falling down the stairs

paula dickerson—eric dickerson's estranged wife, whose eyes eric allegedly tried to poke out—was on abdul in the morning today, denying that eric had ever struck her or her children. (abdul has posted the mp3s of the interview.) here's how abdul describes it in his show notes:

The wife of 7th congressional district candidate Eric Dickerson says he never laid a finger on her or their children. Paula Dickerson is denying the allegations in a 15-year old police report that her husband , Eric abused her in 1991. Paula says the police did come to her house responding to a domestic disturbance, but there was no violence. According to the police report, Paula had bruises and a red marks on her neck. She says she and her husband were yelling at each other she looked red because of her light-skinned complexion. County prosecutors dismissed the charges against Dickerson. The entire affair came to light two days ago, when incumbent Democrat Julia Carson presented the information to the Indianapolis Star.

gary adds "She was adamant that she is not the typical abused wife who is afraid to leave her husband because of financial dependency. She is a college-educated woman with a teaching degree, and she has always been able to obtain work if she wanted it throughout her marriage to Dickerson she explains." but there are all kinds of reasons why abused women don't testify against their abusers. financial dependency is just one of them. more often, the main cause is that the woman believes her abuser is "a good person" at heart and "he'll change". for the same reason, eric's excuse that (paraphrased) "if i were guilty, the judge wouldn't have let me off" is laughable in the extreme. domestic abuse cases are notoriously difficult to prosecute, precisely because it's so difficult to get witnesses to testify.

i'll be generous and i won't quibble with paula's claim that she only looked like she'd had the crap beaten out of her because she is light-skinned and her skin gets all blotchy when she gets agitated. it sounds a bit silly to me, like the "oh, i fell down the stairs" cliche, but it's the only actual defense she offers (everything else is just vague denials, and protests that she's upset that this story is on the news), so i'll leave it alone for now.

but there's a lot of highly detailed stuff in that police report: where did it all come from if it's not true? where did the cops get all that stuff about eye-gouging and elbow biting? why did the cops say that paula told them that eric wanted to kill her? and the cops don't just say that eric bit his daughter, the police report says she had visible bite marks. this sounds awfully specific to be something they just pulled out of their asses.

something doesn't jibe here. the dickerson version of events cannot be reconciled with the police report. someone is lying. either the cops completely made up the entire report, or paula lied (either then or now). and the indy star has already caught eric in one blatant lie about this story:

Dickerson, asked about biting his daughter, said: "I have no clue what you're talking about. . . . There isn't any shocker in Dickerson's closet."

And, he added: "I did not even hire an attorney."

Court records, however, show Dickerson hired Indianapolis attorney Samuel Oates. Oates died in 2004.

is he lying about anything else? or is he accusing the police of lying? and if he's calling the police liars (which he certainly is; that was a rhetorical question), why aren't the right-wingers at indy undercover upset about it? (some of those people suggest that democrats hacked into the police report in order to insert nasty stuff, because they can't accept that cops would actually lie on a police report, nor can they accept that dickerson might actually be a wifebeater nor accept anything but the worst about julia carson.)

wthr also has been covering the story. their story is pretty decent (and includes video), but it refers to dickerson as "ninth district congressional hopeful". (this is the 7th district, not the 9th.) ¶