DID FALSE ACCUSATIONS KILL MICHAEL DORRIS?

[Per]

DID FALSE ACCUSATIONS KILL MICHAEL DORRIS?
Novelist Michael Dorris was perhaps best known for his
groundbreaking work on fetal alcohol syndrome -- informing the world
about the damages done to a child when mothers drink while pregnant.
Dorris learned of this tragic condition when he adopted Abel,
a 3-year-old Sioux boy who was neglected by his alcoholic mother. (It
was 1971 and Dorris was one of the first single men to be allowed to
adopt a child. Jimmy Smits later played Dorris in a TV movie based on
Abel's troubles.)
The mother's drinking had caused Abel to suffer permanent
brain damage -- including severe learning and behavioral disabilities
that Michael Dorris wrote about in "The Broken Cord." In time, he
adopted two more Indian children, Sava and Madeline. But sadly, he
realized that they also suffered from the affects of prenatal
drinking.
Dorris struggled to raise these troubled children, and
eventually married aspiring writer Louise Erdrich and had daughters of
his own with her.
But on April 10, 1997, Dorris killed himself, taking a
combination of sleeping pills and vodka, and then placing a plastic
bag over his head, dying of asphyxiation. Shortly afterward, the
newspapers began to report that he had been under investigation for
child sexual abuse. Remarkably, his wife had no comment about the
charges and did not seem very upset by his death. She acknowledged
that she was in the process of divorcing him.
Then his adopted daughter Madeline sued his estate, claiming
sexual abuse since she was a child.
New York magazine had done a scathing story on Dorris that
claimed there was evidence of "very, very serious physical and sexual
abuse" of two of the daughters he had with Erdrich, and that Dorris
fondled and physically abused his adopted son Sava. And then there's
Erdrich's remarkable silence as these tales are being spread about her
husband.
For most people, it was enough. It seems to make sense -- a
pervert is caught abusing his children and kills himself. Why would he
kill himself if he's innocent?
Few people even wanted to show up for his memorial, which took
place in a nearly deserted room.
Michael Dorris deserves better than that. He told the nation
about the dangers of drinking during pregnancy and made inroads for
single dads.
And there is disturbing evidence that the accusations against
Dorris were false, tragically false.
The New York magazine article is riddled with errors big and
small -- "a mountain of misinformation," as the Washington Post put
it. There also were indications of a possible child custody dispute in
the offing. And the therapist who reported suspicions of child abuse
was also behind a major witch hunt over child abuse allegation in
which all the charges were eventually dropped. Most telling of all,
many of the charges result from so-called "recovered memories."
The accusations against Dorris began at a time when he was
sinking lower into despair and heavy drinking, a time when he was less
and less able to defend himself. His wife brought in therapist Sandra
Hewitt of St. Paul to talk to the children. Afterward, she contacted
Hennepin County authorities to say she suspected Dorris of abusing the
children.
It's not the first set of accusations she's been involved in.
Fourteen years earlier, in Jordan, Minnesota, she was involved in an
investigation of two supposed "sex rings." The investigation led to
dozens of parents being accused of abusing a hundred children. Some of
the children were removed from their homes.
But the case collapsed when the original accuser admitted that
he lied about the "sex rings." And parents and other psychologists
noticed a familiar pattern in these massive allegations. They said
that therapists and investigators brainwashed and coerced the children
into making accusations. It's a pattern familiar to false-accusation
cases from the McMartin Preschool to Wenatchee, Washington and beyond.
In the Jordan, Minnesota case, the charges were dropped and
children returned to their homes. This is one case where mistakes can
be rectified.
But Michael Dorris is dead. We can't bring him back. But we
can ask, did he deserve this?
One thing interesting about the involvement of the therapist
Hewitt with the Dorris-Erdrich family. Erdrich claims that, as a
therapist, Hewitt "works to reconcile [abusers] with their family
members. If she has an agenda, it's to restore relationships."
But after Hewitt got involved, Michael Dorris never saw the
three girls again.
And after she got involved, investigators sough Dorris' two
surviving adopted children, Sava and Madeline Dorris, who accused
Dorris of physical, sexual and emotional abuse.
Bingo. It looked like investigators had him nailed.
Sure it does. If you only look on the surface.
But these were two children he had adopted -- children who
still suffered the affects of a lesser form of fetal alcohol syndrome
from their mothers drinking while pregnant. As the Washington Post
notes, "It's not clear whether the investigators ever understood the
degree of enmity between these children and their father -- or the
children's historical instability and unreliability." Erdrich had
examined her diary for the last four years, and confirmed a
distressing pathology: "It turned out that as a family we hadn't had a
single period longer than three consecutive days in all that time when
one of our alcohol-impaired children was not in a crisis -- health,
home, school -- that demanded our undivided attention." These included
arrests, suicide attempts, violent behavior, expulsion from schools
and "inappropriate sexual contact." Amid all the chaos and
frustration, Michael Dorris at times hit his children.
These children, deeply troubled, deeply resentful, deeply
angry, lashed out at Michael Dorris, giving authorities what they were
looking for -- accusations of child abuse.
But what motive could they have unless it was true?
Consider Sava Dorris, one of the accusers. He was once jailed
on a charge of assaulting his girlfriend and wrote to his parents:
"The strange fact of it all is, is that I enjoyed doing it. . . . I
have gone crazy."
He demanded money from his parents, who feared him. Michael
Dorris pressed extortion charges, which resulted in two hung juries.
In his defense during these trials, Sava Dorris never brought
up the accusations of sexual abuse against his father he later made.
It's an odd omission.
Then, later, investigators show up and ask Sava Dorris about
abuse accusations. Now Sava is suddenly confirming their suspicions.
If Sava had resentments, they had given him a perfect forum for
getting even.
And as for Madeline Dorris' accusations, there is an easier
explanation: so-called "recovered memories." Madeline Dorris is suing
Erdrich and the Dorris estate, which is reputed to be worth more than
$2 million. The basis for this suit: she claims Michael Dorris
sexually abused her regularly, from the time she was five years old
-- and that she absolutely forgot about it. But now she has remembered
because she recovered the suppressed memories.
If you know anything about "recovered memory therapy," you
know it is quackery that allowed many therapists to drain millions in
insurance money to pay for therapy that's never been proven to be
valid. Moreover, "recovered memory therapy" involves many of the
techniques that allow people to recover memories of being abducted by
spaceships, or of living past lives. In other words, the process helps
create false memories. And false memories lead to false accusations.
Madeline Dorris says she recovered these memories six years
ago but she didn't tell anyone until now because she was afraid of her
father. Right. She didn't mention this while he was alive and had a
chance to reply. She told no one of a life history of abuse until she
decided so go after the money in the estate.
Michael Dorris' suicide is not as clearcut as it would seem at
first glance. It's always easy and tempting to believe the
accusations, to believe the simple explanations -- he killed himself
because he was guilty. But there has been a lot of misinformation (the
New York magazine article) and a lot of suspicious accusations. And
there are unanswered questions -- including whether over-eager
prosecutors and activist "therapists" are so bent on getting
accusations that they aren't careful enough in how they get them. This
investigation was, after all, launched by Sandra Hewitt, who was
involved in a case that resulted in hundreds of accusations of abuse
that all were eventually dropped.
And the investigation is notable for what it did not involve
-- interviewing a witness who had close personal knowledge of the
Dorris household. Sandi Campbell, the couple's secretary for six
years, said she would have testified to a lack of tension between
Dorris and his three birth daughters -- the daughters that Hewitt
first focused on when she made her first report of suspected abuse.
"Campbell says she would have been happy to tell this to the child
abuse investigators. She would have said that she never saw Dorris
drunk or violent. She would have described him as an involved, loving
father. But she was never questioned. She cannot understand it. 'How
can you do a complete investigation on a man and not talk to the
person who was in his house every day?' she asks."
We can understand it. Many of these activists don't look for
evidence of innocence -- even when it's readily available. For
example, there were disputes about where the family wanted to live,
and the three daughters wanted to move with Michael Dorris to New
Hampshire. There was even talk of a custody dispute over this. And
Erdrich at one point moved out of the house for a year. Does any of
this suggest the actions of girls who are being raped or a wife who
suspected that her husband was raping his daughters? Would a mother
move out and stay away if she thought this was happening?
We've heard some feminists who say that false accusations are
constructive and instructive. They help sensitize men to women's
feelings.
We say that *nothing* justifies a false accusation -- and any
feminist who thinks a false accusation is a positive thing is being
astoundingly, even ghoulishly, selfish. If they can feel even
marginally safer, they don't care how many innocent men are ruined.
They can't see -- or don't want to see -- the human carnage of false
accusations.
But if we want to get sensitized to people's feelings, let's
try to understand what Michael Dorris was going through at the end of
his life. He adopted children who turned out to have heart-breaking
troubles and behavioral problems. He struggled to make a life for them
and his family, and found that his family was just another casualty in
the breakup of families everywhere. He had struggled to be a good
father and had made mistakes along the way. Now children who were
unstable were turning on him, resenting him, making accusations. And
his wife was leaving him.
It is a profoundly anti-male outlook to assume that men aren't
emotionally devastated in situations like this -- to assume that
suicide was merely a way of escaping a jail sentence, rather than an
act of despair at losing the people closest to him.
Dorris once wrote: "Once we love, we are permanently in that
love's thrall, caught in its wake, a part of its flow." That's not the
writings of a "control freak." That's the words of a man dependent on
love. "He was addicted to Louise," says a friend, Ruth Coughlin; "It
was an obsession."
In his novel "Cloud Chamber," Michael Dorris wrote of a
husband who learns that his wife has stopped loving him. "I despised
his pliant love," she says, "spread it upon my breakfast toast and
devoured it as he watched." But sometimes, she smiled at him and made
promises, and "he was mine once more, settling for less and less. . .
. I taught my husband to beg, and I despised him for his weakness."
The husband thinks: "Death struck me as the most convenient
solution . . . My life for some reason was an affront to her, an
insult. My death would be an appropriate apology."
Dorris talked to Campbell by phone late one night: "I come
back to the hotel and realize I don't have my wife, I don't have my
girls, I don't have anything. How can my professional life be so
perfect and my personal life a disaster?"
And when he learned of the accusations against him by his
adopted children Madeline and Sava, he emailed to a friend: "Louise
has clearly done everything she could to impugn me and intends that I
have no contact with my children -- for years. Those are the facts. My
only possibility for a life is to win a vicious trial -- by
demolishing my wife and children. It is worse than I imagined."
He attempted suicide a few hours after writing that. A friend
happened to call and figured out something was wrong, and alerted the
police. This time the suicide attempt was unsuccessful.
Two weeks later, he succeeded in killing himself.
He had run out of hope, he came to believe he would never get
his family back. Those who harbor prejudices against men will always
refuse to look at the pain many men go through when their marriages
and families dissolve. They will continue to treat men as paychecks or
label them as deadbeats, heaping whatever harsh treatment they want on
them. And when someone like Michael Dorris kills himself, they will
figure it's his fault.
Some of those men snap. Some turn violent. Some, like Michael
Dorris, turn the violence against themselves. And when they do,
society often seems blind to the emotional price that men have paid.
For Michael Dorris, hope seemed to come and go. He called a
friend in 1996 saying he had returned home and found flowers on his
bedroom pillow, plus chocolates and his favorite aftershave, gift
wrapped and signed "Love, Louise." He thought she was coming back to
him. Then, he says, he looked under the pillow and found the divorce
papers.
Erdrich says that's "an absolute fabrication."
Michael Dorris met Louise Erdrich at Dartmouth College in
1972, when he was an instructor and she was one of his students.
Established man, aspiring woman. He took interest in her and obviously
helped and encouraged her literary career. But by the time she was
moving to divorce him, her career was well established. About her
decision to leave him: "There's no explanation for why you stop
feeling what you're feeling," she explains.
And now she has her literary career ahead of her -- a career
he nurtured and helped launch. And Louise Erdrich is oddly silent when
it comes to contradicting the accusations against a man who deserved
better than this.
---
(Excerpted from the upcoming issue of Per's MANifesto Newsletter.
References: "SAD STORY:" By David Streitfeld, The Washington Post,
Sunday, July 13, 1997; Page F01)
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[mrcc...@msn.com]

For a fuller account of the Dorris/Erdrich tragedy, you may be interested
to read the story published Sunday in the Minneapolis/St. paul Star
Tribune, www.startribune.comColin CovertIn article
<33dcb886...@news.idt.net>, pe...@idt.net (Per) wrote:> > DID FALSE

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