Accused: My Fight for Truth, Justice & the Strength to Forgive

by Tonya Craft

  When Dee responded that Brianna is far too young to ever be considered such a thing, Gregor said, “So you are saying she is a pre-slut?” There was anger in his voice.

  He then turned his attention back to asking all sorts of questions about all kinds of supposed incidents and observations of me that hadn’t been introduced during the whole trial to that point—prompting my attorneys to object, and then to object again. Judge House let him keep on going. He seemed to take on a combative tone when he asked what kind of bathing suits I wore. Dee told him I wore bikinis. He asked if it was true that I wore “thong” bikinis, to which she answered that she’d never seen me in one, “No.”

  He asked Dee about her involvement in the “Truth for Tonya movement”—once again bringing that gag-ordered subject into the courtroom discussion. Apparently the gag order only applies to my team. It has nothing to do with not “tainting the jury.” It only has to do with keeping us quiet.

  Dee testified that she was there to “tell the truth” in that courtroom. A few minutes later Gregor asked her, “Which one of Tonya’s truths do you believe?”

  “That she is innocent,” Dee responded without missing a beat.

  When that prosecutor finally sat down, Cary stood up and apologized to Dee for what she’d just been put through on that witness stand—only to have Judge House reprimand him because that apology wasn’t an appropriate thing to say in front of the jury.

  The whole thing just floored me.

  I was scared to death of what they might ask our next witness, Dee’s twelve-year-old daughter. Thankfully, after she testified to witnessing Brianna’s “pole dance” herself, and said she had never seen Brianna at my house, ever, and that I never played rap music or kept any kids from eating while they were at my house, Chris Arnt stood up, asked a few short questions, and let her step down without any Gregor-esque remarks or accusations.

  We decided it was a good idea to move away from the “friends” side of our witness list for a moment when we got back from lunch on that bizarre twelfth day in the courtroom. We didn’t want to incite anymore false cries of lesbianism or any other intimate encounters with my friends from the prosecution. In fact, we tried to get Judge House to bar the prosecutors from entering any further allegations of my contact with adults into the record.

  Once again, Judge House denied our request.

  So we called to the stand Dr. Nancy Fajman, an associate professor of pediatrics at Emory University and a renowned specialist in the field of child sexual–assault examinations. The prosecution objected and asked for a pre-interview to determine what Dr. Fajman was going to say on the witness stand before they allowed her to get up in front of the jury. It seemed like a ridiculous request. She was on our potential witness list. She’s a well-known expert in her field. Yet Judge House granted their request anyway, and the prosecutors took Dr. Fajman downstairs to interview her.

  When she was finally allowed to take the stand, Dr. Fajman explained to the jury that it was standard practice in physical examinations of sexual abuse in young females to make a finding of either “normal” or “abnormal.” The word “suspicious,” which Nurse Sharon Anderson included in her reports, is not a word that is commonly used in the field whatsoever.

  Dr. Fajman then shared her assessment of the photos that Anderson took during her exams. Dr. Fajman said she found that in those photos, all three of those girls’ private areas appeared “normal.” Even Brianna’s, which Anderson had deemed “very suspicious,” appeared “normal” to this woman who we felt was a much more highly educated and renowned expert in the field. She explained in great detail what “normal” actually meant and how the examination photos she had seen did not show any “abnormal” features that would be consistent with the alleged digital penetration of a child—and certainly not a “fisting,” which is the slang term for what Brianna and those mothers had alleged I’d done with my hand.

  Dr. Fajman described the tiny diameter of a six-year-old girl’s vagina. Doc then asked me to hold up my hand so the jury could see just how big my hand was, proving that it would have been near impossible for me to do that—and was certainly impossible to do without severe physical damage being done to a child.

  The whole discussion horrified me. I could not believe I had to sit through that kind of talk concerning six-year-olds and four-year-olds and my hands. I felt sick to my stomach, again.

  Chris Arnt got up, and it looked to me like he tried to pull some of Doc’s techniques on our witness during cross-examination, asking Dr. Fajman about a series of studies and research—but unlike the prosecution’s witnesses, Dr. Fajman was able to answer every one of those questions, and even spelled the name of one particular study’s authors for Arnt. That seemed to only establish her further as a true expert in her field and very much a “credible witness.”

  In any case, the attorneys and ADAs were supposed to verify the credibility of whoever was on the stand. Did they really consider Joal Henke to be a credible witness, considering how many times his stories had changed, even on the very day of his testimony? We had decided not to put some of my good friends and acquaintances on the witness stand ourselves because some of them had questionable moments in their backgrounds. Nothing to be ashamed of, nothing awful. But still, under the law, it was our duty to verify the credibility of our own witnesses, and we took that duty seriously. Even if it weren’t a legal duty, wouldn’t it just make sense for attorneys on either side to use the most credible witnesses possible in order to prove their case?

  We wrapped up that day by putting Mike Potter on the stand, just to corroborate Dee’s timelines and stories, which also matched their twelve-year-old daughter’s testimony. He testified that there was a very long period of time in which his kids were with me every day. He picked them up at the house often, he said, and not once had he seen Brianna or Chloe at my house. Mike made that point well, just as Dee had done. He also shared with that jury just how much he trusted me with his kids.

  Len Gregor stood up, once again, and started verbally attacking poor Mike on the stand. He said all sorts of disparaging personal things concerning me and my history. He asked Mike about a trip to Vegas I’d made with the two of them at one point, in which we’d shared a hotel room—implying that I’d shared their bed with them. He did so using a snappy remark: “What happens in Vegas doesn’t get to stay in Vegas.” Mike wasn’t flustered by it. He told the court, “Yes, we went to Las Vegas together,” but as “friends,” and there was nothing particularly interesting to share.

  Gregor asked if I’d ever worn a thong bikini at Mike’s pool.

  Mike said, “No.”

  Gregor kept getting louder and sounded angrier to me as he spoke. He flailed his arms about as he accentuated his points. It seemed almost like he was fighting some ghost in the room, because Mike wasn’t fighting back at all. He then asked Mike whether his wife had ever bought a dress for me, and Mike said he thought Dee had loaned me some money for a dress once. Gregor seemed to make a big deal out of this, and we had no idea where that question was leading.

  We wouldn’t find out until near the end of the trial.

  Chapter 57

  We rocketed through our witnesses on day fourteen. We called up a series of former colleagues from Chickamauga Elementary, including my original principal and others who worked with me on a daily basis, all of whom backed up the truth about my relationships with kids and, specifically, my relationship with Brianna. We called in the school nurse, who saw no evidence of anything unusual with any of the girls in question during my time with them and who also testified that she would never consider a mother putting medicine on her child’s bottom and vaginal area a potential sign for concern or “abuse.” We called the investigator for the Walker County Sheriff’s Department whom I’d first called about my concerns over Ashley and Sarah, who backed up my timeline of events and the descriptions I’d shared from the very beginning.

  Chris Arnt and Len Gregor switched off their cross-ex
aminations, and Gregor was remarkably calm and polite throughout the entire day. I wondered if he had been reprimanded out of court or something, because he was even apologizing in advance of asking any sort of tough question of any witness. The thing that struck me as really odd was that both of those prosecutors asked nearly every single one of those witnesses if they’d visited the Truth for Tonya website or Facebook page. Some had; some hadn’t. Aren’t they making that page seem like a very big deal to the jury?

  Just to throw it back at them, Cary got up during one of his redirects and asked if our witness had ever visited “Chris Arnt’s promotional Facebook page.” It wasn’t too subtle, but I think he got his point across.

  The prosecution talked about the fact that I took pictures of kids in my classroom at school, and that I took pictures at my kids’ birthday parties. It seemed that they were trying to insinuate that taking photographs meant that I was a child molester—because child molesters are known to take photos of kids in public places. It was just awful.

  Another question that Gregor asked every witness during cross was if they knew that I had once been a “fitness instructor.” He never followed up with anything, he just got a “yes” or a “no” and moved on.

  Finally, he asked almost every single one of our witnesses, “Do you know what a narcissist is?” He would sometimes follow it up with, “Does anyone you know in this room fit that description?”

  It didn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out who he was talking about. Of course none of my friends thought I was a narcissist. I didn’t think I was a narcissist. I might be a lot of things, but a narcissist is not one of them. What none of us could figure out, though, was why he was trying to paint me as a narcissist and what in the world that had to do with the charges against me.

  Hour after hour those prosecutors got up there and attacked my character. Only God knows how I was able to hold back and keep most of my emotions in check. I suppose the adrenaline of holding in the anger might have helped keep me energized and focused. There simply wasn’t time for a breakdown.

  I didn’t look good, though. Whenever I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror, it scared me. I was dropping weight like crazy and didn’t have a moment to step on the treadmill. I couldn’t have run even if I wanted to. My energy was too depleted.

  Somehow, God kept me going.

  On Thursday, April 29, a full eighteen days since we first stepped into that courtroom, my trial became national news. NBC’s The Today Show sent a crew down and ran a report in the early morning, when the viewership numbers nationwide are at their highest point. I’d learn sometime later that Melydia Clewell herself was responsible for pitching my trial to the powers that be. My gut was right about her.

  We rolled through a bunch of our witnesses once again, delivering firsthand, long-term observations of my “normal,” “loving” relationship with Ashley to the jury’s ears—along with more backup that Sandra Lamb and Sherri Wilson had both been publicly trash-talking me long before any allegations arose. Shanica Lewis; Courtney (my lifelong friend); Courtney’s son, Hunter; two other children who were friends with my kids; and Kim Walker’s husband, Joey, all got up and held their own against the relentless questioning of the prosecution.

  Courtney summed up the overall feeling pretty well when asked if she would be comfortable leaving her son alone with me after hearing all of these allegations: “She can take him right now!” she said.

  We brought up Courtney’s mom, Frances, who relayed the Ashley Christmas–present story firsthand and testified to Ashley asking her and my mom why she couldn’t see “her mommy.” We brought up Karen, my parents’ neighbor with the hair salon, and she relayed similar stories about Ashley’s demeanor, as well as her longtime observations of me as a loving mother. We also brought up the original DFACS representative who took Sandra Lamb’s earliest phone reports, just to verify everything Doc had already asked Sandra about when she was on the stand.

  In my opinion, the other side didn’t offer very much in the way of cross-examination for any of them—nothing beyond what I considered character assaults and the repeated questions about my being a “fitness instructor” and “narcissist” who wore “thongs.”

  It wasn’t until Friday that our relatively rapid pace came to a screeching halt. That was the day we were set to call Ann Hazzard—the forensic interviewer from Atlanta who’d found no evidence of abuse with my daughter and who’d previously testified in front of this very judge that my daughter and I should be allowed to see each other.64

  The prosecutors fought to keep her off the witness stand. Len Gregor made what all of us felt was a bogus charge that morning, stating that he hadn’t received our summary of Ann Hazzard’s expected testimony. As far as we knew, that summary had been emailed and properly marked as “received” by the court.

  We were all gathered up in front of the judge’s bench when Gregor claimed he “never received it.”

  “Are you accusing [that] an officer of the court has falsified documents?” Doc asked.

  Judge House reprimanded Doc for raising his voice. He hadn’t reprimanded Gregor for raising his voice over and over throughout the trial.

  In the end, Judge House ruled that Ann Hazzard could testify, but that we wouldn’t be allowed to ask her about any of the key points of our original witness summary. She wouldn’t be able to talk directly about her findings with Ashley at all, let alone what we felt were her revealing interviews with Joal and Sarah. I was devastated.

  Doc wasn’t devastated, though. I swear that man could think on his feet in a courtroom faster than Deion Sanders could run a football down the field. He managed to ask Dr. Hazzard all sorts of questions about “hypothetical” cases involving children and tainted interviews. Almost like magic, he made most of our points to the jury without ever violating the judge’s ruling.

  It seemed to drive Gregor nuts. I could see him steaming.

  Dr. Hazzard told that jury how easily kids’ interviews can be “contaminated” and talked about cases in which children were wrongly influenced by “leading questions” into believing that they had actually been abused. She talked about children’s tendencies to want to please their interviewers, and their tendencies to answer multiple-choice questions with one of the provided answers. Even as adults, if we’re given a question on a test and a choice of four answers, we tend to answer a, b, c, or d. We don’t buck the system and write in “none of the above” if “none of the above” isn’t one of the choices. And if we don’t know the correct answer, we choose one because we think that one of them must be correct. So of course children respond with one of the answers that’s been provided for them, she testified.

  That’s what happened during the interviews in my case.

  Len Gregor seemed all kinds of feisty again that day, and he kept objecting to Doc’s asking “leading” questions of the witness. In response, Doc immediately and very purposefully asked Dr. Hazzard a “leading question” about tainting children’s interviews with “leading questions.” Dr. Hazzard actually laughed out loud on the witness stand.

  I’m not sure Gregor even got the joke.

  Doc asked Dr. Hazzard a couple of questions to guide the jury toward a later witness of ours, too: He probed about whether it would be bad for a child to receive therapy from a “hypothetical therapist” with a mental illness and whether it would be bad for a “hypothetical therapist” to lie to a court. Both answers, of course, were “yes.”

  After all of this, Gregor got up on cross that afternoon and asked Dr. Hazzard who had paid for her lunch. He also asked her how much she’d been paid by me to appear that day.

  Dr. Hazzard is an extremely respected legal expert in the state of Georgia. The prosecution readily agreed at the top of her testimony that they knew her credentials, and that “both sides” know and respect her. Why is he asking her those questions?

  If I were watching it on TV, if it were somebody else’s trial, I might have thought that Dr. Hazzard’s testim
ony put a point in the “win” column for the defense. But the jury couldn’t have kept a better poker face through any of it, and I kept thinking back to that last bit of tearful testimony from Jerry McDonald. I wondered how much that had stuck in the hearts and minds of the jurors.

  I doubted very much that I’d ever see my children again.

  On Monday morning, we called to the stand Dr. Nancy Aldridge—a trained RN with a PhD in social work and psychology and the founder of the Georgia Center for Children. From what my attorneys had told me, there is hardly a more respected expert anywhere in the fields of forensic interviewing and the abuse of children. The fact is, Dr. Aldridge spends the vast majority of her time in courtrooms presenting as a witness for the prosecution.

  On the stand, she admitted that when Cary King first called her to testify for this case, she promised him nothing. She said she would evaluate the interviews and present “the facts” no matter which side they benefitted. It was nearly impossible for anyone to argue that she was not only a credible witness, but also a fair and unbiased witness.

  Doc walked Dr. Aldridge through the specific interviews in my case, and one by one, she broke them down for the jury.

  During Stacy Long’s interviews of Brianna, she said, Stacy asked leading, suggestive, and inappropriate questions. She explained that when children get asked a question repeatedly, “the child believes the answer they’ve given is incorrect and they should change it.”

  She said it was wrong for Detective Tim Deal to tell Chloe that he had already spoken to her mom about the “problem” before they sat down together in the first interview. She said his second interview with her was just plain confusing and not done correctly at all.

  Doc then asked her specifically about the moment during Chloe’s second interview in which she said “my mom told me which is which and where they touched me.” Dr. Aldridge told the court that the only way that could possibly have been marked “inaudible” is if it was done “on purpose.” We were all shocked that she would make such a bold statement on the witness stand.