The sex abuse trial of a world-famous California scientist known as the Father of Gene Therapy began Tuesday as prosecutors said e-mails he sent a young girl would prove their relationship had a “secret dirty side.”
William French Anderson, a pioneer in the field of gene therapy who won international renown for his research, is accused of molesting the daughter of family friends over at least four years, from the time she was 9 or 10 years old.
The opening remarks by Los Angeles prosecutor Cathryn Brougham at Anderson’s trial prompted attorneys for the 69-year-old scientist to demand an immediate mistrial, claiming there was no proof the e-mails referred to sex.
In one of e-mail exchanges Brougham showed jurors, the girl confronts Anderson over the accusations of abuse and he responds: “There is a very bad part of me that, now that I have recognized it, has to be suppressed.”
‘A secret dirty side’
Superior Court Judge Michael Pastor rejected the defense motion, allowing the child molestation trial of Anderson, the former director of the University of Southern California’s Gene Therapy Laboratories, to go forward.
Brougham, displaying for jurors a picture of Anderson and his wife with the girl and her twin sister, said the seemingly innocent picture disguised a darker reality of sexual abuse.
“It was not just a mentor-mentee relationship, not just a father-daughter relationship,” she said. “There was a secret dirty side to that relationship.”
Prosecutors say Anderson, a fifth-degree black belt in tae kwon do who served as a physician for U.S. Olympic teams in the 1980s, began abusing the girl while teaching her martial arts. He was arrested after she told a counselor she was being abused.
The former professor of biochemistry, molecular biology and pediatrics, once the subject of glowing profiles in the press who was considered for Time’s “Man of the Year,” is charged with one count of continuous sexual abuse of a child under the age of 14 and two counts of lewd acts on a minor. He faces nearly two decades in prison if convicted.
Defense attorneys were expected to argue Anderson did not molest the girl and that the e-mails were not a reference to sexual abuse.
