Rozita Swinton. Swinton was
arrested by Colorado
Springs, Colo. Police
Thursday, April 17, 2008,
and charged with false
reporting to authorities in
connection the Fundamental
Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter Day Saints case in
Texas.
The Colorado Springs
Gazette
arrested by Colorado
Springs, Colo. Police
Thursday, April 17, 2008,
and charged with false
reporting to authorities in
connection the Fundamental
Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter Day Saints case in
Texas.
The Colorado Springs
Gazette
False police report in Chula
Vista Elementary School
District/California Teachers
Association / Richard Werlin
/ Robin Donlan case
Vista Elementary School
District/California Teachers
Association / Richard Werlin
/ Robin Donlan case
Sep 20, 2010
The lie that tore my family apart
In the '80s and '90s, thousands came forward with their own incest stories. I was one of them -- and
I was wrong
By Meredith Maran
Why I falsely accused my father
The following is reprinted by permission of the publisher from "My Lie," by Meredith Maran.
Copyright (c) 2010 by Meredith Maran. Published by Jossey-Bass, a Wiley Imprint. To read an
interview with Meredith Maran, click here.
In the late 1970s, a handful of feminist scholars did some groundbreaking research and delivered
some distressing news: one in three American women and one in ten American men, they reported,
had been victims of childhood sexual abuse.
Their studies proved that incest wasn't the rare anomaly it was long believed to be. Incest
happened often. It happened in normal families -- in the house down the street, in the bedroom
down the hall.
A psychological phenomenon called repressed memory had allowed this outrage to go
unacknowledged, even unknown. As Freud had first asserted a century earlier, the impact of child
sexual abuse on young psyches was so profound that victims often lost their memories for years or
decades. Hundreds of thousands of Americans were walking around with the time bomb of
untreated childhood sexual abuse ticking inside them.
For better and for worse, these findings transformed incest from a dirty little secret of American
family life into an American obsession. During the 1980s and early 1990s, several cultural icons,
including Susanne Somers, former Miss America Marilyn Van Derbur, Roseanne Barr, and Oprah
Winfrey, went public as incest survivors. Incest memoirs hit best-seller lists. "The Color Purple,"
whose protagonist had borne two of her father's babies, won the Pulitzer Prize. Sympathetic and
sensational incest stories proliferated on TV news shows and after-school specials and in
newspapers and magazines.
Reported cases of child abuse and neglect surged from 669,000 in 1976 to 2.9 million in 1993.
During those years, according to "Victims of Memory" author Mark Pendergrast, up to one million
families were torn apart by false accusations of sexual abuse.
Mine was one of them.
Many of these accusations were made by adult daughters who claimed to have repressed and then
recovered memories of childhood molestation by their fathers.
I was one of them.
In courtrooms around the country, daughters sat sobbing on witness stands, pointing across the
room at their fathers, listing the atrocities their fathers had committed against their bodies and their
souls.
If I'd been just a bit more suggestible (more impulsive, more vindictive), I might have been one of
them.
Here's how I became convinced that this lie was true.
In 1982, I edited a book by one of those pioneering feminist researchers. I was shocked and moved
by what I learned, working on the book I'll call "The Incest Secret." With missionary zeal -- and
without considering the tunnel vision, good guy–bad guy polarization, and dangerous excesses that
often accompany that kind of heart-thumping fervor -- I spent the next few years writing exposés of
child sexual abuse for local and national newspapers and magazines.
As a journalist doing what journalists do -- slouching toward objectivity, stumbling over my
preexisting prejudices and proclivities -- I helped spread the panic: basing conclusions on skewed
studies I believed to be accurate, citing manipulated statistics I trusted, quoting experts who proved
more attached to their points of view than they were to the facts.
Along with other writers on both sides of the issue, I used quotation marks to declare my allegiance,
calling it recovered memory, not "recovered memory"; incest survivor, not "incest survivor"; "false
memory syndrome" not False Memory Syndrome.
I didn't just hand out the Kool-Aid. I drank it. I didn't just write about recovered memories; I spent a
decade trying to recover my own. Shortly after the 1988 publication of the Bible of the recovered
memory movement, "The Courage to Heal," I joined the ranks of self-identified incest survivors and
accused my father of molesting me.
The full story of how I came to that conclusion is complicated. [To read an interview with Meredith
Maran, click here.] During that time, I was in love with a woman who identified strongly as an incest
survivor. I was in therapy with a woman who believed in recovered memory. Many of my friends
were incest survivors. I'd been plagued by strange dreams -- dreams in which little girls whose
fathers had raped them told me, night after night, that I was one of them. I made a list of the
"evidence" and presented it to my brother over dinner one night. I've never seen him look so
miserable.
"I've read your articles," he said finally. "I know this kind of thing happens all the time. I just never
thought --"
"I know," I said. "Me neither. It took me a long time and a lot of therapy to put the clues together," I
said. "But there's no other way it makes sense."
"Doesn't that seem weird to you?" he asked. "Your girlfriend was molested. Your best friend. Now
you."
Tears sprang to my eyes. "It's shocking to me, too," I said. "But I really need you to believe me."
"I do," my brother said. "I do believe you."
In the 1990s, the backlash began.
In March 1992, accused parents banded together to form the False Memory Syndrome Foundation
(FMSF). "When the memory is distorted, or confabulated," the FMSF newsletter declared, "the
result can be what has been called the False Memory Syndrome; a condition in which a person's
identity and interpersonal relationships are centered around a memory of traumatic experience
which is objectively false but in which the person strongly believes."
Although false memory syndrome was the invention of laypeople, not a medically identified
condition, the phrase burned its way across the country, setting off the firestorm that would come to
be known as "the memory war."
Even characterizing the conflict was cause for controversy. Was the "outing" of child sexual abuse a
brave crusade to save children's lives, or a witch hunt reminiscent of others in the American hall of
shame?
Nearly overnight, "false memory" replaced "recovered memory" on the American tongue. Therapists
were sued for implanting false memories, stripped of their licenses, ordered to pay six-figure
settlements to clients who'd once credited them with saving their incest-ravaged lives. Accused
molesters' convictions were overturned. Many but not all of the accused were set free.
Families devastated by incest accusations were now bifurcated, also, by warring beliefs about truth
and memory. If the outraged parents -- my outraged parents -- were right, they were the victims,
and their daughters were -- I was -- the perpetrator. If the daughters were right, we were the victims,
our parents the perpetrators, denying the trauma they'd inflicted upon us. Each side allied itself with
a phalanx of opposing experts who built constituencies and careers on unproved certainties.
When the culture tilted toward disbelief, I leaned that way too. In 1996, I faced the truth that my
accusation was false. I apologized to my father and my family, quit incest therapy, and broke up with
-- truth be told, was dumped by -- my incest survivor lover.
A few years later, just when I'd fully regained my mind and my memories, my father was diagnosed
with Alzheimer's disease and began to lose his.
Redemption-wise, my father's diagnosis left me two options.
I could hope my father would forget the wrong I did him, along with the other bits and bytes that
were slipping through the fissures in his brain. Or I could convince him to have a conversation with
me about what I did and why I did it and how sorry I was.
A girl can dream: maybe he'd even forgive me, so I might step into that shaft of light and begin to
forgive myself. But first I needed to understand. How had I -- more neurotic than some, but surely
less neurotic than many -- come to believe that my father, a man lacking the cruelty to squash a
spider, had sexually abused me throughout my childhood and spent the next twenty years covering
it up?
How had so many other people come to believe the same thing at the same time?
In "Creating Hysteria," Joan Acocella's 1999 exposé of the sex-abuse panic of the 1980s, she
wrote, "One of the most disgraceful episodes in the history of psychotherapy seems to be coming to
an end."
Acocella's prediction was true, and false. The sex-abuse panic did recede. But ten years later, it still
hasn't come to an end.
"When you once believed something that now strikes you as absurd, even unhinged, it can be
almost impossible to summon that feeling of credulity again," Margaret Talbot wrote in The New
York Times Magazine on January 7, 2001. "Maybe that is why it is easier for most of us to forget,
rather than to try and explain, the Satanic-abuse scare that gripped this country in the early 80's --
the myth that Devil-worshipers had set up shop in our day-care centers, where their clever adepts
were raping and sodomizing children, practicing ritual sacrifice, shedding their clothes, drinking
blood and eating feces, all unnoticed by parents, neighbors and the authorities.
"Of course, if you were one of the dozens of people prosecuted in these cases, one of those who
spent years in jails and prisons on wildly implausible charges, one of those separated from your
own children, forgetting would not be an option. You would spend the rest of your life wondering
what hit you, what cleaved your life into the before and the after, the daylight and the nightmare."
As Talbot says, the panic hasn't ended for the preschool teachers and fathers and uncles who
were convicted of child sexual abuse 20 years ago and remain incarcerated today.
It hasn't ended for the children, now adults, who testified against those prisoners at age four or 10
or 30, some of whom have since acknowledged that their accusations were false.
The lie that tore my family apart
In the '80s and '90s, thousands came forward with their own incest stories. I was one of them -- and
I was wrong
By Meredith Maran
Why I falsely accused my father
The following is reprinted by permission of the publisher from "My Lie," by Meredith Maran.
Copyright (c) 2010 by Meredith Maran. Published by Jossey-Bass, a Wiley Imprint. To read an
interview with Meredith Maran, click here.
In the late 1970s, a handful of feminist scholars did some groundbreaking research and delivered
some distressing news: one in three American women and one in ten American men, they reported,
had been victims of childhood sexual abuse.
Their studies proved that incest wasn't the rare anomaly it was long believed to be. Incest
happened often. It happened in normal families -- in the house down the street, in the bedroom
down the hall.
A psychological phenomenon called repressed memory had allowed this outrage to go
unacknowledged, even unknown. As Freud had first asserted a century earlier, the impact of child
sexual abuse on young psyches was so profound that victims often lost their memories for years or
decades. Hundreds of thousands of Americans were walking around with the time bomb of
untreated childhood sexual abuse ticking inside them.
For better and for worse, these findings transformed incest from a dirty little secret of American
family life into an American obsession. During the 1980s and early 1990s, several cultural icons,
including Susanne Somers, former Miss America Marilyn Van Derbur, Roseanne Barr, and Oprah
Winfrey, went public as incest survivors. Incest memoirs hit best-seller lists. "The Color Purple,"
whose protagonist had borne two of her father's babies, won the Pulitzer Prize. Sympathetic and
sensational incest stories proliferated on TV news shows and after-school specials and in
newspapers and magazines.
Reported cases of child abuse and neglect surged from 669,000 in 1976 to 2.9 million in 1993.
During those years, according to "Victims of Memory" author Mark Pendergrast, up to one million
families were torn apart by false accusations of sexual abuse.
Mine was one of them.
Many of these accusations were made by adult daughters who claimed to have repressed and then
recovered memories of childhood molestation by their fathers.
I was one of them.
In courtrooms around the country, daughters sat sobbing on witness stands, pointing across the
room at their fathers, listing the atrocities their fathers had committed against their bodies and their
souls.
If I'd been just a bit more suggestible (more impulsive, more vindictive), I might have been one of
them.
Here's how I became convinced that this lie was true.
In 1982, I edited a book by one of those pioneering feminist researchers. I was shocked and moved
by what I learned, working on the book I'll call "The Incest Secret." With missionary zeal -- and
without considering the tunnel vision, good guy–bad guy polarization, and dangerous excesses that
often accompany that kind of heart-thumping fervor -- I spent the next few years writing exposés of
child sexual abuse for local and national newspapers and magazines.
As a journalist doing what journalists do -- slouching toward objectivity, stumbling over my
preexisting prejudices and proclivities -- I helped spread the panic: basing conclusions on skewed
studies I believed to be accurate, citing manipulated statistics I trusted, quoting experts who proved
more attached to their points of view than they were to the facts.
Along with other writers on both sides of the issue, I used quotation marks to declare my allegiance,
calling it recovered memory, not "recovered memory"; incest survivor, not "incest survivor"; "false
memory syndrome" not False Memory Syndrome.
I didn't just hand out the Kool-Aid. I drank it. I didn't just write about recovered memories; I spent a
decade trying to recover my own. Shortly after the 1988 publication of the Bible of the recovered
memory movement, "The Courage to Heal," I joined the ranks of self-identified incest survivors and
accused my father of molesting me.
The full story of how I came to that conclusion is complicated. [To read an interview with Meredith
Maran, click here.] During that time, I was in love with a woman who identified strongly as an incest
survivor. I was in therapy with a woman who believed in recovered memory. Many of my friends
were incest survivors. I'd been plagued by strange dreams -- dreams in which little girls whose
fathers had raped them told me, night after night, that I was one of them. I made a list of the
"evidence" and presented it to my brother over dinner one night. I've never seen him look so
miserable.
"I've read your articles," he said finally. "I know this kind of thing happens all the time. I just never
thought --"
"I know," I said. "Me neither. It took me a long time and a lot of therapy to put the clues together," I
said. "But there's no other way it makes sense."
"Doesn't that seem weird to you?" he asked. "Your girlfriend was molested. Your best friend. Now
you."
Tears sprang to my eyes. "It's shocking to me, too," I said. "But I really need you to believe me."
"I do," my brother said. "I do believe you."
In the 1990s, the backlash began.
In March 1992, accused parents banded together to form the False Memory Syndrome Foundation
(FMSF). "When the memory is distorted, or confabulated," the FMSF newsletter declared, "the
result can be what has been called the False Memory Syndrome; a condition in which a person's
identity and interpersonal relationships are centered around a memory of traumatic experience
which is objectively false but in which the person strongly believes."
Although false memory syndrome was the invention of laypeople, not a medically identified
condition, the phrase burned its way across the country, setting off the firestorm that would come to
be known as "the memory war."
Even characterizing the conflict was cause for controversy. Was the "outing" of child sexual abuse a
brave crusade to save children's lives, or a witch hunt reminiscent of others in the American hall of
shame?
Nearly overnight, "false memory" replaced "recovered memory" on the American tongue. Therapists
were sued for implanting false memories, stripped of their licenses, ordered to pay six-figure
settlements to clients who'd once credited them with saving their incest-ravaged lives. Accused
molesters' convictions were overturned. Many but not all of the accused were set free.
Families devastated by incest accusations were now bifurcated, also, by warring beliefs about truth
and memory. If the outraged parents -- my outraged parents -- were right, they were the victims,
and their daughters were -- I was -- the perpetrator. If the daughters were right, we were the victims,
our parents the perpetrators, denying the trauma they'd inflicted upon us. Each side allied itself with
a phalanx of opposing experts who built constituencies and careers on unproved certainties.
When the culture tilted toward disbelief, I leaned that way too. In 1996, I faced the truth that my
accusation was false. I apologized to my father and my family, quit incest therapy, and broke up with
-- truth be told, was dumped by -- my incest survivor lover.
A few years later, just when I'd fully regained my mind and my memories, my father was diagnosed
with Alzheimer's disease and began to lose his.
Redemption-wise, my father's diagnosis left me two options.
I could hope my father would forget the wrong I did him, along with the other bits and bytes that
were slipping through the fissures in his brain. Or I could convince him to have a conversation with
me about what I did and why I did it and how sorry I was.
A girl can dream: maybe he'd even forgive me, so I might step into that shaft of light and begin to
forgive myself. But first I needed to understand. How had I -- more neurotic than some, but surely
less neurotic than many -- come to believe that my father, a man lacking the cruelty to squash a
spider, had sexually abused me throughout my childhood and spent the next twenty years covering
it up?
How had so many other people come to believe the same thing at the same time?
In "Creating Hysteria," Joan Acocella's 1999 exposé of the sex-abuse panic of the 1980s, she
wrote, "One of the most disgraceful episodes in the history of psychotherapy seems to be coming to
an end."
Acocella's prediction was true, and false. The sex-abuse panic did recede. But ten years later, it still
hasn't come to an end.
"When you once believed something that now strikes you as absurd, even unhinged, it can be
almost impossible to summon that feeling of credulity again," Margaret Talbot wrote in The New
York Times Magazine on January 7, 2001. "Maybe that is why it is easier for most of us to forget,
rather than to try and explain, the Satanic-abuse scare that gripped this country in the early 80's --
the myth that Devil-worshipers had set up shop in our day-care centers, where their clever adepts
were raping and sodomizing children, practicing ritual sacrifice, shedding their clothes, drinking
blood and eating feces, all unnoticed by parents, neighbors and the authorities.
"Of course, if you were one of the dozens of people prosecuted in these cases, one of those who
spent years in jails and prisons on wildly implausible charges, one of those separated from your
own children, forgetting would not be an option. You would spend the rest of your life wondering
what hit you, what cleaved your life into the before and the after, the daylight and the nightmare."
As Talbot says, the panic hasn't ended for the preschool teachers and fathers and uncles who
were convicted of child sexual abuse 20 years ago and remain incarcerated today.
It hasn't ended for the children, now adults, who testified against those prisoners at age four or 10
or 30, some of whom have since acknowledged that their accusations were false.
Why This Website
Stutz Artiano Shinoff
& Holtz v. Maura
Larkins defamation
SDCOE
CVESD
Castle Park
Elementary School
Law Enforcement
CTA
CVE
Stutz Artiano Shinoff
& Holtz
Silence is Golden
Schools and Violence
Office Admin Hearings
Larkins OAH Hearing
Stutz Artiano Shinoff
& Holtz v. Maura
Larkins defamation
SDCOE
CVESD
Castle Park
Elementary School
Law Enforcement
CTA
CVE
Stutz Artiano Shinoff
& Holtz
Silence is Golden
Schools and Violence
Office Admin Hearings
Larkins OAH Hearing
Va. family still suffers effects of guilty plea to false charge
By Chris L. Jenkins
November 26, 2011
Washington Post
They believed that their son was innocent but were afraid that Virginia’s penal system would grab
hold of him and never let go.
So Cherri Dulaney and Edgar Coker Sr. told 15-year-old Edgar Jr. to plead guilty to raping a 14-
year-old friend. Their court-appointed attorney told them that was better than risking adult charges
and a lengthy prison term.
Two months after their decision, in November 2007, the girl admitted that she had lied.
The Cokers have been fighting ever since to rescue their son from the consequences. He served
17 months in a juvenile prison. He remains on the Virginia sex-offender registry, and the family
moved to avoid harassment from neighbors.
Last month, Coker, now 20, was arrested during a Friday night football game at the Orange, Va.,
high school he graduated from after his release from juvenile prison. Unless they have permission
from the school, convicted violent sex offenders are not permitted on school grounds. But Coker
had received such permission, and he attended school there for more than a year before
graduation.
“He can’t do something as simple as go out with his brothers and see a football game,” his mother
said as she fought back tears during a recent interview from the family’s modest rambler in Mineral,
Va.
Coker’s attorneys are working to have the conviction vacated in Stafford County, and the Virginia
Supreme Court is expected to hear the case early next year. To his attorneys and other advocates,
the case is about the dangers of ineffective counsel and about Virginia’s restrictive post-conviction
laws, which make it extraordinarily difficult for people like Coker to get a retrial.
“We have a kid here who’s innocent,” said Andy Block, an assistant professor at the University of
Virginia law school and director of the school’s Child Advocacy Clinic, who is helping with Coker’s
defense. “If the Virginia courts fail to intercede, he will suffer consequences for the rest of his life.”
To his parents, those lasting consequences are the most painful part of this saga. They lament that
they couldn’t afford a better attorney for their son.
“He has his whole life ahead of him, and where is he now? With this hanging over his head, he has
limited options,” said Edgar Coker Sr., 44, a warehouse supervisor who often tears up when going
over the facts of the case. “We made a mistake in giving up originally. All we want him to have is
another chance.”
The sex, the parties now agree, was consensual.
But when Michele Sousa caught Edgar Jr. with her daughter, the girl claimed it was rape. He was
arrested in June 2007, and by September he was sent to a juvenile prison outside Richmond.
Just after Thanksgiving 2007, however, Sousa’s daughter, whose name is being withheld to protect
her privacy, told her mother that she lied because she was afraid of getting in trouble. Both Coker
and Sousa’s daughter had learning disorders that required special education when they were in
high school. In a letter to the Circuit Court, the girl wrote:
“Eger didn’t rely rape me . . . in fact we did it befor. Eger was a friend of mine befor this even
happend . . . but now it just seems that I lied about Eger. . . . I will never forgive myself.”
By Chris L. Jenkins
November 26, 2011
Washington Post
They believed that their son was innocent but were afraid that Virginia’s penal system would grab
hold of him and never let go.
So Cherri Dulaney and Edgar Coker Sr. told 15-year-old Edgar Jr. to plead guilty to raping a 14-
year-old friend. Their court-appointed attorney told them that was better than risking adult charges
and a lengthy prison term.
Two months after their decision, in November 2007, the girl admitted that she had lied.
The Cokers have been fighting ever since to rescue their son from the consequences. He served
17 months in a juvenile prison. He remains on the Virginia sex-offender registry, and the family
moved to avoid harassment from neighbors.
Last month, Coker, now 20, was arrested during a Friday night football game at the Orange, Va.,
high school he graduated from after his release from juvenile prison. Unless they have permission
from the school, convicted violent sex offenders are not permitted on school grounds. But Coker
had received such permission, and he attended school there for more than a year before
graduation.
“He can’t do something as simple as go out with his brothers and see a football game,” his mother
said as she fought back tears during a recent interview from the family’s modest rambler in Mineral,
Va.
Coker’s attorneys are working to have the conviction vacated in Stafford County, and the Virginia
Supreme Court is expected to hear the case early next year. To his attorneys and other advocates,
the case is about the dangers of ineffective counsel and about Virginia’s restrictive post-conviction
laws, which make it extraordinarily difficult for people like Coker to get a retrial.
“We have a kid here who’s innocent,” said Andy Block, an assistant professor at the University of
Virginia law school and director of the school’s Child Advocacy Clinic, who is helping with Coker’s
defense. “If the Virginia courts fail to intercede, he will suffer consequences for the rest of his life.”
To his parents, those lasting consequences are the most painful part of this saga. They lament that
they couldn’t afford a better attorney for their son.
“He has his whole life ahead of him, and where is he now? With this hanging over his head, he has
limited options,” said Edgar Coker Sr., 44, a warehouse supervisor who often tears up when going
over the facts of the case. “We made a mistake in giving up originally. All we want him to have is
another chance.”
The sex, the parties now agree, was consensual.
But when Michele Sousa caught Edgar Jr. with her daughter, the girl claimed it was rape. He was
arrested in June 2007, and by September he was sent to a juvenile prison outside Richmond.
Just after Thanksgiving 2007, however, Sousa’s daughter, whose name is being withheld to protect
her privacy, told her mother that she lied because she was afraid of getting in trouble. Both Coker
and Sousa’s daughter had learning disorders that required special education when they were in
high school. In a letter to the Circuit Court, the girl wrote:
“Eger didn’t rely rape me . . . in fact we did it befor. Eger was a friend of mine befor this even
happend . . . but now it just seems that I lied about Eger. . . . I will never forgive myself.”
San Diego
Education Report
Education Report