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| Chris Simcox during an earlier hearing in his child-molestation trial |
Nobody in the suburban Phoenix neighborhood knew who Chris Simcox was, at least not by
the
Minuteman movement persona he had cultivated on television only a few short
years before. As far as Michelle Lynch knew, he was just the dad who would hang
out and watch the kids play outside, like involved dads do
“I had met him just a few times,” she recalled in an interview,
describing the period in early 2013 when they lived in the same suburban
Phoenix apartment complex. “He was always outside the apartments that we lived
in. There were a lot of families like that, especially around 4:30, 5 o’clock,
all the families would come outside and the kids would all play. There was
always a ton of children outside, and he was always outside with his kids.
“I remember once he said to me, ‘You know, my motto is, if
there’s light outside, there’s no reason to be inside.’ … And I thought, ‘Oh,
you know, he’s an involved father,’ but that didn’t last long.
“All of a sudden they were always inside. And you know, he had kid stuff on his
back porch, and my daughter liked going over there because they could paint and
stuff.” The girls enjoyed each other’s company. There were sleepovers. There
was candy.
That all culminated – after months of manipulation of her
daughter – with the then-5-year-old girl telling her mother about how Simcox
had molested her one night in February. It happened as they were going to bed
together one night in May – three months later.
Even after she informed police and they began investigating Simcox, the
manipulation continued.
After
his
arrest in July 2013, his ability to toy with her daughter changed
dramatically, but not entirely: Simcox has delayed the trial multiple times,
and eventually
asserted
and obtained his right to represent himself in court, raising the specter of
the alleged perpetrator cross-examining his victim on the witness stand.
To Michelle Lynch, that was the final manipulation, and a
chance for Simcox to traumatize her daughter a second time.
And until the
Arizona
Supreme Court intervened last week, that prospect very nearly became a
reality after both the trial judge and an appeals-court panel decided to let
the trial proceed with Simcox having the right to cross-examine all witnesses,
including a third young girl who is expected to testify about his similar
attempts to abuse her.
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| Meg Garvin |
“This is just crazy,” says victim’s rights expert
Meg Garvin,
executive director of the National Crime Victim Law Institute. “We shouldn’t
ask the victims that much, and we don’t need to ask them that much. Because you
can balance these easily.
“I actually don’t think this is as hard as some courts are making it,” Garvin
explained in an interview. “The individual’s right to self-representation has
well been acknowledged to be limited. You can put reasonable limits in place.
And when those limits are necessary to protect someone else’s constitutional
rights, particularly a state constitutional right, which is the one at issue
here – although at other times it can be a federal constitutional right to
privacy, depending on the type of question being asked – then the answer should
be pretty straightforward: have a standby counsel ask the questions.”
Daphne Young of Childhelp, an Arizona nonprofit that advocates for abused and
neglected children, said that permitting such a situation would be a gross
mistake.
“When a potential predator has the opportunity to
cross-examine a child victim of sexual abuse, there’s a great risk for
intimidation, manipulation and re-victimizing of that young victim,”
Young
told KPHO-TV. “When you consider all the verbal and non-verbal cues that a
predator uses to groom a young victim, there’s a lot that can happen under the
nose of the judges and even experts in the field because of the intimate
relationship that abusers use to create silence.”
The trial judge in the case, Superior Court Judge Jose
Padilla, is no stranger to controversy.
In
2009, he came under harsh criticism for having refused to allow a Phoenix
woman named Dawn Axsom to move herself and her son out of state to avoid
violence that she feared at the hands of her ex-boyfriend, who a short while
later shot and killed both Axsom and her mother before killing himself.
Michelle Lynch said that her greatest concern in all this is
that, if Simcox gets his way, he’ll traumatize her daughter all over again. She
described
to Hatewatch how her now-7-year-old girl broke down in hysterics when
informed recently that Simcox might be asking her questions directly.
“I am concerned that the system will make my daughter a
victim again,” she said. “There’s no reason for this to be happening. If there
is this consensus as to it not being appropriate, I don’t understand why it is
happening.”
She looks back on the situation now with a mother’s guilt,
knowing there were abundant signals that something was amiss. “I felt bad
because I trusted him,” she said. “There was this candy thing. The kids have
all mentioned candy, which was how he lured them.
“I remember one day the doorbell rang and my son answered
the door, and Chris and his daughter were standing at the door, and Chris
handed my son a two- or three-pound bag of Skittles, and told my son to give it
to my daughter for being a good girl. And at the time I couldn’t understand why
someone would give that much candy to a child. It didn’t even register.”
That happened sometime after the February molestation, but
before Lynch finally learned in May from her daughter that Simcox had molested
her. “It had been happening for a couple months,” she said.
Then came what seemed like an interminable period between
her report to police and Simcox’s arrest. “When I told police, and they were
investigating him for over a month, my daughter and I were dodging him,” she
said. “I mean, he would walk by our house and we wouldn’t go outside. The
minute we got home we would run up our stairs and close the door.
“His daughter gave mine this handmade birthday invitation.
And I told [my daughter] she couldn’t go, and she wanted to write a letter. I
actually have the letter she wrote. She responded with, ‘I’m sorry, [Girl 2], I
can’t go to your party because your dad is doing disgusting things to me.’ ”
No one in the neighborhood seemed to have any idea that the
person they were dealing with was Chris Simcox, the onetime nationally famous
leader of the “Minuteman” nativist border-watch movement.
As
early as 2005, Simcox’s erratic behavior – including allegations of an
attempt to molest another of
his
daughters – had been explored in detail by the SPLC. Even as late as 2010, he
had managed to remain in public view,
running
briefly for the U.S. Senate in Arizona.
Yet in the little neighborhood where he moved after
divorcing his third wife, Simcox was just another guy. It never crossed Lynch’s
radar, at least not until she reported him to police, that he was someone quite
well-known.
“My older [teenaged] son, once he looked up who this guy
was, after the Scottsdale police department told me who he was, my son started
sleeping with a knife under his pillow,” Lynch recalled.
Once Lynch realized who he was, though, more of the pieces
fell in place. “Those personalities like Chris have the narcissistic traits,
and that’s the first thing I think of when it comes to him, you know,” she
said.
“I really feel like because of the kind of person he is, I
think he’s trying to make a comeback to being a nationally known person again.
Especially with representing himself and all that. In all honesty, he’s going
to make a mockery of himself. Because once people start to hear what he is
going to throw out there as his evidence – it’s absolutely ridiculous.” Indeed,
Simcox
has hinted that he plans to present a “grand conspiracy” defense predicated
on the idea that he is being persecuted by nefarious forces.
Seeing justice served on Simcox is only part of her intent,
though. Her chief focus is seeing that her daughter is treated the right way by
the justice system. As she explained to Judge Padilla in a letter pleading to
keep Simcox from questioning her daughter directly on the stand:
I understand that within the justice system, all accused have specific rights
that officials do their best to uphold so to be fair and maintain the integrity
of the Constitution, but it is my hope that my daughter’s rights are also taken
into consideration and [she] is given the opportunity to progress and not
regress due to the ensuring of one individual’s rights over another.
Meg Garvin says that these kinds of conflicts in pro se cases happen on “a not-infrequent basis.” She says that
while it’s rare, there have been cases where accused perpetrators directly
cross-examined their ostensible victims. But she insists that there’s no reason
for that to happen.
“This isn’t that complicated. To ensure that the defendant’s
rights, the real test is if he is directing his representation, and he would
still be able to direct the questions,” Garvin said. “The victim would not have
to be subjected to a very intrusive, invasive and harassing moment where the
perpetrator is essentially assaulting again.”
Yet even though it seems simple, instances such as this one
happen all too often in the American legal system, Garvin says. “Courts
routinely defer to defendants’ rights without doing an appropriate calculus of
the victims’ rights,” she said.
Michelle Lynch believes there’s a real cost to that. “There’s a lot of people
out there that don’t even pursue stuff like this because they’re frustrated with
the criminal-justice system,” she said. “And I get it. I fully understand, now
that I’ve been through this process, why people would just give up and not do
anything about it. But I’m a very strong-willed person.”
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