Sex Abuse Still Issue In Case Of Other Foretich Girl

WASHINGTON - While the case of Morgan vs. Foretich has become a bewildering maze of accusations, denials and legal entanglements, there has always been a single charge that has helped fuel Dr. Elizabeth Morgan's claims that her daughter, Hilary, was sexually abused by the child's father - and likewise raised doubts about the father's denials.

An older child from Dr. Eric Foretich's previous marriage, it

has been alleged, also was sexually abused by him. But not surprisingly, these charges - and the battles surrounding them prove to be just as complex and cloudy as the case of Hilary, 7, who was discovered last month with her grandparents in New Zealand.

The older child is 9 and lives with her mother, Sharon Foretich, in Fairfax, Va.

But if the older child's case has received less attention, it is no less perplexing. So contradictory is the evidence in this case that one doctor who performed a gynecological exam found the child to be ``entirely normal'' six months after another doctor found indications of a ``healed sexual injury.''

The veracity of the charges has confounded the courts as well. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals believed the evidence regarding this child so significant that in a May 1988 decision it said a lower court erred in not admitting that evidence in a trial regarding Hilary's abuse.

On the other hand, the Circuit Court, in a 1987 visitation proceeding, said that the mother failed to prove ``by a preponderance of the evidence'' that the child was abused. ``There is as much evidence that (the father) didn't do it as he did do it, as much credible evidence,'' Judge Bruce Bach said.

A former model who has refused all interview requests and asks that her maiden name (the name she goes by now) not be used, Sharon Foretich, 32, married Foretich, a McLean, Va., oral surgeon, in 1977.

Sharon Foretich, the second wife of Foretich's, said in a deposition that her husband was unreasonably demanding and critical as well as physically abusive during their marriage - charges he has denied - and she left him in August 1981.

There are conflicting accounts regarding which of the mothers brought up the issue of sexual abuse first.

In 1985, Foretich's father, Vincent Foretich, hoping to help vindicate his son, suggested to a social worker who was investigating charges of abuse of Hilary, that she also interview the older girl. According to caseworker Daily Morrison-Gilstrap's report, the child described acts of sexual intercourse with her father.

But according to a 1989 opinion by the Court of Appeals of Virginia, police Detective Daniel Gollhardt testified in the Circuit Court proceedings that when he and the social worker visited the child, the child made no statements indicating abuse had occurred.

The child was then taken to two therapists. Jean Albright, a social worker at the Chesapeake Institute, a mental-health clinic in Silver Spring, Md., that deals with child sexual-abuse cases, concluded the child had been molested.

James McMurrer, a psychiatrist hired by Foretich, testified that ``the child gave conflicting accounts,'' which led him to believe that ``the child is trying to please both parents and is really being pulled in both directions.''

In January 1986, Foretich agreed to suspend his visits with his daughter for six months in return for Sharon agreeing to take their daughter to a therapist not affiliated with the Chesapeake Institute. The new psychiatrist, Elizabeth Finch, saw the child for almost a year.

During most of that time, the child denied that her father touched her. At one session, according to Finch's records, the child said ``that she made a mistake and that she told her mother that her father had touched her when, in fact, he had not.''

But in November 1986, Sharon Foretich took her daughter to Charles Shubin, director of pediatrics at Mercy Hospital in Baltimore.

According to Finch's records, after the exam by Shubin, the child told Finch that ``she didn't want to see her father . . . because he had hurt her in her private area.'' The child said ``she had not remembered that her father had hurt her until the doctor told her mother.''

Finch then changed her view and concluded that the child had been sexually abused.

Six months later, however, the child was examined by Catherine De Angelis, deputy chairman of the department of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who wrote in her report that she found ``no evidence of any scarring, stretching or lacerations.''

Meanwhile, the case had been bouncing around in Fairfax County courts, the Social Services Department having referred it to the juvenile court that in 1986 ordered visitation, finding no conclusive proof of sexual abuse.