Planned CBS Movie Outrages Jailed Mom : Television: Out of jail, Elizabeth Morgan believes story is based on her celebrated fight to prevent her ex-husband from seeing their daughter.

In South 1, Cell 37, on a day earlier this year in the District of Columbia Detention Center, the celebrated inmate Dr. Elizabeth Morgan received a surprise package. A TV script. Unsolicited. She didn’t know who sent it.

It was “In the Best Interests of the Child,” a grim story about a woman who discovers that her ex-husband has been sexually abusing their 5-year-old daughter. The judge insists that “Jennifer” permit “Walt” unsupervised visits with “Mandy.” Jennifer hides the child and goes to jail for contempt.

Morgan was sent to jail for contempt of court in August, 1987, for defying a judge and hiding then-5-year-old daughter Hillary from her ex-husband, Dr. Eric Foretich, who angrily denied her charges of raping the girl.

How close is the script to her story?

Morgan, now out of jail and interviewed by phone from a friend’s house in Virginia, said, “Well, first of all, the script that I saw was clearly my story for various reasons--but the obvious one is that a mother goes to jail for years and years.”

She laughed. “I mean, there’s only one person in the history of mankind who’s done that. I mean, thank heavens (nobody else has gone to jail)--but that can only be me.”

And she has sold the rights to her story to another producer, who has not yet assigned a writer to the project.

Morgan’s outrage was re-ignited last week when casting notices circulated among Hollywood agents for the CBS production of the “In the Best Interests of the Child” script from Papazian-Hirsch Entertainment, with shooting planned to start the first week of January. There is no air date yet.

Producer Robert Papazian, in a telephone interview with The Times, said that the story is about a woman going into the “underground” to hide from authorities, and then “she goes to jail like a lot of other people who have had the same problem.”

Papazian, who had met with Morgan in jail in late 1988, then said he was being interrupted by a long-distance call. An officer in his company called back later to say that there would be no further comment.

CBS said through a spokesperson: “There are a lot of stories out there of women in very similar situations. And Elizabeth Morgan’s is one. But unfortunately she’s not alone in this whole thing, and they all play themselves out somewhat differently.

“The Papazian piece is a compilation and it’s not the Elizabeth Morgan story and, in fact, we feel that the stories are so different that the network’s willing to listen to a pitch from those who own the rights, and we wouldn’t be averse to airing them both.”

Linda Otto, the producer whom Morgan settled on to tell her story, said that she didn’t know how many mothers of sexually abused daughters had gone to jail but “there are not ‘a lot’ of women (who went to jail). . . . And there’s only one famous woman and it’s Elizabeth Morgan. So who are they kidding?”

Morgan, 42, a plastic surgeon, was finally released from jail Sept. 25 after 25 months via special legislation signed by President Bush. On Dec. 2, she married her fiance, Federal Appeals Court Judge Paul Michel, and they are living in the Washington area.

Morgan said that, after a lengthy meeting with Papazian, she didn’t feel he was “right” to produce her story. Later, she said, he told her agent that CBS had given him the go-ahead to make “a generic sexual-abuse story about a mother who goes underground.”

Morgan quoted Papazian as saying, “Would Dr. Morgan be willing to talk to me about her story, not to make a movie about her story, but so I can sort of understand what happened in her case just to help, you know, get a grasp on how these things play out?”

She met two hours in the jail with the assigned writer early this year “and he told me that I was just part of their background research.”

Then the script arrived. She was outraged: “It was a travesty of Hillary’s suffering. It portrayed her father as believable and sympathetic. I thought it portrayed her suffering as really minimal. I felt it portrayed her statements as partly incredible. I thought it portrayed her relationship with me as poor and disturbed. I just thought it was a travesty of the facts about what she went through.”

The casting announcement indicates that ex-husband Walt might be tougher and less sympathetic. Morgan said there did appear to be changes from the script she read.

Is there any legal recourse? “It’s very hard to know,” Morgan said. “Mr. Papazian approached me when I was pretty powerless in jail, when I am fighting the legal battle of my life to protect my daughter. He couldn’t have chosen someone less able to protect themselves.”

Los Angeles attorney Shelley Browning, who handles rights negotiations for Morgan, said, “I think this leaves a real bad, unsavory taste in everybody’s mouth, that somebody would do this. Because this is not just another story. This is a story that needs to have incredible sensitivity in the telling.

“And there’s a real possible and maybe even probable jeopardy to Elizabeth and to Hillary by virtue of some sort of a distorted version coming out, a sort of homogenized, commercialized version of this story.”

Out of more than 500 calls to Morgan’s agents and attorneys inquiring about film-TV rights, they finally were assigned in October to producer-director Otto, a longtime child advocate who had produced the TV movie “Adam,” which helped instigate federal legislation on behalf of missing children.

With the Papazian-Hirsch project, this would be the second time within a few months that her projects were the victims of similarities in CBS movies. Last spring she directed “Unspeakable Acts,” a docudrama based on a child day care scandal in Country Walk, Fla., close in nature to the McMartin Pre-School case. In October, CBS aired a fictional drama with a similar plot, “Do You Know the Muffin Man?” “Unspeakable Acts” now is scheduled to run on ABC Jan. 15.

Otto said that she was “most upset” about the draft she saw of “In the Best Interests of the Child” because it takes a complicated issue and muddles it up by oversimplifying and trivializing it: “It made it seem as though you never know who’s telling the truth. And that’s just not true and it’s certainly not true in this case, in my opinion.”

The script was weighted in favor of the father-ex-husband, she said. “You liked him. So what it did, it made him the nice guy because she was the accuser. It stereotyped the unhappy divorced wife and, although it may not have come right out and said it, it implied very strongly that in cases like this, children are coached by their mothers to say that their fathers did something to them. It perpetuated in its way that myth.”

To make this issue appear “unsolvable and unprosecutable . . . is not in the best interests of the child or anybody else.”

Morgan said that she would like to get back to doctoring “but at the same time I feel there are things that I have to do morally, given what I’ve been through--the legal system and child abuse and the whole problem of the D.C. Jail.”

Has she had any contact with Hillary, now 7?

“I don’t mind your asking,” she said. “I don’t answer though. But I can tell you she’s OK. She’s going to have a happy Christmas.”

What did Mom get her for Christmas?

“Well, again, I give you the same answer. Because anything specific about what I do makes me nervous.”