February 13, 1997 (Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061-0368, fbns@wayoflife.org) - The following is excerpted from an article by Karen Testa, Associated Press, November 18, 1996 --

Beth Rutherford never knew of her tormented childhood until she began counseling with a church therapist. Under the counselor's guidance, she recalled how her father had repeatedly raped her, got her pregnant, and then performed a painful coat hanger abortion.

Yet in truth, Beth was still a virgin, and Tom Rutherford--a minister--had long before had a vasectomy.

Now the Rutherfords have settled a defamation and malpractice lawsuit for $1 million against the church and counselor. They are sharing their story and plan to use the money to travel and warn others of what they call the dangers of recovered memory therapy.

"Had I only known that this type of thing could exist, I think it would have saved our tragedy," Beth Rutherford, 23, said in a telephone interview Friday from her home in Tulsa, Okla.

Park Crest Village Assembly of God church, counselor Donna Strand and her husband, church pastor Robert Strand, agreed without litigation to surrender the maximum benefit under their insurance policy. They admitted no wrongdoing.

The $1 million was received last week by the Rutherfords, who had sought $12 million in a lawsuit filed in Greene County Circuit Court.

The story began in the late fall of 1992 when Beth, then 19, was having trouble sleeping because of work-related stress in her job as a nurse's assistant. Her father suggested she talk to Donna Strand, a counselor at their church.

After three sessions over four months, Beth reported that he stress was relieved, but she mentioned having dreams in which she and friends were being raped in the presence of her father, according to the lawsuit.

Those dreams were an indication of early childhood sexual abuse, Donna Strand reportedly told Beth.

Without her parents' knowledge, Beth returned to Donna Strand for at least 64 counseling sessions during which Strand taught the young woman how to enter a trance-like state through self-hypnosis. Under encouragement from Strand, the Rutherfords say, the vile false memories of abuse between the ages of 7 and 14 began to surface.

Beth said she is not certain where the thoughts came from.

"I can tell you one thing for sure, they did not come from my mind," she said. "There are times in my therapy session that I have no memory of what happened."

The lawsuit said the counselor interviewed two younger sisters, but they had no memories of abuse.

Nearly two years passed, and the Rutherfords still did not know of their daughter's allegations. But Donna Strand and her husband had informed the General Council of the Assemblies of God, where Tom Rutherford worked. He was confronted with the allegations and forced to resign October 14, 1994.

"We were just blown apart, in shock," Joyce Rutherford said of being informed of her daughter's allegations. "You think they have the wrong name, the wrong family."

But they didn't. And it soon grew worse.

Tom Rutherford, now 46, took any job he could find--from seasonal postal worker to janitor. Many friends turned away. Yet he never revealed to the church that he had had a vasectomy when Beth was 4, making her pregnancy allegations physically impossible.

"I never told them because I was so personally outraged," he said. "I thought I'm going to preserve a little dignity of my own and not tell them. I knew my innocence."

It took nearly another year of being away from home and away from the hypnosis counseling for Beth to know his innocence, too, they said.

In October 1995, at the insistence of Sid Willens, a Kansas City attorney for the family specializing in false memory cases, Beth underwent a gynecological exam. That showed she was still a virgin.

Beth, now a registered nurse, fully recanted her story.

"I love them with all my heart," she said. "It's sometimes hard to look at them because of what I accused them of. I struggle a lot with the guilt of it all. They always tell me, 'Beth, we knew that wasn't you.'"

Months after she recanted, the church reinstated Tom Rutherford as a minister.

"We're closer than we've ever been," Tom Rutherford said of the relationship with their daughter.

He said he hopes his family's torment can serve as a wake-up call for others involved in repressed memory counseling. The Rutherfords have met at least 29 other families in the Springfield area being torn apart by recovered memories, they said.

While not all those went to church counselors, Tom Rutherford said there is a tendency among Christians to buy into such therapy because it involves the exposure of sin--even if it is imagined.

"It's a wonderful thing to be able to expose this terrible, horrible, deviant perversion in a family," he said.

Pamela Freyd, executive director of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, said her Philadelphia-based organization knows of about 800 legal cases in which the only basis of the claim is recovered-repressed memories.

Beyond lawsuits, she said at least 18,000 families had contracted the foundation with similar stories.

[The entire issue of O Timothy, Volume 13, Issue 3, 1996, was dedicated to the recovered memory/child abuse phenomenon. The lead article is an 11-page report entitled "Witch Hunt in Wenatchee," which gives a detailed overview of the Wenatchee case which involves charges that a pastor and his wife and other church members abused a series of children. In the process of our research we discussed the case with Pastor Roberson during a lengthy telephone conversation. Other articles in this issue are "Recovered Memories or Modern Witch Hunt?" "Recovered Memory Syndrome Destroying Families," "Justice Department Attorney Warns of Unreliability of Child Testimonies," "Do Children Lie about Abuse and Sexual Trauma?" "1-1.5 Million Families Ruined by False Memory Therapy," "Key Child-Abuse Convictions Are Toppling," "Child Protective Agencies: Power and Profit," "The Radical Feminist Agenda Behind the Book The Courage to Heal," "Evangelical Leader's Wife Has a Spirit Guide," "The Bizarre Case of Dr. Rebecca Brown," "Christian News Editor Sued by Professor for Speaking against Psychobabble."