ROANOKE TIMES

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, March 19, 1994                   TAG: 9403190151
SECTION: SPECTATOR                    PAGE: S-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Long


SISTERS CONFRONT FATHER IN 'ULTIMATE BETRAYAL'

At times, "Ultimate Betrayal" (Sunday night on CBS) is not an easy movie to watch. Based on a true story of incest and physical abuse, it follows four adult sisters as they share their memories and decide to sue their father in civil court.

Their precedent-setting 1990 lawsuit in a Denver court has had repercussions in Washington. If Rep. Patricia Shroeder, D-Colo., gets her legislation passed, the Child Abuse Accountability Act will establish procedures to allow child-abuse victims to claim court-ordered financial restitution by garnisheeing the federal (but not military) pensions of their abusers even years after the abuse occurred. Currently federal pensions can be garnisheed for alimony and child support.

In the film Marlo Thomas plays Sharon Rodgers Simone, eldest of seven children in a Colorado Springs, Colo., family. Now a middle-aged wife and mother, she is a fearful person on the edge of a nervous breakdown, a woman who sleeps in her car at night, returning at dawn to help get the children off to school. Her husband is keeping the family together.

When Sharon's youngest sister, Mary Rodgers LaRocque (Ally Sheedy), calls to ask if she'll join in a lawsuit against their father, Sharon learns that her three sisters also are leading dysfunctional lives. All four have sought psychological help; three have attempted suicide.

But unlike Sharon, who has no explanation for her undefined fears, the other sisters know why: As children, they say, they were sexually abused by their father.

Sharon hears her sisters' stories but denies that such horrors occurred - certainly, she believes, not to her. As Thomas put it, "Only Sharon had trouble connecting the dots."

Filled with shame, the sisters - Mary, Susan (Mel Harris) and Beth Medlicott (Kathryn Dowling) - had never confided in one another.

Sheedy, in one of the more touching and unsettling scenes in the movie, recounts to her older sisters the repeated sexual abuse, including a rape that occurred when she was very young and was the only child left at home.

Edward J. Rodgers Jr. said that never happened. Rodgers had been an FBI agent for 27 years when he retired from that career in 1967 and became a child-abuse investigator for the 4th Judicial District Attorney's Office (El Paso County) in Colorado Springs. He also served on the board of a group that supports the rights of abused children.

The same year he retired from the FBI, he separated from the mother of his seven children. Two years later, he married a woman with a son and two daughters.

In 1990, long after the Rodgers children were grown, Susan Rodgers Hammond and Sharon Rodgers Simone sued their father, not only to gain money to pay for their therapy, but also hoping for a public accounting and to hear their father acknowledge what happened.

That he would not do. Edward Rogers failed to appear in court, and in a written deposition he denied that the sexual abuse ever occurred, although he admitted that he had been a physically rough disciplinarian with a quick temper.

Nor would his sons Edward, Steve and John, who are seen in the film being beaten as children, participate in the lawsuit. They are seen in the film berating their sisters in the courtroom at the close of the trial. Sharon's therapist (played by Eileen Brennan) did testify, as did Sharon's husband, Patrick Simone.

Without the defendant present, and with no defense counsel, a six-woman Denver jury heard the testimony, considered the evidence for 90 minutes and awarded them $2.3 million, the largest settlement (at that time) in a case of this nature.

Thus far, Thomas said, Rodgers has never paid a penny of that sum. Schroeder's bill, introduced in November 1993, would tap into Rodgers's FBI pension.

Thomas pointed out that unlike other cases that have caught public attention recently, "This isn't a case of false memory or repressed memory," she said. "The other sisters said, `I've known this all my life,' but Sharon wouldn't allow herself to admit that."

They related all of this to producer/director Donald Wrye, writer Gregory Goodall and a therapist in an emotional two-day session before the movie went into production. Simone reviewed at least 10 drafts of Goodall's script. Then the actors were cast.

"The abuse psychologist we spoke to said everybody plays a different role in the family," said Thomas. "Sue was the one who fought back and got beaten the most. Sharon was the one who tried to make her father calm down and feel loved, met him at the door, brought him a beer. She thought she was helping by helping her father feel loved. But underneath, there was the guilt of the collaborator.

"To me, what was very touching was that she (Sharon) didn't want to lose her father. Every girl needs her daddy. Sharon told me, `There's a part of me that still loves my father.' Her fantasy was that they would have this trial, the father would be found guilty and then they would all go around and help other families. She said, `I thought maybe we'd make all this bad become good for somebody.' "

Thomas said Sharon eventually came to understand that her vision of family healing was an unlikely scenario. Instead, helping make the movie and working for the Child Abuse Accountability Act have become her way of making "bad become good for somebody."



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