Seducer Or Victim? Trial Continues In Case Where Man Claims Spokane Counselor Initiated Sex

(From For the Record, Thursday, February 8, 1996:) The attorney defending Genesis Counseling Service and co-owner Janice White is Dan Keefe. His name was misspelled in a Wednesday article.

Did a Spokane counselor violate her professional standards and initiate sex with a client?

Or is an unemployed insurance adjustor lying in an attempt to get cash from the counselor and her business?

A jury will wrestle with those questions at the end of a trial that continues today in Superior Court.

Kevin O’Neil, 51, seeks unspecified damages from his former counselor, Janice White, and Genesis Counseling Services.

A witness testified Tuesday that O’Neil will lose $180,000 to $202,000 in future earnings because he has an “inhibiting disability” from being seduced.

His attorney, Dana Kelley, is expected to ask the jury for general damages and an award for future medical bills.

White, 54, is a chemical-dependency counselor and co-owner of Genesis Counseling, 10103 N. Division.

The counselor, her counseling business and physician-husband, Travis White, are named defendants.

The counselor admits hugging O’Neil, taking him to lunch, making house calls and sending him a plant. But she says no sexual contact occurred.

“She denies these allegations of improprieties, unequivocally,” said defense attorney Dan O’Keefe. “They will be proven to be false.”

On the days when O’Neil claims he had sexual intercourse with White, he was on a week-long alcoholic binge and hallucinating, O’Keefe told the jury.

O’Neil is “an angry man” because White refused his request for a business loan, O’Keefe said.

O’Neil, 51, filed the suit in April 1994, seven months after he ended what he alleges was an extramarital affair with his counselor. He sought treatment in early 1991 for depression and alcohol dependency.

Within a month of his first therapy session, his counselor told him he was “good looking” - a statement White admitted during testimony on Tuesday.

“I never told him I was attracted to him,” White testified.

O’Neil claims the counselor told him she wanted a relationship with him. Within a year, the counseling sessions including kissing, hugging and sexual foreplay, O’Neil claims.

He says he was “confused by her advances” and was “emotionally dependent” upon her.

On one occasion, White called a doctor who prescribed Librium for O’Neil without seeing him. She picked up and paid for the medicine, and delivered it to O’Neil’s home.

“Do you make it a practice of getting prescription medicines for your patients?” Kelley asked White.

The counselor said she has picked up medicine for other clients.

O’Neil’s attorney produced a sworn statement from White, who claimed under oath last summer that she never took her patient to lunch.

But in court, White recalled she paid for lunch with O’Neil after he called and said he needed a counseling session. White testified that O’Neil was “haunted by demons who are always there except when he’s snuggled in bed with a woman.”

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