Mum Rejects Cathy Kezelman’s Abuse Claims

By Richard Guilliatt
The Australian
October 4, 2017

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/mother-rejects-cathy-kezelmans-claims-of-child-sexual-abuse/news-story/4b092e14443c9d4b1880708b51133568

The elderly mother of child abuse activist Cathy Kezelman has broken her silence to reject her daughter’s claims of sexual abuse at the hands of her father and a paedophile cult.

In a letter to The Australian today, Lusia Puterman says the abuse her daughter alleges could not have occurred, describing her late husband as a loving man who “cherished his daughter”.

Dr Kezelman, whose expertise has been endorsed by the royal commission into institutional abuse and who sits on the advisory panel of the government compensation scheme for abuse victims, underwent psychotherapy for nine years and recovered repressed memories of extreme sexual abuse by multiple members of her family.

The Weekend Australian revealed on Saturday that leading experts in trauma and memory were critical of the royal commission for endorsing Dr Kezelman’s counselling ideas, which they said were potentially harmful and contravened the best-practice guidelines of major health bodies.

Mrs Puterman, who is 94 and lost her parents in the Holocaust after fleeing the Warsaw ghetto at 19, writes that she and her daughter were best friends until 1998, when Dr Kezelman entered psychotherapy following a breakdown and began experiencing repressed memories of abuse.

She says her daughter became distant and, without explanation, eventually stopped seeing her and that regular contact with her grandchildren ceased. She says she was further hurt in 2010 when her daughter published a memoir, Innocence Revisited, which detailed her allegations of abuse.

In her book, Dr Kezelman wrote that she had no recollection of being sexually abused until she began psychotherapy at 44, and that she developed a multiple-personality condition and remembered a decade of childhood abuse, including rapes by her ¬father and torture by a paedophile cult led by her grandmother.

Mrs Puterman says the allegations “stem only from Cathy’s mind” and it would have been impossible for such abuse to occur without anyone noticing. She says, however, she loves her daughter and has had email contact with her in recent years.

The commission has twice called Dr Kezelman as an expert witness and its chairman, judge Peter McClellan, has commended her expertise and appeared with her at public events.

Her counselling guidelines have been widely distributed and are quoted in the commission’s report on the proposed compensation scheme for victims.

Dr Kezelman was quoted at the weekend saying “traumatic memory is implicit, and mainly unconscious; it manifests in the body and via behavioural re--enactments rather than words”.