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Amirault's accusers reveal their faces, and their pain
by Peter Gelzinis - Boston Herald - Tuesday, August 7, 2001
Almost a year before the world ever heard of the Fells Acres Day School, Barbara Standke sought out psychiatric help for her 4-year-old son, Brian.
During that lonely summer, no one was speaking of group hysteria, or interview techniques that amounted to ``brainwashing.''
All this nurse knew was that the little boy she dropped off at day care was acting very strangely.
``He'd begun to touch me in ways that were inappropriate,'' Standke recalled, ``or he'd try to kiss me with his tongue.'' Her son's behavior had become so aberrant she phoned her ex-husband to ask if he'd been watching pornographic movies in front of the child. Brian's father was justifiably outraged.
When Barbara confided her concern about the scratches on her son's groin to Violet Amirault, proprietor of Fells Acres, she was told such things happen to kids. Both Vi and her daughter, Cheryl, she said, ``laughed and told me not to worry.''
``When I went to that first meeting at the Malden police station,'' Standke said, ``they never said a word about charges or anything like that. The police simply ran down a list of child abuse symptoms. My son had every one of them: the stomach aches, the night tremors, the obsession with secrecy . . . everything.''....
``So, I sat on the floor with Jamie,'' Harriet recalled. ``We were coloring together. As matter-of-factly as I could, I asked her about the first thing on the list - a secret room. To the day I die, I will never forget the look on my daughter's face.
``She jumped up and literally tried to hide in the corner. `Mommy, how did you know!' she kept screaming. `It's supposed to be a secret! Nobody's supposed to know!' My daughter was 5 at the time. But the terror on her face came from someplace else. Children don't look that way, even when they're scared.''
Even after she went to the Malden police station, Rosemarie Hopkins said she went back home to Melrose murmuring the same three words over and over: ``Not my child.'' Not until she watched her 4-year-old daughter Phaedra do unimaginable things to an anatomical male doll, did she realize she was part of a nightmare.
``I did not know these other parents,'' Rosemarie was saying yesterday. ``I had never visited their homes. All of this stuff we've had to live with over the years . . . about brainwashing our children, about coaxing them to say such awful things . . . I understand there are vicious parents in the world, parents capable of selling their children. But to think we would fill our own children's tiny minds with such poison? For what?
``How could people come to believe that of us?'' she asked, her voice breaking. ``You can't begin to understand the guilt I live with. The guilt so many of us live with. I picked Fells Acres over five or six other (day-care) places. They talk about the lack of physical evidence in this case.
``Phaedra was my blessing, my baby. She was barely 4 when I had to take her over to Children's (Hospital) for a GYN exam. I had to listen to my baby screaming as they placed a needle in her arm . . . to check for disease.
``So nobody's ever found a Polaroid picture,'' Rosemarie said. ``I have the report of my daughter's GYN exam at the age of 4. I know what was found.''....
One day after Rosemarie Hopkins and her daughter, Phaedra, stepped before the cameras last week, a co-worker of Rosemarie's husband whispered in his ear, ``Tell Phaedra not to be afraid. I know what she's going through, because I was abused as a kid.''
During all the years spent in anonymity, Barbara Standke watched her son, Brian, grow up in pain, in therapy, in a self-destructive search for his identity as a man. ``My hope has always been that he gets his self-esteem back.''....
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