Sex enlivens a story. Illicit sex enlivens it even more.
This particular vignette occurred some three score years ago in North Carolina.
Jeffrey Mazza suffered from bipolar disorder. Patients with this
diagnosis have extreme and usually unpredictable mood swings that cycle between
mania and depression. They have difficulty organizing and planning, judging
others’ emotions, and staying in touch with reality. Every experience to them
seems either positive or negative, triumphal or disastrous. There is a high
risk of suicide.
Bipolar disorder is usually treated with medication and/or
counseling. Robert Huffaker, a psychiatrist, had been treating Mazza for four
years and had prescribed him both medication and psychoanalysis. During
counseling he was “encouraged to have very intimate, self-revelatory, and
uninhibited discussions” with Dr. Huffaker. At least once he “expressed to Huffaker
serious concern about maintaining a healthy marital relationship with his wife.”
While undergoing this psychotherapy Mazza came to think of Huffaker as his best
friend. In medical jargon this is called “transference,” a common but
unfortunate phenomenon, as we shall see.
One day in the summer of 1979, Mazza called his estrange
wife at home. He testified that because of her telephone demeanor, he became “concerned
about her well-being.” In truth, it is likely that he knew something was afoot.
He decided to pay her a visit “to make sure everything was OK.” The judge
describes the scene as follows:
Plaintiff observed his
psychiatrist's automobile parked near the ... house and saw some of his
psychiatrist’s clothing strewn about the family room. Upon approaching and [breaking
into] the locked master bedroom, plaintiff discovered his psychiatrist … and
his wife … together in bed. Huffaker was naked and putting on his undershorts,
and [Mrs. Mazza] was naked and putting on a light housecoat.
As can be expected there followed a bit of a kerfuffle,
about which more later.
This scene is not particularly uncommon, human nature being
what it is. And medical standards being what they are, the jury in the ensuing
lawsuit found Dr. Huffaker to have breached his professional duty and violated
his patient’s trust and “friendship.” They awarded Mazza a hefty sum.
No surprise thus far. But what is surprising about Mazza v. Huffaker is the vigor with
which the defendant appealed to the North Carolina Supreme Court. Through his
lawyers he raised more than 13 points that he said justifying reversing the
lower court’s decision. I say “more than 13” because the opinion alludes to “additional
assignments of error” that the judges considered and rejected en masse. Apparently those assertions were
even more puerile than the ones the court did address. Of the thirteen somewhat
tenable arguments, three are worthy of the Jealous Mistress’s attention.
First, Huffaker argued that too much importance was given to
expert testimony which said that having sex with your patient’s wife is an act
of malpractice. And next the good doctor contended that it was an error to
allow “expert testimony that sexual relations between a psychiatrist and the
wife of a patient would render useless the previous treatment of the patient by
the psychiatrist and would make it extremely difficult for the patient to enter
ever again into a trusting relationship with any other psychiatrist.” [Translation: That seeing your doctor
diddle your wife could send you off the deep end, especially if you have manic
depressive psychosis, mood swings, lose touch with reality, tend toward
catastrophizing, and are suicidal.]
The court rejected both of these arguments out of hand. They
were puerile, to be sure, but the most inane argument Huffaker made concerned Mazza’s
alleged “contributory negligence.”
Contributory negligence is a common legalism that essentially
means “it's the plaintiff’s own dumb fault.” Huffaker argued that Mazza
contributed to his own psychological injury and should have known better because:
(1) before coming to the house he already suspected the two were having an
affair; (2) before he broke down the door he had seen the doctor’s car outside
and his clothes in the family room; and (3) he knew enough about his mental
condition that he should have know the situation would be distressing to him.
Huffaker’s lawyers argued that “this evidence shows that
plaintiff in entering the bedroom did not exercise ordinary care for his own
safety in light of a foreseeable danger and unreasonable risk and that his
conduct contributed to his injury.”
OMG! The
lawyers actually argued this with a straight face? In the courtroom? In front
of God and everybody? The justices’ closed-door deliberations on this point
must have been something to behold.
After
composing themselves, the judges disposed of the issue as summarily: “We have
carefully perused the record in light of defendant’s imaginative contentions
with respect to an issue of contributory negligence.… We can hardly perceive of a situation where an
issue of contributory negligence would be less appropriate.” The JM admires
their restraint.
Finally,
in the trial court Dr. Huffaker had asserted a retaliatory claim against Mazza
for assault, battery, and destruction of personal property. This was because,
after finding the two lovebirds in
flagrante delicto, Mazza “aimed a loaded shotgun at Huffaker and fired the
gun over Huffaker's head, just missing him. Plaintiff and Huffaker then
wrestled and during the affray plaintiff tried to gouge out both of Huffaker's
eyeballs and thereby bruised them.”
“A few
days later,” the opinion continues, “Mazza located defendant Huffaker's
automobile and slashed two of its tires with a pocketknife and removed from the
automobile Huffaker's briefcase and suitcase.”
The
trial judge refused to let the jury consider this claim and the Supreme Court
agreed:
[W]e hold as a matter of law
that the trial judge correctly refused to submit [to the jury] an issue of
punitive damage on defendant’s counterclaim, in light of the undeniable
evidence of Huffaker’s provoking conduct.
In
other words, you had it coming, doc!
Thus
did the justices of the North Carolina Supreme Court affirm the verdict against
Dr. Huffaker and enshrine in the law books a delicious human-interest story. In
the process they may have confirmed some conventional wisdom: “Ya’ gotta be
nuts to see a psychiatrist … or to be one.”
* * *
Mazza v. Huffaker did not set any significant
legal precedent, and I have not found it referred to in any other judicial
decisions. The brazenness of the arguments aside, it is a mundane case—one of many
involving an illicit tryst gone bad. Most such cases end up in divorce court or
the criminal justice system. Strangely, however, at least one found its way
into California’s workers compensation system. That will be the subject of our next
chapter: “Multi-Tasking in the Wild.”
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