Verdict
Pat Dixon
1
Shortly after 1:30 p.m. on February 7, 2001, Jessica Robinson set her half finished cup of espresso down on the sturdy blond-finish table, wiped tears from both cheeks, and walked from the large Barnes and Noble store to a nearby gun dealer, where she filled out the necessary forms and paid by Visa. With her new shiny Smith and Wesson revolver in a plain brown bag, she walked to the office of Dr. Leonard Wiseman, brushed aside the protests of his receptionist that “The doctor is busy now,” opened the door of his consultation room, and, in full view of his patient, Susan Cunningham, and his receptionist, Julie Roth, shot Dr. Wiseman in his left knee, in his left groin, in the center of his right lung, in his larynx, in his left cheek, and in his left eye.
Eight and a half months later, a jury of her peers brought in a speedy “not guilty” verdict, and Jessica Robinson moved to the next step: three successful lawsuits against the faculty and administration of a large New York City graduate school--which were swiftly settled out of court for twenty-seven million dollars.
2
“Jessy, Jessy, Jessy,” said a deep, muffled voice behind the closed door.
Elizabeth Robinson paused in the darkened hallway to listen.
“No, daddy, please,” came a plaintive, whiny voice. “Please, daddy--don’t. Don’t. Don’t.”
Elizabeth bit her lower lip, pulled her heavy robe more tightly across her chest, and padded to the bathroom. When she returned to her own bedroom two minutes later, everything was quiet inside her daughter’s room.
3
“Jessy, Jessy, Jessy,” said her psychiatrist, handing her another facial tissue, shaking his head, and smiling pityingly. “The good news is that you’re a completely normal young woman. The bad news is that you still do not accept the fact that this is totally in your mind. Of course your father did not molest you for seven years. No girl’s father would ever do such a thing!”
Jessica blew her nose and wiped her tears. She stared trustingly up into his warm brown eyes.
“I know, doctor, that Freud said--I mean, I’ve read that he believed that incest is a fantasy that--a common fantasy that all little girls . . . .”
Her mouth stayed open, but no further words came out. She looked up at Dr. Wiseman, hoping that he would complete her sentence for her, but he continued to smile down at her.
She began again.
“My case is different, doctor. I know that my father did this to me. I’m even pretty certain that he did it with my mother’s knowledge, perhaps because . . . .”
“Jessy, there you go again. Blaming your mother as well for this guilty desire you had for your father to be your lover! Believe me--it’s fully documented: every little girl has the same desires for her own father. That is just a totally normal part of growing up and developing into a separate, functioning adult. The pathology, here in your case, is your resistance to this truth.” Dr. Wiseman smiled paternally at her, letting his eyes linger on the front of her blouse.
“You should learn to trust me, Jessie,” he continued after a two-minute silence. “And you should not be trying to read Freud--or even about Freud--on your own. You are untrained and far, far too troubled to make proper sense of whatever you may encounter.”
This was their fourth session. Twenty-one more sessions later, Jessica was convinced that she was an insane pervert and gave up treatment in despair when her health insurance declined to pay another cent.
Shortly after this, Jessica tearfully confided her distress to a teaching colleague and was interrogated by her department head and dean about her mental problems. Two months later she received an unsatisfactory annual evaluation and formal notification that she would not be renewed for the following academic year. Because she was untenured, the faculty union would not even speak with her.
Three hundred and fifty-seven résumés and cover letters later, she learned that no other universities in North America wanted an expert in Virginia Woolf’s short fiction. After a brief period of shame and denial, Jessica learned all she could about filing for unemployment insurance.
4
At her trial, Michael Hoffman simply waved two paperback books over his head. The jurors were mesmerized.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury--the prosecution has portrayed my client, Dr. Jessica Robinson, Ph.D., as a sicko psycho who is too crazy to try for a nutso plea, but not too crazy to buy a big shiny pistol and pop her shrink--POP! POP! POP! POP! POP!--to pop her shrink who’d done his level best to get her to see that her girlish mind had manufactured visions of an incestuous relationship with her innocent dear old daddy.
“What we’re goin’ to prove is that Doc Wiseman knowingly tried to deflect my client from the real truth--that her daddy had in fact been molesting her for over seven years, that the abnormal person was daddy himself, not my client. Doc Wiseman wrongfully tried to convince my client that incest doesn’t happen, that little girls just make it up.
“We’re goin’ to prove that Freud himself is more to blame than my client for the death of this ineptly named Doc Wiseman. Then we’re goin’ to prove that Doc Wiseman himself was more to blame than my client for his very own death! We’ll call witnesses--Elizabeth Robinson, my client’s mother, and two of Doc Wiseman’s own daughters--to prove that my client was in fact molested by her father on repeated occasions and to prove that even Doc Wiseman did some pretty funny things with his own daughters, and not the funny ‘ha-ha’ kinds of things.”
Michael Hoffman held up a thick book with a photograph of a sad little girl on its cover.
“After a long and frustrating morning trying to find employment as a waitress, Dr. Jessica Robinson, Ph.D., went into a bookstore and sat down to rest among the kinds of things her scholarly mind used to find pleasure in--books about literature. She had been fired from her teaching position three years earlier and had been living from hand to mouth with piddly jobs that wouldn’t pay her rent. She’d sold her car, her books, her furniture, even most of her clothes, and had moved into a cheapo room that had a toilet down the hall that she had to share with ten or twelve other people.
“She went into this bookstore and found this book about her favorite writer--a woman who was not only molested by her own father but who was convinced by reading Freud that she was crazy to think daddy had done that to her. And when this woman--the same one that’s in the title of that old Liz Taylor movie Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf--when this same woman was convinced that Freud was right and she was crazy, what did she do? She killed! But she got it wrong--she killed herself. Or, looked at rightly, Freud killed her with his lie--even though he was already dead from mouth cancer two years before she died. He killed her. Him, the guy that told people that everything that’s convex is a penis symbol--except the cigars he smoked that killed him, a doctor. An’ that everything concave is a you-know-what symbol which I can’t talk about in decent company. Him!
“On the day she shot Doc Wiseman, my client is sitting in this bookstore, feeling very blue as you can appreciate, and she picks up this book, which I’ve entered as defense exhibit number one, from a half-price table and begins to read parts of it. The main title as you can see even from way over there is Virginia Woolf. The sub-title--that’s the key part--the sub-title that I’m coming over there to show you now is The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work. It’s by a non-fiction scholar by the name of Louise DeSalvo--an expert in this field. Later today I’m goin’ to be putting my client voluntarily on the stand and have her read the passages to you that opened her own eyes. And we’ll call people in tomorrow to vouch for this book.”
Michael Hoffman held up the first exhibit and walked calmly over to the jury box to show its cover to the jurors. Then he ran his hand through his dark hair and slowly looked each juror in the eye.
“And that’s not all, not by a country mile. Dr. Robinson, Ph.D., then picked up this other book during the hour she was in that same store. It’s defense exhibit two, and it’s a book my client saw on the shelf of Doc Wiseman’s own office during the twenty-five useless sessions--no, let me correct myself--during the twenty-five harmful, abusive, and criminally negligent sessions of a person who held an M.D. degree among other things, making him the kind of person we’re all supposed to place our trust in because of his Hippocratic Oath and all that.
“As you all can see even without glasses, the large-print title of this book is The Assault on Truth. The smaller-print sub-title--both of these books give you the gist in their sub-titles now--the sub-title is Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory. This here book by a fella named Jeffrey Masson proves that Freud covered up the truth about incest committed by fathers.
“This sick you-know-what had listened to dozens and dozens of little girls telling him what their daddies had done to ’em, and he finally decided these little girls must all be lying to him--or else making it all up because they really wanted their daddies to have sex with ‘em. So he told them that until they gave in and believed they were sick and crazy.
“An’ then Freud built this whole house of cards, this whole tangled web of sicko theories on the wrongness of every one of these little girls and the rightness of every daddy who ever lived. And he made his living off of this--an’ can you guess who paid the bills, those girls or those daddies?--and he wrote books and articles about this stuff and taught it to other people who also made their living off of it--others who had a vested interest in keeping it going, sort of like those chain-letter scams some of you may have heard about. Or like that kids’ story about the emperor’s clothes where none of the grown-ups have the guts or smarts to blow the whistle on the con men.”
Michael Hoffman held up his second exhibit and pointed to its sub-title for the jurors.
“My client will read passages aloud to you from this book, too--ones she read in that store before she bought her revolver. An’ we’ll have experts testify that this is a respected non-fictional scholarly book, too.”
He glanced at Jessica Robinson, who felt warm and happy inside for the first time in eight months, trusting that he had taken proper control of her case.
5
Testimony for the defense occurred exactly as Michael Hoffman had said it would. The prosecution, for its part, lamely attempted to belittle the two books which Jessica --the world’s leading expert in the short fiction of Virginia Woolf--read excerpts from in a voice filled with conviction and with the skill of a practiced teacher. The prosecution, attempting to discredit Jeffrey Masson’s book about Freud, had produced Dr. Wiseman’s copy, annotated with numerous obscenities and ad hominem remarks attacking the character of its author. This strategy, as jurors later told the press, had made their case worse.
When the jurors returned after fifteen minutes of deliberation, their forewoman --a victim of incest herself--announced their unanimous verdict in a firm contralto voice:
“Not guilty, your honor--by reason of sanity.”
