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SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 7,1997 WASHINGTON POST REVIEW Another superb review for Spectral Evidence appeared in today's Washington Post Book World. Written by best-selling "true-crime" author Ann Rule, the review is posted on the Point of View site on this webpage.
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 1997 THE FAT LADY SINGS IN RAMONA CASE: HOLLY WON'T APPEAL DISMISSAL BY CALIFORNIA COURT OF APPEAL After seven tortuous years, dare we say that the fat lady has finally sung in the Ramona recovered memory case? I believe so. Holly announced Friday that she would not appeal the August 19 appellate court decision that dismissed her lawsuit against her father. The only encore that could possibly be sung would be Holly's changing her mind before the 40 day deadline (after the decision) is up. But her statements in the newsstory below indicate that she and her attorneys have taken a reality check and made the prudent decision. The Court of Appeal decision is binding law in California, and although the court chose the narrow issue of the inadmissibility of sodium amytal-tainted testimony as the basis for its decision, the waves of influence of this Kelly-Frye test will roll out to impact the more fundamental issue of the admissibility of the "memories" themselves in other pending lawsuits in California and across the U.S.
The Napa Valley Register By Mike White Register Staff Writer
NAPA -- Holly Ramona has decided against appealing a Los Angeles court decision that stymied her high-profile legal battle against her Napa-area father concerning rape and other allegations. In a telephone interview Friday, Ramona said that pursuing her legal fight could damage other lawsuits filed by victims of sexual abuse. Ramona had claimed that in 1990, when she was 19, she recovered memories of sexual abuse that occurred as early as age 5. Her father, Gary Ramona, filed suit in Napa County against his daughter's therapists, saying that they planted the allegations in her mind. A jury awarded him $500,000 in 1994. Holly Ramona pursued a civil case against her father in Los Angeles Superior Court, but last month the 2nd District Court of Appeal ordered the lower court to dismiss the case. The court said her proposed testimony was inadmissible because it was affected by the drug sodium amytal, admininstered during therapy. The court said the drug was not validated by scientific testing. Ramona said after the verdict that she was considering appealing the decision to the California Supreme Court. But Friday, she said that after consulting with her attorneys, she has decided against an appeal. She said she is concerned that the supreme court could issue a ruling harmful to other people who have filed abuse lawsuits based on recovered memories. In the 1980s and early 1990s, recovered memory lawsuits became popular and highly publicized. But in the last couple of years, efforts by foes of recovered memories have focused attention on the deficiency of scientific evidence supporting these claims. The courts and state governments also are becoming more critical of recovered memory claims. "The legal system is not prepared to deal with this," Ramona said. "It could do more harm than good." August 28, 1997 August 21, 1997 Breaking news: R A M O N A C A S E F I N A L L Y O V E R In Major Kelly-Frye Decision, a California Court of Appeal Dismisses Holly Ramona's Case Against her Father, Citing Sodium Amytal-Tainted Memories as Inadmissible in Court Three days after Holly Ramona's 27th birthday -- seven years after she accused her father of twelve years of sexual abuse and forced bestiality -- the Ramona family's tragic civil war may finally be over. On August 19, the 2nd District Court of Appeal in Los Angeles dismissed Holly's case against her father, effectively killing the case. In applying the Kelly-Frye rule, the judges rejected as failing to meet the criteria of consensus acceptance by the scientific community Holly's testimony of incestuous memories acquired under, and after, the use of the hypnotic drug sodium amytal. The court chose to narrow its decision to the sodium amytal issue, only one of several arguments for dismissal made by Gary Ramona's lawyers; needing only one cause for dismissal, the court chose not to go further to rule on the broader controversy so in need of judicial guidance: the admissibility of recovered memories themselves. But, because of the landmark importance of Ramona, the decision will clearly have a chilling effect nationally and internationally on the hundreds of lawsuits still in the courts. As all who follow the recovered memory wars know, the 1994 Ramona trial was the first in which a father was permitted to sue therapists for planting false memories of sexual abuse in his daughter's mind; the jury verdict of malpractice and $500,000 award to Gary Ramona turned the tide of the memory wars. Even if Holly's attorneys, high-profile L.A. lawyer Gloria Allred and her daughter Lisa Bloom, appeal to the Supreme Court or to the L.A. Superior Court judge handling the case, prospects for success are dim. For the Court of Appeal decision comes as a climactic cap to a summer of resounding legal defeat for recovered memories. Five Supreme and appellate courts in four states -- New Hampshire, North Carolina, Texas and California -- have, in similar decisions, halted recovered memories at the courtroom door. And last week, a jury in federal court in Houston, Texas awarded a record $5.8 million in a recovered memory case against a psychiatrist for leading a former patient into belief in 500 multiple personalities and sexual/satanic ritual abuse. The fact that the appellate court left the recovered memory question hanging is an invitation for some locus other than the courts to finally adjudicate the "memories"' scientific credibility, some forum that stands above the adversarial and politically-loaded climate of the courtroom. Since Ramona, the courts have achieved dramatic reforms within the therapy profession and have brought rigorous science and skepticism to bear on these memories. The numbers of reported accusations and lawsuits has dramatically dropped. But a lifestyle of litigation only deepens the schisms within families. The Ramonas will never heal. The ongoing tragedy for hundreds of thousands of American families cried out from the heartbreaking, hate-filled letter Shawna Ramona recently sent out to newspapers, in which Gary Ramona's youngest daughter said, "There is no chance that my father and I will ever have a relationship with each other. My mother has been and will always be my only parent." No mental health issue of our time has been so destructive to the American family than this terrible decade of the memory wars. Several of our nation's most esteemed memory scientists join me in believing that the time has come for Congress to request that the National Academy of Sciences appoint a committee to study, report and recommend resolution of the intellectual/scientic debate on which the wars hang. It is precisely the kind of job the NAS was created by Abraham Lincoln to do. Sponsors of the request for the committe might well be The National Institutes of Health and/or the Department of Justice. If, as the Clinton administration has just declared, better parenting, and protection and nurturing of children are towering national priorities, let it and Congress take the lead in urging, now, the creation of an NAS committee. Let all of us make our voices heard by urging Congress to act. And let all of us act in our own lives to strengthen the troubled American family. For it is the failure of our most privileged families to communicate and nurture their children that has, in part, bred the desperation and lack of worth and meaning that leads the "best" of kids to strike out with violence: with the confrontations and alienation of recovered memories, with the remorseless killings and gang rapes, self-mutilation, and the throwing of newborn babies into trash cans that shock us on the nightly news. The editor of Napa's daily newspaper has acted. Since reading about the Ramonas in my book -- a family that never ate together or really talked -- he told me, "We've made Wednesday 'family night.' It doesn't matter who cooks or what we do. We're together. With my four kids and my mother. I don't want to be like the Ramonas." If it sounds like a quick fix, think of how impossible the creation of "family night" seems to families so trapped in frantic busyness that, on the average, they spend less than five minutes a day talking. But simply to talk...and listen could be a giant step.
August 18, 1997 ADVANCE SUMMARY of a strong new Loftus article in the
September issue of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. I'll be posting the
entire article under POINT OF VIEW Watch for it: From: http://www.sciam.com/0997issue/0997quicksummary.html SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN CREATING FALSE MEMORIES Memory can be treacherous, not only because forgetting is so easy but because the mind can mistake imagined scenes for reality. In headline-making cases, some people have sworn they remember traumatic events -- including childhood abuse and alien abductions -- that never occurred. This researcher describes how false memories can be implanted through deliberate or unintentional suggestions.
August 16, 1997 TEXAS JURY AWARDS RECORD $5.8 MILLION AGAINST THERAPIST FOR PLANTING FALSE MEMORIES OF SEXUAL/SATANIC RITUAL ABUSE The news flew yesterday through the Internet as a Texas jury came back Friday August 15 with its swift and stunning decision in Lynn Carl's federal court case against psychiatrist Gloria Keraga. Under Keraga's care, Carl came to believe she had 500 multiple personalities and that her children were being abused by "the cult." Below is the Houston Chronicle story giving more details. This award, combined with this summer's cascade of major court defeats for recovered memories, should put the memory wars to rest. But as thousands of destroyed families know, these "memories" and the movement which drives them are nothing if not tenacious. Now, watch for the defensive response of the incest survivor machine, repeating its hollow mantra. It will attack the media for seizing on the Carl case while ignoring all the "true corroborated cases of recovered memory." It will charge the media -- as it charges any of us who have been messengers carrying the bad news about recovered memories -- with seizing on the sensational aberrations, not on the more ordinary "real" cases. It will again misquote solid scienctists to make its specious arguments that proof of repressed memory exists. The movement has reason to feel threatened. As courts have increasingly exposed these memories to scientific scrutiny before permitting them in as evidence (applying the Daubert and Frye rules established to keep junk science out of court), recovered memories have been turned back by state Supreme and appellate courts -- and, yesterday, by a federal court. The Carl award comes as a decision is awaited from the California Court of Appeal in the case that started the trend to charging and finding therapists guilty of false memory malpractice, the 1994 Ramona case on which this website is based. Gary Ramona became the first father -- the first third party, non-patient -- to gain the right to sue a therapist in a recovered memory case; he won a $500,000 jury award against two therapists and a hospital. Now Holly Ramona is trying to take her father to trial for the twelve years of rape and bestiality a Napa Valley jury found uncorroborated, as they found her memories false. Although her flashbacks verged on the grotesque in her charges that her father had forced her into oral copulation with the family dog, Holly's memories were generally of the more "ordinary" incestuous events which are the movement's last hope, for they are harder to dismiss as ridiculous and impossible as are the wilder claims, like Carl's, of satanic ritual abuse. Trying to bypass the crucible of the scientific credibility test at the courtroom door, Holly's attorneys are now claiming that Holly's memories are simply ordinary, fallible, human memories whose accuracy should be for a jury to decide. This cynical about-face comes after seven years of using the reliability -- the truth -- of Holly's memories as the basis for destroying her family and her father's life. But if the California Court of Appeal follows the trend -- if it comes down with a decision to deny the admissibility of Holly's memories as testimony into court -- I think we can truly celebrate the end of the memory wars. HOUSTON CHRONICLE JURY AWARDS $5.8 MILLION IN SATANIC
MEMORIES CASE A jury awarded nearly $5.8 million Friday to a woman who claimed her family was torn apart when her psychotherapy produced false memories of satanic ritual abuse. The judgment is believed the largest among several handed down in recent years against therapists accused of implanting false memories of sexual abuse, often involving a satanic cult. Many other such suits filed around the country have been settled out of court. Jurors in U.S. District Judge Ewing Werlein Jr.'s court, who were given the case on Wednesday, said they reached a general consensus in favor of plaintiff Lynn Carl during the first few minutes of their deliberations. But they said it took longer to arrive at the amount of their judgment against Dr. Gloria Keraga and other details of the verdict. "This verdict validates my story, and I hope gives strength to those other patients who have suffered similar abuse," said Carl, 46, who during psychotherapy came to believe she had practiced murder, cannibalism, sexual abuse and incest. Carl's attorney, Skip Simpson, argued during the trial that therapists implanted false memories that worsened Carl's condition so they could collect more than $1.1 million in insurance. "This case was all about creating victims so the mental health field could have patients and expensive treatment," he said. The jury found that Keraga bore 12 percent of the liability in the case, with a number of others identified as sharing the blame for negligence. All the other defendants previously settled with Carl or were dropped. Keraga and her attorneys declined comment and gave no indication of whether they would appeal. During the trial, Keraga, 44, testified that she didn't know if the specific memories Carl recovered in therapy were true, but said she believed the "gist" of them. One of Keraga's attorneys, Suzan Cardwell, argued the medical care Keraga provided Carl was a reasonable effort to help the patient work through severe emotional problems. Carl is one of more than a dozen patients who filed lawsuits against therapists at the former Spring Shadows Glen Hospital in Houston. The patients allege that therapists planted false memories of abuse after the patients were diagnosed with multiple personality disorder. Several jurors said they were concerned Keraga and other Spring Shadows Glen therapists failed to warn their patients about the risks of the treatment. "I think most of us felt red flags should have gone up quickly during therapy," said juror Joe Kemper, 42. He also said that in reviewing medical records presented during the trial, jurors found no evidence that Carl was improving despite her expensive treatment. "I couldn't figure it out," Kemper said. "When did the treatment end? It just went on and on." "Dr. Keraga didn't specialize in satanic ritual abuse, but she had the power to stop treatment that wasn't helping her patients," added juror Robert Swan, 31. In 1993, Spring Shadows Glen closed the dissociative disorders unit, where such patients were treated, after state authorities cited the hospital for excessive use of physical restraints on patients, censorship of patient mail and phone calls and, in one case, making a patient's discharge contingent upon safety from a "satanic cult." The hospital now is under different ownership and has been renamed Memorial Spring Shadows Glen. Carl, who suffered from depression, testified that during her therapy at Spring Shadows Glen from May 1991 to March 1993, she became convinced she had developed more than 500 personalities because of repressed memories of involvement with a satanic cult. Therapists never warned her the memories she recovered through hypnosis and other forms of psychotherapy might be unreliable, she testified. And they told her that unless she continued recovering memories about the abuse, she would remain in denial and her children "wouldn't get well," Carl testified. Carl's children -- Kristi, then 13, and B.J., 14 -- entered the hospital a year after Carl began her stay there. They were admitted for evaluation after Carl's allegations that they had been abused. B.J. came to believe he was programmed to die by age 16, and Kristi believed she was a "breeder" for the cult, according to testimony. They also believed they had committed incest. Before she left the hospital, Carl signed a letter to Children's Protective Services, claiming she and other cult members abused her children "sexually, physically, verbally and emotionally." Carl said these false memories led to divorce from her husband and a court order preventing her from seeing her children. Upon her release from Spring Shadows Glen, Carl went through treatment in Florida and Maryland before reuniting with her husband, Joe, and their children. In April 1996, the couple remarried. Keraga's attorney, Cardwell, pointed to testimony from several therapists that the Carl situation represented a "classic pedophile" case in which the perpetrators and victims later deny the sexual abuse. Describing members of the family as "evil," Cardwell said Simpson and Carl hoped to "make money off this sexual abuse." She said Carl demonstrated symptoms of abuse and that evidence is overwhelming" that the Carl family had practiced incest. Referring to Carl's journals and medical records describing bizarre sexual abuse, murder and torture, Cardwell said such memories could not be falsely implanted. Although no specific corroborative evidence was submitted during the trial, Cardwell suggested that the "cult" described in the medical records could be the Carl family. Treatment for mental illness linked to "repressed memories" soared during the 1980s and early 1990s as hundreds of patients reported that psychotherapy had brought forth memories of childhood abuse. Since then, many patients have alleged that they are victims of "false memory syndrome" -- memories of events that didn't happen, which were implanted or suggested by overzealous therapists trying to cash in on generous insurance benefits. | |
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