Mickelson Case: GA coverup cont.,

[_Mary]

Let's keep personal insults out of this Rosebud and assume the best of each other. There is a proven track record of abuse victims going to the press, in fact anyone who will listen to them, in order to get justice. It has worked in the past. Ron states he is doing this for the benefit of his daughter. I believe his good intentions, you don't, right?

PS, first time online I have ever been called a troll.

[_Chap]

There's not much to talk about here related to the case

And we are now on page .... what?

And the posting goes on and on and on ... long, long posts, some of which even complain about Karren's long-winded posting style. Can't be bothered to find the customary gif of the overloaded irony meter, but all the same ...

[_cwald]

There's not much to talk about here related to the case

And we are now on page .... what?

And the posting goes on and on and on ... long, long posts, some of which even complain about Karren's long-winded posting style. Can't be bothered to find the customary gif of the overloaded irony meter, but all the same ...

Exactly. It's been brutal to read.

[_AmyJo]

[_Res Ipsa]

Aren't all the allegations based on Mr. Karren's word? Has the court docket been released? Have we heard from the allegedly abused daughter? Frankly, if it is all comes from a single source and given the family court background, it's simply hard to believe.

His story where he recounts when his daughter allegedly tells him about how she knows what's going on, when they were supposedly driving in the car is too detailed with the non-essential elements of the case. He supposedly remembers insignificant details about where he was, etc. Memory doesn't work that way. We remember generalities. The specifics make it seem like he is exaggerating a bit and harm his credibility. Also, why the slow reveal? What not just lay it all out at once? Why the sensationalism?

1. No. The therapist's report states the daughter described conduct similar to what Ron says the daughter told him.
2. The docket is available online. However, it cuts off the titles of pleadings after one line. Everything except the orders and minute entries is designated "Private" and so is not publicly available (at least online).
3. My own opinion is that Ron's recollection about the conversation with his daughter has shifted over time in ways that are consistent with how memory works.

[_Mary]

Brilliant!

[_Res Ipsa]

RI, I looked over the latest release again.

Ron states the daughter told him about the abuse in January 2008. His phone records indicate he starts phoning around the next working day. The letter to the court from the psychologist with commensurate date's in February, wherein he recalls a February date for the abuse discussion with daughter do not add up. There is date discrepancy there - which needs explaining. Did the conversation in the car with the daughter occur in January or February?

Was the impetus for counselling sparked by the daughter's in car discussion with Ron or by the wider divorce case.
My basic timeline

Micklesen phonecall 2002- daughter 6
Mum walk out 2006 - daughter 10
Car discussion January 2008 - daughter 12
Divorce finalised 2009
No of affidavits filed and video made 2012
Wife remarries 2013

I can explain the discrepancy in a way that makes sense to me. When there are multiple versions of a set of facts, I start with the earliest piece of evidence and work forward. The first piece is Ron's phone bill. Ron placed a 10 minute call to a mental health professional on 1/22/08. The next piece of evidence in time is the psychologist's report. It states Ron contacted her on 2/5/08. The report describe her notes of that phone call.

My noties indicate the Initial Problem was identified as ‘divorce case, mother physically and emotionally abusive of two boys, Court wants recommend regarding placement, oldest boy currently with Dad.’ During this consversation Mr. Karren asked if I was fully licensed. He also indicated he had concerns about “witness tampering by a general authority.” He asked about my religious affiliation and my expertise in identifying child sexual abuse since he had concerns his daughter had been sexually abused. He indicated the”Court was waiting an opinon from a therapist to see of the oldest stays with me … both boys want out badly. I’ve openly taped abuse.

OK, let's stop there and see if those notes make sense in the context of the information we have from the court docket. Here are the entries that address custody of the children:

6/20/06 Court gives temporary custody of the kids to Jean, with visitation to Ron.
7/26/06 Ron and Jean agree to an order that gives temporary custody of the kids to Jean, with visitation to Ron.
7/11/07 McKay is living with Ron. The court orders that, in accordance with the orders, McKay be returned to his mother's custody.
12/4/07 Ron and Jean stipulate to an order the holds Ron in contempt of court. The agreed order requires Ron to return McKay to his mother's custody within 60 days. The Court also orders a psychological examination. (I think this is the Jensen report, which we haven't seen.)

As of January 2007, Ron has been keeping McKay with him in defiance of court orders for over 6 months. He's been held in contempt (which he actually agreed to) and has been further ordered to return McKay by early February. That context is completely consistent with the psychologist's notes, which indicate his primary concern is with residential placement of the kids, with emphasis on the boys. He tells her that Jean has been physically and emotionally abusive, but nothing other than a concern that his daughter has been abused.

So, what do we learn from the rest of the report? The psychologist first did intake interviews with all three kids. Then she met with the parents. Then she started therapy with all three kids. Here are the dates that have to do with the daughter:

2/12/08 Daughter's intake session. No mention of molestation.
2/19/08 Daughter's first therapy session. No mention of molestation.
2/25/08

“Mr. Karren spoke with me on February 25th and asked if Kylee had reported her grandfather’s abusing her. He indicated she had told him a week earlier and he had instructed her to tell me in therapy the next day.”

2/26/08

When I met with [daughter] on February 26th she did not say anything about the incident until she was told, “Your father said you had something you wanted to tell me. [Daughter] then reorted her maternal grandfather sexually abused her ‘when I was six’ by ‘rubbing my thighs and I could feel his weenie.’ She later referred to her grandfather as a ‘pervert.’ She said she had not told anyone beore she told her father last week, but was vague about why she was coming forward now. Based on her allegation, I made a CPS report.

Ron's contact with the therapist on 2/25/08 is the earliest evidence I can find of the daughter recounting memories of the interaction between her and her grandfather.

The next piece of evidence in time is Ron's complaint to the licensing board in 2012. In that complaint, he says the conversation with his daughter took place on January 20, 2008 while he was driving his daughter to a friend's home to spend the night. He also describes his telephone call with the mental health professional on 1/22/08:

“I gave him the details of an LDS General Authority grandfather who had previously claimed (six years earlier) as a 65-year old man that my 6-year old daughter was promiscuously physical with him; and, that in order to justify his claim, he accused her of having the same promiscuous patterns as his eldest niece, who also was all over him promiscuously when she was six years old (as per this LDS General Authority’s account).”

What he doesn't say in his description of that phone call is that he daughter had recently told him she'd been molested by her grandfather. He describes only the 2002 phone call, which he's been focused on for a long time.

Finally he describes his phone call with therapist Stringham:

“For two weeks, I looked for a non-LOS psychiatrist but could not find one, when I came across psychologist Gale Stringham. As per the Psychiatrist's (Dr. Rick Beisinger's) instructions, I asked if she was LDS, and qualified (with details) of why I made this unusual inquiry. On the phone she stated she was not LDS.

At the end of the first visit, she changed her story and said that she was LDS, but that she was not active and that I would not have to worry

Now we have conflicting evidence. Ron's recollection in 2012 does not match the therapist's notes and recollections in 2008 at the time of the therapy visits. On balance, I trust recollections that are closer to the time of the events than those that are further away. Research into how memory works tells us that every time we recall a memory, our brain also rewrites it. The more we recall it, the more we change it. Thus, over time, memories tend to get increasingly inaccurate.

But how do we explain the discrepancy? In this case, I noticed this in Ron's complaint to the licensing board:

As the following Monday, January 21, 2008 was a holiday (closing psychiatric offices), I began making calls to several psychiatrists the next business day.

So, we have the daughter telling him about the grandfather the day before a Monday holiday and his phone call to a psychiatrist on the day after. What if he is correctly remembering the relationship of these events to a Monday holiday, but he has confused two different Monday holidays? In 2008, it looks like President's Day, a Monday holiday, fell on February 18. The therapist's report says that Ron told her on February 25 that the conversation with his daughter was about a week before. The daughter said the same thing the next day. There had been a Monday holiday about a week before, and Ron recalled in 2012 that the conversation had taken place the day before a Monday holiday.

That resolves the discrepancy while keeping as much of Ron's later recollection as accurate as possible. It also makes his 2012 recollection of his call with the first mental health professional make sense -- he couldn't mention the conversation with his daughter because it hadn't happened yet.

So that's how I reconcile those discrepancies. It makes sense to me in another way. In my experience, as people rewrite their memories over time, they tend to do it in a way that makes them look good. Or if it's a bad memory, less bad. It's like the internal rationalization that people have for the memory gets incorporated into the memory itself. In this case, the change in recollection changes the narrative from Ron seeking out a therapist to try and justify his keeping McKay in defiance of a court order into a father who immediately set out to find a therapist to help his daughter.

The final piece of evidence we have is Ron's current version of the story in his blog. Not surprisingly, the telling differs from his recollection four years ago.
The date of the conversation: (January 21 v. January 20)
The context of the conversation: (Driving the daughter home to Jean's house after a school holiday visit v. driving the daughter to an overnight visit with a friend)
The therapists disclosure: (LDS v. LDS, but inactive)

Omitting that last bit is significant to me, because it weakens his claim that the therapist was acting in the best interests of the church rather than those of his children.

At the outset, I said I wouldn't trust Ron's story without corroborating evidence. This is one example of why.

[_Mary]

I hope that his faulty memory does not detract from his daughter's experience.
Excellent though RI. Thankyou.

[_Res Ipsa]

I hope that his faulty memory does not detract from his daughter's experience.
Excellent though RI. Thankyou.

Thanks, Mary. I'm hesitant to describe it as "faulty" memory. I think it's consistent with the way memory works. You can see the same thing in his claim that the divorce was a complete surprise when, in fact, he knew Jean had gone to her father a year before (as well as her bishop and some kind of "professional") to take about a divorce. He seems reluctant to accept that Jean didn't want to be married to him anymore, and so his brain edits information and memories to the more acceptable "Jean's father made her divorce me." Something like that.

I try to limit any conclusion that someone's story is an outright lie or fraudulent to situations where the evidence can't be reasonably understood any other way.

I don't know what to make of the daughter. I suspect I never will. I'm convinced by what I've read that, at the time she told Ron and the therapist about the memory, Ron was actively engaged in pushing his perception of events and recall of past events on his children in order to convince them their mother was a bad person. I am concerned that this included prompting his daughter to try and remember things about her grandfather based on his singular focus on the 2002 phone call. I've read some of the literature addressing how easy it is to implant false memories. I've read about how poorly trained police and other investigators prompted children to recall false memories of ritual child abuse. All of this makes me reluctant to place as much weight on what she told the therapist as I would normally be inclined to do.

It's a hard case. I think I can understand why people acted the way they did. But I don't have to like it.

[_sock puppet]

Can someone give a 3 paragraph synopsis, a Cliff Notes version, of where things now stand on Karren's accusations against Mickelson?

I long ago stopped reading, but see that this thread never seems willing to die. So where does the evidence of the accusations stand at this point?