by Bill Rowe
“I would agree,” said Dylan, “if any such activity were established by credible evidence. But I am denying that the alleged abuse ever took place. I am stating flatly that her story is a total fabrication, and in order to establish our case, I must have leeway to probe her testimony widely and deeply to ascertain the credibility or otherwise of her story.”
“Objection sustained,” said Judge Oona Ledrew. “Consent or lack of consent by the complainant is irrelevant to these charges. If you wish to proceed along the lines you just indicated, Mr. Dylan, do so very cautiously.”
“Miss O’Dell, this alleged sexual abuse, which you claim went on for several months, how did you finally stop it?”
“I didn’t stop it. He stopped it. After Christmas vacation of my grade seven year, when I was still twelve, about a month after we’d come back from a holiday down south, he just stopped. He told me he was worried some friends and teachers might be getting suspicious and that we should lie low until it was safe again. He didn’t want me to get into trouble, he said. I argued with him that no one was suspicious, no one had any idea what had been going on, our secret love was safe.”
“We’ll find out later exactly what friends and teachers, indeed your own mother, thought at the time. Did you ever resume your alleged sexual relationship?”
“No. I wanted him to because I loved him and missed him so much, and I became very depressed. But as the months went by, I started to come to my senses, and my yearning was replaced by anger at him and shame at myself, and finally by absolute disgust at myself and at him for what we had done.”
“When you came to your senses, as you claim, did you then tell anyone what had happened to you?”
“At first I was too ashamed, too guilty, and disgusted at myself to tell anyone. But after a while I told my friend Suzy, a sexual assault victim herself, but no one else until this year.”
“What? Surely if what you say is true you must have alerted your younger sister so that she wouldn’t also be victimized.”
“That didn’t occur to me as even a possibility at the time. I thought what he was doing to me were acts of love for me alone. I wasn’t thinking then in terms of his being a predator on children. I was thinking only of a unique love between us. Besides that, for a long time after the sex stopped, although I always felt the shame and guilt and disgust festering in the back of my mind, I had forced those emotions out of my daily thoughts. I escaped into my school work and activities and sports and a beautiful relationship with my boyfriend, and I blanked it all out.”
“Your boyfriend, is he in the court today?”
“Yes, right behind you in the front seat. Thomas Sharpe.”
Dylan’s eyes bored into me before he turned away to make a note and resumed. “Now Miss O’Dell, your real father, whose death, you say, led to the grief which made you—a highly intelligent twelve-year-old girl, so vulnerable—that would be the poet, the sex poet—it’s all right, Ms. Barrett, I withdraw the words sex poet—the erotic poet, Mr. Joyce O’Dell?”
“My father was an award-winning poet, yes.”
“What kind of a relationship did you have with him?”
“I had a wonderful, close relationship with him. He and I—”
“And this wonderful relationship you believe in hindsight you had with your real father, was it a real father-daughter relationship or—think about it carefully now—was it a fantasy relationship too?”
Lucy Barrett shouted, “Objection, My Lady! First he interrupts instead of letting her answer the question, and then he puts forward a disgraceful innuendo.”
“It is a relevant question, My Lady. I wish to compare Miss O’Dell’s view of her relationship with her father to other more objective views. It is relevant to my theory that she tends to fabricate memories regarding her relationships.”
“Overruled,” said the judge. “Proceed cautiously, Mr. Dylan, till I see where you are going. And please allow the witness to answer your questions without unnecessary interruptions.”
“You were saying, Miss O’Dell, that you and your father, the erotic poet, had a real, close relationship.”
“It was a wonderful father-child relationship in which he challenged me to be self-reliant. Then, the summer I was eleven years old, when we were on a canoeing trip, he accidentally drowned in the river. His tragic death—”
“Let me stop you there for a moment in the interests of truth regarding your father’s death. It was neither accidental nor tragic, I would suggest, but negligent and farcical. He staggered drunk out of the tent you and he were sleeping in together, and then, while having a bowel movement on the edge of the bank in the dead of night, tumbled into the river and drowned, did he not?”
Rosie glared at Dylan in pure contempt. He was getting to her, I thought. But she went on calmly. “He was performing a perfectly natural function which, I suspect, you yourself are forced to do rather frequently”—there were snorts from around the courtroom, and even the judge controlled a grin— “and he fell accidentally into the river, hitting his head on a rock.”
“I enjoy your sense of humour, in these grave and traumatic circumstances for you, but do go on with your current recollections of the wonderful relationship you say now you had with your father.”
“I was about to say my father’s tragic death shook me to my roots. I nearly went crazy from shock and grief. I think I might have if I hadn’t had a good friend, a childhood boyfriend, really, who helped me find my way again.” Rosie looked down at me and smiled. “I was consumed—”
“Is that the childhood boyfriend you’re referring to?” Murray Dylan had looked in the direction of her smile just as I was smiling back, making me feel as if I’d been caught doing something wrong. “Not, surely, the same Thomas Sharpe who is now your boyfriend years later, with months of alleged sexual activity at the hands of another man in between?”
“It’s not as strange as you are trying to make it look. We’ve known each other all our lives. I was in love with him when I was eleven years old, but I was too stupid with grief and shock to know it. What I needed and wanted was right before my eyes, as I realized years later, but I was too blinded by some romantic notion of a Prince Charming who would come and make the hurt stop and sweep me off my silly feet.”
Dylan eyed me and wrote on his pad, then mused upon me again through narrowed eyes during several more seconds of silence, and wrote again. What the hell was he doing, sizing me for the dimensions of my coffin? “Oh, sorry,” he said, as if snapping out of it, “I was trying to make some sense of all this. You say you were blinded by a romantic fantasy, Miss O’Dell?”
“At the time, yes, and Heathcliff fit that bill, as he himself knew and took advantage of. Part of the pain of what he did to me is that he deprived me of the possibility of first innocent love with the real love of my life.”
“Go on, Miss O’Dell. You were saying you thought you might have gone crazy after your real father’s death. Did you read any of his poetry before or during your teenage years?”
“Yes, I believe I read every poem he wrote.”
“We’ll have some samples of his poetry later, but for the moment, would you say it was written for adults or children?”
“I would say it was adult in nature.”
“Did you have your parents’ permission to read it?”
“I didn’t have their permission as such, no.”
“I am not surprised, having read some myself, as much as I could stomach. Now, Miss O’Dell, besides reading your real father’s passionate erotic poetry, frankly sexual in content, did you read many romantic novels as a teenager?”
“I’ve always read a lot of novels of all kinds.”
“Yes, your familiarity with fiction is apparent. The words you put into Dr. Rothesay’s mouth in that hotel room in San Francisco on what you called ‘our honeymoon’ seem to be words from a character in a preadolescent, romantic novel rather than from a mature and brilliant professional doctor in his mid-thirti
es.”
“I would guess that if a brilliant professional man in his mid-thirties is endeavouring to seduce a twelve-year-old girl he would use language that would appeal to the emotional level of a twelve-year-old girl. In his case”— she pointed at Rothesay— “I don’t need to guess. I know he did.”
“You have very cleverly worked all this out in your own mind, haven’t you, Miss O’Dell? I venture to say you have never been at the emotional level of a twelve-year-old girl. I suggest to you that a normal twelve-year-old girl would have a normal twelve-year-old’s crush on an older person. Nothing extraordinary about that. We’ve all experienced that. But what you’ve done is taken your normal twelve-year-old feelings and expanded them in your mind, in your fantasies, into a mature love affair between two consenting adults.”
“I have not. That is amateur psychology at its most absurd.”
“Oh, come, come, young lady, you are maintaining in the face of common sense that not once over a five-month period did your mother or your sister in their bedrooms a few feet away in the quietness of night hear anything or get suspicious and come into your room when Dr. Rothesay was allegedly there?”
“I never said my mother didn’t come into my room when he was there. She did come into my room when he was there, not once but twice.”
“Miss O’Dell, Miss O’Dell, please, which is it? She did come to your room or she did not? Kindly stick to one story or we’ll never finish this.”
“What I said was that she was never attracted to my room by noise or suspicion. I didn’t mention this before, Mr. Dylan, because my memories of the two times my mother did come to my room are so painful to talk about.” Rosie stopped and looked at me, but she did not smile as before. She closed her eyes for a moment, breathed in deeply, and continued. “The first time she came to my room was after he had put his penis in my mouth and thrust it against the back of my throat and ejaculated his semen down my throat and made me gag and choke, and I threw up all over the bed. He calmly bundled up the bedclothes and got tissues and towels from the bathroom and wiped me off, and then he went out and woke up my mother. I could hear him calling her name a half-dozen times. He brought her into my room and told her I had the flu and was stomach sick and that he would stay with me and watch me in case meningitis developed. She started to come over to me, and he told her not to come too close for fear of getting the bug herself. He was already exposed to it, so he would clean up and wash the sheets and everything, and she should go to Pagan, my sister, who was now in the hall, and put her back to bed and go back to bed herself and not worry, everything was in the doctor’s capable hands.
“The second time my mother came into my room when he was there with me happened a few nights later. He had put the lubricant on his penis and in my rectum and had anal sex with me for the first time, and my sphincter muscles must have relaxed too much, he told me later, and I had diarrhea all over my bed. He got my mother up again and said it was a resurgence of my flu and he was keeping a close eye on it to make sure it wasn’t something worse. Both times I lay there in my bed wanting to die from the physical reaction and the fear and guilt over what I’d done, and hoping my mother didn’t find out what was going on. Later he told me he’d be more careful to keep those reactions from happening again when, as he put it, we were enjoying oral and anal sex together. I said earlier that he had sex with me nearly every night for five months. To be accurate, I would have to say he had oral or vaginal or anal intercourse with me every night. And whenever we were alone in the house he would do all three, one after the other.
“Later, after it had stopped, I tried to blank it all out my mind as if it had not happened to me but to some other person. But of course it had happened to me, and my stepfather, the man whom I had loved with all my heart, had done it to me as his child sex slave, and for a long while it corrupted every good feeling in me. It wasn’t till later that I could see that Dr. Rothesay, he and he alone, had exploited me and made me his slave for his own perverted sexual purposes, all in the name of love. But it wasn’t love, it was sick sex and I was the victim of it and I was slave to it. He took advantage of my pathetic little girl’s feelings to enslave me with his sick, pathological sex and nearly ruined my life forever.” Tears were running down Rosie’s cheeks, but as she talked, she was oblivious to them until she felt them drop onto her breast. She pulled some tissues out of her jacket pocket and quickly wiped her eyes, murmuring, “Sorry.”
The courtroom was soundless. Jurors looked dazed. Wetness shone in the eyes of some. Murray Dylan tried to maintain professional confidence, but Rosie’s words had undermined his poise. Rothesay’s erect posture had also sagged. I tried to tell myself that this was absolutely fabulous: her testimony had clobbered the fancy, self-assured defence lawyer. But the truth was that it had shattered me. I would have preferred it a thousand times over if Dylan had proved that the acts committed by Rosie and Rothesay had never actually taken place, that everything she’d sworn to was a pack of lies.
“Miss O’Dell,” Murray Dylan began again, amazingly unruffled once more, “I put it to you that your main emotions and feelings towards Dr. Rothesay soon after he came into your mother’s life were not as you have described them under oath but were, in fact, bitterness and resentment because he would not respond to your infatuation in the manner you wanted him to.”
“That is simply not true.”
“Miss O’Dell,” Murray Dylan thundered, “I put it to you squarely that none, not one, not a single one, of the sexual acts you have alleged, in fact, took place.”
Rosie’s voice rose. “And I tell you they did, all of them.”
“Moreover, I put it to you that all your allegations are a fabrication of your imagination, your feverish, overactive imagination spurred on at the time by your grief, your love, your actual love of Dr. Rothesay—I don’t deny your love was real—and that the sexual acts and all the emotional upheaval you have related in court are fantasies of your imagination.”
“Perhaps, Mr. Dylan, you can tell me if this is also a fantasy of my imagination.” Rosie’s voice was low and calm again. “After he stopped sexually assaulting me, something horrifying began to happen in my genital region. I started to have spasms, and seizures and contractions down there, unexpectedly and spontaneously, completely against my will. They would happen any time of the day or night, sometimes when I was asleep, sometimes when I was awake, perhaps just sitting at my desk in school. I was having what I can only describe as some twisted and warped form of orgasm, always extremely unpleasant, but with an echo of love and pleasure mixed up in it somewhere. It was a sick and horrible feeling. Can a person imagine that? Dream it up? Fabricate it? As a thirteen-year-old girl going through puberty, I would long to become an adult so that I could go to a hospital somewhere and have my genitals surgically removed and never, ever have to feel anything there again for the rest of my life.”
“Do you have those alleged sensations currently, or did they stop as you got on with your life?”
“I gradually controlled them myself and with the help of my friend Suzy and by concentrating on other things in my life: studies, tennis, basketball, student activities. But my memory of them is very acute and added for a long time to my fear of intimacy with anyone of the opposite sex.”
“A long-time fear of intimacy with anyone of the opposite sex—how old are you now?”
“Sixteen.”
“And at the age of sixteen, are you saying you have been trying for a long time to be intimate with others of the opposite sex?”
“Objection,” said Lucy. “Whether she has been trying to be intimate with anyone else for a long time or a short time or not at all is completely irrelevant to the matters before the court.”
“Miss O’Dell trotted that out, not me, My Lady,” said Dylan. “I was only trying to clarify what she was attempting to say.”
“Nice try, Mr. Dylan,” said the judge. “Objection sustained. The question is irrelevant.”
“Well, I put it to you again, Miss O’Dell, that your own word ‘memory’ is the operative word in this case. You fantasized those horrible feelings just as you fantasized the sexual acts, and you now remember your fantasies as if they were real.”
“Look, Mr. Dylan, everything I have described were real events, not fantasies. You remind me of what Dr. Samuel Johnson did when someone asked him how he would refute the argument that nothing exists. He said, ‘Thus I refute it, ’ and he kicked a big rock and injured his foot. And I would say the same thing. I know what Dr. Rothesay did to me as surely as if I had kicked a rock, and I know as surely as if I had broken my bones what injuries those real acts have done to me. It all happened, sir, as facts, not fantasies.”
“You are an extremely well-read young lady—the pragmatics of Dr. Johnson dragged out onto the stage as a prop, no less. Let us see how strongly grounded you are as well in the literature of child sex abuse. Did you study up on sexual abuse victims, their fears, their guilt, their shame, their disgust, their sometimes spontaneous and unwanted physical reactions, in preparation for this trial?”
“Not in preparation for this trial, no.”
“Oh? Because during my own reading in preparation for this trial, I came across many of the very points you have made so well here today. Some of your points seemed like quotes from the books and articles I read.”
“Long, long before this trial, sir, I did do a lot of reading in this area. I am sure that if you had been a victim of sexual abuse as I was, you would have done a lot of reading in that area, too, just as you have obviously done a lot to become such an expert courtroom bully.” The jury and spectators stirred. Some tittered: this was getting better and better.
Dylan gazed upon Rosie with an indulgent smile. “Now, now, Miss O’Dell, kindly rein in your spiteful, resentful, vengeful streak and answer my legitimate questions.”