Girl Tells of Beatings, Torture by Mother : Courts: The Westlake 16-year-old, who was locked in a family racquetball court, testifies in Charlotte Russo’s child-abuse trial.

The teen-age daughter of an affluent Westlake woman on trial for child abuse testified Wednesday about years of torture and humiliation, including being beaten, hosed down and forced to live in the bathroom of the family’s racquetball court.

Once, after she picked the lock of the bathroom door to escape, her mother ordered her to disrobe and proceeded to strip search her in an attempt to find the key, the girl told a jury in Ventura County Superior Court.

Charlotte Russo, 51, faces one count of felony child abuse for allegedly biting the girl and one misdemeanor count of child abuse for locking her in the racquetball court, prosecutors said.

The girl, now 16, was the first of dozens of witnesses expected to take the stand during Russo’s trial, which is expected to last four weeks.

Before the girl’s testimony, attorneys for both sides agreed that Russo incarcerated her inside the racquetball court’s bathroom and that the woman had bitten her daughter.

But defense attorney James M. Farley and Deputy Dist. Atty. Dee Corona disagreed as to the circumstances surrounding those incidents.

In her opening remarks, Corona called Russo a wicked mother who went beyond the acceptable level of discipline, physically and emotionally torturing her child for more than two years.

In addition to being jailed for months in the racquetball court bathroom, the girl was “scratched, pinched, slapped, bitten and punched by her mother,” contended Corona. The prosecutor called Russo’s conduct “outrageous treatment.”

Farley, however, described Russo as an ideal suburban mother who was only looking to instill a degree of responsibility into an unruly child. The girl, Farley said, manufactured her claims of abuse “for the purposes of gaining attention and becoming the center of attraction.”

He contended that the girl had medical troubles when Russo and her husband, Richard, adopted her at the age of 1. The girl testified that she has had heart surgeries four times.

“Charlotte Russo is not the wicked mother who has singled out one child . . . for abuse,” Farley argued, saying it is wrong to portray the victim as the “Cinderella stepdaughter of the family.”

The teen-ager, however, took the witness stand and described alleged events at the Russo’s nine-bedroom home on Outlook Circle in just that manner.

She responded to some questions from Corona with precise detail, while appearing to have difficulty understanding some others. Twice, as the girl grappled with responses, Corona asked Judge Charles W. Campbell Jr. for a short recess.

The girl said she lived a fairly normal childhood until the seventh grade, when her mother perceived her to be underachieving in school. The girl said her grades were Bs and Cs.

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Soon, she said her mother began leaving her out of family plans and making her sleep in a dressing room of the racquetball court, which is detached from the family’s home. The girl said her mother enrolled her in summer school in 1990 at La Reina High School, requiring her to ride her bike the seven-mile distance.

Charlotte Russo became even more upset with her, the girl said, when she would hitchhike to classes. As punishment when she got home, the girl said she was forced to lay on her back, raise her feet in the air and pedal an imaginary bike until she was exhausted and hurting.

By Halloween, 1992, she said she was sleeping in the dressing room of the $75,000 racquetball court full time and excluded from family activities, such as “family fun day” on Sundays.

“What were you doing when the rest of the family was having fun?” Corona asked.

“I was in the racquetball court,” she answered.

She said her mother also began referring to her by profane names. When asked what the names were, she declined to say, but did write them down for the jury. Among the milder ones were “tramp (just like your mother)” and “no good.” She said the “mother” referred to was her biological mother.

She was allowed back in the home for two days after having a seizure in March, 1992, she testified, until her mother woke her one morning at 2 and ordered her back into the racquetball court for not completing her homework.

It was shortly after that, she said, that her access in the racquetball court was limited to the bathroom, where her father had configured the lock to work from the outside so she could not leave.

But the girl said she picked the lock with the spring from the spool that held the toilet tissue.

“I’d put the wire in through the hole (on the lock), and it popped. When it popped, I thought, ‘Great!’ ” she said.

“I didn’t want to stay in there for God knows how long,” she said. “. . . It worked.”

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She said she only walked around the racquetball court and was careful to return to the bathroom before her mother returned. But she said her mother noticed that the door had been unlocked and searched the bathroom for a key. That is also when Russo conducted a search of the girl’s body cavities, she said.

Also, the girl said her daily routine included eating the same meal every day. At one point that meal was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Later, she said, it changed to oatmeal, eggs and orange juice.

She also testified that she was showered down with cold water from the garden hose on a daily basis.

When she complained about the cold water, her mother told her that she “didn’t deserve hot water,” the girl testified.

Richard Russo has pleaded guilty to a single count of misdemeanor child abuse and was sentenced to 30 days in jail. He and his wife are expected to testify in the case.

The girl, meanwhile, is expected to be back on the stand when the trial resumes this afternoon.