Recanting a Sex Abuse Charge; Family Needs to Heal, but Which Statement Is the Lie?

CLARKSTOWN, N.Y., July 8— At her father's sentencing last year, Stacey Hoehmann was a figure of tortured outrage, providing her own pronouncement of doom for what she said was his sexual abuse of her as a teen-ager.                        

 

 ''Maybe nobody else saw what he did, but God did and He's not going to forget,'' she told the court and her father. ''So if you think it's over today, it's not, because your day is still coming. You're burning in hell for what you did.''                                                                     

 

But today, Stacey and her father, Joseph Hoehmann, hugged jubilantly in a hallway of the same courthouse and were joined in the embrace by Stacey's mother, Kelly Hoehmann. The three walked off to a local diner for their first lunch together in years, with Stacey gently stroking her father's back.

 

What set off this reversal was a startling letter Ms. Hoehmann, now 20, sent to Judge Vincent J. Alfieri Jr. of Clarkstown Justice Court in March. Her accusation, she said, had been all lies. Her father, who has been free on bail pending an appeal of his conviction for sexual abuse, was not guilty of the charges for which he received a year in jail, she said.                                                                                                   

Ms. Hoehmann's new account has backed the Rockland County law enforcement authorities into an uncomfortable corner. It has forced the District Attorney, who believes her recantation is a lie, to proceed with a case without a cooperating victim, and it has forced Judge Alfieri to decide whether he should throw out a conviction he himself handed down.

 

But her recantation has also opened a window on how difficult it can sometimes be to untangle abuse charges in the messy dynamics of a family. Did Ms. Hoehmann falsely accuse her father three years ago to exact revenge against his authoritarian discipline? Or is she lying now to save from jail an abusive father whom she still loves, and to enable herself to reunite with parents who have also been wounded by the death of her 15-month-old sister?                                                                                                                   

 

Some experts in child psychiatry approach such recantations skeptically because, they say, a child can be more upset by the convulsive effect of her charges than by actual abuse.

 

''First of all, it's tremendously traumatic to betray a parent,'' said Dr. Alan J. Tuckman, chief forensic psychiatrist for Rockland County. ''What invariably happens is that the child is ostracized by the family, a second trauma. All her fears are made to come true and she has gotten revictimized.

 

''The way to distinguish between false and authentic recantations, he said, is to analyze the depth of detail. ''Children who make up a sexual abuse usually present a very superficial set of facts,'' he said.                                                                                        

 

Dr. Richard A. Gardner, professor of child psychiatry at Columbia University Medical School, said such cases highlight the difficulty of resolving child abuse allegations through an adversarial legal system. What is preferable, he said, is to have both the child and the father evaluated by impartial mental health professionals.

 

In an interview at her tidy apartment in West Nyack, N.Y., Ms. Hoehmann, a willowy, freckle-faced young woman who manages a mall coffee shop and studies at St. Thomas Aquinas College in Sparkill, N.Y., said her accusations against her father grew out of a lie she told a friend in her simmering anger at her father's strictness. That lie, she said, ''spun out of control.'' The friend told a priest who told a guidance counselor who brought in the county's child protection agency and the police. Soon, she said, she felt compelled to invent lurid details so she would not be branded a liar.

 

''They kept wanting more and more details,'' she said. ''I didn't know what they were looking for, so I made stuff up.''                        

 

But as her father's appeal neared a decision and it became clear he might actually go to jail, she decided to recant, she said. Prodded by the judge at a hearing last month, she tearfully apologized to her father, who cried as she spoke. Today, Judge Alfieri lifted a court order that had barred any contact between father and daughter.

 

In an interview, Mr. Hoehmann, a 38-year-old building contractor, said that ''an awful lot of reconciliation'' would have to take place because what she did ''absolutely destroyed'' his life. But, he added, ''She grew up enough so that she had to make it right, and the only way to make something right is to tell the truth.

 

''Mr. Hoehmann's lawyer, Bennet Goodman of Bronxville, N.Y., criticized the Rockland County District Attorney's office for proceeding when there was no corroboration. ''Society has no interest in continuing a conviction under these circumstances, because it's too likely that it will be sending an innocent man to jail,'' he said.

 

The District Attorney, though, has found three friends to whom Ms. Hoehmann said her recantation was untrue. One friend testified that she explained her recantation by saying, ''I've been without a family so long that to walk out into a room and have everyone nice to me and not feel like the villain made me feel good.'' (Ms. Hoehmann said she had lied to them again because she did not want to lose their friendship.)

 

''It is our position that her recantation is a fabrication out of guilt of seeing her father go to jail and out of a desire to reconcile with her siblings,'' said Louis Valvo, First Assistant District Attorney.                                                                                    

 

In the interview, Ms. Hoehmann described her father as a tough disciplinarian who kept her from seeing friends or watching television for infractions like cutting classes. She was also embittered at having to baby-sit frequently for her five younger siblings.

 

The enmity deepened when her parents forced her to transfer for disciplinary reasons from Nyack High School to a girls' Roman Catholic school, Academy of the Holy Angels, in nearby Demarest, N.J. When she bloodied a brother's nose in late 1994, her father ordered her to find another place to live. Days later, in January 1995, Ms. Hoehmann told a friend in a Catholic youth group, Patricia Sullivan, that her father abused her.

 

''I made up a stupid story,'' she said. ''I never intended for it to get back to adults.

 

''Ms. Hoehmann began giving a strikingly detailed account, the same testimony she was to give in Judge Alfieri's courtroom. She told a worker for the county's Child Protection Services that in the summer of 1992, when she was 14, her father showed her a pornographic video in his bedroom, asked her to put on her mother's robe, and attempted to have sex with her but was interrupted when her mother knocked on the door.

 

The second incident, she testified, occurred two years later in July 1994, the night before a party for a priest close to the family. She mentioned such details as a shower she took at 4 A.M. A third incident took place after Christmas 1994, she said.

 

''All three incidents were lies,'' Ms. Hoehmann said in the interview. ''I was a screwed-up little kid. I did have pangs of conscience, but it was out of my hands at that point.

 

''After she made the accusations against her father, Ms. Hoehmann said, she found another justification for lying. A fire started by defective wiring tore through her parents' home. Her father, who had been barred from the home by court order, raced to the scene late and tried to rescue 15-month-old Allysia, but could not find her, and she died. Ms. Hoehmann blamed him for setting the chain of events in motion.                

 

''It made it a lot easier for me to keep doing what I was doing,'' said Ms. Hoehmann, who wears a locket with Allysia's photograph. ''It was easier for me to blame him than to be angry at myself.

 

''When the abuse case came to trial, Ms. Hoehmann's sister, Gillian, and other relatives pointed out apparent flaws in her account; a video recorder was in the living room, for example, not the parents' bedroom. They said she appeared cheerful at the party for the priest the day after the second incident, and even jumped playfully on her father's back in a pool.

 

But at a nonjury trial in October 1996, Judge Alfieri found Mr. Hoehmann guilty of third-degree sexual abuse and endangering the welfare of a child, both misdemeanors.

 

Ms. Hoehmann, who lives with her boyfriend, has come to believe that she bears some responsibility for her sister's death because her charges, forcing her father to leave home, meant he could not fix the wiring problem. She said she wanted to take more responsibility for her life, rather than blame her father.

 

''I don't agree with a lot of what he did and I don't like the way he acted,'' she said, ''but he never did anything that he had to go to jail for.''