Giving her account

JESSICA HENDRA’S life today bears no resemblance to the nothing-is-sacred bohemian chaos that marked her childhood, when there were bong hits in the living room and piles of cocaine in the fridge, when John Belushi was a family friend and weekends were for skinny-dipping. Inside the tidy Rancho Park Spanish bungalow she shares with her husband and two young daughters, just a few blocks from the Westside Pavilion, there are no reminders of her troubled past, or of her father, satirist and bestselling author Tony Hendra -- no framed covers of National Lampoon, the magazine that launched his career, no photos of him in his glory days as the brilliant young writer and hip New York scenester, chatting up Debbie Harry at Max’s Kansas City.

In this house, with its colorful tile, Persian rugs and damp towels hanging in the bathroom, Hendra, once a New York theater actress who won her own modest fame (to Trekkies anyway) as Dejar on TV’s “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” is a full-time mom. She’s married to character actor Kurt Fuller, a regular in TV and film, whose most recent turn was as a detective on “Desperate Housewives” this season. But lately, Jessica Hendra has earned a certain media-bubble notoriety for resurrecting her family’s sad history with a book of her own. In “How to Cook Your Daughter,” published Oct. 4 by ReganBooks, Hendra describes how her father -- former editor of National Lampoon, a costar of “This Is Spinal Tap” and former editor of Spy magazine -- forced her to perform oral sex on him when she was 6 and when she was around 10, forced her to masturbate him on two occasions. Tony Hendra has denied that any of it is true, but Jessica Hendra is undeterred. The book bears the title of a Lampoon article that her father wrote in 1971, around the same time, she claims, the sexual abuse began.

Jessica’s crusade started 13 months ago, after Tony Hendra earned critical acclaim and a spot on bestseller lists for his 2004 confessional memoir, “Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul.” Outraged by a glowing review in the New York Times Book Review saying that Tony “spares us no details of his own iniquities,” Jessica informed the New York Times that Tony had omitted his gravest sins from the book: pedophilia and incest.

The paper put an investigative reporter on the case, who found Jessica’s story convincing. Next came a public editor’s column questioning the need to investigate, along with much published hand-wringing, soul-searching and conflicted back-and-forth among editors and reporters from the New York Times and elsewhere.

For Jessica, a few months later, writing the memoir was a chance to present “the quote unquote evidence” of the abuse, and to give a child’s-eye view of the sexualized climate among her father’s 1970s satirical set. She’d kept dutiful journals, she said, that she used to map her story. A friend referred her to literary agent Sterling Lord, who paired her with USA Today’s Blake Morrison, and together they wrote the book in four months. Judith Regan bought it in February and now, Lord said, a film option is likely.

But, like many childhood sexual abuse accusations, it’s a story that may never have a real conclusion. For the Hendras, ready access to the media has only kept the family’s ordeal more alive, hurtling forward in its own disturbing way.

For his part, Tony has called his daughter “pathological” and claimed that her memories were recovered only recently in hypnosis, which she, her mother, her friends and therapists deny. Tony declined, through spokesman Gregory Miller, to comment for this article.

“You reap what you sow to a certain extent,” Jessica said, perching her slim frame on the edge of her sofa on a recent rainy afternoon. She decided to speak out, she said, only after years of urging Tony Hendra to acknowledge the abuse. “I gave him so many opportunities. This confessional book he wrote was his final opportunity to do that. And he didn’t take it.”

Father’s bestseller

“FATHER JOE” was meant to be a kind of mea culpa for Tony Hendra’s oversexed, drug-and-alcohol-fueled lifestyle in the 1970s and ‘80s. Rave reviews called the book, which details his lifelong relationship with a Benedictine monk, “ruthlessly” and “brutally” honest. Radio personality Don Imus insisted his audience buy it. The Catholic political columnist and former editor of the New Republic Andrew Sullivan, writing in the New York Times Book Review, ranked it “in the first tier of spiritual memoirs ever written.” It shot up bestseller lists.

Three years earlier, Tony had told Jessica he was writing “a biography of sorts.” At the time, Jessica said, she’d already been through years of therapy addressing the abuse. She’d even confronted her father about it, but each time, she said, he brushed it off as her problem and “no big deal.”

Finding her father’s book so spare in its details of his life with her, her older sister Katherine and her mother, Judith Hendra, added insult to injury. He wrote that he’d committed “crimes” and admitted that “no father could have been more selfish -- treating his family like props, possessions, inconveniences, mostly forgetting them completely in his mission to save the world through laughter.” But this, Jessica concluded, was far too little, too late.

“When I read ‘Father Joe,’ ” Jessica said, “I realized that even at what should have been my father’s best moment and most introspective moment of his life, he still was not going to acknowledge the damage he had done.” She considered pressing criminal charges against her father but learned the statute of limitations on sexual abuse had expired the year after she first disclosed the incident to a friend in the 1970s, she said. So, after consulting with her husband, her therapist, her friends and family, she decided to go public. Jessica detailed her allegations in an unsolicited op-ed piece that she sent to the New York Times. Op-Ed editor David Shipley didn’t publish it but decided it was a serious enough issue to pass on to news editors, who assigned reporter Sonny Kleinfeld to investigate the matter.

The Hendras’ story broke in the New York Times on July 1, 2004. Tony, Jessica’s mother, several of Jessica’s friends, two of her therapists and husband were quoted, and e-mail exchanges between father and daughter were cited in which Tony neither admits nor denies guilt. Tony, his second wife, Carla, and an ex-boyfriend of Jessica’s refuted her accusations.

“I can only just categorically deny this,” Tony told Kleinfeld. “It’s not a new allegation. It’s simply not true, I’m afraid.”

Ultimately, Kleinfeld sided with Jessica.

“I realized for her story to be false, she’d have to be lying, the several far-flung friends would have to be conspiring with her to lie, her mother would have to be lying and, in doing so, making herself look fairly bad as a mother,” Kleinfeld said in a recent phone interview. “Two therapists, that as far as I can determine were reputable, would have to have concluded incorrectly about what she had told them and her husband would have to be lying as well.”

The story set off a debate among New York Times writers and other journalists. At first, Daniel Okrent, the newspaper’s public editor at the time, asked in a column, “What do readers of the Times (or of “Father Joe”) gain by believing Hendra guilty of abuse? There’s a difference between the right to know and the need to know and in this case, the need escapes me.”

In response to Okrent, the New York Times child welfare reporter Nina Bernstein argued in the paper that “to define his daughter’s accusation as not fit to be printed, even though we believe it to be true, is to reward the hubris that Tony Hendra has shown in publicly trading on his private transgressions to claim moral growth, knowing all along that his daughter was accusing him of a transgression more damning than those he chose to trumpet.”

Okrent then revisited the column on his blog, writing that in eight months on the job he’d “never been more ambivalent” about a column he’d written.

Then Sullivan weighed in, writing on his blog that “by erasing the distinction between what is public and private, the media is slowly making our democracy a place where no flawed human being can safely and sanely operate.” Bloggers and writers for other publications soon took up the story as well. Tony stayed away from the media fray for months. But when Jessica was interviewed by Diane Sawyer on “Good Morning America” in late summer 2004, he first demanded his own interview, then canceled and issued a written statement.

Then about six weeks ago, Tony served Jessica’s mother and her friend Krisztina Zugor with two separate libel suits filed in British courts for publicly substantiating Jessica’s claims in the New York Times. He is demanding about $86,000 in damages, attorney fees and a court order prohibiting both women from ever repeating their statements.

“It is very bizarre that [Tony Hendra] has not sued the New York Times but has chosen someone who has contributed a few words to the article,” said Nick Armstrong, the London solicitor defending the women.

Tony Hendra’s London attorney Louise Prince would not comment on the case or the reasons her client has chosen not to sue the New York Times. Tony has said nothing publicly of the suit. He hung up on a New York Post reporter seeking comment last month, and his New York agent Jonathan Lazear said his client had asked him not to speak on his behalf.

A daughter’s account

“THERE wasn’t an adult around me who cared that I was a kid -- or who had any idea that it mattered,” Jessica Hendra writes in “How to Cook Your Daughter.”

As preteens, both Hendra girls posed as prostitutes for a 1977 Lampoon cover, in platform shoes and miniskirts. Jessica chose this photo for her book’s cover.

“I felt like I always got set up, and I didn’t understand the context of things,” she said, growing animated as she explained what she was trying to convey in her book. “The sexual abuse was just an extension of that.... I understand this was the time of satire and pushing the envelope ... but there’s something about taking on children that is just so off-limits. They don’t understand. They can’t fight back.”

After the New York Times piece ran, she said, several of Tony’s former friends contacted her with observations that in retrospect seemed to substantiate her allegations. In “How to Cook Your Daughter,” she writes that one former Lampoon colleague, Ted Mann, described an exchange he’d had with Tony in which he bragged of having had sex with three women in one day. According to her book, Mann asked, “Was any of these your wife?” and that Tony replied, “No, but one of them was my daughter.”

“The most shocking moment of my life was to hear that my father had made a joke about it,” Jessica said. “I think when he made that joke I was 9 or 10.”

The effect the sex abuse allegations, true or not, have had on Tony’s life is unclear. “Father Joe” dropped off bestseller lists shortly after Jessica made public her claims. Random House, which published “Father Joe,” did not buy his next book, a novel, due out next spring.

Yet even as his daughter promotes her book, portraying her father in every interview as an unrepentant, incestuous child molester, the reputation of Tony Hendra the writer has survived. Even though the New York Times Book Review had also, in the wake of Jessica’s accusations, published a letter from “Spinal Tap” co-writer Michael McKean saying that Tony Hendra over the years had exaggerated his role in making the film, Tony appeared once again, in August, in the section where his media ordeal began. He was hired to review the biography of wine expert Robert M. Parker Jr., because, said the section’s editor, Sam Tanenhaus, Hendra had previously written on the subject for the newspaper. “The question [of Jessica Hendra’s allegations] came up at the time, of course, and there was a good deal of discussion about it,” he said. But ultimately, said Tanenhaus, “we just approached him as a skilled reviewer.”