I Speak For This Child: True Stories of a Child Advocate

by Gay Courter

  Mitzi nodded.

  “Why did you do that?”

  “For Cory.”

  “What about Tammy? She’s trying to steal him from me.”

  “Alicia wanted to find her, so I helped them make contact. What happens next remains up in the air. Cory is so unhappy and confused, I want you to think about how you can make your visits with Cory more pleasant and less stressful for him.”

  “It’s so hard for me now. I’m depressed and have serious financial problems of my own.”

  “When are you going to pay some money toward Cory’s care?” Mitzi asked.

  “I’ve had to ask Pop for twenty-five grand for the attorney and that means he has to sell the house so we have something to live on.”

  “If Cory were at home, you’d be supporting him,” Mitzi replied.

  “I can’t ask Pop for anything more now. We’re broke. Those little bitches are going to pay for it in the end. My lawyer is going to sue the Pruitts for false arrest and anyone else who tells lies about me. And now they’re digging up every piece of dirt they can find.”

  “By the way, I don’t have a complete social history,” Mitzi interjected. “When were you first married?”

  “I was eighteen and she was sixteen. It was in Oklahoma.”

  “What was her name?” I asked.

  “Annette. She died in an accident.”

  “Did you have any children?” Mitzi continued.

  “Yes, a daughter.”

  Apparently, after Annette died, this daughter was taken from him by the court, who declared him an unfit father because Annette had another daughter, who had been hospitalized with a broken pelvis. Both parents had been suspected of child abuse.

  “My own mother wanted Annette’s kid and helped take her away from me.”

  After that, Red stopped communicating with his mother. He claimed she was a “whore” who had men “right in front of me.” She also allowed customers to “screw me in the ass” when he was little and “she kept the money.”

  I could hardly believe these revelations were being made in an HRS office in the presence of a guardian and a caseworker, and I was certain Mitzi was equally astonished. Together we questioned Red Stevenson for more than an hour using polite, soft-spoken voices and acting sympathetic rather than accusatory. We even managed to discuss Sunny Rhodes.

  “That was blown way out of proportion. I came out of the bathroom wearing a robe and Sunny was watching television. She jumped up and leapt into my arms. To catch her, I had to let go of the bathrobe, which didn’t have a belt. So of course the robe opened and I was naked underneath. Sunny saw my privates and screamed. Next thing I knew she’d called her grandmother, who never liked me anyway, and she told the police. But, once they heard my side of the story, they never prosecuted me.”

  After Red left, I sat limply in Mitzi’s office. “Had you known that he had a child removed from him in Oklahoma with his own mother siding against him?” I asked.

  “No,” Mitzi admitted. “You wouldn’t really champion Cory’s return to that pervert, would you?”

  “After what he’s just confessed in here, combined with the way he behaved with Cory, he’s even worse than I expected. But whether we want to or not, we have to deal with the fact that Cory loves him.”

  At this point the trial preparations were in full swing. Whenever the attorneys wanted children to appear, they had to be made available. After I told Grace Chandler, the state’s attorney who was prosecuting Red Stevenson, what Rich had witnessed and experienced, she was anxious to take his statement. Without telling me, she called Dr. Newman and made arrangements for Rich to be deposed. Fortunately, Mitzi alerted me because as his Guardian ad Litem, I was the only other person allowed in the room during the interview.

  I contacted Grace Chandler and warned her that Rich might still be on mind-altering medications. Grace thanked me and phoned Dr. Newman to request that Rich not be given drugs a few days before the appointment if at all possible. When the therapist seemed doubtful about him handling the stress without tranquilization, Grace followed my suggestion. “Promise him the pizza of his choice for cooperating.”

  Apparently that worked. When I met Rich outside the state attorney’s office, he was docile and affectionate, hugging me like a long lost pal. Mitzi seemed anxious to get back to her office and said she’d meet us at the pizza restaurant. While we waited, Rich and I debated whether pepperoni was better with green peppers or mushrooms and wondered what sort of person ordered anchovies.

  “I hate fish, especially if you see their disgusting eyes,” he said.

  “Do you know the Dr. Demento version of ‘Fish Heads’?” I asked.

  He didn’t, but he broke up laughing at the words to the silly song.

  When I first was asked to take the Stevenson case, I had thought that since I was trying to survive the throes of adolescence with our sons, I might be better off with younger ones. Later I discovered that knowing the jargon was a decided advantage. Who would have thought that being able to quote the lyrics to “Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road” or that all-time mother-cringer, “Dead Puppies,” would come in handy? Perhaps Dr. Newman and her peers might analyze these songs in terms of Rich’s disorder, tying them in with his morbid preoccupations, but I knew that most boys that age took delight in these verses during a macabre phase that fortunately passed.

  When we were called into the state attorney’s office, Rich went in humming the fish head song. Grace Chandler bantered with him for a few moments before she took out her tape recorder and had him swear he would tell the truth. After those formalities, Grace asked a few routine questions, then narrowed in on the night he had seen his father molesting his sister. Rich repeated what he had told me almost word for word.

  “Now, describe what your father did to you,” Grace asked.

  “He played with my privates.”

  “When was that?”

  “Last summer.”

  “What happened?”

  “We were working late to get the boats ready for the Memorial Day races, so Dad decided we’d camp out at the store.”

  “What went on that night?” Grace coaxed.

  “We were getting ready for bed, well, not really a bed, we were going to share a double sleeping bag. I was wearing my shirt and bathing suit, but Dad said to take off my suit. I didn’t want to because I knew what he meant.”

  “Why is that?” Grace asked.

  “He’d done it before.”

  “He’d masturbated you before?” Grace asked to clarify.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you know what an orgasm is?”

  “It’s when you come all over.”

  Grace nodded. “Is that what happened when you were at the marine shop in May?”

  “Yeah, he came and …” Rich’s head drooped. I saw his shoulders heaving. Nobody spoke. “He made me … he made me come too.”

  Grace took some notes. “Do you have the street address for your father’s marine repair shop?”

  “No, but you know the Camel Hump Bridge?” Rich replied in an unsteady voice. “Well, right after you cross it, you take the first left turn and go back behind the shrimp docks, and his place is the last one on the end before the gas pumps.”

  “Aren’t the shrimp docks over the county line?” Grace asked me.

  “I’m not sure,” I replied.

  “Yeah, they are,” Rich added.

  “Where’s your house?”

  Rich described the area known as Stevenson Groves. Grace nodded. “At least that’s in our county, but the incident Rich can pinpoint by date took place in the marine shop out of my jurisdiction.”

  “Does that mean you can’t charge him on this count?” I asked.

  “Unfortunately.” Grace cloaked her annoyance and spoke gently to Rich. “Don’t be ashamed of what happened. It was not your fault.” She thanked him for his time and me for my help, and asked that I call her to talk about the rest of the charges relating to Alicia a
nd the other girls.

  Then Mitzi and I took Rich out for his well-deserved pizza—well, make that two pizzas, extra cheese and everything but anchovies.

  The months leading up to the trial were especially hard on Alicia. She was doing so poorly in her new school she was asked to repeat ninth grade. Her foster mother, Ruth Levy, reported that Alicia seemed too preoccupied to concentrate on her studies. Alicia was in group therapy for sexually abused teenagers, but Ruth didn’t think it had made any difference.

  “Does Alicia receive any individual counseling?” I asked Ruth.

  “Not at this time because the only Medicaid provider in our district is the mental health clinic, and they have a waiting list for individual therapists. The best program around here is at Valley View, but that’s private.”

  “I have a friend in their community relations department. Maybe I can ask them to donate some services.”

  “Sometimes it’s easier to get something for free than to convince HRS to pay for it,” Ruth replied.

  After a few days of wrangling, the Valley View Foundation contributed ten sessions with the female therapist who specialized in sexual abuse problems. When we spoke a month later, the therapist said, “Every time we touch on a tender topic, Alicia clams up. Mostly she nods off.”

  I was annoyed that the precious hours of free counseling were being wasted, but I also knew that Alicia’s behavior was a form of disengagement, a way to escape from the apprehension that comes with having to confront the past. When the free sessions were about to end, Valley View sent their recommendations to Mrs. Levy.

  “Listen to this!” Ruth said in an irate voice. “The counselor indicates that very little progress has been made due to Alicia’s refusal to confront the issues of her sexual abuse. Then there’s some gobbledygook about disassociation, acute anxiety, and her identification with the aggressor. They suggest—get this!—an ‘in-patient program to stabilize the situation with twice a week therapy after that.’ Each session would be sixty dollars an hour and the hospital care is four hundred forty-two a day, plus extras. Now where are we supposed to come up with ten thousand dollars?”

  I groaned. Valley View was a private, for-profit, mental health facility that actively recruited for its adolescent unit, even advertising on television. Many health insurance policies covered in-patient therapy, and I had heard of teens being admitted by parents fed up with oppositional behavior, drug or alcohol use. Miraculously, each child was released at the precise moment his family’s insurance benefits were exhausted. While the hospital did have some excellent clinicians on staff, I was wary of these sales tactics, especially when I learned from their “director of marketing” that doctors were paid “commissions” for in-patient referrals.

  “Just explain that Alicia is not covered by insurance, but you’d love her to receive treatment at their expense. That will put an end to that.”

  “I don’t want this in Alicia’s file,” Ruth said with much agitation. “It makes it sound like she’s crazy.”

  “She does have serious problems, Ruth, but I doubt she needs to be hospitalized. Maybe we can use this diagnosis to continue to get therapy for her. She’s going to need special support around the time of the trial.” “That’s what I am here for,” Ruth replied softly.

  In many ways Alicia typified the sexual abuse victim. Inferior school performance was one indicator, but her sexually oriented behaviors were more illustrative of what had happened to her. Alicia displayed inappropriate mannerisms for a child of any age, even a belligerent fifteen-year-old. Ruth described Alicia answering the door with her blouse opened, lifting her skirt and touching her vulva in public, as well as catching her fondling boys and allowing them to squeeze her breasts and buttocks. On Halloween Alicia had gone into a community group’s haunted house but had not come out with the other girls. When Ruth went in after her, she found Alicia in a corner under an eerie skeleton that glowed in black light lifting her sweater and revealing her naked breasts as visitors came around the corner. Even I had observed Alicia lifting her skirt and scratching her genitals in the front hall of the house, where anyone in the living room could see her, and I had heard the stories of her sexual exploits firsthand. Her foster father, Milo Levy, had to be ever vigilant and never dared hug her without another adult in the room. He avoided being alone in the house with Alicia, or any of the other foster girls, because even an accusation of sexual abuse by an angry foster child could ruin his reputation.

  Before being placed in the Levy home, Alicia had been in shelter care for several weeks. She and another girl had run away and hitched a ride to the beach, where they met two guys who were all too happy to share a hotel room with them. Alicia giggled as she recalled the “nonstop fucking” and said she’d done it with a black man they had met at a bar while the others watched. When the boys started to bring their friends around, though, she had had enough and called HRS to report her whereabouts. Mitzi recalled finding her in a filthy room, wearing sexy, punk clothes, bleached hair, and heavy makeup that made her “look like a whore.” She had sores on her legs and arms and some wounds cut into her ankles in an attempt at primitive tattoos. At the Levys’, Alicia’s hair had grown back into its natural wheat color and she had a small wardrobe of more modest clothing. Still, she had not altered her highly sexualized approach to life.

  And why should she have? Here was a child whose mother had abandoned her. Alicia remembers that around the age of five there was an incident in a tool shed when Red sat on a mower-tractor seat and asked if she wanted to drive. She climbed on his lap and he kissed her neck and hair and told her how much he loved her. While she held on to the mower’s wheel, he reached up and slipped his hand inside her panties. He explained that this was her secret place and only her daddy knew about it. She said it had felt peculiar, but not terrible, and he had patted her there for a long time until he squirmed around and made “a funny noise like he was feeling sick.” After that, he would come to her when she was in bed at night and rub her the same way. Sometimes he stuck his finger in her “rear end,” sometimes in her “front end.” When she told him she didn’t want him to do it, he promised to buy her something if she would let him. “It wasn’t so bad,” she said, “and besides, I got everything I wanted.”

  Over many years Alicia had been groomed by her father to be his sexual companion. After I had known Alicia for many months, the real horror of this incestuous relationship came into focus. Alicia’s self-esteem was bundled with her sexuality. For years she had been rewarded with love, privileges, and material goods for allowing her father to molest her. Most of the time the sex had been gentle, and to his twisted mind, consensual. Alicia had found sex with her father to be pleasurable and something she may even have initiated once in a while. Eventually, as she matured and began to become interested in boys her age, she started to realize that her relationship with her father was taboo. Even so, she never tried to resist him, nor did she voluntarily confide in anyone because by then, she found a perverse pleasure in defying the rules of society, being some sort of a romantic outlaw.

  Nevertheless, others in the community had noticed that Red Stevenson behaved oddly toward his daughter. In middle school, Alicia began to hang out at a convenience store close to the school bus stop, which was managed by Dee Smiley. Mrs. Smiley had told investigators that she had heard Red shouting at Alicia to get into the pickup truck by saying, “C’mon, you cunt.” According to the report, a few weeks later, Red had a beer bottle in his hand when he came to fetch Alicia. As he prodded her outside the store, he shoved the bottle between her legs and kept poking her until she got into the truck. Then he told her to clasp it between her thighs.

  “The odd thing about it,” Dee Smiley explained, “was that Alicia took it as the normal way to act.”

  Not long after that, when Red didn’t come for Alicia when expected, Dee Smiley gave Alicia a ride home from the store. “I made some comments about not liking the way her father treated her, and I guess the moment
was right because she was angry at him for not coming on time. She said he was punishing her because she wanted to go out with a boy her father called a piece of trash. I told Alicia that if she ever wanted to talk to me about anything, I would be there. Before we got to the grove, she started crying and told me what her father had done.”

  I realized that this must be the same Mrs. Smiley who turned up in the police files and was the person who probably reported Alicia’s problem to the abuse hotline, which then led to her removal from the home.

  Repulsion is a common reaction to incest, especially of the father-daughter variety, and yet I never had an intensely negative reaction to Alicia’s situation, perhaps because my role was to understand the child’s perceptions, as well as to figure out how she might overcome her past. To me, it wasn’t the sexual act that was ugly, but rather the father’s corruption of love and nurturing into sexual performance. Was it any wonder that Alicia had no self-worth other than her sexual prowess? Or that she had difficulty trusting anyone because the person who had been her sole emotional support had betrayed her? Although Alicia wanted the foundation of her existence to be formed from the concrete her father said it was, when she grew up she realized it was made of jelly.

  Why didn’t Alicia tell anyone sooner? Her father had not threatened to harm her if she didn’t comply, and she was free to go to school and see friends. There were stepmothers in the house much of the time. Later I would learn that at least one of these women had strong suspicions and had tried to broach the subject with Alicia. Did Alicia keep silent because she was jealous of her stepmother’s relationship with her father or was she angry at the woman for not offering to protect her? At some point, though, Alicia realized that what her father was doing was wrong, but to protect herself from feeling like a transgressor, she justified it in her mind. If nobody knew about it, it was all right. Much later, she would confide that one of her worst fears was that other people would not understand and would stigmatize her. As it turned out, her grandfather sided with her father, either denying it ever happened or blaming her for seducing her father.