According to his daughter Jessica, however, Hendra wasn't confessing all. In an article published on July 1, she told The New York Times she was "stunned" that—while he admits to drugs, drink and over-the-top dysfunction—her father fails to mention that he sexually molested her. "It's being seen as totally honest—the whole story," said the former actress, 39. "[But] this book is erasing what happened to me."
Hendra's bestselling memoir—the tale of a boy from rural England who becomes a successful satirist (he edited National Lampoon and Spy) but keeps his faith in God—clearly springs from a family background in which there are two realities. On Jessica's side: her mother, Judith (a consultant who has seldom spoken to Hendra since their acrimonious 1984 divorce); Jessica's husband, actor Kurt Fuller, who lives with her and daughters Julia, 6, and Charlotte, 3, in L.A.; and several friends. (Her only sibling, Katherine, 40, has made no comment.)
On the other side is Hendra's camp, which includes second wife Carla, 47, whom he wed in 1986. Hendra, who lives with Carla and their three children in New York City, calls Jessica's accusations "false in every respect," adding, "They are hurtful because I love Jessica very much." In an e-mail to PEOPLE, he claims, "My daughter has a long history of psychological issues.... I am sad about this whole matter and hope she finds the help she needs."
As Jessica tells it, she was raised in a home where chaos reigned. Married in 1964, a year after their older daughter was born, her parents moved from L.A. to rural Glen Gardner, N.J., when Jessica was 5. There, says Jessica, "everybody else's moms wore Bermuda shorts, and they got Wonder Bread in their lunch. My parents were sitting in the stream totally naked with their friends, and I got tofu."
By Tony's admission, he was a reluctant parent: In Father Joe, he writes, "I largely ignored and certainly resented [the girls].... No father could have been more selfish—treating his family like props, possessions." And while Jessica describes Hendra as "charismatic, imaginative, funny," she also claims that she "never felt like a child in my house. There was never a moment when they said, 'Don't do that in front of the children.'"
Jessica says she was 7 when her life spun out of control. She claims that on a night when Hendra told her he was going out and she asked him to stay, he climbed into her bunk bed "and said if I didn't take my underwear off, he would leave. I don't really remember how it happened," she says, "but he [sodomized me]."
The next day, she alleges, Hendra "told me he had been drunk, but it [was] okay." She kept the incident a secret from her mom for years—even though, as she tells it, Hendra molested her twice more when she was 10 or 11. "I didn't have the capacity to tell," she says. "I thought I had asked for it in some way."
Judith, who initially told the Times she didn't know about the abuse at the time, later changed her story and now claims that Hendra admitted years ago that he molested Jessica. "It's not a very distinct memory," she says, "but he was extremely upset. He said, 'I'm a monster.'" Why didn't she take action? "I don't know," says Judith. "I think he minimized what happened, but that doesn't excuse anything."
By Jessica's account, the molestation left its mark in the form of anxiety and bulimia that began when she was around 13 and lasted into her 20s. "I [felt] I had done something terrible, and I was purging myself," she says. She claims that when she was about 21 and a drama student, she finally confronted her father. She says he told her, "I'm sorry," but later retrenched by saying, "It's not that big a deal...get over it."
Over the years, Jessica shared her allegations with a few friends, beginning when she was 12. "As far as I remember," says Krisztina Zugor, now 39, "she said Tony would come into the bed and ask her to touch him." One old boyfriend, though, says he's shocked by Jessica's accusations: "We dated for seven or eight years, and she never said anything about this," says Pablo Alvarez de Toledo, an artist. "Did it happen? Only God and the two of them know for sure."
Still, the L.A. psychiatrist who began treating her for anorexia in 1994 says of Jessica, "I have no reason to doubt her." Might she have created a "false memory" of abuse? Says the psychiatrist (who asks to remain anonymous): "There's no chance that happened here."
As the book world buzzes over the controversy, those in Jessica's camp, at least, feel relieved. After Jessica read Father Joe, says husband Kurt, "she kept saying, 'What do you think I should do?' I told her to do whatever it takes to help her sleep better at night."
Now, says Jessica, she's doing exactly that.
Michelle Green. Kathy Ehrich in Boston
- Contributors:
- Kathy Ehrich.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
