Suit exposes truth behind “Monster Study” and its victims’ pain

Nixon v. State, Iowa, Johnson Co. Dist., No. LACV063695, Aug. 17, 2007.

It was January 1939 when 22 children from the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans Home first met graduate student Mary Tudor. The children, ranging in age from 5 to 15 years old, half of whom had speech impediments, thought she was there to help them speak better. Unfortunately, things were not what they seemed.

Instead of being there to help the children with their speech, Tudor was actually there to perform an experiment. Her advisor, University of Iowa Professor Wendell Johnson, himself a stutterer, had sent her to test his theory that stuttering was a learned behavior rather than a genetically determined one. If Tudor could turn any of the children with normal speech patterns into stutterers, his theory would be proven correct.

For the experiment, thought to be so cruel by other graduate students in Tudor’s program that they dubbed it the “Monster Experiment” and “Monster Study,” the children were split into separate groups: 10 stutterers and 12 normal, or “fluent,” speakers. Half of each group received positive reinforcement about their speech, and the other half received negative messages, including persistent criticism of their speech designed to cause them to stutter.

The six fluent speaking children subjected to this negative treatment were forever changed. None became lifelong stutterers, but all of them experienced adverse psychological effects as well as varying degrees of speech anxiety. Some of these effects were so immediate and intense they were noticed by the orphanage’s staff, which was also unaware of the true purpose of the study. Many of the effects were so intense that they followed the children for their entire lives.

They became aware of their involvement in the experiment in 2001, when they were identified and contacted by a reporter who was writing a story about it. Then in their 70s and 80s, they and their families were stunned and angry.

They felt something had to be done to bring those responsible to justice. An heir of one of the children contacted an attorney, who referred the case to Evan A. Douthit, of Kansas City, Missouri. Although he knew from the beginning that Iowa tort law would preclude a high recovery, Douthit took the case “as a matter of principle to help these people and bring the truth out.”

“Dr. Johnson knew as well as anyone the lifelong effects of stuttering,” Douthit said. “He knew that if the study was successful, it would have a huge psychological effect on the children involved. That’s why he went to an orphanage.”

Together with AAJ member Randall L. Rhodes and Mary C. O’Connell, both also of Kansas City, Douthit represented five of the six affected children or their estates in a lawsuit against the state of Iowa.

As expected, one of the first obstacles Douthit faced was Iowa law. Not only are plaintiffs ineligible for punitive damages under the Iowa Tort Claim Act, but before filing a suit against the state, plaintiffs must file a claim with the state attorney general’s office and wait at least six months for the state to respond. When the state did not take action, Douthit and his team filed suit in state court, alleging intentional infliction of emotional distress and fraudulent misrepresentation, among other claims.

The state first tried to have the case dismissed, claiming that the statute of limitations had expired because the experiment took place in 1939. Douthit successfully argued that the statute of limitations had not expired because the plaintiffs only learned of the experiment in 2001. His argument was that, under the tort claim act, the plaintiffs’ cause of action did not accrue until they discovered that there had been a tort committed against them and that they had been injured as a result.

“We also argued that the state’s concealment of the ‘Monster Study’ from the plaintiffs was an ongoing tort from 1939 to 2001, as its concealment of its involvement in the study made the children go through life thinking there was something wrong with them,” he said.

When Douthit defeated the motion to dismiss, the state appealed to the Iowa Supreme Court, where plaintiffs prevailed and the court formally adopted the “discovery rule” in Iowa for determining when a cause of action accrues under the act. 704 N.W.2d 643 (Iowa 2005), 49 ATLA L. Rep. 88 (Apr. 2006).

As the 2007 trial date slowly approached, Douthit said it became apparent to the state that it had some serious liability issues. The parties reached a settlement of $925,000, which was announced by the Iowa attorney general’s office in August.

Plaintiffs relied on Jerry Halvorson, a speech pathologist from Diamond Bluff, Wisconsin, and Michael J. Retzinger, a stuttering expert from Manitowoc, Wisconsin. They also employed adolescent psychiatrist Stefan P. Kruszewski of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Douthit said that, like him, the plaintiffs are glad that the truth came out and that the university had to acknowledge what it had done to them, although they wish they had been able to force the state to pay punitive damages, which Douthit estimates would have been in the millions of dollars.

As for the fate of the “Monster Study,” Tudor’s research and thesis on the topic were never published. And Johnson, despite going on to be a highly regarded speech pathologist, did not mention the project or its results in any of his own work. Even at the time of the study, when the orphanage started to see severe problems in the speech and emotional well-being of the children, the only effort that Johnson made was to send Tudor to visit the children over her winter break to try to reverse the study’s effects—something that such a short visit had no chance of accomplishing.

“The university had the resources to help these children,” Douthit said. “Instead, these children were treated like they were disposable. The most important thing was making sure this doesn’t happen again.”

BRIANNE KENNEDY