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"M E M O R Y W A R S" - A Report From the Front Award-winning investigative reporter Moira Johnston recently published her record of the 1994 precedent-shattering Napa Valley trial in which a top executive in the Robert Mondavi Vineyard, Gary Ramona, successfully sued his daughter Holly's therapist for malpractice. This was in response to being charged with rape by 19-year-old Holly, who suddenly, during therapy, had flashback memories of 12 years of sexual assault Ö from the time she was 5 until she was 16. She had confronted her father and filed suit against him, his wife had divorced him and he had lost his job. Johnston's book, "Spectral Evidence: The Ramona Case: Incest, Memory, and Truth on Trial in the Napa Valley," is a gripping, scene-by-scene account not only of the trial of Gary's lawsuit against the therapist, but of the socioeconomic class, psychology, and culture of the valley and of the family of Gary and Stephanie Ramona and their three daughters. It is the story, too, of the "memory wars" sweeping this country, in which adult children claim to "recover" memories of sexual abuse during their childhood which up to that moment they had not remembered often with the aid of therapy and sometimes under hypnosis or so-called truth drugs. While no one disputes the distressingly high level of real child sexual assault in this country, this virtual epidemic of "recovered'' memories by adults has permanently estranged thousands of families, spawned hundreds of lawsuits and several large national advocacy groups, generated divisive debate among psychologists and memory researchers, and enriched lawyers and expert witnesses. This trial was notable in that it was the first time that a third party not the party being treated had successfully brought charges for damages against a psychotherapist, with far-reaching effects on the therapy profession. It was also notable in the maliciousness of the pretrial rumors, gossip, and social ostracism rendered passionately by Napa residents, towards both sides of the case. The allegations, alienation, and consequent legal maneuverings also, of course, destroyed a family. Q:What drew you to the Ramona case? A: I knew nothing about recovered memory, when but there was a front-page story appeared about the Ramona family. I couldn't believe it. that Here was a very senior man at Mondavi about to start a trial against therapists, charging them with implanting false memories of incest. It was just astounding to me that this had been going on for several years in our small, gossipy valley, and that their divorce and custody battles had been going on five minutes from my home for four years. I went down to the courthouse and never left for one minute for seven weeks. It was everything I ever wanted to write about it. It was the story of the American family that was accessible; I discovered early in my writing that the lawsuit process of discovery makes available to a writer an enormous wealth of material that nothing else does. It's just like opening a suitcase that spills onto a floor and all these facts and events in the background, the personalities it's all dumped before you. I realized that it was also a huge social issue that was sweeping not only this country but North America, Australia, and England and that it dealt with the very questions of does repression exist, and recovered memory and incest and huge justice and legal issues. It was irresistible.
Q: My understanding of child sexual abuse was that until, say, 20
years ago, children were hardly ever believed when they made accusations
of child sexual abuse against adults thanks to Freud. Then it
began to very slowly change, with feminists really leading the
way. Now Do you think we now could be having a backlash where
once again we disbelieve some of the children, some of the adults,
who should be believed? A: I don't think so. I think we discovered real abuse, and then went to excesses in embracing and believing it all. Now what is returning is some scientific thinking and some skepticism. Scientists will say and I'm quite ready to believe it, and scientists will say, that the vast majority of forgotten child abuse is within the rubric of "ordinary forgetting and remembering'' that all of us experience...and that is real. We have to pay attention to the genuinely abused child who falls into his or her loss of memory of these events they may not be serial events, they may be for a couple of years as a child, two or three or five; but generally not, as with Holly, twelve years of alleged horrendous and increasingly grotesque abuse. In cases where actual abuses are forgottenbut if they are forgotten, these tend not to have been over as long a period of time without and this is very important without anyone else ever seeing anything to corroborate it. Also, you have Holly'sher life progressing in a fairly normal path during the time she later saysremembers that she was being abused, and you have no other member of the family or any other girl child in the neighborhood having any sign or any memory at all which is most unusual...and there's no record of Gary's having touched anyone else.
Q: So, what is your conclusion about Holly's memories? A: We'll never know definitively if they're false or true, but the jury found them "more likely than not'' to be false. After three years of research, I agree. Hers fit the pattern which is now being broadly discredited of young women who report "massive repression'' of acts of incest as the acts presumably occurredthey occur, not once but dozens or hundreds of times over periods of many years, up to and including events such as - as was reported by Holly Ramona of forced oral copulation with the family dog, which would seem memorable. This, to my mind, dubious discredited theory holds that such events but these would then be instantly repressed, they and would slumber in the unconscious, being manifested as manifesting themselves as symptoms of eating disorders, or bad sexual relationships or any number of things that could be explained by a thousand other things. And Then, triggered by some event at some point, they begin to return as flashbacks, developing into full reliable memories. And It is the claim of reliability of these memoriesof them in such cases that I think has done the most damage.
Q: Holly, her sisters, and her mother continue to adamantly proclaim
Gary's guilt and the truth of Holly's memories. One sister has
written a letter that is quite anguished, mentioning angrily that
society is still "enthralled'' by the pain of her family. How
does that makes you feel? A: I feel my coverage of their story I feel was as fair, sympathetic and even-handed as any writer is going to give them. Several friends of theirs -not in the family's inner circle - told me that when they (the friends) read the book they still can't tell what "side'' I'm on. I spent three years of my life on this book. I would not have written it unless I had won the trust in the stories of both mother and father. I lived both sides as fully as I could both sides. I knew the valley, had lived in the valley for many years, and I felt that if I betrayed the truth I was finding and the voices that were talking to me, I felt I couldn't continue to live there. Because I was a neighbor, I believed I was going to be held to a higher standard than a carpet-bagging journalist who might come for the sensation, do a quick hit and leave - as many, many of the media did on this story. Examining life's dark side, its disasters, to try to give it form, meaning, insight, is what writers have always done, and I think it is their social job. The fact is, the Ramona women found themselves caught up in a widespread and divisive social controversy that has damageddamaging at least 20,000 families in this country. The moment Holly Ramona sued her father, her privacy was lost. The world was at her trial in 1994. Also, I fear they are prolonging their own pain, with Holly's current lawsuit, her second against her father (the first was dismissed because she claimed that all her memories came from a sodium amytal interview which is not permitted in court). If her case goes to trial in January 1998, as it's scheduled, with her high-profile celebrity feminist attorney Gloria Allred, it will be a media circus comparable to the O.J. Simpson trial. That is not a protection of privacy.
Q: So, How have you and your book been received in the Napa Valley? A: I've heard nothing from Stephanie and her friends since the book. But there's been an extraordinarily positive response from some of their friends, not from the inner circle of their friends but from some who've said to me, "Look, I know this valley and now I understand so much more about what happened. And you've given such dignity to these women.'' But I do know there have to be people out there who will be profoundly hurt by this book because, let's face it, I name some of the fine women of the valley as the perpetrators of a witch hunt. I could not avoid saying that. And I would not have said it had I not had documentation for it.
Q: Tell me a little about Holly. A: By the end of her high school years, she was a profoundly unhappy child. You have this family Ö on the surface, the "perfect family,'' but underneath, lots of tension and lack of communication, and this child, full of desperation in this land of bounty - with the father earning half a million dollars a year, - BMWs for her sixteenth birthday. But none of this was providing her with any kind of happiness. There were probably some genetic components in her bulimia and her depression, mixed with theher culture of excess. Also, we all know Holly is an incredibly honest child. Everybody knows this and I believe this of Holly Ramona. She was a disciplined, obedient, truthful child. And I think that's one of the reasons that the mother and the daughters and a lot of neighbors believed her.
Q: You were able to describe the whole family in great personal detail. Much of your book focuses on the Holly's parents and their relationship. You obviously came to know both pretty well. A: That was what, to me, was so great about being able to spend time with both of them. I didn't want this just to be a story of a trial and a tragedy. I felt if it was worth telling, it had to be told down from square one, from their births, from their childhoods, from their meeting, mating, child-bearing, development of family, in order to understand who they were when this came and how it could happen to them and how it could unfold as it did.
Q: I thought the way you did this was a wonderful part of the book. I felt like I got to almost move into this community, this culture, this class, this family. A: Well, you know, Marya, what I felt was important is that we've read a lot of horror stories about families, but those of us who live lives of middle-class comfort and privilege - let's face it - often feel immune from the worst we see of life. I could see that in this story it was all of us. This was a story of Napa Valley, of this nation's suburbs, its middle class, it's upper middle class. It was a story of many of us.
Q: In your book, I thought Gary came across as externally charming but obnoxious and controlling to his family. It seemed that you were "conned'' by him, and excused his negative behavior. A: On the other hand, I was tougher on him than my own experience of him would have led me to be, because I let the jury speak for me in many respects. I had known of Gary for a long time. I never knew him personally but I'd run into him at wine events, as anybody does over the course of many years in the Napa Valley. Most people who know Gary describe him as a "great guy.'' In 20 to 25 hours of interviews I saw a consistently polite, decent person. But the jury - they watched him for seven weeks - perceived him as intrusive and arrogant. I let them speak because they were a very disparate group of 12 people and I thought their view was a very interesting measure of him. Even those who believed he was innocent were tough on him.
Q: How do you explain that he claimed to not didn't remember any of the bad things that happened in their marriage that she claimed to remembered? A: Well, Part of it may be the old beloved word, denial. Part of it may be that these things did not happen. And then, To me, the more likely thing is that Stephanie perceived events differently than he did. Any of us in relationships know that men and women often interpret the same events very differently. I think this was carried to extremes in their marriage. Remember "Rashomon'' - a murder told four ways by four witnesses, to fill their own needs and biases, and their own perceptions of what happened. And The Ramonas' life was Rashomon. They lived under the same roof for 25 years, but they lived on different planets. I think sometimes things in which there was some truth, you could take the basic events and say, OKokay, this happened. But Stephanieshe was not secure in herself. She would truly perceive them as being - what would it be? -less thoughtful to her, more exploitive of her, less sensitive to her, than he would honestly perceive them.
Q: So you felt... A: That she was trapped in a life before she knew she should have one. She had no education, she had no life of her own, and she speaks of it herself. I always felt great empathy for her. She, more than many women, truly lacked confidence. I liked her so much and I felt such sympathy for her because I come from that generation. We're women of the '50sfifties. Even though she's younger than I am, she's a woman of the fifties who was caught. She didn't read the "Feminine Mystique'' soon enough.
Q: One aspect of the Ramona family that you revealed was their total emotional isolation. The thing that touched me the most in the book was when Stephanie realized that she and her daughters had never had a real conversation. That was the most astounding comment. A: This is what I liked about Stephanie. Again, she felt such guilt and probably suffered more than she needed to, but she was willing to look inside herself and say these things to me - that she'd thought about it and talked to her daughters and had to admit that she couldn't remember one time when the family had ever had a "real'' talk. And so, rather than disrespect these women, I hope I gave them the dignity of really having the reader understand who they were and where their feelings came from.
Q: You mentioned earlier that Holly had filed a second lawsuit. What's that about? A: Holly's lawyer now argues, in the briefs submitted to the Court of Appeal in L.A., that Holly doesn't know if her memories are true or false, all memories are fallible, so let's let a jury decide. This is the popular, trendy new argument Ö and I don't say this lightly - which is now being used in other memory lawsuits. This strategy is to now call her memories ""ordinary fallible memory.'' But it comes after making the accuracy of her memories the basis for the confrontations, lawsuits, seven years of hate and war that destroyed a marriage, a family, her father's life. ...coming after arguing in court an elaborate theory that the truth of her memories was due to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, traumatic amnesia, repression, dissociation.
Q: Now, if you could redo history... let's say this young woman believes she's been raped by her father and let's say we concur that the legal system is the wrong place to try to solve these problems... A: It's a terrible place...
Q: What do you think should be done - should have been done - instead? A: I think it should have - and again I'm going to quote the jury - it should never have Q:But another kind of therapist? A:Yes. A family therapist who could have worked with the dynamics of the entire family. I think who should have been found is not Marche Isabella, a brand-new master's-level, fundamentalist Christian therapist who had 2,000 patients in her first fewtwo years of practice, and who had no special training in working with families or with eating disorders or with memory. They needed awfully good help. They couldn't do it themselves. The minute Holly filed her lawsuit, then the train began that led to more tragedy. And yet, I don't blame Holly for filing. Because, again, she's a bright, obedient child, who did exactly what all the self-help books and the powerful therapeutic climate were telling her to do: Confront her father. Make him own his abuse. And sue him because that will force him to confess, to get help, and you'll feel better for it. And so she did precisely what thousands of other young women were doing. Q: But maybe family therapy could have uncovered .Ç.Ç. A: Even those who believe in recovered memories, some of the leaders in that field, now argue that the worst thing you could do is sever all links with your family or, in this case, the abuser. Even if a father confesses abuse, there are often ways in which something beneficial can come from maintaining that relationship. I tend to listen to that general shift in belief now. Enormous reforms in therapy have come from the Ramona trial.
Q: Such as? A: Well, the unprecedented suing of a therapist by a nonpatient father put a sense of threat into the entire mental health profession. The finding of malpractice against a family therapist, a psychiatrist, and a hospital led to immediate reforms from the insurance companies, which now, since many other third-party suits have followed Ramona, find themselves paying multimillion dollar awards against therapists.
Q: What's the change with malpractice insurance? A: That they will not write insurance for therapists unless they get signed consents that the patient understands the unproved nature of this therapy to heal, what it will consist of, that the use of sodium amytal and hypnosis does not produce reliable memories, it may produce truth but it may produce more fantasy. And that confrontation is not a recommended technique. Almost every technique used by Marche Isabella has now become part of a standard form of ""no-no's.''
Q: Really? A: And the use of making notes, tape recording, even videotaping, Ö which was either not done or done very shabbily in the case of Ramona, Ö is now recommended. And higher training, more attention paid to the apprentice period of 3,000 hours.
Q: What's happening in California? A: Within California there are just the beginnings of reform. But in a number of states, the states themselves have withheld the licenses, called back the licenses of therapists, in the beginnings of an effort to bring state-level reform of the process of training, licensing and monitoring the quality of professional therapists. So, many,
Q: You feel then that, as mistaken as this lawsuit was in its impact
on the family, it was healthy for the therapy profession? Have
you talked to therapists? A: Oh, so-called "good" therapists have been hurt badly by this.Just as dubious memories have hurt the cases with genuine, forgotten but genuine abuse. The well-meaning but inept therapist who has promoted recovered memory hysteria, has hurt the responsible, well-trained, sensitive therapist. So, bad things being done have hurt the best on both sides. Marya Grambs, an East Bay writer, is also a program developer and organizer on health, violence prevention and women's and girls' issues. |
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