Jury awards $638K to mom who sued over claimed sex abuse of adult daughter; defense argued consent
A jury has awarded $638,000 to the plaintiff in an unusual Connecticut lawsuit filed by a mother over claimed sexual abuse of her highly intelligent but mentally ill adult daughter.
The first time around, the jury in the Stamford Superior Court case reached a defense verdict for Craig Martise, a married father of four, in a 2009 trial of Mary Kortner’s civil sexual battery and assault claims, the Associated Press reports.
Caroline Kendall Kortner had at one point been admitted to Yale University, but was in a conservatorship overseen by her mother because of health problems that included depression, anorexia and obsessive-compulsive disorder. She allegedly weighed 80 pounds and wore a diaper because she was incontinent, according to the news agency and an earlier Hartford Courant article.
Her mother said Martise gagged, spanked and whipped Kendall Kortner and led her around in a dog collar at times. The defense argued consent. In overturning the first verdict, the state supreme court said it was a jury question whether the daughter had the capacity to consent to sex, including sadomasochistic sex. Simply because she was in a conservatorship did not necessarily mean the daughter was incapable of consent.
Martise and his legal counsel, Philip Russell, could not immediately be reached for comment. Russell had called Mary Kortner’s suit frivolous in an interview with the AP last year.
Kendall Kortner died in 2010 of an undisclosed illness at the age of 39.
Related coverage:
Hartford Courant: “Mother Says Man’s Sadomasochistic Sex With Mentally Ill Daughter Was Abuse, Takes Case To Supreme Court”
