"I Don't Know How You Can Live With Yourself"

"I don't know how you can live with yourself."

Quote by child psychiatrist Dr. David Schwartz to Dr. Etta Bryant, a rabid Ayres supporter. - Wednesday, July 9 in the courtroom, just before the day's testimony.

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Well! We think the good doctor must have been dressed down yesterday by Doron Weinberg after his train-wreck of a rambling performance that included remarks about buck naked boys running around in a locker room; homosexual magazines being left in the doctor's waiting room by a parent; and flies being unzipped and penises popping out.

In fact Weinberg appeared to be so concerned about what would emerge from Ayres' mouth today that he actually said to the doctor today,"Let me direct you please, and let me ask the question." We also noticed that Weinberg did a little hand signal thingy next to his ear whenever he wanted his client to shut up.

We're getting ahead of ourselves, however. As Deep Sounding has noted, the number of Ayres' supporters has dwindled with each day. Today, Dr. Etta Bryant and Thea Leavitt showed up and sat near the back. Dr. Sam Leavitt - whom we have noted seemed to be having real trouble with the graphic testimony, was a no-show. Sitting with Solveig and the increasingly haggard Robert were the dorky guy whom we call the green shirt guy - who has been wearing some sort of goofy hillbilly Fedora hat -the kind Jethro Clampett used to wear - and his female companion, whom we've come to think of as "Choking Girl." There were also two pale and very plump women in the Ayres camp, who may be nieces or some blood relative.

We had been a bit worried about Solveig for the last two days, because she'd come to court in a drab brown windbreaker and a brown patterned shirt. We thought it was odd because we thought she would want to look cheery for hubby. Today, she was back to form with a new shirt in her signature peacock blue.

Ayres was sworn in again at 9:05 am. As he did yesterday, as he was being sworn in he held up his right arm by by placing his left hand on his right elbow. It seemed to us that he needed reinforcements to keep that right hand propped up because if he didn't, the right arm would refuse to cooperate. We think his right arm knows that the good doctor was about to lie and didn't want any part of it.

[DS Comment, 7/10/09: We observed ayres later in the day making some very far reaches with his right hand, picking up a stack of documents, all without the assist of his left hand. It is possible that there's some kind of rotational injury that prevents him raising his hand at the elbow, like he did when swearing-in, but the activity that he exhibited with that hand otherwise, suggests not.]

Ever so gently, Weinberg interrogated his client for one hour and ten minutes. For some reason, in spite of his avowed faulty memory Ayres admitted to remember making victim Scott T give what we call "pee demonstrations" in his office . He even recalled - right down to the number of ounces (4) that Scott T peed into something we think was called a urinal container(not a Dixie cup). We do remember that as he was recounting the pee demonstrations with his poor patient Scott T, Ayres slapped the counter in front of him on the witness stand hard and said "If you know what a physical is..." We kept wondering why he thought it was important to slap that counter so hard.

We could have done without his doctorly lecture about how a stream of urine is "like a garden hose - if you put a finger on it, it sprays."

[DS Comment, 7/10/09: ayres called it a "glass urinal" with volume markings. Funny, to me, it looked like a paper Dixie Cup, with no volume markings. Maybe there's some kind of automatic volume measurement device in the drain that measures and reports the volume when ayres dumps the pee down the drain immediately after having you pee into the cup. I suppose it's entierly possible that ayres realized that they have "medical" stuff for measuring volume, and that would make his story more plausible, by the time Scott T was there.]

We noted something today that is happening more and more frequently as the trial goes on: when Weinberg asks Ayres a question, he then looks at the clock. To us it appears that he is thinking,"Oh, God, please let this trial be over. If I have to ask one more question about Scott T's urine stream I think I'm gonna kill myself."

As Weinberg asked Ayres to recount victim Scott E, -- who had the bad luck to have been subjected to one of Ayres' super duper weirdo physical exams after complaining of a chest pain, -- we noticed Ayres' voice softened. Although he swore he had no memory of treating Scott E

( Yeah, right. Just like he can't remember David Gross the son of pediatrician Dr. Sheldon Gross, whom he molested and all the other 40 victims he can't remember molesting) his voice softened considerably as he recounted to Weinberg what he did to the boy.. "Palpating his abdomen.." As Ayres spoke, we felt as if we had suddenly been transported into a Tennessee Williams play. Ayres may look just like Burl Ives in "A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" but with his fluttery feminine hand gestures, all we could think of was Blanche Dubois in "A Streetcar Named Desire." Factor in his high-pitched lispy Truman Capote voice and well, you're watching a real performance. Not that we're buying it for a minute.

How convenient we thought, that Ayres to thoughtfully include in his physical exam of Scott E that "testes were not examined."Hmmm.. did he add that detail recently, we wondered?

When Weinberg moved on to his questions about victim Robert W - whom Ayres predictably could not remember at all ( although he can remember every last office he has held back to 1956), Ayres waved a medical excuse letter in front of him and asked the judge if he could show it to her and the prosecutor. The judge declined to see this bogus letter that says his physical problems have affected his memory, as did the prosecutor. This little ploy just once again confirmed that Ayres refuses to take responsibility for anything and was most likely spoiled rotten by his dear old mama.

It was right around this point, when Ayres was lecturing his poor dumb audience about the "Tanner Stages" of development, he let out a really creepy serial killer kind of laugh when talking about the hairs on a boy's penis. We've heard that scary laugh before, on a lecture he gave to an Adolescent Psychiatry group back in the 1990s, that was taped and is now available for sale on the internet. On that tape, he talks about boys who lie about how often they masturbate and he laughs so hard that he can't finish his sentence. During his testimony today, we were subjected to that same goofy-scary laugh a number of times and we have to say it is much more disturbing to hear it in real life.

[DS Comment, 7/10/09: as was the case on Wednesday, during Thursday's testimony, whenever ayres was able to slip past Weinberg's tighter reign, he would regale the courtroom with obviously fond memories of his "medical exams," and would sprinkle his commentary with "humerous" anecdotes. The jury never once laughed at these, and several times, would look very ooged-out and jot a quick note.]

Ayres said he doesn't remember the victims Thomas C or Dana or Peter V. He does bizarrely bring up the fact that he remembers one thing about victim Greg Hogue -- the subsequent police investigation. Greg Hogue - as most readers of this blog know by now - was the heroic boy who went to the police in 1987 to say that Ayres molested him. Bizarrely Ayres says he remembers the day the police came to visit. "There were two policemen in the waiting room. I remember there was an Officer Melody - although that may be a false memory," he told the courtroom jovially. " The officers asked me if I had showed a former patient a book that had pictures of naked boys in it. I recalled that this was the only time I had used the book. I had a book when I went to Yale about the physical development of males. One chapter was about the onset of puberty. Greg was concerned about his development so I went to my closet and reached up to the top shelf where all the medical books I never used were and I reached up to the top shelf and pulled out this book and showed it to the patient. That was the only time I ever used it. I showed it to the officers and they were fine about it. They were very nice. After the officers left I threw the book away. "

As Ayres was recounting this bizarre and implausible story, we wondered a) why with his faulty memory he was suddenly able to remember such crystal clear detail about top shelves and such and b) if the book was no big deal and the officers thought it was fine, why did he throw the book away? and c)Was there really ever an Officer Melody? It was our understanding that it was officer Rick Nielsen and Sgt Lee Violett who confronted Ayres. And d) has Ayres thought to ask Greg Hogue's mother Lonnie about what was going on with her son at the time? Seems to us she would say that "development "was the last thing on her son's mind.

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10:40 am. Cross examination time. Ayres' behavior at times was startling and definitely out there.

When the prosecutor read portions from Ayres' deposition from his molestation civil suit with Steve Abrams, Ayres had a very strong aversion to hearing the portions of his testimonythat concerned whether he had ever asked a boy to drop his pants.

In line with his inability to take responsibility for his behavior, for several minutes Ayres attacked Steve Abrams' mean old lawyer Bob Tobin back in 2004 for pressing the issue of his penchant for "physicals " with boys. He told the prosecutor that Abrams' lawyer was aggressive and confrontational. He attempted to mimic what he remembered as Tobin's combative manner, reciting Tobin's words "Have you ever asked a boy to take his pants down?" through gritted teeth and in a loud growly voice. Many people suppressed a smile, but some observers believed they were witnessing the doctor's dark side. He appeared to be recreating the encounter he had four years ago with Tobin, and it really rattled him. He tried to portray Tobin as rather menacing but to some of us it was Ayres who appeared to be the scary one. He even tried to play the indignation card: "To ask a doctor whether he has ever asked a boy to drop his pants is insulting!" he almost shouted. ( At this point, we turned around to take a peek at Ayres' groupie Dr. Etta Bryant, and even she looked horrified and ready to bolt)

( Trapellar update 7/10/09. ) We just got off the phone with Bob Tobin, Steve Abrams' civil lawyer whom Ayres mimicked in the courtroom yesterday. When we described Ayres' growly angry voice when he played the part of Tobin, the lawyer let out a big chuckle. "That guy was so obnoxious and holier than thou in that deposition," Tobin remembered. " I hope they nail his sorry ass."

Other highlights:

- Ayres said he thought that all parents knew that when he was going to do a physical on a boy they would automatically know that this would include a genital exam. (What planet is he living on?)

- Ayres said that many parents just "forgot" that he had told them he was going to do physical exams. (Cue the groans coming from parents of the victims in the courtroom.)

- At the lunch break, Ayres asked his former colleague child psychiatrist Dr. David Schwartz --who had come to support the victims-- "Are you a Scientologist?" We think that's the Ayres' crew new attack - if you're against Ayres then you're automatically a Scientologist who hates all shrinks.

- Thea Leavitt, wife of pediatrician Dr. Sam Leavitt - giving a long and sickening hug to Ayres in the courthalls at lunch time.

- In his cross with the prosecutor, Ayres said he wasn't the type of shrink who went out and played baseball with his patients as part of therapy( with that doughy body of his, we doubt he's ever done a stick of exercise in his life.). However, what Ayres didn't mention was that he used to take out a certain 13 year old patient of his at Belmont Hills Hospital in the 1960s on weekend shopping sprees - sprees that involved Ayres buying two or three record albums and action figures from Talbot's and comic books. Ayres didn't mention that he told the boy he would bill his parents for the presents but never did. Ayres didn't mention that he molested this boy repeatedly - once in his hospital bed, at Belmont Hills, even.

More highlights: when the prosecutor asked Ayres whether he had given Scott E an exam around the groin area, Ayres denied it. His reason? "You can't believe what children say."

"Or what anyone says, for that matter, the prosecutor shot back. Touche!

[DS Comment, 7/10/09: ayres face changed into a very dark thundercloud upon hearing this remark. It is the only time I can ever recall seeing this kind of sheer anger from the beast. It could easily be described as murderous. He held the look for a good 15 seconds and said absolutely nothing.]

- Ayres admitted to not having a changing room for his patients or offering them a gown to wear after he'd asked them to disrobe or a cover. He actually said he "wiped down " his table before and after examining the kids. From what we've heard, he was busy wiping other things during the session but his table was not one of them.

Ayres said that he didn't talk to parents about the physicals afterwards because they normally weren't in the waiting room. Has he forgotten that he told a number of parents and in fact almost ordered one mother to leave the waiting room because he said, he didn't want parents in the waiting room?

- We enjoyed hearing Ayres saying right towards the end of his testimony" When I was jailed, I sat on some benches.

Also, he said, "I 've seen children who were violated by pedophiles."

At the very end of the prosecutor's cross, she asked a series of questions about pedophilia. One was " Are you aware that other psychiatrists have been determined to be pedophiles?"

Although that question was stricken from the record, we hope that the question was branded into the minds of the jurors.

[DS NOTE: Original Post date was 7/9/2009. Moved up for visibility]