Description
Maryland v. Huott was a 2014 criminal case which arose after Danielle Bostick came to remember that she was sexually assaulted by her swimming coach, Christopher Huott, beginning when she was 7-years-old. Bostick writes of hearing about the Rick Curl case in 2013, a case involving a swimming coach from the D.C. area who was charged and later convicted of sexually abusing a girl he had coached in 1986. Hearing news of Curl’s arrest, Bostick says: “I felt unsettled, but wasn’t sure why.” She did not identify herself at the time as a victim of her own coach. Within a year of hearing about the Curl case, Bostick approached the police with what she described as “little more than memory fragments and a gut feeling that I had been abused” by her own swimming coach, Christopher Huott. The police arranged for a monitored telephone call to Houtt. As she described it, “for nearly two hours, [Houtt] confessed to abuse more horrifying than I had imagined or feared" (Bostick). Huott was later charged with abusing Bostick; he eventually pleaded guilty to one felony count of child abuse and was sentenced to 10 years, the maximum penalty allowed at the time that the crime occurred (Lewis). This case is significant as an example where abuse more extensive than the victim had been able to recall was corroborated by the perpetrator’s confession, showing the nature of traumatic memory and recovery at play. It also serves as a reminder that cases involving recovered memory continue to come to light long after controversy over traumatic memory faded from the national focus that it held in the 1990s.