11/09/2019 Lawyers for father accused of rape want psychiatrist appointed for boy

Lawyers for father accused of rape want psychiatrist

appointed for boy
By Anita Wadhwani;, The Tennessean; Published 11:40 p.m. CT Dec. 15, 2013 | Updated 11:40 p.m. CT Dec. 15, 2013

Lawyers for a man accused of raping his 8-year-old son are taking the unusual step of asking a judge to
appoint a psychiatrist to determine whether the boy is competent to testify at trial.

Prosecutors oppose a psychiatric assessment, calling it unusual in a child rape trial to subject a victim to a
psychiatric exam that could result in further trauma to the boy, who has already been interviewed by child
abuse investigators.

The father, a 58-year-old Missouri veterinarian, has been charged with four counts of child rape and one count
of aggravated sexual battery. Police allege the incidents occurred at a Nashville hotel in 2011.

The criminal charges followed years of claims by the child’s mother that her ex-husband was sexually abusing
their son, who is now 10.
(Photo: Sheri Oneal )

The Tennessean does not identify victims of alleged sexual abuse, and is withholding the parents’ names to
protect the identity of the child.

A pediatrician, a child therapist and a caseworker with the Department of Children’s Services also alleged the boy had been sexually abused, but no
charges were filed until a 2011 FBI investigation found pornography and other items at the father’s home that prosecutors said corroborate the boy’s
story.

By then, the mother had lost primary custody of the boy. A Rutherford County family court judge ruled that the mother’s repeated insistence that her son
was being sexually abused was untrue, “obsessive” and harmful to the child. He awarded custody of the boy to the now-accused father in 2007.

On Friday, the father’s attorneys, Mark Scruggs and Ed Yarbrough, argued the boy all along has been coached into making false accusations by his
mother, and they asked that an independent psychiatrist be appointed to evaluate him.

“This is a rare motion in a rare case,” Scruggs said. “If you look back to the original divorce filing, you’ll see a mission that (the mother) was on to destroy
this man.”

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At Friday’s hearing, prosecutor Kristen Menke turned her attention to questioning the credibility of the boy’s previous court-appointed psychiatrist.

Defense attorneys have asked the judge to appoint Vanderbilt psychiatrist Dr. Bradley Freeman to evaluate the boy. Freeman is a colleague of Vanderbilt
psychiatrist Dr. William Bernet, who was involved in the couple’s 2007 custody battle. Bernet was appointed as an evaluator to recommend which parent
should have custody.

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11/09/2019 Lawyers for father accused of rape want psychiatrist appointed for boy
It was Bernet’s conclusion in 2007 that the boy had not been sexually abused by his father. He concluded that his mother had suffered an “obsession that
went on for years” that her son was being sexually abused by his father, because the father’s own father was convicted of sexually abusing his
psychiatric patients.

It was Bernet’s recommendation that Rutherford County Judge Ross Hicks relied heavily upon in taking custody away from his mother and awarding it to
his father.

On Friday, Bernet called the boy “highly suggestible” and said that he may share “delusional symptoms” with his mother.

Menke noted Bernet omitted some of his findings about the family in his 2007 evaluation.

Bernet had found that the boy’s father had two risk factors for being a sex abuser, and that the father tested higher than average on a standard test for
psychopathic deviates, a measure that correlates with pedophiles, Menke said. Bernet did not note those test results in his recommendations to a judge
at the time, Menke said.

Bernet was also aware at the time that the child’s mother had taken the boy to a doctor after finding pubic hair in the boy’s rectum, that a Robertson
County sheriff’s deputy had reported that there was “no way a child could manufacture” such detailed sex abuse allegations, that a pediatrician viewed
fingertip bruising on the boy’s buttocks and believed he had been sexually abused and that a Robertson County DCS caseworker told him she believed
the boy’s allegations of sex abuse to be true.

“I believed they were wrong,” Bernet said. “The only person that was right in all of this was you,” Menke said. “Good grief, it would take a lot to make you
believe anyone was,” sexually abused.

Criminal Court Judge Steve Dozier said he will take the motion for a psychiatrist to be appointed under advisement.

Reach Anita Wadhwani at awadhwani@tennessean.com or 615-259-8092.

Read or Share this story: http://tnne.ws/1c6ixTu

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