'Rockefeller' created life of fantasy, witnesses say

Forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Keith Ablow of Newburyport, and forensic psychologist Catherine T.J. Howe of Salem, each testified for the defense that they interviewed Rockefeller repeatedly at the Nashua Street Jail in recent months.

Both witnesses said that he suffers from narcissistic personality disorder and grandiose delusions and that those illnesses caused him to believe a slew of fantasies, including that he was a member of the storied Rockefeller family. Recently, however, he has recognized his true identity, in part because his confinement has stripped him of any aristocratic pretensions, they said.

"It wasn't completely a concession," Howe said, on the first day of Rockefeller's defense in Suffolk Superior Court. "It was sort of an incorporation."

Rockefeller is being tried on charges of kidnapping his 7-year-old daughter, Reigh, during a supervised visit on a Back Bay street on July 27, 2008, seven months after a bitter divorce from Sandra Boss, a senior partner at McKinsey & Co. His lawyers, Jeffrey A. Denner and Timothy Bradl, contend that Rockefeller was legally insane at the time of the abduction.

Ablow, who also works as a paid com mentator for Fox News and writes fictional thrillers, said Rockefeller's illnesses stem from alleged traumatic mistreatment as a child by his father in Germany, the country he left for the United States as a student in 1978.

"His father called him human refuse," Ablow said.

Assistant District Attorney David A. Deakin vigorously challenged the findings. He pointed out that Ablow wrote in a Fox News health blog 11 days after Rockefeller's arrest, months before Ablow was hired by the defense to diagnose him, that the defendant might have suffered "terrible pain" as a child. Deakin questioned whether Ablow had "interviewer bias" when he spoke with Rockefeller six times in jail this year and was looking for childhood trauma to bolster his speculation.

Deakin directed Ablow to read most of his entry, "Inside the Mind of Clark Rockefeller," from the witness stand. Ablow wrote that the defendant was a "human chameleon" who lied without remorse. "No regard for the truth. No regard for the law. No concern for a mother's panic when her daughter is kidnapped," he wrote.

Ablow brushed the blog off as "journalism-slash-entertainment."

Deakin also presented evidence disputing that Rockefeller's father, Simon Gerhartsreiter, mistreated his son. In a 1978 affidavit in the defendant's US immigration file, the elder Gerhartsreiter said he sent his son $250 a month and paid his health insurance.

The prosecution, which rested its case Tuesday after four days of testimony, contends that the defendant is a world-class con man who fooled many people with stories of an aristocratic pedigree and extraordinary achievements and that his purported mental illness is one more con. The prosecution is expected to call its own expert to the stand today.

Both Howe and Ablow testified that the defendant's underlying illness is narcissistic personality disorder, a condition diagnosed when a person displays five of nine criteria, including having a grandiose sense of self-importance and being preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success and power.

"What's fascinating about Mr. Rockefeller is that not only does he meet five or more, he meets all nine of the criteria," Howe said under questioning by Denner. "What is also interesting is that not only does he meet all nine, he meets it to such a significant extent. If there is a continuum of narcissistic personality disorder, he is on the far end of the continuum."

Both defense experts said his narcissism was reinforced when people believed his fantastic accounts of entering Yale at 14, helping small countries relieve themselves of crushing debt, owning $1 billion worth of fine art, and being a member of the Trilateral Commission, or "the Group," as he called it. The commission is a private organization that seeks to generate closer cooperation among the United States, Europe, and Japan.

Ablow, who has already been paid $10,000 to work for the defense, said Rockefeller was so delusional when he first interviewed him in February that the defendant believed he and his daughter had communicated telepathically in a language he called "Elephantian."

While cross-examining Howe, Deakin asked about the possibility of a "hypothetical stone liar" whose stories become increasingly elaborate when confronted with his fabrications.

Noting that Howe had written in an early diagnosis that Rockefeller might represent a "diagnosis unto himself," Deakin held up the telephone-book-sized Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and asked a series of questions.

"And there's no diagnosis in here for liar?" he asked.

"There's a diagnosis for malingering," she replied, fakery that she had ruled out in the defendant's case.

But no diagnosis for liar? Deakin asked again.

"There's nothing in there under that word, no," she responded.

Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jsaltzman@globe.com. http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/06/04/rockefeller_created_life_of_fantasy_witnesses_say/