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Psychotherapist Testifies He Has Treated Scores of Victims of Alleged Satanic Cults

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

A psychotherapist who treated three alleged victims of ritual sexual abuse told a jury Friday that he has treated scores of patients who have similar memories of horrific torture and abuse by satanic cults and have developed multiple personalities as a result.

“Their stories are sad but not extraordinary,” said Timothy Maas, a former Lutheran minister and director of counseling at Seaview Counseling Inc. in Huntington Beach.

Maas denied having coached the alleged victims or suggesting to them in any way that they had ever been abused. He said he believed traumatic memories are often repressed for decades only to emerge in therapy later in life.

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Maas testified in the fourth day of a civil trial in which two sisters and the 11-year-old daughter of one of the sisters are suing the girl’s grandmother for allegedly participating in a sadistic cult whose members, they say, sexually abused and tortured them from infancy.

The 76-year-old grandmother, of Mission Viejo, says none of the ghoulish events ever took place. So far, the sisters’ attorney has produced no physical or material evidence to support their allegations.

The three say they developed multiple personalities and other psychological problems as a result of the alleged abuse. They have told an Orange County Superior Court jury that they were drugged, tortured with electric shocks, prostituted and forced to commit ritual murders and bizarre acts of incest.

Some of the abuse took place during satanic rituals more than 40 years ago in secret mountain caves, the oldest sister, now 48, has testified.

The younger sister, now 35, testified on Friday that she had also been prostituted by her parents, drugged, and sexually abused and filmed on what appeared to be a movie set, while her mother watched.

The grandmother’s attorney, Tom M. Allen, has said that while the women may believe their stories, “there is not one scintilla of proof that this happened.”

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The white-haired grandmother “doesn’t understand why she’s being attacked and vilified with horrendous things when she just didn’t do it,” Allen said.

On Friday, the younger sister testified that she had always been extremely close to her mother, but that she began therapy with Maas in 1989 after her sister told her that she believed there had been abuse in the family. Slowly, the memories began to emerge, she said.

“It was hard for me to believe that they would do that. . . I have a great deal of trouble with that; actually, I didn’t want to believe it was true, actually, but it is.”

The woman, now a sales professional living in Newport Beach, testified that she is financially independent and does not need her mother’s money, which she will inherit anyway, according to her mother’s will.

“I would not put myself through this,” she said, sobbing. “I don’t want the publicity. It scares me, it terrifies me, because I have to have a life when this is over.

“But if we don’t do something, it won’t stop, with her or with any of the other people who do this stuff.”

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The woman also said that she was terrified that members of the cult who are still living would harm her.

The women say they grew up in well-to-do homes in Pasadena, La Canada, Anaheim and Tustin, with a father who was in aerospace sales and a mother who had once been a licensed nurse. They say they attended Christian churches, and appeared outwardly to have an ordinary family life.

The younger sister on Friday sobbed violently when she was shown photographs of herself in her high school prom dress and during a family vacation in Hawaii.

“I just wish that our family was the way that looked, because that’s what I wanted, and that’s what I thought I had, but I didn’t,” she said.

She testified Friday that she had been raped at age 7, molested by a father who called her “his sexual princess,” and had twice become pregnant and twice had abortions between the ages of 14 and 16.

She suffered several nervous breakdowns, she said. At one point, she said, her parents took her to Skid Row in Los Angeles, where they lured a transient into their car with alcohol, took him home, then dressed her in a transparent negligee and forced her to stab him.

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“I had a knife in my hand and I was stabbing the man and I don’t know if he was dead or not,” she sobbed. Her parents then called her a “murderer” and threatened to turn her over to the police in order to force her to behave normally and to cooperate with the cult, she said.

The sisters and their attorney have said they believe hundreds of other children were similarly abused by cults, which then destroy the bodies of their victims.

Their attorney, R. Richard Farnell, a former Orange County prosecutor, said he hoped the suit would help persuade the public that ritual child abuse does occur, and spur law enforcement agencies to investigate. No criminal charges have been lodged in this case, and Farnell would not comment about whether he had approached his former colleagues about filing criminal charges.

Maas told the jury that children who are horribly abused in some circumstances and then expected to behave normally in other situations may develop multiple personalities. They “become different people, depending on who they’re dealing with,” he told the jury.

He said outside the courtroom he believes that trained therapists can distinguish between people with multiple-personality disorders and psychotics who suffer hallucinations. He said he believes the sisters’ memories are real.

He said his clinic has become a center for victims of ritual abuse, with up to 25% of his patients reporting such memories. He said similar allegations of child abuse during bloody satanic rituals have been reported across the nation.

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Defense attorney Allen has told the jury that the notion of abuse was planted in the older sister’s mind by her therapists. He has argued that she then persuaded her sister and daughter to go to Seaview, where they were encouraged to discover similar memories.

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