ELSA NEWMAN: Remember This Name, Please

The Elsa Newman Story—

Did this mother’s devotion to her children and her attempt to protect them from sexual abuse actually play a role in her being sentenced to prison?

I think so…

 

Part I: An Introduction

 

Elsa Newman. Please remember this name. She is in prison. She is in prison, and her children are in the hands of a man whom physicians and psychiatrists have told her is a pedophile, her former husband, and the father of the children.

Well…of course you don’t believe me! Or at least I suspect you doubt. I’ve met doubt at every turn:

“How can I help a woman who is in prison, when I believe her to be innocent?” When I posted this question to a popular question site on the web, one of the answers I got was this: “Stop thinking with your d***,” and yes…that is a precise quote, except this rather rude responder used the word instead of the asterisks. The primary problem with the answer is that I am a nearly-seventy-year-old retired seventh-grade teacher—a woman, and I lack the particular aspect of human anatomy that I was accused of thinking with.

So you see, I do deal with doubt, and deal with it in a variety of forms.

After all…Elsa was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder—plus a bunch of other stuff—was she not? The American justice system doesn’t make that kind of mistakes, does it?

Yes…it does…and frequently. I have read that as many as one in every seven people in prison is innocent. I suspect that is a bit high, but it certainly seems to me to be within the realm of possibility. If you are dubious, google the words “Innocence Project,” and read about the people who have been found innocent through DNA testing–while they were on death row.

Elsa is not on death row. She is in prison for the so-called “conspiracy” mentioned above. There is a serious problem with this “conspiracy” concept, however: no conspiracy ever existed.

While Elsa was out of town, attending her niece’s wedding, a family friend, Margery Landry, broke into the house of Elsa’s estranged husband, planning, she says, to look for evidence of child pornography. She is the godmother of Elsa’s children and she believed—with Elsa, as well as with a variety of medical and psychiatric professionals—that the boys were being sexually abused by their father.

[Some accounts say she was carrying samples of child pornography and intended to plant said items in the house, where, supposedly, anyone who searched on behalf of the children would find them. I don’t know which version is true. I have read that Landry herself testified that she was “looking” for child pornography.]

Landry has said repeatedly that she did this entirely on her own. She has said repeatedly that Elsa didn’t even know she (Landry) was planning to break into the home. She has repeatedly refused a reduction in her own sentence in exchange for testifying against Elsa. She has gone so far as to say, “I wish I could blame this on someone else. But the blame is entirely mine.”

Elsa likewise asserts that there was no conspiracy, that she had no idea about Landry’s plans, that she had, in fact, told her to “keep away from” the children’s father. Elsa also refused a reduction in sentence if she would appear sorry for the crime. Elsa also refused to lie, even though it cost her added years in prison and added time away from her children. She says she could not be “sorry” for a crime that she did not commit, a crime that, in fact, did not even exist, since there was no conspiracy.

I’ve said all that by way of introduction. The second part of this article was written by someone else, a professional of considerable stature and co-author of the book, The Hostage Child. In this excerpt from a letter to me—via email–Michelle Etlin will tell you about how she met Elsa Newman and why, with a selection of her observations on Elsa and on the children.

ELSA NEWMAN: Please Remember This Name

The Elsa Newman Story—

Did this mother’s devotion to her children and her attempt to protect them from sexual abuse actually play a role in her being sentenced to prison for 20 years?

I think so…and so do many others.

 

PART II: A LETTER FROM MICHELLE ETLIN

Having spent many years trying to help mothers who were being deprived of their children as punishment for believing their children’s outcries against incest, I thought I was in retirement.  A friend, however, asked me to speak with Elsa Newman, another woman in a long line of women who were trying to deal with this impossible situation in their own and their children’s lives. 

 

Elsa had lawyers, so she wasn’t trying to get advice about how to deal with the courts.  She had financial support from her family, so she wasn’t trying to get loans or frank financial assistance.  She had been organizing groups of people to raise consciousness and to put pressure on the courts and social services to try to make them respond to this crisis properly, both in her own case and in others.  She was a lawyer and had worked for years as a government lawyer, so she had resources.

 

Yet she was in the same position as other mothers whose credibility was counted as zero as soon as they stepped into the system that chose to ignore the problem and blame it on the victims, rather than diligently and honestly trying to solve it.  Old story, the story I had written a book to describe.  (And the book didn’t solve it, only described it.)

 

I learned about Elsa’s case in the first few days of 2002.  I did not want to deal with any problems just then, so I asked my friend to give my number to Elsa Newman with the request that she call me on or after January 7, 2002.  I was taking a weekend off thinking about distressing things.

 

In the early morning hours of January 7, 2002, while Elsa was in New Jersey at her niece’s wedding, her friend Marjorie Landry crept through the basement window of the house owned by the children’s father (who was accused of molesting them) and after one thing and another, she ended up in a physical struggle with him in his bedroom, and the handgun she was carrying discharged and he was shot in the thigh.  She fled and was later arrested.  Elsa learned about these events from her divorce attorney’s secretary later in the day.  I learned of them at about 9 p.m. that night, when Elsa Newman called me for the first time.  Then, we hung up at around 10 p.m. and the story flashed onto the television nightly news.

 

As if it were written for a novel.  A dark novel.

 

When I was on the phone with Elsa that night, as she was telling me what had taken place in court, unbelievably, counter-intuitively, unreasonably, unconstitutionally, irrationally (custody of the children handed over to the man they said molested them, mother’s visitation strictly curtailed and supervised by hostile visitation supervisors, mother’s rights chipped away steadily until she was on the defense in an undeclared war), I said to her what I remembered saying to more than two hundred other astounded mothers: “I believe what you are telling me; I believe every word you are telling me.”

 

Every word she was telling me was absolutely believable to someone who had seen this insane situation play out over and over and over in every county courthouse in every state of the union . . .

 

Someone should have a card and “read their rights” to all mothers approaching social services agencies for help.  They don’t help.  They pretend they are set up to protect children.  And the big lie is often believed.  It is a lie; we know that from history.

 

Two or three days after first speaking with me, Elsa was arrested and charged with conspiracy.  Although it is assumed that when divorcing mothers make allegations against divorcing fathers, those allegations are motivated by malice and hatred, the same assumption does not hold when divorcing fathers make allegations against divorcing mothers.  When the father of Elsa’s children told the 911-emergency operator that the home invasion was the result of a conspiracy by his wife (which, if it were, he could not have known!), they acted on that allegation as if it was evidence, not the ravings of an angry, wounded man.  They didn’t decrease his credibility by pointing out that he had incentive to get his wife arrested and charged with a crime.  What was his incentive?  If his wife was in jail, of course, he was going to win custody, and furthermore, her charges against him for molesting the children could be neutralized. 

 

I won’t go into the whole story here.  I’m going to skip to the first time I met Elsa’s children, which was the first time they were allowed to visit her in the Montgomery County Detention Center on Seven Locks Road in Potomac. 

 

Aitch and Arsakey* were 9 and 6, I believe, when they visited, brought to the county jail by their “guardian ad litem” Alan Town.  [All right, I called him the "guardian ad nauseam," for those of you who like a little Latin joke from time to time.  He has died since that time, a relatively young man.  I couldn't find an obituary in the newspapers.  It was strange; a public figure, well known lawyer, foster father (upon information and belief), yet he died young and nothing was said.  He seemed to be known when he was appointed by the court to represent these two boys; he seemed to be unknown when he died.  Up until the very day of his death, he was working to punish Elsa and her mother for trying to help these boys he "represented."  I heard him tell Elsa's sister and brother-in-law that he had made a telephone call to Elsa's lawyer to tell HIM to mistrust Elsa's friend Marjorie.  I found that quite revealing and absolutely astounding.  It was certainly outside proper activity for a child's guardian ad litem to interfere like that in the attorney-client relationship of a parent's divorce lawyer!  Yet this man seemed to have no boundaries; he did what he chose to do and he knew that he was protected by the social services and court systems.]

 

Back to the visit itself.  In came the boys and sat with their “keeper” — their “guardian ad litem” — who was so obviously hostile to their mother that they looked, to me, visibly afraid of him.  I was there for about a half dozen of their visits with their mom, and both of them used to gravitate toward me, try to touch me, talk to me, lean on me, hover around me, while waiting for their mother to enter the room.  They seemed to want to put me between them and Alan Town, to increase their distance from that man who allegedly represented their best interests.  It was so transparent that he was there to keep them under control — to “tell on them” if they made any move to appeal to their mother for help and support in their sorrow.

 

When their mother was allowed to enter the visiting room, both little boys leaped off their hard chairs and flung themselves onto the plate glass, so eager were they for contact with their mother, so cruelly separated from her.  In confusion, they grabbed the telephones that would let them hear her voice, and they both spoke at once, trying to get closer, be heard, make contact.  She was beyond joyful to be in their presence, touched the glass, as they touched the other surface of that glass, rigid silicone border of the imposed separation.

 

I thought,

 

“THE STATE BLOCKS YOU FROM TOUCHING YOUR CHILDREN

BECAUSE YOU HAVE TRIED TO PROTECT THEM

BECAUSE YOU HAVE BELIEVED THEM

BECAUSE YOU LOVE THEM”

 

*To protect the children, I have substituted an initial for one and a little-boy nickname for the other, rather than use their real names.”