Woman Says Memory Of Abuse Implanted; Church Settles

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. - Beth Rutherford had no memory of a tormented childhood until she went to a church therapist for counseling.

Under the counselor's guidance, she recalled how her minister father repeatedly raped her, got her pregnant, then performed a painful coat-hanger abortion.

In truth, Beth Rutherford was still a virgin, and her father had had a vasectomy many years before.

Now the Rutherfords have settled a defamation and malpractice lawsuit for $1 million against the church and the counselor.

"Had I only known that this type of thing could exist, I think it would have saved our tragedy," Beth Rutherford, 23, said yesterday by telephone from her home in Tulsa.

Donna Strand, the counselor at Park Crest Village Assembly of God Church, and her husband, Pastor Robert Strand, admitted no wrongdoing in their settlement and declined comment.

The story began in the fall of 1992 when Beth Rutherford, then 19, was having trouble sleeping because of work-related stress in her job as a nurse's assistant. Her father suggested she talk to Donna Strand.

After three sessions over four months, Beth Rutherford reported that her stress was relieved but she mentioned having dreams in which she and friends were being raped in the presence of her father.

According to the lawsuit, Donna Strand told her those dreams were an indication of early-childhood sexual abuse.

Without her parents' knowledge, Beth Rutherford returned for at

least 64 sessions during which Strand taught the young woman how to enter a trancelike state through self-hypnosis.

Under the woman's encouragement, the Rutherfords say, Beth Rutherford recalled a string of false memories between the ages of 7 and 14: being raped by her father with a curling iron, having a clothes-hanger abortion by her father and being raped by her father while her mother watched.

To this day, Beth said, she is not certain where the thoughts came from.

"I can tell you one thing for sure, they did not come from my mind," she said. "There are times in my therapy sessions that I have no memory of what happened."

The Strands had informed the General Council of the Assemblies of God, where Rutherford worked. He was confronted with the allegations and forced to resign Oct. 14, 1994.

"We were just blown apart, in shock," Joyce Rutherford said. "You think they have the wrong name, the wrong family."

Tom Rutherford, now 46, took any job he could find - from seasonal postman to janitor. Many friends turned away. Yet he never revealed to the church that he had had a vasectomy when Beth was 4, making her pregnancy allegations physically impossible.

"I never told them because I was so personally outraged," he said. "I thought I'm going to preserve a little dignity of my own and not tell them. I knew my innocence."

In October 1995, at the insistence of the family's attorney, Beth Rutherford underwent a gynecological exam. It showed she was still a virgin.

Beth Rutherford, now a registered nurse, recanted her story butstill feels terrible about her parents.

"I love them with all my heart," she said. "It's sometimes hard to look at them because of what I accused them of."

Months after she recanted, the church reinstated Tom Rutherford as a minister. As for his relationship with his daughter, he said: "We're closer than we've ever been."