Sexual abuse: truth and consequences, part 2

Michigan Family Alleges Harrowing Misconduct by Prosecutors, Police

Thomas Berman and Jonathan Balthaser
ABC News
Fri, 06 Jan 2012 16:04 CST

In a quiet suburban community north of Detroit, one Michigan family thought it was witnessing a miracle: After years of silence, their autistic daughter seemed to be finally communicating and even excelling in school. Little did family members know that the technique that seemed to open their daughter's world would provide fodder for an aggressive police investigation that nearly tore the family apart.

The story of the Wendrow family's agonizing ordeal began with hope. Diagnosed with autism at age 2, their daughter Aislinn was severely disabled -- so much so that she couldn't communicate. But in 2004, the West Bloomfield, Mich. family thought the girl had experienced a breakthrough: a technique called facilitated communication seemed to allow Aislinn to communicate what she was thinking.

The technique involves a trained person called a facilitator, who holds a disabled person's arm while they type on a keyboard. For Aislinn, this seemed miraculous -- for the first time in her life, she now appeared to be able to answer questions, complete grade level schoolwork and even write poetry. By the time she graduated middle school, a teacher had told the Wendrows that Aislinn wanted to go to college and become a professor.

"All those dreams we had we thought were dashed are back and now maybe she will go to college and have a real job, and have a lot more independence in her life," her mother, Tali Wendrow remembered.

Those dreams were soon replaced by a nightmare. In high school, Aislinn was paired with a new facilitator. On Nov. 27, 2007, using FC, Aislinn typed out something no one expected: "My dad gets me up...He puts his hands on my private parts."

With just a few keystrokes, Aislinn had supposedly accused her father, Julian Wendrow, of the unthinkable -- sexual assault as recently as the previous weekend.

"The allegations were just horrific," said Lori Brasier, who covered the Wendrow's story for The Detroit Free Press. It was "the kind of story, you know, it would keep you up at night." (Read The Detroit Free Press' coverage of the Wendrow story here.)

The school, Brasier said, reported the allegations. Child protective services immediately removed Aislinn and her younger brother Ian from their home and the local prosecutor's office sprang into action.

Two days after the initial allegations, Aislinn was brought to a special county agency to meet with investigators. By her side was the same facilitator with whom she supposedly typed her initial sex abuse allegations, even though the Wendrows, along with facilitated communication experts, advised investigators to bring in a different facilitator -- one with no knowledge of the allegations.

That didn't happen.

With the facilitator's help, Aislinn seemed to divulge even more sensational details about alleged sexual abuse by her father, saying the abuse had started when she was just six years old, that her father had taken naked pictures of her and that he had forced her younger brother, Ian, to take part in the abuse as well while her mother did nothing to stop the abuse. But Aislinn also seemed to make telling mistakes -- through the facilitator, Aislinn typed the wrong names for both her grandmother and the family dog.

The sex abuse allegations were doubly painful for the Wendrows. Knowing the allegations of horrific abuse through facilitated communication were untrue, they realized that all of Aislinn's apparent accomplishments had to be equally false. "We had to swallow a pretty bitter pill," Tali Wendrow said. "It became pretty clear that we were wrong."

Red Flags Don't Stop Investigation

But while the Wendrows were ready to give up on facilitated communication, investigators weren't.

On Dec. 5, 2007, eight days after the sex abuse allegations surfaced, police arrested both Tali Wendrow and her husband, Julian. Tali Wendrow was released on bail and sent home with a tracking device, but her husband wasn't as lucky -- Julian Wendrow was placed in the Oakland County jail. He remained there for the next 80 days, most of that time in solitary confinement.

Investigators searched the Wendrows' home for the naked pictures Aislinn had supposedly alleged her father had taken. They found nothing.

Investigators took Aislinn for a medical exam. A nurse found "no acute injury."

Meanwhile, others questioned the heart of the case -- that Aislinn was able to communicate at all.

Braser said that as soon as her first story on the Wendrows was published, she got a call from one of Aislinn's former teachers.

"She said, 'There is no way that child is able to type, and I said, 'That's not what the police and prosecutors are saying,'" Braser told "20/20." "She said, 'If you said to Aislinn point to the sky, the child would not be able to do it.'

Chris Cuomo met with Aislinn and asked her to point to the letter "B." This time, there was no facilitator to help her -- and Aislinn couldn't correctly identify the letter.

"Once you admit that Aislinn Wendrow couldn't read, then the next, only logical conclusion is, 'Well then she never could have said anything through FC...she couldn't have typed,'" the Wendrows' attorney, Deb Gordon said.

The charges against Julian Wendrow were later dropped.

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Gabrielle Giffords: a bizarre miracle

Last night I watched the much-anticipated Diane Sawyer interview with Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, the woman gunned down ten months ago by a maniac outside a grocery store where she was chatting with her constituents. Her head was literally blown apart, the top of her skull shattered in an injury so catastrophic that the press initially announced she was dead.

The culture loves success stories, and comeback stories are even more remarkable. I watched the interview in fascination, wondering if the radiantly-smiling, vibrant and confident Gifford we saw before the shooting had retrieved enough of herself that she could be considered completely recovered.

Much was made of her charismatic, determined personality as a public figure, and indeed she did seem appealing, a go-getting kind of woman who appeared to disregard every personal obstacle. Her astronaut husband spent much of his time away on missions, truly living the American dream.

All that was blown apart in an instant. There was an explosion: a bullet; a ruptured skull. Life itself was shattered and remained attached only by the thinnest of threads.

The scenes of her early recovery are gruesome: her eyes are open and glassily staring while she listlessly raises a hand or a finger in response to commands. Then comes the long and impossibly gruelling daily therapy to try to drag her back to her former self, or at least some semblance of it.

Watching this, I was reminded of Christopher Reeve, a man stricken down in his body more than his brain. He was the person whom I first heard say, "Anything can happen to anyone at any time."

He should know.

I had a strange, even uncomfortable feeling watching this program. Though Giffords smiles radiantly through most of it, and intelligence still flashes in her eyes, she can barely put a sentence together and gropes for words. Her husband, who comes across as a sort of emotionless personal trainer, prompts her and even finishes her thoughts.  In that stalwart, never-say-die American way, the way that brooks no obstacles nor even recognizes them, we hear him insist that she will attain nothing short of "100% recovery".

It's the astronaut's way, isn't it? Figures; percentages. There is no doubt this man cares about his wife, but I never once saw a hint of tears, vulnerability, or the kind of  traumatized shock that would be natural even in the most emotionally-reserved of spouses.

The thing that astonished me the most about this fascinating but deeply unsettling interview was the fact that Diane Sawyer wanted to know if she would go back to Congress next May. The spectre of a woman struggling with massive aphasia while trying to keep up a stressful political career was almost macabre. But it's the hallmark of that "100%" myth: we can't just recover part of the way. It must be total. We must go back to being the person we were, our "old self" again.

There is no "old self".

There is the self of today, which is fluid and which changes and fluctuates moment-by-moment and can be interrupted or even destroyed in a nanosecond. If we were fully aware of this, we probably wouldn't be able to go out the door. So we wrap invincibility around ourselves, a sense of special protection by supernatural forces (that is, if we believe in "God"). We see tangible outcomes and cling to them, throw them up like grappling hooks in hopes of being able to gain purchase and pull ourselves up.

I find it interesting, in cases of extreme brain damage, what it is that remains: in the program, Sawyer states that science has no idea which part of the brain is responsible for "personality" (whatever that is). In the case of Giffords, the smile remains - in fact, its dazzlement is a little eerie - along with a coached-looking gesture of a determined, waved fist. This is "the old Gabby" shining through. One wonders how much is locked up inside a badly-damaged structure, like a liver or pancreas severely compromised and barely able to perform its usual function.

And yet, wrapped inside what seems like a desolate truth, that flexibility of personal identity, that fluidity, offers the key to a different kind of recovery: a self not "whole" in a conventional sense - certainly not the "old self" - but someone radically new. What is retained is a kind of bare essence (and where in the brain does that reside? How much do we know about the mysterious structure that supposedly calls all the shots in human existence?). Gabrielle Giffords has become not so much a shadow-self as a sister-self, a kind of spiritual twin, someone who looks like her, gestures like her, but is (in the words of the great poet Yeats) "changed, changed utterly."

"A terrible beauty is born," the poet says. And because of this bizarre miracle, beauty has somehow emerged from the very worst kind of terror.

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