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Tim O'Brien
New Jersey Law Journal
07-07-2003
How Do You Convince a
Jury That Your Client Was a Victim of a Cult?
For Philip Elberg, you don't
present expert witnesses and you don't utter the word. Through
witnesses and records, you let the story tell itself.
For the past three weeks,
the partner in Newark's Medvin & Elberg has been presenting evidence
to a Hudson County jury about why his client should be compensated
for the 13 years she spent in a rehabilitation center.
Lulu Corter of Wanaque was
signed into Kids of North Jersey Inc. in Hackensack by her parents
on Oct. 27, 1984, when she was a 13-year-old with learning problems.
In August 1997, she bolted from what dozens of teenagers have
described as a living hell.
Like many participants in
the program, Corter had no drug or alcohol problem. Today, those who
ran Kids of North Jersey cannot say why she was admitted because her
records have disappeared. They say only that she had behavior
problems, though they cannot recall the specifics.
Elberg, who won a $4.5
million settlement for another Kids of North Jersey patient in 1999,
did give the jury a road map in his opening on June 12 before
Superior Court Judge Maurice Gallipoli.
"This [program] is not about
tough love. It's about destroying families as they existed, and
creating a new family with [V.] Miller Newton as the father and Ruth
Ann Newton as the mother," Elberg told the eight-member jury hearing
Corter v. Kids of North Jersey, L-3578-00.
The suit is seeking
compensatory but not punitive damages because Newton is in
bankruptcy in Florida. It alleges that Newton violated Corter's
civil rights, provided treatment that deviated from the standard
care, and caused emotional, physical and psychological damage.
Newton is the 63-year-old
rehabilitation guru who ran Kids of North Jersey from 1984 to the
early 1990s, then moved the operation to Secaucus after stiffing the
landlord for $400,000. State authorities finally cut off his
Medicaid payments in 1998 and sued him in 1999 for $1 million in
Medicaid overbillings. Kids of North Jersey closed in 1999.
Newton's operation was also
shut down by state officials in California, Florida and Utah, where
a prosecutor called the program "a sort of private jail, using
techniques such as torture and punishment."
Newton's wife, Ruth Ann,
served as a clinical director and second in command. Both are
defendants, along with their organization, under several names, and
four psychiatrists. Elberg and his partner and co-counsel in the
case, Alan Medvin, previously gained settlements from carriers on
behalf of three of the psychiatrists. The fourth, now dead, was
dropped as a defendant.
Though Elberg has
assiduously avoided the "cult" word, three witnesses testified to
being brainwashed. He says that even an expert for the defense said
in a report that Lulu was brainwashed.
Testimony was elicited that
Miller would routinely require patients to shun their families, or
parents to shun their children who left the program before
graduating. For example, Lulu Corter testified that Newton
discouraged her and her mother from attending her older sister's
wedding because that sister had left the program prematurely.
Last Thursday, one of the
questions from a juror to another psychiatric expert for Newton
asked about whether teenagers could be conditioned to think a
certain way.
And there seems little doubt
that the three weeks of testimony -- which includes tales of
escapes, kidnappings, beatings, and physical and mental punishment
-- have had an impact on Gallipoli.
Last Thursday, shortly
before lunch break during Newton's cross-examination, Gallipoli
began a series of sharp questions for the witness. Noting that Lulu
was in Kids of North Jersey for years for an eating disorder and
compulsive behavior, Gallipoli asked Newton whether such disorders
and compulsive behaviors could be treated on an outpatient basis.
Newton said they could.
When the jury was ushered
out, defense attorney John O'Farrell objected to the judge's
queries, saying they were "too skeptical."
Gallipoli responded, "They
are skeptical." When O'Farrell, of Morristown's Francis & O'Farrell,
pressed his objection, the exasperated judge snapped, "We're just
about walking through a fantasy land, and there comes a time when
the court just can't sit there and accept this like a bump on a
log."
Asked by a reporter whether
he thought the judge went too far in expressing his opinion,
O'Farrell said only, "What do you think?" adding that he had high
regard for Gallipoli.
The exchange followed 90
minutes of cross-examination by Elberg that included a rundown of
Newton's qualifications, including a Ph.D. in 1981 from The Union
Institute in Cincinnati in public administration and urban
anthropology. The school bills itself as an "alternative
learner-directed" organization without classes or the need to show
up anywhere.
Newton has described the
degree on resumes as being in "medical anthropology" and then
"clinical anthropology." Newton says those titles describe what he
studied. He also says he is a "board certified ... medical
psychotherapist." When pressed, he says it is a "peer
certification."
SETTING UP THE 'DOCTOR'
Before the cross examination
of Newton, with backers on one side of the courtroom and angry
former patients and staffers on the other, the jury heard from five
former patients who say they were victims of Kids of North Jersey.
Elberg says he was able to call those witnesses by invoking a rule
of evidence allowing him to rebut testimony he contends is not true.
When Ruth Ann Newton was on
the stand, Elberg pressed her about comments by former patients in
the past two decades in court, on television shows and to reporters.
Specifically, he asked four
questions: Could patients leave when they turned 18? Did Kids of
North Jersey routinely try to get parents to sign in siblings once
one child was admitted? Did the program encourage kidnappings of
those who escaped from the program? And was it common for patients
to offer false or exaggerated confessions about how bad they use to
be so they could advance through the program's phases and ultimately
graduate?
Ruth Ann Newton said no to
each query, at which point Elberg put on his rebuttal witnesses. "If
she had admitted those things, I could not have brought those
victims on," Elberg said in an interview.
The five told their horror
tales, which included sitting in chairs, ramrod, for 12 hours of
group therapy each weekday. Those in the first phase of treatment
could not speak, and most could not write letters, read, make
telephone calls, talk to each other or make eye contact.
There was no privacy.
"Old-timers" or "peer counselors," those who had graduated but were
coerced to stay on as staff, accompanied newcomers to the bathroom,
where there were no doors on the stalls.
The tiniest infraction, such
as eating a cookie, could send patients back to the first phase.
This, the victims testified, was the ultimate hammer, causing many
to lie in the hope of getting out.
Jeffrey Stallings, for years
the No. 3 official at the facility, testified that he quit to avoid
breaking the law. He had testified in an earlier case that Newton
altered records in anticipation of visits by regulators and withheld
some records.
Two weeks before Elberg
filed his complaint in the current case in 1999, he filed a show
cause order, ex parte, with Gallipoli, asking that Kids of North
Jersey's records be seized to prevent the disappearance of more
files. The judge signed the order, and the state's Office of
Insurance Fraud Prosecutor seized the records from a warehouse in
Glen Rock.
Stallings said he stayed for
years and remained loyal. "Looking back, I realize I was
brainwashed."
Janna Holmgren-Richards
testified that she made up stories while "relating" during group
therapy because when she told the truth she was told to sit down,
thus harming her chances of advancing. "Lulu admitted she ate sugar,
but she didn't, and I said I pushed my poop out because I was there
for anorexia, but I lied." Lulu, in fact, made up stories of having
sex with a dog and being molested by her uncle so she could move up,
she testified.
Stallings testified that
many patients had only three options: sit tight and try to go along;
rebel; or lie to move through the phases.
As to why so many patients
went along with such abuse, many have said that if they told their
parents, their parents would go to Newton and he would convince them
that their child was lying.
"I never told my dad,"
testified Jessica Calderone, a former patient. "He would question
it, and call up the Newtons, and I'd be accused of manipulating and
would be put back to phase one."
As for why so many patients
would stay on as trainee staffers and later as paid peer counselors,
many say Newton coerced them by telling them they had to "give back
[and] carry the message" as is done in Alcoholics Anonymous.
"He guilted you," Erica
Goodman, a former patient, staffer and program nurse, said in an
interview at the courthouse. Just out of nursing school and lacking
experience, Goodman ran the laboratory and developed the eating
disorder protocol after speaking with seven patients who allegedly
had eating disorders, she says.
Newton and his operation
have been sued many times, and his carriers have paid out more than
$5.8 million. He's been investigated criminally in Florida and New
Jersey, but never prosecuted. But one by one, agencies have cut off
the payment of claims, sometimes after exposes by the television
shows "60 Minutes," "20/20" and "West 57th Street."
As for Lulu, the real
tragedy is that she was the victim of sexual abuse by her older
brother before she entered the program, and the program knew that,
according to documents and testimony. Yet, she was not diagnosed as
an incest victim until 1990, six years after being at Kids of North
Jersey.
Newton testified it is often
difficult to determine whether a young girl is just experimenting or
participating in sexual play.
Throughout Kids of North
Jersey's stint in New Jersey, the staff psychiatrists, according to
their own depositions, rarely saw patients, let alone treated them.
In his complaint, Elberg accuses Newton of "renting licenses," with
the peer counselors using rubber-stamps to sign the psychiatrists'
names to reports to collect private and Medicaid insurance.
"I never saw a psychiatrist
once," says Christine Johnston, a former patient and staffer who
traveled from San Diego to watch the trial.
Newton admitted on the stand
that his program routinely does not talk to a potential patient's
teachers or doctors before making a diagnosis, saying it is not that
important and takes too much time.
The jury in the case has
been active, taking notes and asking hundreds of questions through
the judge -- dozens of Newton alone. Based on those questions, they
appear skeptical.
Elberg did call Newton a
cult-like leader in court papers in the case that led to the $4.5
million settlement in 1999, Ehrlich v. Kids of North Jersey,
HUD-L-4592-95. And he had a cult expert ready for both cases.
"But I decided not to call
him or use the term 'cult' because that could have turned the trial
into one about the meaning of a cult, rather than about this girl
who was yanked out of school and forced to go through what she went
through."
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