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Kirkus Review | Detriot Free Press
The Santa Fe New Mexican Copyright 1997 New Mexican, Inc. July 20, 1997, Sunday A FAMILY TORN ASUNDER Dennis Dutton SPECTRAL EVIDENCE - The Ramona Case: Incest, Memory, and Truth on Trial in the Napa Valley
By Moira Johnston In 1990, a 19-year-old Napa Valley woman, Holly Ramona, sought therapy for depression and bulimia, and in the course of treatment recovered memories of being sexually abused by her father, a top executive at Robert Mondavi Winery, from age five to 16. Gary Ramona was charged with repeated rape and sexual abuse of his daughter -- including anal intercourse and forced copulation with the family dog -- but in 1991 he filed his own lawsuit against his daughter's therapists and a medical center for planting false memories in her daughter's mind. The case finally came to trial in 1994. Moira Johnston's Spectral Evidence is a riveting and, overall, an evenhanded account of that trial, in which Holly Ramona came to represent all incest survivors, and Gary Ramona all parents falsely accused of incest by their children. The book paints a Rashoman-like portrait of the Ramona's family life and of a marriage of 25 years that to some Napa residents seemed perfect, to others troubled, and in which the family members' memories of their life together are often radically different. The reader is left not knowing where to stand -- not knowing what really happened between father and daughter, husband and wife -- but knowing at least this: that if a family is meant to be a sacred compact, with love and mutual respect at the core, then that compact was broken somewhere along the line among the Ramonas of Napa Valley. The case was a landmark for a number of reasons, but principally for establishing, for the first time, a parent's right to sue therapists for planting false memories of sexual abuse in a childs mind. The central question the jury had to consider was whether or not any of the defendants were "negligent in providing health care to Holly Ramona by implanting or reinforcing false memories that plaintiff had molested her as a child?" It was alleged that Holly's psychiatrist, Dr. Richard Rose, and her therapist, Marche Isabella, had developed false memories of sexual abuse through irresponsible and negligent therapeutic practice. At Holly's first session with Isabella, "she asked Holly if she had ever been sexually abused. Im not sure, Holly recalls saying, as Marche also told her that most of her patients had some type of abuse. Then, spontaneously and outside of the therapeutic setting, a flashback suggesting sexual abuse as a child occurred to Holly, followed later by others. She then heard from another patient of a "truth serum," sodium amytal, that could be used to aid memory recovery, and asked Isabella about it. "Yes, it could help uncover hidden memories, but she felt that Holly didn't need it now." Other flashbacks came, more detailed, more explicit, and finally involving her father. She confided with her mother, Stephanie. Divorce proceedings were initiated. Dr. Rose injected Holly with sodium amytal and "confirmed" rape by her father (though in the trial it came out that the drug was unreliable). Isabella encouraged Holly to confront her father so that he "would have to own the damage he had done as part of Holly's recovery process. The meeting took place at Isabella's Orange County office, with Isabella, Holly and his wife Stephanie present. Gary Ramona didnt know what the meeting was for -- only that Holly had been ill with depression and bulimia and had asked to see him. "Then she came out and said it: You raped me. "Gary gave an involuntary gasp, as if he had been socked in the stomach. What? Holly, that's not true! He looked at Isabella and demanded, What the hell is going on here? I did not do this." After this, "Gary's free fall had begun." The jury's verdict, after a long trial the author attended, and a jury deliberation that the author compellingly reconstructed from subsequent conversations with jury members, was in Gary Ramonas favor. They found Dr. Rose, Marche Isabella, and the Western Medical Center, where the sodium amytal has been administered, guilty of malpractice. But the jury awarded Gary Ramona only half a million dollars for damages -- not much for someone who had "lost everything: his wife, children, home, job, reputation, friends, money, and the almost- finished dream house on the hill." He had asked for $ 8.6 million. One cant help but think, from reading Johnston's description of Gary Ramona, that they simply didnt like him -- not his slick salesman's smiles at inappropriate times during the trial nor his apparent neglect of his wife and three daughters for the sake of personal ambition. It was not a perfect family, and Gary Ramona was not a perfect father. By any means. Still, at least the 20,000-some parents nationwide who had been accused of incest through recovered memory techniques had been given support by the verdict, and a deluge of recovered-memory court cases has dramatically lessened since the trial. Many verdicts against accused parents have been reversed since Ramona, some that had sentenced them to prison for life. However, many people who have experienced child sexual abuse or recognize it as the pandemic, worldwide, horror that it is, understandably see the verdict of this case as defending abusers and further victimizing victims -- for example, Gary Ramona's wife (now ex-wife) Stephanie, who as she left the courthouse told camera crews, "He should not have received a penny for raping his own daughter." Stephanie had never actually witnessed any sexual abuse of Holly by her husband or even suspected anything; but when Holly told her of her memories, several pieces from the past suddenly fit together in her mind, and she knew immediately that he was guilty. The authors presentation of these pieces of a human puzzle -- glimpses of her husband's behavior at various times throughout their marriage -- is\ done from Stephanie's point of view and then presented from Garys; the reader cant help but feel, first, that Stephanie was right, and then, second, is left feeling not sure. Sexual abuse? Probably. Nothing? Maybe so, after all. The Rashoman effect, again. Spectral Evidence is not comfortable reading. Sigmund Freud's theory of repression was at the psychological center of the trial, with key questions raised regarding memory, memory loss due to trauma, the recovery of memory, and the malleability and/or distortion of memory. Can a series of sexual abuse over twelve years be so traumatic that they are completely lost to memory? Can a girl immediately and utterly block out the memory of her father forcing sex on her when she is 16, and then suddenly remember the event at age 19? Can such memories be reliably recovered through the administration of a "truth serum" (sodium amytal) and hypnotherapy? Can the mind and memories be so manipulated, or so distorted by the mind itself or by therapeutic intervention that a person can be convinced that something happened when, in fact, it did not? None of these questions was conclusively answered by the verdict since the jury only had to weigh the "preponderance of evidence" to come to a judgment about malpractice. In fact at first, in their deliberation, four of the jurors felt that "something had happened" between father and daughter. But finally, according to one juror, ". . . there was enough feeling that he didn't do it to say that false memories were more likely than not." "It came down to the hymen." said another juror. "She's abused from five to sixteen in every orifice of her body and her ob-gyn says partially separated hymen. Im sorry." The trial was that graphic -- the sexual practices of Gary and Stephanie Ramona were trotted out by the lawyers of both plaintiff and defendant as well -- and at the center of this sensational trial was a shy young woman who reportedly had never kissed a boy or a man and who used terms like "down there" to describe her vagina. The press had a field day. The author draws no final conclusions about Gary's innocence or guilt, and is sympathetic throughout to Holly Ramona and her mother and two other daughters. But Johnston also feels that justice was served in exposing some of the abuses of using recovered memory in sexual abuse cases. She also states that many incest survival groups are hurting incest victims by continuing, in the wake of the Ramona trial, to defend "discredited recovered memory stars," the expert witnesses -- health professionals and theoreticians -- who seem to make a living by testifying at trial after trial for generous fees. The best that can perhaps be said in the trials aftermath is that all the principals involved in the ordeal have survived, though the father and his family were ripped apart and remain unreconciled, Gary Ramona's ex-wife and two other daughters having taken Holly's side in the case -- this, and that recovered-memory accusations will no longer have carte blanche within the justice system. In addition, the Ramona case has thankfully brought sexual abuse of children to stage-center as an issue in the courts, even if the alleged perpetrator in this case (Gary Ramona) has so far escaped conviction. And finally, another upshot of the verdict appears to be that insurance companies are forcing more stringent legislative and professional controls on the practice of therapists, especially the more than 40,000 non-MD, non-PhD marriage, family, and child counselors who provide psychological health care nationwide. It is perhaps both ironic and redemptive, therefore, to learn that since the trial, the now 26-year-old Holly Ramona has become a counselor. Her case against her father goes on, and is scheduled to finally go to trial this summer. Dennis Dutton is a freelance writer from El Rito. |
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