Abuse Memories True or False? We Seldom Can Be Sure

John had read my column last week about Sandy, who at 30 remembered for the first time that her father had abused her for years when she was a child and young teen.

“I wanted you to hear another side of the story,” John said when he called.

We talked for nearly an hour this week, about himself and the other 50 or so members of the Orange County chapter of False Memory Syndrome, a group of parents who say they stand falsely accused by their children of molesting them as youngsters. John is 62, with gray hair and beard. His story began about 6 1/2 years ago, he said, shortly after his middle daughter gave birth to a girl. John saw the infant at 8 weeks old but shortly thereafter got a phone call.

A social worker told John he could no longer visit his granddaughter. The reason, she said during a later interview, was that his daughter had accused him of having had sex with her more than 20 years ago when she was a child. “I about fell out of my chair and was in a total state of shock,” John said. “The conversation lasted 10 minutes, and I told her the charge was absurd.”

A couple of days later, he got a letter from his former wife of 25 years, detailing the allegations, relayed to her from their daughter. He mailed the letter to his daughter’s husband, thinking maybe he could shed some light on things. Instead, his son-in-law steadfastly supported his wife and made it clear that John should stay clear of his granddaughter.

He hasn’t seen his daughter or his granddaughter since.

Given his protestations of innocence, I was shocked to learn that John initially questioned whether he was guilty of the abuse. “The first thing that happens is you go through an introspection that never ends,” he said. He even returned to his Midwestern town where the family lived and asked friends and neighbors if they remembered anything inappropriate.

A few months later, his ex-wife sent him a follow-up letter in which she detailed more allegations and said a second daughter had made similar claims against him.

“At that point, I was like anyone else,” John said, “thinking maybe I did something, maybe something happened, maybe I walked in my sleep.”

His ex-wife accused John of “being in charge of a multi-generational satanic cult,” he said. John believes it is his ex-wife’s and daughters’ religious fervor and the particular kind of therapists they enlisted that accounts for their allegations.

If you hadn’t done anything, I asked, why question yourself? “Looking back, my first reaction was anger and that it was preposterous, but then you think these allegations are being made against me and I’m going to have to defend myself and I have to take a close look at my life. . . . “

Complicating matters is that some professionals adhere to the possibility of repressed memories, while others don’t. For example, Paul McHugh, director of psychiatry at the esteemed Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, has debunked repressed memory. “People don’t forget important things that happen to them,” McHugh told The Times in an interview late last year.

John’s current wife is also involved in the False Memory Syndrome chapter. At times, she sounds more outraged than John about the allegations against him. “If you talk to these fathers,” she said, “they go into deep shock (when first accused). It’s probably the worst crime a man can be accused of. Initially, they get very angry. They say this is totally impossible but yet here is your own sweet little daughter, who you’ve been taking care of all your life, all of a sudden is making these accusations and you say, ‘How could someone you love say this?’ ”

*

I tell John and his wife that these repressed memory cases fascinate me, because there’s often no way to know who’s telling the truth and because the human stakes are so high.

In John’s case, however, there’s at least one more important footnote. I talked this week to John’s son-in-law, the man who refused to allow John near his infant daughter 6 1/2 years ago.

The son-in-law told me that, after his wife made the original allegations against her father, she later implicated her mother. Subsequently, she implicated him as well. The couple now is divorced. A court has awarded him custody of their daughter, with his ex-wife restricted to limited visitations.

The son-in-law said he believed his wife until she started accusing him of abuse. He says he originally went to “the same type of professionals” his wife was seeing and they told him he was an abuser and “part of a satanic cult.”

So, I asked, has that changed your mind about John? “If that much of her memories were false (involving himself), then it makes me very, very suspicious of the rest,” the son-in-law said. “I can’t say more than that.”

Are you saying you can’t exonerate John? I asked. “I cannot ever foresee allowing my daughter to be with him alone. There will always be that doubt.”

And yet you were falsely accused, I said. “As you said, there’s no way to ever know in these cases,” he said. “The only way I would ever know for sure is if my ex-wife were to recant. That would be the only resolution, and even then, who knows?”

John is not legally barred from seeing his granddaughter but both he and his former son-in-law believe it would cause too many problems with John’s daughter if he were to do so. And thus far, John refuses as a matter of principle to see the little girl under any ruse that depicts him as anything but her grandfather.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.