She put her fingers too far where she shouldn’t have, and she hurt me,” she remembers on the video. “She was bathing me, and I only remember one instance, and she hurt me.
At 17, she is less confident that it was deliberate abuse. In the later video, she recalls only one episode. When she was six, she had referred to repeated assaults. There are differences between her description at six and her recall at 17. In a few seconds, she goes from truculent teenager to broken child. On the video, they discuss the situation and suddenly Kluemper appears to remember the abuse. Meticulous as always, Corwin filmed Kluemper consenting to watch the videos. Eventually, they agreed that they should watch the videos together when he was next in California. It seemed wrong to withhold the videos from Kluemper, but he couldn’t just send them to the by now 17-year-old and hope for the best. The request created an ethical dilemma for Corwin. She contacted Corwin and asked if she could watch them. “And, as you can imagine, having a parent pass away at 16, anyone would be looking for something to grab hold of.”īut her mother’s erratic behaviour sparked questions, and Kluemper decided she had to see the videos. “At that time, I didn’t remember any more why I had been taken from my biological mother’s custody,” Kluemper says. By the age of 16, Kluemper knew the videos existed and that they were being used as training aids, but no longer remembered what they contained.Īround the time that her father died, four years after his stroke, contact with her mother was re-established at the suggestion of Kluemper’s then foster mother. As time went by, she couldn’t remember any more why she didn’t see her mother. As a result, Corwin contacted Kluemper occasionally to ensure that she still consented to his use of the recordings.īut over the decades, Kluemper forgot what was actually on the videos. He believed this recording was an unusually clear and effective illustration of a child explaining abuse. With the assent of Kluemper and her father, Corwin was using the video of Kluemper as part of his training of fellow psychiatrists. There was one constant in the chaos: Corwin. In one year, she moved eight times, ending up in an informal foster home with other kids. Her mother had disappeared from her life, and she was not close to her half-brother. In fact, she was left with barely any family at all. “At that point, since I didn’t have any family members to step in and take custody of me, I lived in several different state-run or private living situations,” Kluemper says. Then, when she was 12, Kluemper’s father had a stroke and had to move to a convalescent home. Kluemper went to live with her father and stepmother. It is only the words that are shocking: a small girl describing how her mother has sexually abused her.Īs a result, Kluemper’s mother lost custody of her daughter. She looks into the video camera occasionally, articulate for a small child. Behind her are shelves of heavy legal textbooks. Her dark, curly hair is held back by a pink ribbon, and her smile is missing a front tooth. In the video, Kluemper, by then six, is playing with her crayons. In 1984, to create evidence for court hearings, a psychiatrist called David Corwin filmed interviews with Kluemper. Her parents’ marriage had broken down within months of her birth, but the divorce had been brutal and long, with the battle for custody sprawling over years. As part of the custody evaluation, a forensic evaluation was done.” “She and my father were in the process of getting a divorce. “When I was about four, I accused my biological mother of sexually molesting me,” Kluemper says, sitting in the living room of her peaceful split-level home to the east of San Diego.