"How can this happen?" accused child molester and former kindergarten teacher Tonya Craft, recently acquitted on 22 charges, asked in a recent national news interview. "How can I be falsely accused of something and lose everything--my home, my children, my job?"
It's a question on many of our minds. In search of an answer, some news analysts and psychologically-oriented bloggers have focused on the fascinating ways in which memory works--and doesn't--to imperfectly "record" what happened in the past, as well to record suggestions of what may not have happened. Such imperfect, coached, and false memories were spectacularly on display during the McMartin Preschool Trials of 1987 to 1990. The preschool "witnesses" and "victims"--all 360 of them--were encouraged to "pretend" by "expert investigators" in order to "remember" what had "happened" to them. They reported that teachers had flown through the air "like witches," taken them into underground tunnels and traveled with them in hot air balloons. One would think--fervently hope, actually--that after the McMartin trial, in which all the accused were eventually exonerated, such coercive, suggestive, and leading questioning tactics used by many so-called experts in trials of alleged sexual abuse would have been utterly discredited.
Unfortunately for Tonya Craft, it seems she was living in a town outside of time where the lessons of history were completely forgotten. In fact Ringgold, Georgia, a place currently divided over whether Craft was rightfully acquitted after being unfairly set up, or let off the hook in a terrible miscarriage of justice, is one of the most important players in this drama about alleged sexual abuse. Another major player in the drama: divorce and remarriage with children.
Some recent news analysis and analysis of Craft's predicament and her plaintive question--"How could this happen?"--has shifted the focus from what allegedly happened at Craft's house during a sleepover party Craft's daughter had with two school friends, to the details of what happened in the courtroom itself over the course of the trial. Disturbing accusations of prosecutorial misconduct are emerging, and in the small Georgia town where it all went down it seems there may be, surprise, a fair amount of cronyism--a judge who was apparently tight with the D.A.'s office and often demonstrated what even members of the news media though to be bias against Craft, and who refused to recuse himself in spite of having represented Craft's ex husband in their divorce, and who repeatedly ruled during the trial in ways that create the impression of bias.
Not that the news media were unbiased themselves; there was an awful lot of speculation in the local news, for example, about Tonya Craft applying lip gloss during proceedings and generally seeming to care quite a bit about how she looked, and Croft having had too much to drink at a party several years back and dancing in a "provocative" manner, and whether it all indicated that she was, in fact, capable of inserting her finger, fingers, or entire fist into a first grader's vagina as the girl eventually alleged at different times during several rounds of questioning by "experts."
(An Emory University assistant professor of pediatrics was bluntly effective in her assessment of the findings of those so-called experts, revealing much when she simply pointed out that she found the photos of all the girls' labia "normal" and that the term "suspicious"--used by the "experts" for the prosecution--is not one used in such forensic analysis, period. And yet in some sense these girls are in fact victims: believing as they do that something terrible happened to them cripples them in many of the same ways that experiencing actual sexual abuse would, according to experts who have worked with children with false memories).
Cronyism and bias are part of the backstory--but so, it seems, is step/family drama. Local news outlets recently reported that one month before she was accused of molesting kids at a sleepover, Tonya Craft (then Henke), who had gone through an acrimonious divorce, placed a call to social services. She complained that her ex-husband's wife was showering with her daughter when the child was there for her time with father and stepmother, and that she, Craft, found it inappropriate and wanted it to stop.
A month later, Craft found herself accused of abusing her own daughter. Fill in the blanks...during the trial it emerged that when picking up their kids at Tonya's after the divorce, Joal Henke (an alleged serial cheater whom Tonya reportedly once filmed in the act with another woman in their backyard) would allegedly tell her, "Get a good look at your kids--this might be the last time you see them." The Tonya Craft case in being viewed, currently, through several lenses: as a cautionary tale about shoddy interviewing and false memories; as a story about how and why accusations stick; as an instructive narrative about collective hysteria sweeping through communities. One last look is in order. It's time for a serious national conversation about how divorce and repartnership--and all the twisted power struggles and bitterness is can sow--can wreck havoc on children, families, and entire communities in ways we might not previously have even imagined.
Meanwhile, as we ponder this issue, we must all wonder, as one anonymous poster on the internet did, "Where does Tonya Craft go to get her life back?"
