Shattered Trust: The Shari Karney Story

An attorney, upon handling an incest case, learns that she was an incest victim by her father from the age of five months to five years. Through therapy, she arranges to confront her father and her mother (for physical and emotional abuse in her teens) and gets nowhere. She is further frustrated when she takes on another incest case, only to have the judge throw it back in her face after the child’s testimony of what was being done to her is disbelieved and the abuser apparently doesn’t fit the “profile” of one who would commit incest. Her anger mounts upon learning that the little girl of the first incest case she was handling ends up with severe emotional damage because of the judge’s refusal to stop the father’s visitation, after medical evidence of the incest was presented in court (with graphic descriptions of what took place). Upon learning this news and exploding at the injustice of the system that seems to protect the abusers instead of the victims, she embarks on a crusade with another attorney to get a law passed for incest victims to be able to sue for damages when they are adults upon their recollection of the incest.