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 too well.
In 1989, his 33-year-old daughter told friends and family that LaPlant had sexually molested her when she was a child, based on memories that she said she recovered during therapy. Later, she also would claim that her father was involved with child pornography and ritual baby-killing. Though he was never charged with a crime, LaPlant’s relationship with his daughter was never mended.
“He’s in for some rough days,” said LaPlant, who, like Bernardin, has catagorically denied the accusations against him.
Mental health 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.
Bernardin’s accuser is Steven J. Cook, who charged in a lawsuit that 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. Cook, diagnosed with AIDS, now lives in Philadelphia.
“Everything that is in that suit about me is totally untrue, totally false,” Bernardin said Friday.
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“I am 65 years old, and I can assure you that all my life, I have led a chaste, celibate life.”
Cook, 34, also accused another priest of sexual abuse. The charges were never reported to Cincinnati police, he said, because memories of the events had returned only recently, 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 last 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 five 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 the allegations has come at a price: increased skepticism toward the accusers and the therapists who counsel them.
On Saturday, LaPlant and his wife, Elizabeth, helped organize the fall meeting of the Illinois chapter of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, in a Des Plaines community house. More than 130 people attended.
Psychologist Paul Simpson of Tucson, speaking to the group, compared the current national trend of sexual abuse accusations to the witch hunts of medieval Europe.
“We did this same thing 400 and 500 years ago,” said Simpson, a national expert on false memories induced by hypnosis. “It’s the same, in as much as the accused only have one of two options. It’s either you’re guilty or you’re in denial.”
This backlash has taken various forms, with the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, which numbers 5,500 members nationwide, being the largest group.
But 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 social worker at Des Plaines Valley Community Center who specializes in child sexual abuse. “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.”
At Saturday’s meeting, several protesters gathered outside against the False Memory foundation, which they called “an advocacy group for perpetrators.”
“I do believe Steve Cook, who came out with it after so many years,” said Michelle Lannes, 20, of Northwest Action Against Rape. “Even if it’s such a long time, it needs to be brought out, whether it’s Bernardin or not.”
Some experts who oppose hypnosis and other therapy techniques argue that certain techniques-often practiced by people who are not well-trained-are more likely to create memories of non-existent events.
Because of the complex way memories are stored in the brain, even the person with the recollection often cannot tell whether the event really happened, scientists say.
“With the right amount of information, given in the right way, you can convince someone that something happened to them,” said Elizabeth Loftus, professor of psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle and a prominent 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.
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 occurs and the mind pushes it into some far corner of the unconscious. Then something triggers that memory and fragments 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 had 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.
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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 Komie, a Chicago lawyer who is currently representing a Chicago-area priest facing criminal and civil charges that he molested two boys during a trip to Wisconsin in 1986.
Lawsuits based on recovered memories have had mixed success, experts say. And some people have begun 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 reached 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.
At the same time, however, the U.S. Supreme Court in a ruling this year made fighting such lawsuits a bit easier. According to Simpson and others, the ruling has opened the door for people accused of abuse to challenge the validity of hypnosis and “memory” techniques.
“People are starting to realize,” Simpson said, “there is no solid, scientific, qualitative evidence for repression.”