(62) Tue 19 Aug 97 16:56 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: Ramona: Spectral Evidence St: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ @EID:44e1 23138700 @MSGID: 1:278/15 00132c9f Can Recovered Memories Be Trusted? 08/17/97 Newsday SPECTRAL EVIDENCE - The Ramona Case: Incest, Memory and Truth on Trial in Napa Valley, by Moira Johnston. Houghton Mifflin, 440 pp., $25. `SPECTRAL EVIDENCE" puts the reader in the front row of the jury box for one of the decade's most riveting trials. Are the memories of childhood incest that popped up in the mind of 19-year-old Holly Ramona true? Did Gary Ramona, a millionaire executive at a prominent winery, really rape his daughter? Or did an incompetent therapist and doctor plant these memories in Holly's mind? These disturbing questions linger throughout "Spectral Evidence," an in- depth account by investigative reporter Moira Johnston. The book details the events leading up to Gary's slapping his daughter's doctor and her therapist with a lawsuit for putting false memories in her mind. That lawsuit marked the first time a court permitted a third party to sue over medical treatment provided to another person. The 1994 trial of this groundbreaking case provides the book's climax. "Spectral Evidence" is also the tale of a supposedly perfect family shattered by incest accusations, as well as a country torn by a debate over the veracity of recovered memories. Though it has dozens of characters, "Spectral Evidence" is essentially the story of three people: Gary Ramona, his daughter Holly, and his wife, Stephanie - a "Barbie corporate wife" who divorces her husband after learning about Holly's recovered memories. For the most part, this saga is told by Holly's parents. Although Holly is the central character in "Spectral Evidence," she remains a shadowy presence. Unlike her parents, who are quoted extensively, Holly seems not to have consented to in-depth interviews. Consequently, Johnston's portrait of Holly relies on her courtroom appearances, her depositions and others' perceptions. Even without much access to Holly, Johnston manages to craft a compelling narrative by delving into the minds of the dozens of people affected by the trial. Stephanie Ramona lies awake at night, berating herself for not having been a better mother. Female court reporters empathize with Holly as she testifies about battling bulimia and low self-esteem during her first year of college. Parents-turned-activists, whose own daughters have accused them of incest, flock to the trial to cheer Gary on. But the issues on trial here are incredibly murky, and even the most convinced characters in this story are not always sure what the truth is. Johnston even gets one of the attorneys opposing Gary - who is, like Gary, a father with daughters - to admit the doubts that raced through his mind during the trial. "I thought . . . What if I was Gary and I didn't do it?" the lawyer says. "Yeah, I was feeling empathy for Gary." Some of the book's most compelling insights belong to the trial's jurors. Johnston deftly threads the jurors' thoughts about pivotal events in the trial - gleaned from post-trial interviews - into her narrative. "My personal feeling - my honest-to-goodness belief - is that Gary screwed up his own life," one juror says. "OK, so you don't like his attitude, his ego," says another juror. "It's who he is. It doesn't make him guilty." These doubts keep the reader wondering, and reading. In his lawsuit, Gary contended that his daughter's therapist and doctor drove her to accuse him of incest - allegations that cost him everything: his $500,000-a-year job, his marriage, his relationship with all three daughters. But the story Johnston tells is not just that of a family's dissolution. Armed with rigorous research into a wide variety of issues, she places this case in the context of current psychological and legal battles. She outlines the impact of the Ramona case on debates over several controversial issues, including the accuracy of recovered memories and the admissibility of these memories as evidence in court. The characters in "Spectral Evidence" tell wildly different versions of the same story. They disagree about almost everything, from Gary's guilt to the quality of his and Stephanie's marriage. Consequently, Johnston's challenge is to craft a coherent narrative of events during which no one seems to agree on what happened. For the most part, she meets this challenge. The only exception is in the book's first two chapters, where the author does not mediate between conflicting viewpoints. The result is two wildly different versions of the same story. In the first chapter, Johnston depicts Stephanie and Gary's marriage as violent and oppressive; she quotes Stephanie describing her ex-husband as controlling, manipulative and unfaithful. In the next chapter, Johnston paints a picture of a relatively happy marriage with Gary as a devoted, sensitive husband. "He loved Stephanie dearly," Johnston writes. Twenty pages earlier, however, she had written, "Gary had ceased to show affection the day they married." The author does not always explain these apparent contradictions, and they initially leave the reader confused and doubting her authority. But throughout the rest of "Spectral Evidence," Johnston successfully manipulates this tension by clearly saying whose viewpoint she is describing. She skillfully shifts perspective throughout each chapter, keeping the reader guessing about whether Gary actually molested his daughter. To her credit, Johnston does not overwhelm readers with her own opinions. Rather, she clearly presents all sides of the "recovered memory wars" and lets the reader try to ferret out the truth. But after three years of working on this book, Johnston does have strong feelings about the issues she raises. In her title and opening lines she is comparing recovered memories to the "spectral evidence" used to convict "witches" 300 years ago in Salem, Mass. And Johnston occasionally draws parallels between the Ramona case and the Salem witch trials elsewhere in her book. But she saves her most emphatic words for last: In the notes section after the book's conclusion, she writes: "The charge of witch-hunt in my home valley is not made lightly, but I believe that it is appropriate and inescapable wherever damage to human lives is done by unproven and uncorroborated charges made on the basis of emotion, fear, and a lack of moral clarity and intellectual skepticism. In other words, it is, to me, a very simple and fundamental justice issue." -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, you look fabulist! --- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10 * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 112/4 218/701 890 1001 278/15 230 353/250 396/1 3615/50 51 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 218/1001