                    Copyright Chicago Tribune 1993

  DATE: Tuesday, November 9, 1993         EDITION: NATIONAL
  SECTION: MAIN                      PAGE: 1
  SOURCE: By Jean Latz Griffin and Bonnie Miller Rubin Tribune Staff Writers.


                Memories a contested sex-abuse issue

    When Roger LaPlant heard allegations that Cardinal Joseph Bernardin had
sexually abused a high school student in the late '70s, his reaction was one of
empathy.
    LaPlant, a retired gas company employee who lives in Des Plaines, knows the
nightmare of the accused only too well.
    In 1989, his 33-year-old daughter told friends and family that he had
sexually molested her when she was a child, based on memories that she had
recovered during therapy.  Later, she would also claim that her father was
involved with child pornography and ritual baby killing.  Though he was never
charged with any crime, LaPlant's relationship with his daughter has never
mended.
    "He's in for some rough days," said LaPlant, who, like Bernardin, has
categorically denied the accusations against him.
    Mental healt and legal experts are grappling with a deluge of charges by
people claiming to have recaptured long-repressed memories of past abuse.
    The credibility of these memories, the methods by which they are uncovered
and their impact on the accused are part of a growing controversy that on
Friday found a particularly sensational target in one of Chicago's most
powerful and respected citizens.
    Berardin's accuser is Steven J. Cook, who charged in a lawsuit that
sometime between 1975 and 1977, while he was a pre-seminary student in
Cincinnati, he was sexually abused by Bernardin, then archbishop of the city
diocese.
    "Everything that is in that suit about me is totally untrue, totally
false," Bernardin said Friday.
    Cook, 34, also accused another priest of sexual abuse.  These charges were
never reported to Cincinnati police, he said, because memories of the events
had only recently returned, long after the statute of limitations for filing a
criminal case expired.
    The accusation touched off shock and anger in Chicago's Roman Catholic
Archdiocese, which under Bernardin's leadership has launched an aggressive
campaign to combat alleged sexual abuse by its clergy.
    The charges also brought into focus the emotional debate over the
reliability and accuracy of memories that surface after many years, sometimes
during controversial forms of therapy.
    "We have no idea whether these memories are real or not real," said Ian
Gotlib, professor of psychology and director of clinical psychology training at
Northwestern University in Evanston.  "It could go either way.  We know you can
give people memories that never happened and have them not only believe them
but embellish those memories."
    Over the past five years, the number of people claiming that they were
sexually abused as children or teenagers--but just recently recalled the events
under therapy--has risen so quickly Gotlib said, that more cases were reported
nationwide in the last fiver years than in the previous 50.
    These days, charges of child sexual abuse, once largely ignored by the
public, are a daily occurrence.  But heightened public awareness and debate
over these allegations has come at a price:  increased skepticism toward the
accusers and the therapist who counsel them.
    This backlash has taken various forms.  LaPlant and his wife, Elizabeth,
for example, are the northern Illinois state representatives for the False
Memory Syndrome Foundation, a national advocacy group which has 5,500 families
as members, 228 of them in Illinois.
    Many mental health professionals worry that hard-won gains in victims
rights will be scuttled by such organizations.
    "To disclose abuse is just so painful," said Avis Shapiro, a licensed
clinical social worker who specializes in child sexual abuse at Des Plaines
Valley Community Center.  "Then, when victims are not believed, it will just
shut them up again.  We'll go back to the way things were when nobody said
anything."
    Some experts lay blame on a particular kind of suggestive therapy--often
practiced by people who are not well-trained--which uses techniques that are
more likely to create memories of non-existent events.
    "With the right amount of information, given in the right way, you can
convince someone that something happened to them," said Dr. Elizabeth Loftus,
professor of psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle and a widely
known researcher of false memory creation.
    Loftus said the type of therapy that appears particularly prone to
inventing memories starts with the assumption that child sexual abuse occurred,
rather than remaining open to many possible diagnoses for a set of symptoms.
    The possibility of creating false memories has been demonstrated by Loftus
and others through experiments in which adolescents and adults have been
convinced that they experienced events as children that never happened to them,
including getting lost in a mall or spending the night in a hospital.
    Cook's suit does not say how his memories began to return, and neither he
nor his attorneys could be reached for comment.
    At the same time, researchers also have found that memories of actual
events can be repressed if the memory is too painful.  Such repression, experts
say, is a normal, natural survival technique in which the brain weeds out
exceptionally harmful, or useless, information.
    Many psychiatrists and psychologists say repressed memories are the very
foundation of psychoanalysis.  A traumatic event and the mind pushes it into
some far corner of the unconscious.  Then something triggers that memory and
gragments return until the patient has a detailed picture of the event.
    Reconciling newly discovered memories with actual experience is sometimes
impossible.
    "Right now, we are undergoing a kind of epidemic of false memories," said
Dr. Eitan Schwarz, assistant professor of psychiatry at Northwestern Medical
School.
    "This does a disservice to the people who really have been traumatized, and
to those who are accused of trauma.  What it comes down to is the word of the
accuser against the accused.  How does one determine that?"
    Increasingly, the answer is being sought in the courts.
    Illinois and about two dozen other states have rewritten their laws in the
past five years to make it easier to file lawsuits seeking damages based on
long-suppressed memories of physical and sexual abuse.
    State laws traditionally have required that suits seeking damages on behalf
of people who were wronged be filed within a few years--generally two or
three--after the harm was allegedly done.
    The result of the change has been an explosion in litigation.
    "This is the hardest kind of case in the world to defend," said Stephen M.
Komie, a Chicago lawyer who is currently representing a Chicago-area priest
facing criminal and civil charges that he molested two boys during an outing in
Wisconsin in 1986.
    Komie noted that people seldom keep anything that would be evidence of
where they were at on a specific day years earlier.
    "Everyone's records are destroyed," Komie said.
    "Simple things like gas receipts or hotel bills, which would show when
someone might be out of town."
    Lawsuits based on recovered memories have had mixed success, experts say.
And some people have been bringing suits against therapists, alleging misdeeds
or malpractice.
    The Illinois General Assembly revised a state law this year to eliminate a
requirement that suits alleging child sexual abuse had to be filed before the
victim reaches age 30.
    Effective Jan. 1, such suits can be filed in Illinois at any time, though
they still must be filed within two years after the victim becomes aware he or
she was abused as a child.
    "I would suspect that many of the cases we are hearing about today are
based on false memories," said Bennett Leventhal, chairman of the department of
psychiatry at the University of Chicago Medical Center.  "But just because they
are false memories doesn't mean it doesn't have a troubling effect.  They are
not just the victim of their own fantasy and memory, but another victim is
created.
    "Given our current climate, there is a fair amount of potential reward.
You can sell your story, get damages in court.  There is an incentive to do
this."

[Tribune staff writers William Grady and Robert Blau contributed to this
article.]

