The OP posted this question: "Have you ever been accused of something you did not do? If that happens, what do you do?"
I thought long and hard about posting a response to this thread. It's been some ten years since I was accused by my adopted son.
This son of some 38 years of age was found dead in a room littered with drug paraphernalia a few years after he telephoned me with this shattering revelation (to him) and accusation (of me) thanks to one of those therapist sessions where they take an alleged victim back during some type of memory regression.
Skeeter (not his real name) told me via long distance telephone that one of his sessions revealed that he was sexually abused when he was about 10 years old and that I was the perpetrator.
Skeeter and his old brother were abandoned by their father (my recently deceased older brother) in 1964 while the mother was in a mental hospital ward when the tyke was only 6 weeks old. My then wife and I decided to adopt them despite already having two children of our own. We were both JWs and 23 years old at the time.
It would be some 13 years later that I decided to abandon the Watchtower ship after re-reading the 1975 yearbook where the governing body reminded us how those faithless in 1925 used their overactive imaginations in thinking that faithful men of old would be resurrected in that year. They then drew a 50 year parallel to the possibility that same thing could happen with the 1975 date and that some of us could have overactive imaginations as well. History proves that did indeed happen. Another casualty of my abandoning “mother's” ship was our divorce of some 19 years of marriage.
I digress. Back to that phone call and Skeeter was on the other end of the line. Naturally I became angry. I quickly realized there was nothing I could tell him that would change his mind, a once brilliant mind that had become blurred by some 15 years of drug abuse. I told him that I would not be answering the phone if I knew he was on the other end unless it would be to hear a retraction of that horrific charge followed by an apology. That never happened.
Skeeter and his older brother Jake never became JWs as did their non-adopted siblings. That 1977 divorce tore the kids down the middle and Skeeter and Jake opted to live with me. However, they at times both waffled back and forth enough to realize from their mother how horrible a father I was, that I "never really loved them and that I hated Jehovah".
Years later, Jake relayed to me this "almost daily" hate campaign their jilted mother would wage.
In retrospect it doesn't surprise me that Skeeter came up with this incredible charge against me since it opened the door with his mother and JW siblings for subsequent sympathy handouts. All this would justify and reinforce their hatred of me as apostate turned sex offender.
I was fortunate enough to live several thousand miles away from Skeeter and my former family where my alleged reputation was isolated. It should, however, be understandable that when I hear some "he said, she said" story, my sympathy always favors the slandered.
