Mother Jailed, Faces Trial After Fleeing With Child : Custody: She claimed husband molested daughter; he denied it. Case illustrates the lengths people will go to to protect a child.

Nancy Hogan alleged that her ex-husband molested their young daughter. He denied it. Ultimately, a San Diego judge awarded him custody of the little girl.

The day the judge awarded Thomas Hogan custody, Nancy Hogan said, she felt trapped. What to do? Who to turn to? How to trust a court system she felt had betrayed her?

She fled. She left the country, taking her daughter with her, back to family in the Dominican Republic. A few months later, needing to make money, Nancy Hogan ventured back, alone, to the United States--and was arrested on charges of child stealing, hauled back to face justice in the very same San Diego courts that triggered her despair.

This week, Nancy Hogan, 29, is due to stand trial. She has already been in jail, awaiting the trial, for more than a year. If convicted, she could draw three years behind bars. Her daughter, now 5, remains in the Dominican Republic.

No one knows precisely where the girl is living and Nancy Hogan isn’t telling, so the case will not bring the girl back to the United States. But it illustrates the raw passions and the competing claims that scream for resolution when courts wrestle with the damning allegation of sexual abuse--difficult to prove and almost impossible to disprove.

In an interview from the Las Colinas Jail in Santee, Nancy Hogan said she is “very much afraid of going to prison.” But she said she is willing to remain locked up to protect her child’s whereabouts.

“If the sentence were 100 years, just knowing that my little girl is safe, I wouldn’t worry,” she said.

She added: “All I ever wanted was for her to be protected. I realize I failed at protecting her. That was my failure. But then the courts failed, too.”

Caryn Rosen, the prosecutor in the criminal case, said Nancy Hogan has that last part backward. The system did not fail Nancy Hogan, Rosen said. It is Nancy Hogan who failed the system by not trusting in the courts, Rosen said.

And, she said, it is completely unacceptable for Nancy Hogan to have taken the law into her own hands. “If that was the case, everyone would be taking their children to who knows where,” Rosen said.

Experts in the dynamics of child abuse said the courts sometimes put women who fear abuse in the unwinnable position of choosing between conflicting moral and legal demands.

Most claims of child sexual abuse are made in good faith and a deliberately false allegation is “a pretty rare exception,” said Nancy Thoennes, a Denver researcher who prepared a 1988 report on child sexual abuse allegations in divorce cases. The report was funded by a federal agency, the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect.

“What happens in many of these cases is that the protective parent honestly and genuinely believes their child has been victimized,” said Howard Davidson, director of the American Bar Assn.’s Center on Children and the Law in Washington, D.C. “But that parent hasn’t been able to convince a court of that.”

A San Diego social worker who interviewed both Nancy and Thomas Hogan during the divorce found “the mother’s version of events more convincing,” according to court records.

But Thomas Hogan, a waiter who just turned 40, has never faced criminal charges of child abuse. He said last week that he wanted to talk about the case but thought it was best to keep quiet. “Most adamantly, I deny the charges of molesting my daughter,” he said.

Thomas Hogan and Nancy Felipe met in 1983, in Florida. He grew up in Canada. She grew up in New York, where her family had moved from the Dominican Republic when she was an infant.

In 1984, back in New York, they moved in together. The next year, they were married. The year after that, the couple’s only child, a daughter, was born.

According to court papers filed by Nancy Hogan, Thomas Hogan was abusive from the beginning of their relationship.

Nancy Hogan alleged that he punched her, pulled her hair, burned her hands with cigarettes and shoved her down stairs. The police were called no fewer than a dozen times and Thomas Hogan was arrested on several occasions, the court papers said.

The legal briefs do not, however, indicate whether Nancy Hogan pursued charges against her husband.

When the baby was born, according to the court papers, Thomas Hogan did not make it a regular practice to feed, change or clothe the baby. But, she alleged, he “constantly insisted” on taking baths with her that led to inappropriate contact--spelled out in explicit detail in court files.

During the alleged molestations, Nancy Hogan said, she screamed at her husband. He locked her out of the bathroom, she said.

After a particular incident in 1987, Nancy Hogan took the baby and moved in with a sister in San Diego. A few months later, Thomas Hogan moved west and the couple tried to reconcile.

But, Nancy Hogan said, Thomas Hogan began “tongue-kissing” the baby. And in February, 1988, she caught him with his hand in the naked baby’s crotch, she said in the legal papers. He said he was drying her off after a bath, but there was no towel anywhere near, she said.

The next day, Nancy Hogan said, she entered a battered women’s shelter with the baby. Shortly after that, the couple began divorce proceedings.

During the divorce battle, Thomas Hogan alleged that his wife had been molested by her father for years. “I think she is very angry at me and sometimes I think she confuses me with things that her father did,” he told a psychologist in an interview filed in court files.

She said she was trying to unlock a cycle of denial and shame. She told San Diego County social service workers she had not even wanted to report the February, 1988, crotch-touching incident “due to my denial of admitting that I had married such a person.” But, she said, “Counseling sessions have made me stronger.”

He admitted he was fighting a drinking problem. But he said he had not abused the baby.

“I may have been a bad husband, but I could never do that to my daughter,” he told the psychologist. “The sun rises and sets on my daughter, and I’m not a man who could do things like that.”

During the divorce proceedings, Nancy Hogan said, Thomas Hogan called her constantly at home and at work, threatening her or begging her to reconcile.

He warned her that, “if and when he was able to gain custody of (their daughter) he would make Nancy pay for the grief and turmoil she was putting him through by hurting” the child, Nancy Hogan alleged in the court files.

In September, 1989, Family Court Commissioner Alan B. Clements pronounced the couple divorced. He awarded custody to Nancy Hogan, saying Thomas Hogan would be permitted visits only in a public place and in the presence of a third person.

One of those visits took place Oct. 21, 1989. Nancy Hogan told her ex-husband that she and her sister had to drive to the Los Angeles airport to pick up another sister, and invited him along. The baby went, too.

What followed was a bizarre chain of events. The relative who was arriving was not Nancy Hogan’s sister, but a brother. He and a friend were flying out from New York to “instruct” Thomas Hogan to leave Nancy Hogan alone, according to court documents.

Nancy Hogan’s sister left the car to find the brother. In the car, Thomas and Nancy Hogan began to fight when she refused his sexual advances, she said. The brother and friend arrived and joined the fray.

At some point, Nancy Hogan handed her daughter to her brother and frantically tried to leave the parking lot. She ran over her ex-husband’s foot with the car and crashed into a cement pillar, rendering the car unusable, according to court documents. In hysterics, she ran away from the parking lot.

Thinking the baby was safe with her brother, Nancy Hogan hitchhiked home. Two days later, she learned that her brother and his friend were in jail, charged with assaulting Thomas Hogan, and that a warrant was out for her arrest. And, she learned, the police had turned the baby over to Thomas Hogan.

At an Oct. 31 hearing, after learning about the incident at LAX, Clements reversed himself and awarded custody to Thomas Hogan. Clements declined last week to comment on the case.

Nancy Hogan pleaded with Clements to turn the baby over to a foster home. He declined, saying she could spend the day with the baby but had to turn her over to Thomas Hogan at 6 p.m.

That afternoon, the girl, nearing age 3, told Nancy Hogan she “had slept in cars and hotels with her daddy,” the mother said in legal papers. The girl also kept rubbing her crotch, according to the papers.

Believing “the police could not help her and the courts would not help her,” Nancy Hogan and her daughter left the country immediately, the legal papers said.

More than a year later, in December, 1990, Nancy Hogan turned up in a restaurant in New Jersey, working as a waitress. She had come back to the United States in June, 1990, and given her real Social Security number when seeking work. The FBI tracked her down, arrested her and shipped her back to San Diego to wait for trial.

“This case is about a woman doing what she perceived to be the only rational move left,” said Nancy Hogan’s defense lawyer, San Diego attorney Kerry Steigerwalt. Arguing that Nancy Hogan chose the lesser of two evils when she spirited her daughter out of the country, he said, “she had exhausted all available resources going through the court system.”

At a pretrial hearing last week, San Diego Municipal Judge William H. Woodward said that choice was flawed.

The law recognizes that Nancy Hogan could have reasons to flee, Woodward said. But at some point, the judge said, she had to notify U.S. authorities where she was and what she had done with the child. Instead, she was arrested, Woodward said.

Steigerwalt promised an emergency appeal. If the decision stands, Nancy Hogan is essentially without a legal defense.

How is it exactly, asked a women’s rights activist who attended the hearing, that Nancy Hogan can draw confidence in such a system?

“For Nancy to have come back to the system after she fled would have been to offer her daughter up to her husband’s sexual abuse,” said Kit-Bacon Gressitt, coordinator of the North County branch of the National Organization for Women, which has followed the case.

“To continue to look to the system at that point would have been to give up that child to a life of abuse,” Gressitt said, wiping away tears in a hallway outside the courtroom. “And now this. I’ll tell you, she’s trusted the system a lot longer already than she should have.”