Under watch: a doctor, a philanthropist’s son and his attorney. Alcoholism is the best explanation.
Dr. Christopher Thompson, 60, convicted of mayhem, assault with a deadly weapon and other criminal charges after being arrested for slamming on his car’s brakes on a narrow Brentwood road with two bicycle riders right behind him, seriously injuring them. Thompson, a veteran emergency room doctor, was the subject of the January 2009 TAR Myth of the Month) after a blogger asked, “Do you really think that a prominent local member of the community—himself in the medical profession—deliberately tried to cause harm to these cyclists?” If he’s an addict, the answer is a resounding “yes!” but, unfortunately as is often the case of non-celebrity professionals, personal information is difficult to find (and in fact was redacted from many web sites, prompting me to comment, “As is all-too-normal in the case of non-celebrity professionals, this sort of knee-jerk need to redact makes it practically impossible to confirm alcoholism, where we really need to: in people who may affect our lives profoundly, rather than in those who simply entertain us.”) While Thompson faces up to 10 years in prison, there is no report that he faces what he probably needs most: coerced abstinence, which would give him a shot at sobriety.
Anthony Marshall, 85, son of the late philanthropist and Manhattan socialite Brooke Astor, and estate attorney Francis X. Morrissey Jr., found guilty of fraudulently tricking Astor into changing her will and scheming to defraud her estate out of millions of dollars. Marshall was convicted on several counts, including grand larceny, and Morrissey was found guilty of forging Astor’s signature in a codicil to her will in which she left most of her $198 million fortune to Marshall rather than to step-children of subsequent marriages and her grandson, Philip Marshall, 54. While witnesses, including Barbara Walters, Nancy Kissinger and Annette de la Renta, could not testify as to Astor’s mental condition at the moment she signed changes to her will, they recalled moments when she appeared confused, erratic and irrational, a result of the Alzheimer’s disease with which she was diagnosed in 2001. A discussion of Philip’s accusation of his father’s disgusting mistreatment of his grandmother can be found in the “under watch” section of the December 2007 edition of TAR along with the observation that Astor’s first husband and father of Marshall, New Jersey Republican councilman, assemblyman and state senator John Dryden Kuser, clearly had alcoholism. The elder Marshall will probably spend the rest of his life behind bars—which is likely due either to misbehaviors stemming from his own alcoholism, being egged on by his wife Charlene and her possible alcoholism, or going through life as an untreated codependent to his long-dead father from whom he may have learned awful lessons.