Therapist Lost License, Kept Clients : Ethics: An admission that he had sex with two former patients cost Dana Prom Smith his state marriage and family counselor’s license. He’s a consultant now.

Dana Prom Smith has found a new calling.

Just weeks after the state stripped the marriage and family counselor of his license, he shut his Torrance office and opened a new one in Rancho Palos Verdes. There, he said, he continues to see many of his old clients, charging them $95 to $125 for an hourlong session.

What they get in return, he calls “consultation.”

“I do not do psychotherapy,” he said firmly.

Smith, 63, Princeton graduate, writer and former Presbyterian minister, lost his state counseling license Aug. 19 after admitting to having sexual relations with two former patients and disclosing confidential patient information to a third woman he was dating.

Today, Smith appears to be taking the penalty in stride. He has not lost a single client, he said.

“People are referred, not because you have a license, but because people think you’re good,” he said.

State officials said they do not know enough about Smith’s current work to determine whether he is doing marriage, family and child counseling without a license.

The state Board of Behavioral Science Examiners’ staff had accused Smith in 1989 of having sex with two patients while they were in therapy, among other violations.

In a settlement negotiated in June, Smith admitted to having sex with the women two months after they left therapy, and the state dropped all but one of the other charges. As part of the settlement, the state board revoked Smith’s license--the harshest sanction it could impose.

The state had the evidence to prove the sexual charges, said the deputy attorney general involved in the case. But Smith adamantly denies that he had sex with the women while they were patients.

Smith contends that the loss of his license has had two major consequences: He cannot advertise as a therapist and can no longer receive insurance reimbursements.

He has no plans to reapply for a license next August, when he will become eligible for reconsideration, he said in a series of interviews over the past six weeks. He agreed to the settlement to avoid spending $20,000 defending himself in a state hearing, he said.

“I don’t need the license,” he said. “You can be a consultant. I am so angry with what happened, I don’t want anything to do with (the board).”

In addition, his practice had moved away from traditional counseling in recent years, he said. He was doing less psychotherapy and giving more spiritual advice. He was also doing more consulting work.

His current list of 60 clients, he said, includes a number of professionals seeking practical advice: lawyers working on rhetoric, business executives wanting to be better public speakers, writers looking for writing coaches.

Although state officials say they are satisfied with the license revocation, the two women are angry that the baring of their most intimate indiscretions has achieved so little.

For his part, Smith maintains that the two women solicited him, and that the liaisons were ethical because the sex occurred after they had stopped being his clients. “I think I was in line,” he said.

He now recognizes there are problems in having “a romantic relationship” with former clients, even though he found it acceptable at the time. “In retrospect, I’ve changed my mind,” he said.

For example, he said, he is counseling a woman who is in “an intimate relationship” with her former therapist. She’s been repeatedly surprised, he said, as her partner reveals more of himself.

It is widely recognized that clients are extremely vulnerable in therapy and likely to see the therapist as larger-than-life. Patients sometimes fall in love with their therapists.

Counseling experts say that sex between therapists and clients--even recent past clients--is a serious breach of ethics. In fact, the American Assn. for Marriage and Family Therapy prohibits sex with patients for two years after treatment ends, and some experts believe it is never acceptable.

“Our ethics committee almost considers sex with a client tantamount to rape, and, on the other hand, (it) has some similarities to incest” in the long-lasting damage done, said Steven L. Preister, who oversees professional standards for the association. “It takes a very long time for a client to get over a relationship with a therapist because it’s such a violation of trust, and trust is the essence of the therapeutic relationship.”

The responsibility is solely the therapist’s to prevent a sexual relationship from developing, Preister said. “I don’t care if a client comes into a room, lies down, takes off all her clothes, and says, ‘Have sex with me.’ ”

The Smith case is not an isolated one. In the past five years, of 35 marriage and family counseling licenses surrendered or revoked by the state board, 23 involved accusations of sexual involvement or misconduct with clients, state records show.

Concern about therapists taking sexual advantage of patients is reflected in recent state actions. This spring, the state published a 16-page pamphlet titled, “Professional Therapy Never Includes Sex.” It tells patients how they can complain to the state board and professional associations. A state law that took effect in January makes it a criminal offense for a marriage counselor, psychiatrist or psychologist to have sex with clients. Penalties range up to three years in prison or a $5,000 fine for repeat offenses.

Three women who were to testify for the state against Smith--all mature, articulate, well-educated and generally well-to-do--say they are frustrated by reports that he is still in business. They talked about the case on the condition that they their identities be protected.

“He’s flaunting the authority of the state. . . . It’s kind of like he’s above the law,” said one of the women, Alice Reed (not her real name), who said Smith had sex with her during a therapy session.

For the past 22 years, Dana Prom Smith has filled various ministerial roles on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. He has been spiritual counselor for a church congregation, emotional counselor for his therapy patients, philosopher-leader of a religious foundation.

He still has about him the look of a convivial pastor. He is balding, with a well-trimmed gray beard. His smile is quick, his voice well-modulated, his eyes knowing.

One former client said Smith’s looks are a cross between actor Sean Connery and Santa Claus. He comes across as highly intelligent, charming, even charismatic, said many of the dozen clients, former clients, parish members and others interviewed over the past six weeks.

“He uses his eyes. He’s one of those people who always looks very directly into your eyes. He listens to women,” Reed said, describing his appeal. “I think he’s studied women very well, and he knows kind of what buttons to push.”

Another former client-cum-sexual partner, Patricia Glover (not her real name), tried to explain why she returned to Smith for therapy, week after week, and also had sex with him.

“He makes you feel good. He makes you feel like, gee, you’re really special. And that, somehow, by maintaining the relationship with him, you can continue this special feeling,” Glover said, adding that she now feels she was manipulated.

Religion has been a primary theme in Smith’s life.

The decor at his Western Avenue office in Rancho Palos Verdes is a rich mix of the religious and the aesthetic; throughout are religious objects: a set of Communion dishes, heavy wooden pedestal-style candlesticks, a colorful prayer stole hanging in the foyer. A black chair with the Princeton seal sits near the large picture window. Art covers the rose-colored walls; books about Rembrandt and Michelangelo are on display.

A native Californian, Smith returned from the East in 1968 to become pastor at St. Luke’s Presbyterian Church in Rolling Hills Estates. His popular sermons and unorthodox style generated a lengthy 1973 Los Angeles Times profile of Smith that likened the parish to “an artist-writer-actor colony.”

But Smith’s tenure at St. Luke’s begat controversy.

He resigned as pastor in February, 1980, renouncing the church’s jurisdiction. At the time he was under investigation by a special committee of the Presbytery of the Pacific, the regional church governing body, said David C. Meekhof, the regional presbyter. Meekhof will not comment on the allegations except to say that they were serious and involved personal impropriety.

Smith said the investigation grew out of a big political struggle in the church. “They saw me as subversive. I had grown quite alienated from the denomination,” he said.

Therapy became his new calling.

He got a master’s degree in marriage, family and child counseling from Cal State Dominguez Hills in 1980. He has several undergraduate and graduate degrees, including a doctoral degree he received in 1983 in the science of theology from San Francisco Theological Seminary. The state issued him a counseling license on Oct. 9, 1981.

Smith founded St Pauls Foundation, a nonprofit religious group that conducted Sunday religious services and Friday night dinners in private homes, attended by some of his therapy clients. Smith considers himself an independent minister and administers Communion.

Glover said she trusted Smith all the more because he was not only a therapist, but a minister.

She recalled his serving wine and bread to members of St. Pauls Foundation, and said, “This ritual he’d go through with Communion every Sunday--somehow I associated his having the service and going through an important religious ritual as showing he had strong and good convictions.”

The state received an anonymous complaint about Smith in June, 1986.

The Department of Consumer Affairs investigated and in May, 1989,the state board’s executive officer charged Smith in a 17-page accusation with numerous violations of the state Business and Professions Code and the California Administrative Code, involving at least seven patients.

The document alleges that Smith had sex with two of them--the women quoted here under the aliases Alice Reed and Patricia Glover--in 1983 and 1984 while they were his clients. The liaisons between Reed and Smith, it states, “took place on occasion in the counseling room, and before and after counseling sessions; the sexual relations sometimes took place in lieu of a counseling session.” Smith took nude photographs of Reed, it alleges. He firmly denies that charge, saying he has “not the slightest idea” where the allegation came from.

The accusation is not based on sworn testimony. But it paved the way for an administrative hearing, set for June, that was canceled because of the settlement.

Smith has repeatedly denied having sex with any clients while they were in therapy.

“I don’t even look at (clients) that way. The sexual dynamic between a male and female is just very different than the dynamic between a therapist and a client,” Smith said in one of 10 interviews since August.

But Calvin W. Torrance, the deputy attorney general who prosecutes many such cases for the state, called this one of the strongest cases he has seen involving charges of therapists’ having sexual relations with patients. The state was prepared to present witnesses and other evidence at the hearing that “would have proved the charges that (Smith) had sex with patients during the period that he was their therapist,” Torrance said.

Regardless, he said, it is a violation of the state code if a therapist has sex with a patient soon after therapy has ceased. “We interpret the word ‘patient’ in that statute to mean patient or immediate former patient,” he said.

Torrance agreed to the settlement, which revoked Smith’s license, because “we got the very harshest penalty. It is rare, very rare, that a settlement can be achieved for the maximum penalty,” he said.

Practicing without a license is a misdemeanor punishable by up to a $2,500 fine and six months in jail. The board’s staff could follow up on the case, but it has received no complaints about Smith since the license was revoked, said an enforcement employee with the Department of Consumer Affairs.

Glover and Reed, who were to testify at the hearing, insist that the therapy and the sex overlapped.

Glover said in a recent interview at her home that her sexual relationship with Smith started soon after the therapy did. Smith called her one evening, said he was in the neighborhood and asked if he could come to her house to discuss the results of some psychological tests he had given her, Glover said.

As she described the incident, Glover began to laugh.

“So--dummy me, what did I know?--I said, ‘Well, that’s OK,’ ” Glover said.

At the time, Glover said, she was busy professionally, but lonely.

“He must have sized that situation up and decided, another victim . . . . It felt good to have that kind of attention.”

Reed said in an interview at her home that Smith solicited her in a therapy session at his office. “There were always little innuendoes, and I thought, well, he’s trying to make you feel good about yourself. And then, one day, he told me that he loved me. I just kind of passed it off. He says, ‘I’m not talking about Christian love.’ So it kind of started from there.”

As the sex continued, the therapy suffered, Reed said.

Smith appeared to grow bored. “He was always getting up, having to make a phone call or checking his recorder . . . ,” Reed said.

Smith said the women are wrong, and that they initiated the sex once the therapy was over. In fact, the physical layout of his offices at the time would have made sex difficult, he said. An office in his home had a large glass window, and his office in a converted garage had a glass door, he said.

The settlement says Smith saw Glover as a client about once a week between August and November, 1983, and had “sexual relations on four occasions” with her between January and March, 1984. He saw Reed as a client about twice a month between October, 1981, and June, 1985, and between December, 1985, and January, 1986. The two “had sexual relations” between August and November, 1985.

Smith also admitted to disclosing confidential information about clients to a third woman whom he was seeing socially from 1983 to 1986. That woman, who was not a client, also cooperated with the state investigation. Smith said the woman obtained access to his records without his permission, but he accepted blame because he did not properly guard his files.

Smith said he agreed to the settlement not only to save legal fees, but because he is within a year and a half of retiring. He said he feels he is “the victim of a vendetta,” and said he got caught in the state’s “big crusade about no sex with clients.”

The settlement has left Reed and Glover angry at what they see as a lack of justice. The sexual entanglements caused some long-lasting damage, both women said.

Reed doubts she will ever go to another male therapist. Glover said she waited a long time before becoming involved with another man, and that she remains distrustful of both men and religion. Since the Sunday St. Pauls services, she has stayed away from all churches. “I just want to keep my distance.”

When news of the license revocation spread among Smith’s clients in and around the Palos Verdes Peninsula, some offered to write letters of support to a local newspaper.

“I said that would be foolish,” recalled Smith, noting that he has not hidden his problems with the state from his clients.

Soon after he lost his license, he asked two clients if they would talk to a reporter for The Times. One of the women, Nona Williams, said that Smith has never made improper advances to her.

“He’s really an extremely talented therapist,” said Williams, who remains a client. “He’s very perceptive in finding out what’s going on.”

The second woman, Kathleen McMaster, a client in 1986-1987, initially praised Smith’s techniques. A week later she called back, however, and said that Smith told her during her first therapy session--when she was tearfully discussing her life--that he was sexually attracted to her. And in her second-to-last session, she said Smith told her, “One of my greatest regrets in life is having not made love to you.”

Smith, asked about her critical comments, said that McMaster might have misunderstood him. In a later interview, he said he had checked his notes from the second-to-last session and found McMaster was “very distraught” at the time because of a traumatic event, which he then described in detail. He also related intimate information about McMaster’s childhood and issues she was dealing with in therapy.

Asked whether he was violating client confidentiality, Smith said he was simply giving his side of the story.

In an interview this week, he provided a further explanation. He said he had been discussing with McMaster the need to control one’s impulses and said it is important that therapists not act on feelings they might have for a client. “I certainly would not tell her I wanted to have a sexual relationship with her,” he said.

When McMaster heard what Smith reported about her counseling sessions, she said that much of it--including the “traumatic event”--never occurred.

“He is incorrect. He may have misremembered; let’s give him that,” McMaster said.

Today, Smith sees clients at two offices, in Rancho Palos Verdes and in Westwood. He continues to offer Communion at services of the St. Pauls Foundation.

Divorced a decade ago, he married for a second time in 1987.

He is putting the investigation behind him, he said during an interview in his office last month. Just that day, he had met with a lawyer client, rehearsing how that person could present a case, gauge jurors’ reactions and improve one’s style, he said.

He pulled out a flyer for St. Pauls Foundation. It advertises a series of weekend seminars this summer and fall, in spots such as Palm Springs and Westwood. The series is titled: “Mythologies, Metaphors and Alchemies: the transformational uses of hypnosis and meditation with the incested and abused: dealing with trauma without trauma, with Dr. Dana Prom Smith.” The fee is $175.

“I’m just getting on with my life,” Smith said.