordinary cases, hearsay evidence is not admissible in court.

Constitutional Questions

Such changes have raised serious constitutional, as well as ethical, questions.

Michael Graham, a law professor at the University of Miami and evidence expert, said he and other scholars “are beginning to be more concerned that some of these proposals are both not good and not constitutional, and that we have to be a little bit more careful in developing a response to child abuse that will reduce the trauma for children but protect the defendant’s rights.”

“You go to jail for a long time on these things,” he said.

The issue of child testimony is hotly debated. Psychologists are divided over whether young children will lie about sexual contact with adults and whether they can be induced to lie by the adults who question them.

In the Jordan, Minn., case, for example, the children revised, recanted and expanded their stories. That does not necessarily mean they were lying, therapists say, but it did present problems for adults trying to determine the truth.

As sexual abuse has become easier to prove, “there has been somewhat of a backlash,” said Josephine Bulkley, director of a government-funded project to study recent legal reforms in such cases.

Emotional Impact

“Unfortunately, cases like Jordan and McMartin have really gotten people emotionally upset, and there’s a tendency to react quickly to solve the problem without necessarily thinking about the end result,” she added.

In Minneapolis, a group calling itself Victims of Child Abuse Laws, or VOCAL, was formed in October “to get the message to other people, not so much that all of us in VOCAL are innocent, but that it could happen to you,” said Mary Lou Bauer, who is on the group’s board of directors.

“All it takes is an angry allegation from a neighbor, an angry spouse, an angry child, and that’s it.”

VOCAL receives dozens of calls a day from adults who have been accused of abusing or neglecting their children and who find themselves considered guilty until proven innocent by state abuse laws, Bauer said.

At schools and day care centers, many child care workers worry that their own behavior, no matter how innocent, might trigger a false accusation.

In schools nationwide, male teachers are being advised never to be alone with a child, especially a girl. “It’s just a liability if you are,” said Gilbert Thurston, principal of Birchwood Elementary School in Bellingham, Wash.

Divided Loyalties

“The plain fact is we are no more sophisticated about this kind of thing than anybody else,” said Lee Goodman, of the National Assn. of Elementary School Principals. “We really don’t know what to do about it. Our principals’ loyalties are divided. We have a big feeling for the children, but our teachers have to be protected too.”

David W. Bahlmann, president of Big Brothers/Big Sisters of America, said children and volunteers in the organizations are advised of appropriate behavior. For example, overnight sleeping at the home of a Big Brother or Big Sister is prohibited. Nevertheless, he acknowledged, “we have a number of cases now, in terms of allegations” among the 80,000 adult volunteers in the program.”

“It’s a very difficult field. We have to protect the child, but, at the same time, we have to be careful to protect our volunteers too,” Bahlmann said.

The national concern about sexual child abuse has also made children “more and more tense, insecure and distrustful of adults they know well,” said John Ourth, principal at Oak Terrace Elementary School in Highwood, Ill.

Some of his students have refused to accept rides from staff members, even when Ourth intervened, because their mothers have prohibited them from accepting rides from any adult.

“We have to be sure that the alarmist in us does not steal from us our basic humanity,” he said.

Times researcher Wendy Leopold contributed to this article.