The following article is reprinted from a 1996 Associated Press article. It happened to a friend of mine in Springfield, MO.
Beth Rutherford never knew she had a tormented childhood until she went to a church therapist for counseling.
Under the counselor’s guidance, she recalled how her minister father repeatedly raped her, got her pregnant, then performed a painful coat-hanger abortion.
In truth, Beth was still a virgin, and her father had had a vasectomy many years before.
Now the Rutherfords have settled a defamation and malpractice lawsuit for $1 million against the church and the counselor – and they plan to use the money to travel the country, warning others of the dangers of recovered memory therapy.
“Had I only known that this type of thing could exist, I think it would have saved our tragedy,” Beth Rutherford, 23, said Friday by telephone from her home in Tulsa, Okla.
Donna Strand, the counselor at Park Crest Assembly of God church (now Life360), and her husband, Pastor Robert Strand, admitted no wrongdoing in their settlement. Through their attorney, they declined comment.
The story began in the fall of 1992 when Beth, then 19, was having trouble sleeping because of work-related stress in her job as a nurse’s assistant. Her father suggested she talk to Strand.
After three sessions over four months, Beth reported that her stress was relieved, but she mentioned having dreams in which she and friends were being raped in the presence of her father.
According to the lawsuit, Strand told her those dreams were an indication of early childhood sexual abuse.
Without her parents’ knowledge, Beth returned for at least 64 sessions during which Strand taught the young woman how to enter a trancelike state through self-hypnosis.
Under the woman’s encouragement, the Rutherfords say, Beth recalled a string of vile false memories between the ages of 7 and 14: being raped by her father with a curling iron, having a clothes-hanger abortion by her father, and being raped by her father while her mother watched.
To this day, Beth said, she is not certain where the thoughts came from.
“I can tell you one thing for sure, they did not come from my mind,” she said. “There are times in my therapy sessions that I have no memory of what happened.”
The lawsuit said two younger sisters also were interviewed by the counselor but had no memories of abuse.
Nearly two years passed, and the Rutherfords still had no knowledge of their daughter’s allegations. But the Strands had informed the General Council of the Assemblies of God, where Rutherford worked. He was confronted with the allegations and forced to resign Oct. 14, 1994.
“We were just blown apart, in shock,” Joyce Rutherford said. “You think they have the wrong name, the wrong family.”
But they didn’t. And it soon grew worse.
Tom Rutherford, now 46, took any job he could find – from seasonal postman to janitor. Many friends turned away. Yet he never revealed to the church that he had had a vasectomy when Beth was 4, making her pregnancy allegations physically impossible.
“I never told them because I was so personally outraged,” he said. “I thought, I’m going to preserve a little dignity of my own and not tell them. I knew my innocence.”
It took nearly another year of being away from home and away from the hypnosis counseling for Beth to know his innocence, too, they said.
In October 1995, at the insistence of the family’s attorney, Beth underwent a gynecological exam. It showed she was still a virgin.
Beth, now a registered nurse, fully recanted her story. But she still feels terrible about her parents.
“I love them with all my heart,” she said. “It’s sometimes hard to look at them because of what I accused them of. I struggle a lot with the guilt of it all. They always tell me, `Beth, we knew that wasn’t you.”’
Months after she recanted, the church reinstated Tom Rutherford as a minister and he said his family’s torment should serve to alert others of the dangers of repressed memory counseling.
As for his relationship with his daughter, he said: “We’re closer than we’ve ever been.”
Tom and Joyce volunteer at James River Church. They mentored my wife and me while we were attending the megachurch years ago.
Click here for the definition of false memory syndrome.
The girl was medically examined and found to be a virgin. Consequently, TR and his wife had to testify in court against the A/G counselor, and the A/G Fellowship coughed up big bucks to cover their butts in a massive settlement.
Click here for another article about false memory syndrome.
I wrote a novel based on that horrific situation. It’s on Amazon. “The Reporter” by John Cockroft.
I can’t imagine the pain of having your own child testify against you, saying vile and damaging things in a court of law, all because of a conniving, convincing church counselor.
Here is another link to the article about the Rutherfords in the Los Angeles Times.