Syosset mother charged with molesting her 3 children

In between car pools and karate classes, Nassau prosecutors say one Syosset mother was doing unspeakable things to her three children.

The 53-year-old woman, whose trial on child molestation charges began Friday in Nassau County Court, was molesting her youngest daughter with a Barbie doll, and forcing her older children to play tug-of-war naked and then have oral sex while she watched, prosecutors said. Newsday is not naming the woman to protect her children's identities.

"What [the woman] pretended to be at PTA meetings and at her daughter's cheerleading practice was not the same person that her children knew her to be," prosecutor Stephen Antignani told jurors.

But the woman's lawyer, Kevin Keating, of Garden City, said in his opening statement that his client is just a normal suburban mom - and that the real horror is her children's false allegations.

"This case will frighten you to your core," he told the jury. "It's a story of alienation, it's a story of suggestion ... it's the story of the fallacy of recovered memory."

The woman, who now lives in Seaford, has been charged with three counts of second-degree course of sexual conduct against a child and second-degree sexual abuse. The charges pertain to the abuse of her two younger children, a boy and a girl, but not to her eldest daughter, whose charges were beyond the statute of limitations. If she is convicted, Judge James McCormack could sentence her to a maximum of 7 to 21 years in prison.

The woman was convicted of the charges once before in 2006, but her conviction was overturned by the Appellate Division of the state Supreme Court on the grounds that her former lawyer made significant mistakes in defending her. The retrial has drawn high-level attention: District Attorney Kathleen Rice and several members of her senior staff attended opening arguments Friday.

The three children, who were between the ages of 6 and 11 when authorities say the abuse occurred from 1996 to 1999, began speaking of it only after they moved to their father's house in the wake of a divorce, both lawyers said.

Antignani said that's when the children felt safe enough to tell anyone. But Keating said the son, now 20, sought revenge on his mother for the divorce, and the youngest daughter, now 17, was persuaded to remember nonexistent abuse.

By ANN GIVENS
Posted Saturday, September 13, 2008

 E-mail this page
 Printer-friendly page