Stepfather Must Pay for Molestations : $920,000 Awarded Under Novel Law

Julie Schondel’s stepfather, once a prominent Oceanside dentist, admits he had sex with her. But he said it happened only once, on vacation in Cabo San Lucas, when she was 15. And, he claims, as he did in sworn court testimony, that it was her fault--that she seduced him.

Her memories are radically different.

She recalls a childhood of forced alcohol and drug abuse and repeated molestation--like the incident in Cabo San Lucas.

“We had stayed up drinking one night, playing cards,” Schondel said Wednesday. “I got tired and went to put my nightgown on. He took it off, laid me on the bed, and I blacked out. I came to with him on top of me--which has caused me many nightmares since. Then I blacked out again.

“The next thing I remember, I was laying on the beach. I had a beer in my hand, and he had a beer in his hand. And he said to me, ‘Why did you let me do that?’ Of course, he was blaming me for it.”

Earlier this week, a Vista Superior Court judge awarded Schondel, a 25-year-old bookkeeper, more than $900,000 in damages, blaming her stepfather, David Evan Peterson, 56, for years of molestation.

It’s not clear whether Schondel will ever see any of the money, awarded in one of the first verdicts in the state under a novel California law that gives adult survivors of child sexual abuse an express legal right to seek money damages for having been molested.

Peterson has assets. He was so well off that he retired 18 months ago, selling his dental practice and bringing in an additional $265,000, said Schondel’s lawyer, Andrea Leavitt.

But, in the midst of last week’s trial, Peterson fired his lawyer and skipped out of state with the money he had withdrawn days before from an Oceanside bank account, Leavitt said. He surfaced briefly at a motel in Las Vegas but is likely to move on to Colorado, where he has another house, Leavitt said.

Whether she does or doesn’t recover the money, Schondel said Wednesday, the verdict will always be a “vindication.” Before, she said, “The authorities made me feel like I was wrong. This is a way of saying (I was) right, and this is awful, and we need to do something about it.”

When she was younger, she said, she would run away from home--and Oceanside police, who knew her parents, would drag her back. As a teen-ager, she went to stay with an aunt--and county social workers urged a Juvenile Court judge to send her home.

Instead, she fled for good, seeking shelter with friends. After a while, she turned to an alcoholic support group and to therapy. Now, she said, someone in a position of authority, Vista Superior Court Judge Ronald S. Prager, has finally listened to her story--and believed it.

“This is kind of a final validation that says I don’t have to live in hell anymore,” Schondel said. “The secret’s out. The truth’s been told. I have been validated by an authority.”

Belatedly, authorities have begun to recognize the astonishing frequency of cases in what was, for many years, a forbidden topic, one that simply was not discussed in public.

A “very conservative estimate” is that one of four girls and one of 10 boys around the nation will be abused by age 18, said Joan Duffell, a spokeswoman for Committee for Children, a Seattle-based nonprofit group that educates children, parents and teachers on issues of child sexual abuse.

Because so many cases of abuse remain unreported, authorities err on the cautious side when it comes to statistics, she said. What is clear is that “most of the time, a very great percentage of the time, the perpetrator will be someone they know or trust, most likely a family member,” Duffell said.

Schondel testified last week in court that her stepfather molested her from age 5 to 15.

At first, she said, he would get her drunk or high. Then, she said, he used her increasing appetite for alcohol and drugs to compel her to engage in sex.

She said he introduced her to wine, liquor, marijuana, nitrous oxide--the familiar “laughing gas” used by dentists as an anesthetic--and amyl nitrate, commonly known as “poppers,” a stimulant widely used as a heart medicine.

“It was kind of like an education,” she said in an interview Wednesday. “At 9 years old, I knew what amyl nitrate was for. He thought it was a stimulant for orgasm. I knew what orgasms were, and erections.”

At that same age, she said in court, he taught her about oral sex. He had her watch pornographic movies, then expected her to re-create what she saw on film, she said.

“The porno movies were just part of that education,” Schondel said. “It’s pretty sick.”

When she was a bit older, Schondel said, Peterson arranged it so she would have sex with her stepbrother, three years older, and with another relative, whom she declined to name but said is 20 years older.

“He would just put me in the room with them, expecting that kind of behavior,” she said Wednesday. “Since that’s all he had taught me, it was like he was offering me up to these other men.”

Court files indicate that Peterson denied his stepdaughter’s allegations against him, with the exception of the incident in Cabo San Lucas, which he admitted but said was at her urging. The attorney he fired, David R. Thompson, a Carlsbad lawyer, did not return a call seeking comment.

Schondel said her mother was an alcoholic and did nothing to stop the abuse.

After years of abuse, Schondel said, she also became an alcoholic.

At age 16, she finally ran away from home for good. She lived for a couple of months from hand to mouth, reeling from friend to friend in San Diego, then stumbled onto a support group for alcoholics and stopped drinking.

A few years later, she said, she was persuaded to see a counselor.

“I had low self-esteem,” she said. “I had depression problems. I didn’t know where it was coming from. After a couple months, (Vista counselor Lydia Garoian) started digging all this out and saying, ‘This is because you were molested.’ It took a long time to believe this was why I was having these problems in my life now.”

Schondel got her high school equivalency degree. She met and married her husband, Greg, now 26, a petty officer in the Navy. Last year, they moved from San Diego to Maine, where he was transferred. “He has been there when I didn’t want anybody to touch me and asked, ‘Is there anything I can do?’ I know I couldn’t have done it without him,” Schondel said.

Summoning her courage one day about five years ago, Schondel confronted her stepfather.

“I told him I was in therapy,” she said. “He said, ‘What kind? For what?’ I said, ‘Mental therapy for the (molestation).’ He said, ‘I never meant to hurt you.’ I said, ‘You did, and you need to take responsibility for it.’

“At first he said, ‘I’ll do what I can to help.’ Then a couple weeks later, he said, ‘I didn’t do anything wrong, and I’m not going to help.’ I said, ‘If that’s the way it’s going to be, I’ll talk to an attorney about it.’ ” And, in 1988, she filed suit.

Under a novel 1986 state law, the time frame for filing a civil lawsuit claiming damages as a child victim of abuse does not begin to run until the victim realizes, as an adult, that he or she was molested. The idea, said Leavitt, Schondel’s attorney, is to make sure a suit won’t be thrown out just because the abuse occurred years before and the victim had repressed painful memories.

After a two-day trial last week, Prager, the Vista judge, ruled Monday in Schondel’s favor, awarding her $640,000 in damages, $250,000 in punitive damages and about $30,000 in court costs, for a total of $920,000.

Schondel said she hopes that word of the verdict will “make a difference in other people’s lives, if they’ve been through the same thing.”

She added, “Use my name.”

Talking about the case is therapeutic, she said: “You get to the point where you kind of detach from it. It feels like it happened to somebody else. Now that I’m dealing with it, it’s not as hard to talk about it.”

“My biggest motivation is for children going through it today who don’t think there’s any way out,” she said. “There is.”