Cry Rape: The True Story of One Woman's Harrowing Quest for Justice

29. “Expect the Worst”

29 “Expect the Worst” Every family has its secrets, some darker and buried deeper than others. The secrets kept by Patty’s family were very dark and very deep. “We don’t talk about it,” Patty’s sister Brenda said matter-of-factly during her deposition in the civil case. Yes, she knew Patty alleged being sexually molested by her stepfather (Brenda’s father) when Patty was young. Yes, she attested, “I would say I believe her.” But mostly, said Brenda, “it’s just not something—we just don’t go there. It’s fine that way.” Patty, in her own deposition, put it like this: “We like to pretend nothing ever happened.” Mark Eisenberg filed his motion on Friday the thirteenth of February 2004. It sought “to allow the defense to introduce in its case prior untruthful allegations of sexual assault made by the complainant”— namely, her claims of being sexually molested between the ages of six and fourteen. The stepfather, Eisenberg told the court, “will testify that this never happened.” Detective Schwartz, tellingly, had tried the same approach: find the stepdad and see if he’ll say she lied about that, too. But Eisenberg, unlike the detective, had found the stepdad. “Patty’s going to be victimized all over again,” sighed her sister Sue, in response to this news. A few days earlier, she had gotten a call from an investigator who did not initially volunteer that he was in Eisenberg’s employ. Just like Schwartz, he wanted to know about these allegations involving the stepfather. He asked “if I believed Patty and everything she said.” Her reply: “Of course I do.” Eisenberg and his investigator visited Patty’s ex-husband, Misty’s father, showing him her psychiatric records, the ones Judge Nichol had 222 turned over on grounds that Patty “waived her privilege of confidentiality ” when she sued the police. They also spoke with Patty’s former boyfriend Mark, perhaps to ask about her “mental chemical depreciation.” But tracking down her childhood molester was Eisenberg’s attempted coup de grâce. Sue shuddered at the memories it brought back, the secrets it threatened to unleash. “We were all victims of inappropriate behavior by that adult,” she told me. Patty, the oldest, got the worst of it, and by coming forward as a teenager might have spared her sisters. Police reports con- firm that the authorities who removed Patty from the home never even spoke to these other children. Sue recalled being touched in inappropriate ways. A third stepdaughter, she related, would only say, “I know what he did to me.” Another sibling, one of the man’s daughters, would not let her own daughter be alone with him. Sue agreed this was wise: “He’s a person who never should be around children.” Patty reacted to Eisenberg’s motion with alarm: “I can’t have it going that far.” Denial had worked well for her family; it protected her mother, especially, from pain and guilt over these past events. And now this lawyer was stooping to this, “telling our family when and how to deal with it.” The impending trial and, perhaps, the throwing down of this gauntlet , seemed to energize Schwaemle. This would be her first trial in more than five years—her duties in the district attorney’s office were largely supervisory—and she was excited by the challenge that the case presented . Eisenberg had so much to work with to confuse the jury and plant the seeds of reasonable doubt: Patty’s recantation, her implication of Dominic, Misty’s fling with the defendant, police witnesses more interested in justifying their decision to turn on a rape victim than in convicting her assailant. Schwaemle’s job was to keep the issues simple: a woman is raped; the semen of a man she didn’t know but who knew of her is found in her bed. “A lot,” she told me, “will depend on what Judge Nichol lets in.” “I think I’ll get a lot of stuff in,” chirped Eisenberg to Schwaemle prior to the start of a February 27 hearing on his motion to dredge up Patty’s “prior untruthful allegations of sexual assault.” Patty was at this proceeding, the first she had been to in Nichol’s court. Sue was also present, in case she was needed to testify. The stepfather was nowhere “Expect the Worst” 223 • to be...