WRONGLY ACCUSED SYNDROME - DISORDERED THINKING
Kenneth Pangborn

For more than a quarter century working with people wrongly accused of child abuse, rape, domestic violence and similar acts we have been able to identify certain common traits in the client base. While most of the people do not share all of the traits they do tend to share most of them. Most of this is borne out in the psychological testing routinely administered to our clients, (MMPI-2 MCMI-III and other tests) and in their decision making process. The evidence has not yet risen to the level of a medically provable syndrome as such. The information in this article is offered to identify problem areas for those facing false allegations and those attempting to assist them in their defense as well as to encourage further research by other professionals.

For every client we are able to test and collect data on there are 9 people that we are not. Many of these people wind up being tested within the legal process under different paradigms than what we employ. We occasionally gain subsequent access to the testing results and they are consistent with what we find in clients we do have tested except the degree of psychopathology generally tends to be somewhat higher in those individuals.

When first encountering the potential client they are in a confused state knowing that their situation is desperate but wanting to hear some magical answer to their dilemma, they have generally passed through the initial panic stage before we hear from them after learning they have been accused of the acts. When we first encounter the clients they are in depression, a state that will stay with them for some considerable time in the legal process and hinder their ability to make sound judgments. They often retreat into a world of magical thinking and self delusion where they want and expect simple answers to the situation they find themselves confronted with. It is hard for these individuals to fully process their new environment and to understand that the people that are confronting them in the legal system are not always people they can trust. Most of us were raised to place unquestioning trust in police officers, and accused people generally suffer denial that any law enforcement officer can be dishonest. (Actually dishonest may be too harsh a word, but many police investigators tend to function with the belief that the ends justify the means, especially in sex crimes.) Most people see social workers as a helping profession and are unable to face that many of them have personal agendas or organizational agendas that won’t give them a fair shot at clearing their names.

9 of every 10 potential clients we encounter listen to our approach to these cases and almost literally run in the other direction. We confront them with the reality of what they face and a realistic cost estimate for clearing them. Which is usually in the near mid five figure range. This is usually shocking for the newly accused client whose local counsel has signed on for anything from a few hundred to $5,000. It is natural to recoil from being told they will have to spend such a huge amount when they are not hearing that from somebody they can actually see in person as opposed to a voice on the phone who they don’t know. The individual has no frame of reference to determine what reality is in these situations. On one had they have a lawyer they have met with and know promising the moon for far less money, and one who often tells them they don’t need to do all the elaborate things we suggest. Human nature kicks in, and reasoning that under different circumstances might stand them in good stead now is likely to cause them endless misery. In cases we have tracked, mainly through subsequent contacts from these clients, we know that in almost every case the accused people wound up spending considerably more than we estimated, often twice, and that statistically 9 out of 10 of them wind up being convicted, or losing their children. That is something they cannot see from that vantage point. The single greatest factor that clouds their judgment is depression, depression that often rises to clinical levels. One of the features of depression is the paralysis that people suffer in being able to make clear, rational judgments to order their lives. They either make no decisions or the wrong ones. The tendency is to withdraw and make no decision at all or to allow others to make decisions for them.

These individuals also make problem clients. They are difficult to keep centered and they engage in self-defeating behaviors sometimes to the extreme they act out in ways that will sabotage their legal position. An example is a client who was accused of neglecting his son on visitations. His estranged wife came to his apartment one evening and began pushing all of his buttons ( a deliberate habit she had mastered ). He called me about 2 A.M. with a “question.” I could hear noise and sirens in the background, which helped me wake up. Still groggy I agreed to answer the question. He told me of the events and how she had been taunting him for better than 90 minutes and how he finally lost his temper and shoved her through a picture window in his living room. He wanted to know if this event would “hurt his case for custody.”  I asked him; “you live on the second floor don’t you?” He affirmed that he did, and I told him that I didn't’t think it would affect his case for custody because he no longer had one. Both his lawyer and I had spent hours with him (sometimes yelling at him) from previous events, trying to get him to stay away from the woman and to do anything to avoid these deliberate confrontations she started. Fortunately the woman wasn't’t badly injured, but the event did cause him to lose what had been an almost certain win. The underlying psychological causes were always there in this fellow. In the compact time afforded in legal matters it just isn't’t possible to correct problems such as these.

The wrongly accused syndrome includes a number of facets. One is selective listening. What is the tendency to take what you want to hear from what you are told, or to try to find some ways around having to pay for doing things right. For example, we speak of the need for specialized testing, and being prep’d for the testing. Some individuals try to learn the names of who we use as experts and then to save costs, will try to contact those experts themselves and “cut out the middle man” as they see it. To them this saves them thousands of dollars, and they don’t see any of the risks for doing that. Some folks get lucky and it works for them. But for many people it doesn't’t and they are left worse off than if they had done nothing. The need for doing things by a formula isn't’t always easy to see especially when the person gets contrary advice from lawyers or other consultants even when that advice is well intentioned.

The traits we see in WAS-DT clients are elevated scores for narcissism, histrionic personalities, generally are immature individuals, and also tend to be conformist and rigid in their thinking, as well as have a propensity to engage in magical thinking. Many tend toward prescriptive and controlling religious beliefs. And all of the WAS-DT clients we see suffer varying levels of depression from borderline clinical levels to serious levels that should be treated with medication. Many of the WAS-DT clients are also Borderline Personality Disorder codependents. They have generally had a spouse who is BPD. These individuals have great difficulty in thinking clearly in many areas of life during this time. Work performance generally suffers to the point that many will lose employment. At some point these individuals become very angry a trait that is likely to stay with them the rest of their lives to varying degrees.

It is fair to say, however unpopular it may be, that “normal people don’t get accused of these things.” As much as people facing accusations want to see themselves as “normal” when we look at their profiles on psychological testing we see clear trait patterns for the people facing the allegations. Generally the patterns differ somewhat depending on the type of allegation they are facing. Men facing false date rape allegations generally tend toward hypermasculinity and are insufferable boors. They are the opposite of “New Age Sensitive Guys.” Their lack of sensitivity, their propensity to use people and to disregard their feelings makes them ideal candidates for a date rape accusation. Men accused of child sexual abuse in a divorce case also tend to be less than sensitive. The late Dr. Henry Adams of the University of Georgia described this as his “asshole theory.” This was derived from seeing patterns of psychological profiles of wrongly accused men in SAID cases. (Sexual Abuse allegations In Divorce) These men tended to be rigid and difficult people. They tended to be controlling and psychologically domineering and abusive to their wives. In short, the abuse allegations were the only way the women had to level the playing field and keep the men at bay. The women didn't’t realize that people within the legal and social services systems would have agendas of their own and the cases would take on a life they had never imagined. They had, however, grabbed the proverbial tiger by the tail and couldn't’t let go and survive.

Many of these people make it hard to distinguish themselves from real offenders although they don’t realize that they are doing so. Most lawyers are not knowledgeable enough to recognize what they are dealing with in the WAS-DT client even if they are one of the few who have the legal knowledge to defend a false allegation case. They offer the WAS-DT client advice they believe to be legally sound and in some cases it might be, but in the majority of cases it isn't’t. One of the complicating factors that the legal profession has is that from their first day in law school they have the idea that 95% of their clients are guilty as charged. This is why a dynamic develops between the WAS-DT client and the average lawyer which spells injustice. The lawyer is proceeding with the unspoken belief that his WAS-DT client is in fact guilty, so he never really plans an elaborate defense. When you have a guilty client, why on Earth would you need one? And many lawyers engage in self deception. It isn't’t a deliberately concocted plan  to sell out his client, but, nevertheless in the back of his mind is to move the case to a point some time down the road where the client can be persuaded to accept a plea bargain. Over 90% of these cases end in plea bargains. Certainly the lawyer will never tell the client; “I think you are guilty and am handling your case that way” and probably doesn't’t even admit that to himself. But when you examine the cases of most lawyers you see they are almost never tried, and when tried are rarely successful. So an unspoken dynamic is at work that goes something like this; ‘You know you’re guilty, and I know you’re guilty, but we are just not going to talk about it.”  A central point of this dynamic is that when the time comes to bully the client into accepting a plea bargain, the consequences of accepting that plea are either not explained or deliberately misrepresented to the client. Of course those lawyers know that if they explained the lack of civil rights, what the clients will actually face (especially in sex cases) with being in a registry of sexual predators and how life will be with constant law enforcement hassles, that the clients would never agree to the pleas. Often they are told they are “not” pleading guilty, when in fact they are. Legally “no contest” and “guilty” mean the same thing. No matter how you dance with legal semantics it does mean the same thing. All the consequences are the same.  And I realize that almost none of these lawyers really track their clients to see how life goes afterward. The suicide rate for these clients is very high. The lives of entire families are ruined.

More research needs to be done to codify this syndrome. Sadly as Henry Adams and I were working on this article he passed away. The data that we had collected was very persuasive for us that a genuine syndrome exists. And that the facets of the syndrome help to explain why the “prep” of clients for the legal process works so well. It is clear that psychological intervention early in the process is key to the success of resolving the legal issues satisfactorily for the client.

I must also note that these are often extremely difficult clients. Some people just will not be helped. These people tend to blame others for their problems, and in the end those working on their legal problems are no more immune from their wrath that everyone else in their lives. You often take these cases at some risk a small percentage will “badmouth” you no matter how big the win you bring them. Gratitude is not part of the personality profile of most WAS-DT clients.