Court Opinion

ID: 9697058
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 19:04:49.082902+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:20:28.883625
License: Public Domain

NEWMAN, Justice,
concurring.
I am writing this Concurring Opinion because I respectfully disagree with the Majority that the discovery rule does not apply, as a matter of law, to Appellant Linda Dalrymple’s claim of repressed memory. The Majority’s analysis is faulty because, assuming arguendo the validity of Appellant’s repressed memory theory, a jury could find that she experienced a natural consequence of sexual child abuse, i.e., a contemporaneous dissociation and repression of all awareness of the offensive contact, such that she was reasonably unaware of her injury until her memory of the events returned many years later. However, I believe any discussion of the discovery rule, here, is academic because Appellant has failed to produce evidence of facts essential to her claim. Because she has failed to establish a prima facie case, I agree that Appellee *233Eugene Brown is entitled to summary judgment. Therefore, I concur in the result reached by the Majority.

Admissibility of Scientific Evidence

Neither party, the trial court, the Superior Court, nor the Majority addresses the admissibility of repressed memory evidence. Ordinarily, before admitting expert testimony concerning a novel scientific theory, a trial court must determine that the subject of the expert’s testimony has gained general acceptance in the scientific field in which it belongs pursuant to Frye v. United States, 293 F. 1013 (D.C.Cir.1923). See Commonwealth v. Topa, 471 Pa. 223, 369 A.2d 1277 (1977).1 Therefore, any discussion of whether the discovery rule applies to Appellant’s claim assumes, without deciding, the evidentiary reliability of repressed memory evidence.
I note, however, that the validity of repressed memory theory is subject to considerable debate in the psychological community, and some courts have rejected its admissibility. See, for a thorough discussion of the admissibility of repressed memory evidence, State v. Hungerford, 1995 WL 378571 (N.H. Super.1995) (disallowing testimony concerning recovered memory of sexual assault in a criminal trial because the phenomenon of repressed memory is subject to “violent” disagreement); see also Doe v. Maskell, 342 Md. 684, 679 A.2d 1087 (1996), cert. denied, — U.S. -, 117 S.Ct. 770, 136 L.Ed.2d 716 (1997)(noting serious disagreement in the psychological community concerning repression theory). Again, I emphasize that, for purposes of this concurring statement, I express no opinion as to the admissibility of repressed memory evidence. I add this cautionary note to preclude any misreading of the Majority Opinion, or this Concurring Opinion, as implicitly accepting the admissibility of the evidence.

*234
Summary Judgment

Turning to the issue on appeal, I believe that any discussion concerning application of the discovery rule to this case is academic. Appellant has briefed her theory of repression, but she has failed to come forth with sufficient evidence to support her cause of action. Most glaringly, Appellant has failed to produce any affidavit or expert report that would enable a fact finder to evaluate her claim of repressed memory. As emphasized by Appellee, Appellant’s discussion of her anticipated expert testimony concerning dissociation and repression is wholly inappropriate because it is not part of the record. The record contains only Appellant’s testimony concerning her experiences. As repression is a scientific theory beyond the knowledge or experience of the average person, expert testimony is required to assist the trier of fact in evaluating Appellant’s claim. See Churbuck v. Union Railroad Co., 380 Pa. 181, 110 A.2d 210 (1955). Due to the absence of evidence necessary to support her claim of repressed memory, Appellant has failed to defeat Appellee’s motion for summary judgment. Pa. R.C.P. 1035.2(2).2 Therefore, I concur in the Majority’s affirmance of the grant of summary judgment in favor of Appellee.

Discovery Rule

Despite the inadequacy of the record before us, the Majority has established a rule of law forever foreclosing application *235of the discovery rule to cases of alleged repressed memory. I am, therefore, compelled to express my disagreement with the Majority’s analysis.
The “discovery rule” is an equitable, court-made rule that tolls the running of the statute of limitations where the plaintiff does not know or cannot reasonably detect the existence of an injury within the prescribed statutory period. Hayward v. Medical Center of Beaver County, 530 Pa. 320, 608 A.2d 1040 (1992). The purpose of the discovery rule “is to exclude the period of time during which the injured party is reasonably unaware that an injury has been sustained so that people in that class have essentially the same rights as those who suffer an immediately ascertainable injury.” Id. at 324, 608 A.2d at 1043. Before applying the discovery rule, courts must address the ability of the plaintiff, exercising ordinary diligence, to know of the injury. Pocono International Raceway, Inc. v. Pocono Produce, Inc., 503 Pa. 80, 468 A.2d 468 (1983). When an injured party is unable to discern an injury that is discoverable by the exercise of due diligence, through means within his or her reach, “[tjhis is not the sort of blameless ignorance which compels the application of the discovery rule.... ” Id. at 86, 468 A.2d at 471.
The Majority properly states that, in Pennsylvania, the standard of knowledge is an objective one, Redenz v. Rosenberg, 360 Pa.Super. 430, 520 A.2d 883 (1987), allocatur denied, 516 Pa. 635, 533 A.2d 93 (1987); therefore, it is the nature of the injury that determines whether the discovery rule applies, Baily v. Lewis, 763 F.Supp. 802 (E.D.Pa.1991), aff'd without op., 950 F.2d 722 (3d Cir.1991). Whether a plaintiff should have discovered his or her injury within the statutory period is generally a question for the jury; only where the undisputed facts lead unerringly to the conclusion that the plaintiff took an unreasonable time to discover the injury may we decline to apply the discovery rule as a matter of law. Seto v. Willits, 432 Pa.Super. 346, 638 A.2d 258 (1994), allocatur denied, 538 Pa. 648, 647 A.2d 902 (1994); Pearce v. The Salvation Army, 449 Pa.Super. 654, 674 A.2d 1123 (1996). Here, in his Motion for Summary Judgment, Appellee avers that there is no *236genuine issue as to any material fact respecting the tolling of the statute of limitations. R. at 140a. Instead, he argues that, as a matter of law, the discovery rule cannot toll the statute of limitations in this case even when drawing all factual inferences in the light most favorable to Appellant. Id.3
Appellant asserts that Appellee, a family friend, sexually abused her when she was between the ages of six and eight. She claims that when the alleged abuse occurred, her mind involuntarily blocked any contemporaneous recollection of the acts through psychological mechanisms that resulted in a lack of conscious awareness of the abuse. According to her proposed expert testimony, dissociation was the key psychological mechanism at work. Through dissociation, her mind immediately suppressed and repressed any memory of the assaults as they occurred by creating a fiction that the abuse was not really happening. It was the nature and severity of the ássaults and intimidation that caused her mind temporarily to lose all contemporaneous memory of the trauma and the details of the assaults until nearly twenty-three years later. According to Appellant, her lack of conscious awareness and repressed memory of the molestation is an integral part of the injury itself.
She explains that sexual abuse of a child of tender years produces a dissociative phenomenon, causing the repression of conscious awareness and memory of the molestation. Thus, due to repression, all of the elements of the sexual battery are not known to the child victim at the time of the molestation. Repression of childhood sexual abuse is not, according to Appellant, an individual disability or incapacity, such as a personality disorder, but is a normal psychological mechanism that can operate in any healthy young mind when confronted with a traumatic event.
In Hewczuk v. Sambor, 803 F.Supp. 1063 (E.D.Pa.1992), a similar case in which the court rejected the defendant’s claim *237that the statute of limitations barred the plaintiffs action, the Honorable John P. Fullam, Sr. was persuaded by the reasoning that:
even though a plaintiffs physical or mental disability does not ordinarily toll the statute, where the inability to discover the trauma is due to the nature of the original injury itself, the statute is tolled; in such circumstances, it is the tortfeasor who caused both the original harm and the inability to discover.
Id. at 1064. Another federal case applying Pennsylvania law, Greenberg v. McCabe, 453 F.Supp. 765 (E.D.Pa.1978), aff'd without op., 594 F.2d 854 (3d Cir.), cert. denied, 444 U.S. 840, 100 S.Ct. 78, 79, 62 L.Ed.2d 51 (1979), is instructive in analyzing claims such as Appellant’s. In that case, the plaintiff sought to recover for psychiatric malpractice after the expiration of the statute of limitations. She asserted that her mental condition and medicated state, caused by her doctor, precluded her from timely discovering the doctor’s negligence. The court acknowledged that, in Pennsylvania, a person’s mental deficiency generally cannot be considered in determining the reasonableness of his conduct. However, the court determined that:
logic compels the conclusion that it was proper for the jury to consider the plaintiffs mental disabilities insofar as they were caused by the defendant. Our determination is based in part on our understanding of the rationale for the discovery rule in Ayers v. Morgan.141 The Supreme Court reasoned the Ayers’ Claim could not be barred because the defendant’s conduct set in motion objective “laws of nature” which prevented Mr. Ayers from ascertaining the cause of *238his abdominal pain: since defendant had sewn him up as part of the treatment, “he could not open his abdomen like a door and look in” to discover the cause of his pain. Similarly, in this case the testimony of the psychiatrist called by plaintiff as an expert established that as a matter of scientific fact the defendant’s therapy impaired the judgment and mental processes of Mrs. Greenberg in a way that was analogous to, if subtler than, the surgeon’s sewing up of Mr. Ayers’ abdomen. Thus, the plaintiff presented competent and unrebutted testimony that as a result of the operation of the “laws of nature” in connection with [the defendant’s] treatment, which laws we understand to comprise the psychiatric as well as the physiological, she was precluded from discovery. At issue is the objective effect of the defendant’s treatment on discoverability by a reasonable person, not the impact on discoverability of the plaintiffs mental deficiencies apart from that treatment.
Id. at 768-69 (citations omitted). The Greenberg rationale is equally applicable here. At issue is the objective effect of the alleged abuse on a reasonable person’s ability to discover the injury. As alleged by Appellant, severely offensive abuse naturally causes repression in the mind of a minor child. Thus, assuming the validity of Appellant’s scientific theory, the “laws of nature” prevented her from ascertaining her injury. As the Greenberg court concluded, “the statutory period does not begin to run if the fact-finder concludes that the plaintiffs failure of discovery, objectively determined, is brought about by the very nature of the defendant’s conduct.” Id. at 769.
However, rejecting Appellant’s argument as contrary to common sense, the Majority concludes that “it would be absurd to argue that a reasonable person, even assuming for the sake of argument, a reasonable six year old, would repress the memory of a touching so that no amount of diligence would enable that person to know of the injury.” Dalrymple v. Brown, at 170. The Majority, therefore, concludes that Appellant is asserting nothing other than an individual incapacity to know that she suffered a battery. I believe, howev*239er, that the engine driving the Majority’s analysis is its summary rejection of the validity of Appellant’s repressed memory theory, a question not now before this Court. The question before us is not limited to what makes common sense. We must accept, solely for purposes of this decision, a scientific theory that, like countless novel scientific theories, initially appears inconceivable.
As previously stated, Appellant asserts that repression is a normal psychological response of a healthy six to eight-year-old to a traumatic childhood event. Judge Fullam recognized in Hewczuk, where foster parents allegedly abused a minor child, “it is not at all unreasonable to suppose that a child of such tender years, with her limited experience in life, would not understand that her ‘parents’ were mistreating her and that these horrors would be totally repressed and excluded from her consciousness.” Id. at 1065. Just as exposure to asbestos does not cause cancer in every individual, childhood sexual assault may not trigger a dissociative reaction in every victim. In neither case does an incomplete correlation of cause and effect necessarily indicate an idiosyncratic reaction of a particular plaintiff. Although repression may be an extraordinary phenomenon, a victim such as Appellant, who allegedly dissociated and repressed all conscious awareness of childhood sexual assault, is blameless in her inability to discover her injury within the statutory period. Thus, I believe the Majority errs in concluding that, as a matter of law, it was unreasonable for Appellant to fail to detect her injury within the statutory period.
Baily, cited by the Majority, appears at first glance to involve a similar factual scenario. A closer inspection, however, reveals that Baily is factually distinguishable from this case. The Baily plaintiff claimed that he had psychologically repressed his memory of childhood sexual molestation by a family friend. The District Court said that the discovery rule applies where an injury is not readily discernible, such as in the case of a surgical sponge left in a patient’s abdomen. Id. (citing Ayers). The Baily plaintiff, however, did not allege that he was unaware of the alleged abuse when it occurred or *240who committed it. He conceded that, at the time of the abusive incidents, he knew that it hurt both physically and emotionally. Instead, he asserted that he did not know the acts were wrongful at the time they were committed. The Baily court, therefore, reasoned that it was not the nature of the injury itself, i.e., a readily discernible battery, that resulted in the plaintiffs inability to sue, but his own incapacity.
The facts of Baily are more similar to those of E.J.M v. Archdiocese of Philadelphia, 424 Pa.Super. 449, 622 A.2d 1388 (1993), and A McD. v. Rosen, 423 Pa.Super. 304, 621 A.2d 128 (1993), than the facts of the case at bar. In E.J.M., the plaintiff conceded that he never repressed his memory of the physical acts a priest had committed upon him, but claimed that he did not know those acts were “abuse” and had caused psychological and emotional harm. Likewise, in A. McD., the plaintiff was aware that her psychiatrist committed sexual acts upon her, but claimed that her psychiatric problems precluded her from knowing that the acts were unethical. In both cases, the court held that the plaintiffs lack of awareness that the defendant’s conduct was wrongful and injurious is irrelevant to the discovery rule analysis. In each case, the court held that once the plaintiff knew what was happening to him or her and who was doing it, the plaintiff had a duty to investigate the matter and institute suit.
Here, however, Appellant asserts a contemporaneous dissociation from the molestation. Thus, although all of the elements in a typical battery action are ordinarily present and known to the plaintiff at the time of the touching itself, Baily, here, it was the offensiveness of the contact that allegedly caused her to repress all conscious awareness and memory of the touching. Accordingly, the battery was not immediately discernable to her. Therefore, it is the nature of the actual injury that prevented her from ascertaining its existence.
In factually similar cases, Seto and Pearce, the Superior Court has, however, erroneously relied on Baily to hold that repressed memory categorically constitutes an individual incapacity of the plaintiff. The Seto court affirmed the grant of summary judgment against a plaintiff who allegedly suffered a *241personality split in the course of sexual assault that caused her to mentally block out the acts committed upon her. Relying on Seto, the court in Pearce affirmed the grant of preliminary objections against a plaintiff who alleged she repressed her recollection of traumatic assaults inflicted upon her as a child. Nonetheless, the court stated:
A question arises, however, as to whether it is appropriate to utilize this standard when a mental incapacity is averred as the reason for delayed discovery of an injury. It is not for this court to decide whether a plaintiff who alleges repression or other mental disability had the ability to know of the injury and its cause. As the Seto court stated, “if there is to be any departure from the clear and certain pronouncement of prior case law and statute, it must be taken by our legislature or Supreme Court.”
Pearce, 449 Pa.Super. at 660, 674 A.2d at 1125. Here, we should take the opportunity to announce that where a plaintiff alleges a contemporaneous dissociation and repression of all memory of childhood sexual abuse, it is for the jury to decide whether to apply the discovery rule to toll the statute of limitations.

. This Court adopted the Frye test for evaluating scientific evidence in Topa. The United States Supreme Court has, however, recently rejected the Frye test in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579, 113 S.Ct. 2786, 125 L.Ed.2d 469 (1993), finding it superseded by the Federal Rules of Evidence. We declined to decide whether the Daubert test supersedes or modifies the Frye test in Pennsylvania in Commonwealth v. Crews, 536 Pa. 508 n. 2, 640 A.2d 395 n. 2 (1994), and I offer no opinion on the issue now.

. Rule 1035.2 provides:
After the relevant pleadings are closed, but within such time as not to unreasonably delay trial, any party may move for summary judgment in whole or in part as a matter of law
(1) whenever there is no genuine issue of any material fact as to a necessary element of the cause of action or defense which could be established by additional discovery or expert report, or
(2) if, after completion of discovery relevant to the motion, including the production of expert reports, an adverse party who will bear the burden of proof at trial has failed to produce evidence of facts essential to the cause of action or defense which in a jury trial would require the issues to be submitted to a jury.
Pa. R.C.P. 1035.2.

. In reviewing a grant of summary judgment, we must examine the record in the light most favorable to the non-moving party, and resolve any doubts as to the existence of a genuine issue of material fact against the moving party. Hayward.

. 397 Pa. 282, 154 A.2d 788 (1959). In Ayers, the plaintiff discovered, nine years after an ulcer operation, that his surgeon had left a surgical sponge in his abdomen. The plaintiff brought a cause of action for negligence against the doctor. The defendant moved for judgment on the pleadings, raising the statute of limitations as a bar to the action. This Court reversed the trial court's grant of judgment on the pleadings, reasoning that "[w]hen knowledge is impossible because of the laws of nature, or because of the actual fraud of the wrongdoer, the statute runs from the time of discovery.” Id. at 287, 154 A.2.d at 791-92 (citations omitted).