GIVING HER ACCOUNT

Outraged By Her Father's Bestselling Memoir, Jessica Hendra Decided
To Write Her Own Book, Saying That He Left Out The Most Sordid Details

JESSICA HENDRA'S life today bears no resemblance to the
nothing-is-sacred bohemian chaos that marked her childhood, when
there were bong hits in the living room and piles of cocaine in the
fridge, when John Belushi was a family friend and weekends were for
skinny-dipping. Inside the tidy Rancho Park Spanish bungalow she
shares with her husband and two young daughters, just a few blocks
from the Westside Pavilion, there are no reminders of her troubled
past, or of her father, satirist and bestselling author Tony Hendra -
no framed covers of National Lampoon, the magazine that launched his
career, no photos of him in his glory days as the brilliant young
writer and hip New York scenester, chatting up Debbie Harry at Max's
Kansas City.

In this house, with its colorful tile, Persian rugs and damp towels
hanging in the bathroom, Hendra, once a New York theater actress who
won her own modest fame (to Trekkies anyway) as Dejar on TV's "Star
Trek: Deep Space Nine," is a full-time mom. She's married to
character actor Kurt Fuller, a regular in TV and film, whose most
recent turn was as a detective on "Desperate Housewives" this season.

But lately, Jessica Hendra has earned a certain media-bubble
notoriety for resurrecting her family's sad history with a book of
her own. In "How to Cook Your Daughter," published Oct. 4 by
ReganBooks, Hendra describes how her father - former editor of
National Lampoon, a costar of "This Is Spinal Tap" and former editor
of Spy magazine - forced her to perform oral sex on him when she was
6 and when she was around 10, forced her to masturbate him on two occasions.

Tony Hendra has denied that any of it is true, but Jessica Hendra is
undeterred. The book bears the title of a Lampoon article that her
father wrote in 1971, around the same time, she claims, the sexual abuse began.

Jessica's crusade started 13 months ago, after Tony Hendra earned
critical acclaim and a spot on bestseller lists for his 2004
confessional memoir, "Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul."
Outraged by a glowing review in the New York Times Book Review saying
that Tony "spares us no details of his own iniquities," Jessica
informed the New York Times that Tony had omitted his gravest sins
from the book: pedophilia and incest.

The paper put an investigative reporter on the case, who found
Jessica's story convincing. Next came a public editor's column
questioning the need to investigate, along with much published
hand-wringing, soul-searching and conflicted back-and-forth among
editors and reporters from the New York Times and elsewhere.

For Jessica, a few months later, writing the memoir was a chance to
present "the quote unquote evidence" of the abuse, and to give a
child's-eye view of the sexualized climate among her father's 1970s
satirical set. She'd kept dutiful journals, she said, that she used
to map her story.

A friend referred her to literary agent Sterling Lord, who paired her
with USA Today's Blake Morrison, and together they wrote the book in
four months.

Judith Regan bought it in February and now, Lord said, a film option is likely.

But, like many childhood sexual abuse accusations, it's a story that
may never have a real conclusion. For the Hendras, ready access to
the media has only kept the family's ordeal more alive, hurtling
forward in its own disturbing way.

For his part, Tony has called his daughter "pathological" and claimed
that her memories were recovered only recently in hypnosis, which
she, her mother, her friends and therapists deny. Tony declined,
through spokesman Gregory Miller, to comment for this article.

"You reap what you sow to a certain extent," Jessica said, perching
her slim frame on the edge of her sofa on a recent rainy afternoon.

She decided to speak out, she said, only after years of urging Tony
Hendra to acknowledge the abuse. "I gave him so many opportunities.
This confessional book he wrote was his final opportunity to do that.
And he didn't take it."

Father's bestseller

"FATHER JOE" was meant to be a kind of mea culpa for Tony Hendra's
oversexed, drug-and-alcohol-fueled lifestyle in the 1970s and '80s.
Rave reviews called the book, which details his lifelong relationship
with a Benedictine monk, "ruthlessly" and "brutally" honest. Radio
personality Don Imus insisted his audience buy it. The Catholic
political columnist and former editor of the New Republic Andrew
Sullivan, writing in the New York Times Book Review, ranked it "in
the first tier of spiritual memoirs ever written." It shot up bestseller lists.

Three years earlier, Tony had told Jessica he was writing "a
biography of sorts." At the time, Jessica said, she'd already been
through years of therapy addressing the abuse.

She'd even confronted her father about it, but each time, she said,
he brushed it off as her problem and "no big deal."

Finding her father's book so spare in its details of his life with
her, her older sister Katherine and her mother, Judith Hendra, added
insult to injury. He wrote that he'd committed "crimes" and admitted
that "no father could have been more selfish - treating his family
like props, possessions, inconveniences, mostly forgetting them
completely in his mission to save the world through laughter." But
this, Jessica concluded, was far too little, too late.

"When I read 'Father Joe,' " Jessica said, "I realized that even at
what should have been my father's best moment and most introspective
moment of his life, he still was not going to acknowledge the damage
he had done." She considered pressing criminal charges against her
father but learned the statute of limitations on sexual abuse had
expired the year after she first disclosed the incident to a friend
in the 1970s, she said. So, after consulting with her husband, her
therapist, her friends and family, she decided to go public.

Jessica detailed her allegations in an unsolicited op-ed piece that
she sent to the New York Times. Op-Ed editor David Shipley didn't
publish it but decided it was a serious enough issue to pass on to
news editors, who assigned reporter Sonny Kleinfeld to investigate the matter.

The Hendras' story broke in the New York Times on July 1, 2004. Tony,
Jessica's mother, several of Jessica's friends, two of her therapists
and husband were quoted, and e-mail exchanges between father and
daughter were cited in which Tony neither admits nor denies guilt.

Tony, his second wife, Carla, and an ex-boyfriend of Jessica's
refuted her accusations.

"I can only just categorically deny this," Tony told Kleinfeld. "It's
not a new allegation. It's simply not true, I'm afraid."

Ultimately, Kleinfeld sided with Jessica.

"I realized for her story to be false, she'd have to be lying, the
several far-flung friends would have to be conspiring with her to
lie, her mother would have to be lying and, in doing so, making
herself look fairly bad as a mother," Kleinfeld said in a recent
phone interview. "Two therapists, that as far as I can determine were
reputable, would have to have concluded incorrectly about what she
had told them and her husband would have to be lying as well."

The story set off a debate among New York Times writers and other
journalists. At first, Daniel Okrent, the newspaper's public editor
at the time, asked in a column, "What do readers of the Times (or of
"Father Joe") gain by believing Hendra guilty of abuse?

There's a difference between the right to know and the need to know
and in this case, the need escapes me."

In response to Okrent, the New York Times child welfare reporter Nina
Bernstein argued in the paper that "to define his daughter's
accusation as not fit to be printed, even though we believe it to be
true, is to reward the hubris that Tony Hendra has shown in publicly
trading on his private transgressions to claim moral growth, knowing
all along that his daughter was accusing him of a transgression more
damning than those he chose to trumpet."

Okrent then revisited the column on his blog, writing that in eight
months on the job he'd "never been more ambivalent" about a column
he'd written.

Then Sullivan weighed in, writing on his blog that "by erasing the
distinction between what is public and private, the media is slowly
making our democracy a place where no flawed human being can safely
and sanely operate." Bloggers and writers for other publications soon
took up the story as well. Tony stayed away from the media fray for months.

But when Jessica was interviewed by Diane Sawyer on "Good Morning
America" in late summer 2004, he first demanded his own interview,
then canceled and issued a written statement.

Then about six weeks ago, Tony served Jessica's mother and her friend
Krisztina Zugor with two separate libel suits filed in British courts
for publicly substantiating Jessica's claims in the New York Times.
He is demanding about $86,000 in damages, attorney fees and a court
order prohibiting both women from ever repeating their statements.

"It is very bizarre that [Tony Hendra] has not sued the New York
Times but has chosen someone who has contributed a few words to the
article," said Nick Armstrong, the London solicitor defending the women.

Tony Hendra's London attorney Louise Prince would not comment on the
case or the reasons her client has chosen not to sue the New York
Times. Tony has said nothing publicly of the suit. He hung up on a
New York Post reporter seeking comment last month, and his New York
agent Jonathan Lazear said his client had asked him not to speak on his behalf.

A daughter's account

"THERE wasn't an adult around me who cared that I was a kid - or who
had any idea that it mattered," Jessica Hendra writes in "How to Cook
Your Daughter."

As preteens, both Hendra girls posed as prostitutes for a 1977
Lampoon cover, in platform shoes and miniskirts. Jessica chose this
photo for her book's cover.

"I felt like I always got set up, and I didn't understand the context
of things," she said, growing animated as she explained what she was
trying to convey in her book. "The sexual abuse was just an extension
of that . I understand this was the time of satire and pushing the
envelope but there's something about taking on children that is
just so off-limits. They don't understand. They can't fight back."

After the New York Times piece ran, she said, several of Tony's
former friends contacted her with observations that in retrospect
seemed to substantiate her allegations. In "How to Cook Your
Daughter," she writes that one former Lampoon colleague, Ted Mann,
described an exchange he'd had with Tony in which he bragged of
having had sex with three women in one day. According to her book,
Mann asked, "Was any of these your wife?" and that Tony replied, "No,
but one of them was my daughter."

"The most shocking moment of my life was to hear that my father had
made a joke about it," Jessica said. "I think when he made that joke
I was 9 or 10."

The effect the sex abuse allegations, true or not, have had on Tony's
life is unclear. "Father Joe" dropped off bestseller lists shortly
after Jessica made public her claims.

Random House, which published "Father Joe," did not buy his next
book, a novel, due out next spring.

Yet even as his daughter promotes her book, portraying her father in
every interview as an unrepentant, incestuous child molester, the
reputation of Tony Hendra the writer has survived. Even though the
New York Times Book Review had also, in the wake of Jessica's
accusations, published a letter from "Spinal Tap" co-writer Michael
McKean saying that Tony Hendra over the years had exaggerated his
role in making the film, Tony appeared once again, in August, in the
section where his media ordeal began.

He was hired to review the biography of wine expert Robert M. Parker
Jr., because, said the section's editor, Sam Tanenhaus, Hendra had
previously written on the subject for the newspaper. "The question
[of Jessica Hendra's allegations] came up at the time, of course, and
there was a good deal of discussion about it," he said. But
ultimately, said Tanenhaus, "we just approached him as a skilled reviewer."