Eric Foretich: Loser in Dr. Morgan's war

[Dave Gross]

ERIC FORETICH: LOSER IN DR. MORGAN'S WAR
by Cathryn Donohoe
The Washington Times

The law, majestically stark, calls the case simply "Civil Action No. D 684-83."
The Public knows it as The Elizabeth Morgan Story, as if it were
already film: Dr. Morgan, 42, a well-known Washington plastic surgeon, accuses
her ex-husband of sexually abusing their daughter, Hilary. She hides the girl
to keep her from court-ordered visits with the father, goes to jail for defying
the judge and toughs it out for two years.
After 4 1/2 years of claim and counterclaim in both the District and
Virginia, after more than 450 pleadings and legal costs that run to several
million dollars, after almost 100 witnesses have supported and denied Dr.
Morgan's allegations, no court has finally sustained them. That has not kept
her from repeating them.
And seven years to the month since she walked out on her husband and
gave birth to their daughter, a media-savvy Elizabeth Morgan is winning in jail
what she couldn't win in the courts -- the public-relations battle to have
Hilary's father presumed guilty.
Even Dr. Eric Foretich, 46, the prominent Northern Virginia oral
surgeon who is Dr. Morgan's target, can't help but frame the case in media
terms, unfavorable to him: "`Mother Behind Bars Protecting Child From Rapist
Husband,'" he mocks the headlines.
"She goes on radio and television and keeps using the word `rape,'" he
says, "`You raped my daughter. You raped my daughter.' It's the same
principle they use in advertising to sell something. You keep repeating it.
Barbara Walters interviewed us three or four weeks ago, and Elizabeth Morgan
used the word `rape' six times in a minute and a half."
His words just prove he's playing on someone else's turf. His ex-wife
-- she is his third -- was dropping in on "Donahue" even before they met back
in 1981. Once a columnist for Cosmopolitan, Dr. Morgan has written a consumer
guide to plastic surgery and three books on her triumphs and tribulations as a
woman professional, including one excerpted in Self magazine about her custody
fight with Dr. Foretich. At one point in the long battle, she paid a publicity
agent $6,000 to put her case across.
She has defined the terms of the debate, and it shows. "Martyred Mom,"
a headline writer labels her. "One Who Resisted Abuse," another proclaims,
while columnists contrast her defiance with the passivity of the broken Hedda
Nussbaum, the brutalized New York editor who stood by while her common-law
husband, Joel Steinberg, battered List, the child they had taken into their
home illegally. The implication is that the cases are similar.
By now a heroic figure to feminists and victims' associations, Dr.
Morgan has drawn the support of the National Organization for Women, the
Women's Legal Defense Fund and local groups such as D.C. Men Against Rape.
The Friends of Elizabeth Morgan, an activist group that claims a
metropolitan-area mailing list of up to 2,000 and nationwide support, has
mounted a particularly intense effort to lobby Congress and the courts to free
Dr. Morgan. The group's coordinator, Alice Monroe, makes no secret of her
views of Dr. Morgan's ex-husband: "I think Dr. Foretich pretends his innocence
as a form of psychological denial," she says.
The man who is either a monster out of a Dostoevski novcel, or the
hapless victim of a monster out of a Dostoevski novel considers the Friends of
Elizabeth Morgan a menace to his practice and reputation. He accuses the group
of sending copies of an unflattering article from Glamour magazine to all his
referral dentists in Northern Virginia. Ms. Monroe says she knows nothing of
the activity. In any event, FOEM's views are well known. What he can't
understand, he says, are the media.
"It may sound cynical, but people have come down here for all these
women's magazines, and they want me to be guilty. It gives them a story,"
he says, sitting on a Queen Anne sofa downstairs in the meticulously kept
Great Falls home he finished in 1983. On four acres of rolling lawn that was
once pasture, the Early Georgian house of pink Virginia brick is modeled on
Brafferton Hall and the President's House on the campus of the College of
William and Mary, Dr. Foretich's alma mater.
"They'll come in with a preconceived notion of what they want to write.
And then they can say, `Well, I've talked to Dr. Foretich,' and they get some
half-sentence from me and they feel like they've done their duty. And then
they go off and sacrifice me," he says.
"The fact is, if the accusation is untrue, wh{icy6{h it {is --
totally untrye, completely and 100 percent untrue -- if it's untrue, there is
no story. I have to be guilty in order for there to be a story. That's the
bottom line. I have to be guilty in order for her to be the martyr and for
there to be a story."
Lank, pale and blondish, with a fretful air, he speaks so fast he
swallows some of his words. "The accusations once made..." he trails off.
"You're guilty until proven innocent. How can you prove you didn't do some-
thing? You can't prove a negative."
His parents, Doris and Vincent Foretich of Gloucester Point, Va.,
have just arrived at the house for a visit after a 50th-anniversary trip to
Bermuda. They nod their agreement. In Alexandria courts in 1986 and again in
1987 Dr. Morgan accused them, too, of sexually abusing Hilary beginning
shortly after the girl's birth. And as Eric Foretich runs down the list of
Dr. Morgan's claims against his parents, his mother, a 70-year-old retired art
teacher in summery pink, puts her head in her hands and says she doesn't want
to hear it again.
"If you read her allegations, you would not think a person in her
right mind would say that," says Vincent Foretich, 74. He is a retired
manager of product engineering for Newport News Shipbuilding. "It was just
like from the bottom of a filthy cesspool. I mean, downright filth. That
woman is sick, capital letters sick."
From June 1983 to June 1985 the senior Foretichs lived in an upstairs
apartment here so they could be present for young Hilary's visits. Later they
would drive up from Gloucester Point for each visit, on the advice of a lawyer
friend who had warned Dr. Foretich to keep the house in "wall-to-wall people"
because of the latest trend in child custody cases -- accusations of sexual
abuse.
"Not only did he have us," Mrs. Foretich says, "but we had many, many
children spending the night, and people over from everywhere, and she did it
anyway."
One of those other visiting children was Heather Foretich, now 9.
She is Eric Foretich's daughter by his second wife, Sharon, from whom he was
separated in September 1981, just weeks after he met Elizabeth Morgan. And in
a twist to the case that Dr. Foretich concedes is his "Achilles' heel," in
1985 Sharon Foretich also accused her ex-husband of sexually abusing their
daughter.
Dr. Foretich denies the charge, contending that his second and third
wives were colluding and that Heather had been coached. He has taken and
passed two lie-detector tests on his behavior with his two children. The court
in Fairfax County said Sharon Foretich failed to prove her case.
Even so, between Heather and her father the court found "great friction
and discomfort" and has recommended counseling for the older daughter before
she sees Dr. Foretich again. The two have been kept from visiting since 1986.
More important to the Morgan case, a medical finding of vaginal
scarring in both Heather and Hilary Foretich by a doctor who examined them both
in 1986 -- at different times and without knowing they were half-sisters --
will not go away.
Last year a federal appeals court in Richmond ordered a lower court to
consider the report as evidence in Dr. Morgan's case against Dr. Foretich and
his parents. The appeals panel then went further: It concluded that the
similarity of the two girls' injuries clarified "the identity of the
perpetrators" and made "implausable" the idea that Hilary might have hurt
herself or been abused by her mother.
One of Dr. Foretich's main assertions has been that Hilary's injuries
came from the crayons and demitasse spoons that were inserted in her vagina --
by Dr. Morgan, Dr. Foretich charges -- in April 1985, as Dr. Morgan photo-
graphed the child to bolster her claims of abuse. That act made Dr. Morgan the
target of a two-year criminal investigation, now dropped, by the District
police.
The test of the medical report never came: Last November the lower
court in Alexandria dismissed Dr. Morgan's suit entirely because she refused an
order to produce her daughter to the court.
Sharing time with Hilary has been the problem from the very start
seven years ago, says Eric Foretich, who likes to recall the line from Dr.
Morgan's book, "Custody," published in 1986: "Men are all very well, but
nature didn't make men for rearing little children."
He believes that defines his ex-wife's attitude. It was not until a
D.C. Superior Court granted him liberal visitation rights in November 1984
that Elizabeth Morgan first raised a question of sexual abuse, he says. He
believes she is using the charges to keep him from seeing his daughter.
"I don't even know if my daughter's alive," he says. "I think
Elizabeth Morgan is insane. I think she's totally evil.... I believe she's
a dangerous person, and I think she's capable of doing almost anything to my
child."
Both in her writing and in her words, Elizabeth Morgna has confessed
to being swept off her feet by a charming Eric Foretich. That is not a version
he subscribes to.
It was far from a head-over-heels love affair, he says. Yes, he
agrees, he was separated from Sharon Foretich in September, 1981, then flew
to Haiti in January 1982, where he divorced her and married the two-months
pregnant Elizabeth Morgan. (Dr. Morgan has testified that she once tried to
have Dr. Foretich prosecuted for bigamy; his divorce from Sharon did not
become final until May 1984.) But they married "only to give the child a
name," he says, suggesting that by the time they did marry there was no love
in the relationship.
"She used me to get pregnant," he says flatly, contending that Dr.
Morgan never had any intention of staying with him.
Dr. Foretich, in fact, maintains that because Haitian divorces and
marriages are not valid in this country, he and Dr. Morgan were never
married at all. Three times he repeats: "She was never my wife."
His marital history is "not helpful" in the battle for public opinion,
he concedes. His first wife, a school-teacher, divorced him in 1969 after
4 1/2 years of marriage, while he was interning in New York. He takes full
responsibility for that break up. His second, Sharon, was 15 years his junior
when he married her in 1977. She ran up bills, he says, and drove him "crazy."
"I've made some poor decisions in some of the women I've been
associated with, and my track record doesn't look too good on that score, I
must admit," he says. "But I did not rape my children. I did not do that.
That I did not do. I'd blow my brains out first. I wouldn't want to breathe."
Today he is separated from wife No. 4, Patricia Kentz, a Northern
Virginia dentist he married in 1986. They keep a friendly relationship, he
says, and would not have broken up were it not for the strain of what was
becoming an increasingly public life.
The custody struggle -- which is basically what this is -- has cost
him at least $500,000 in legal expenses. In the last six months, the number
of patients in his practice has dropped to 55 percent of what it was a year
ago.
"The strain is immense," says Julie Lesceux, a Great Falls friend and
neighbor. "My husband says many times that he would have cracked."
How can a man with a passion for order, who builds a symmetrical
house like the one in Great Falls in open admiration for what he calls the
"totally uniform" designs of the 16th-century Italian architect Andrea
Palladio, endure such disorder in his personal life?
Not alone. He began Bible study seven years ago, when the trouble with
Elizabeth Morgan began. And he, a nominal Catholic, has drawn increasingly
close to the congregation at Christ the King Lutheran Church, whose pastor,
the Rec. Thomas Dudley, sometimes has spent whole days with him in support.
Eric Foretich says he wants nothing more than to reclaim his
daughter, his reputation and his practice, and, once that's done, take back
his privacy with a good long Caribbean sail. That may not be possible: He
has a friend who talked with a literary agent about putting his story in book
form, and the agent turned it down.
"They say my story is not as compelling as hers," he says.

--
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- dgross.polyslo.CalPoly.EDU -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
"I am utterly convinced that when a little child is taken from its loving
mother, even for visitation, it may lose its natural protector and its
security." -- Dr. Elizabeth Morgan