Newly released court documents detailing Casey Anthony's jailhouse conversations with two psychiatrists reveal Anthony's unusually calm demeanor as she spoke about her daughter's death and her accusation that she was molested by her father and brother.
In one deposition, psychiatrist Dr. Jeffery Danziger recounted his "puzzlement" with Anthony's "nice, sweet and pleasant demeanor" as she sat behind bars as the prime suspect in the death of her 2-year-old daughter Caylee Marie Anthony. Anthony, 25, was acquitted last summer.
"Her demeanor, the best way to say it, is she was calm, cooperative and pleasant as if we were discussing someone who had a parking ticket," Danziger said in an April 7, 2011 deposition.
He notes that she was in a good mood, reading books, sleeping fine and had a good appetite.
"No feeling of guilt, not hopeless," he said.
"This is someone who is sitting in jail. Her child is missing, presumed dead," Danziger said. "While she had not yet been charged with murder, obviously, she's charged with crimes and is being accused by the whole world in the disappearance of the child. You would expect that that would provoke some measure of distress."
Danziger was taken aback by her reactions and imagined himself in her position.
"If my child was missing and I was in jail and being accused of it, I probably wouldn't eat or wouldn't be cheerful and wouldn't be able to read," Danziger concluded.
The second psychiatrist who interviewed Anthony, Dr. William Weitz, also noticed her lack of emotion over Caylee disappearance.
He noted Anthony's "complete separation of emotion and affect from the various questions that she's asked to respond to."
"She seems detached from a lot of her feeling and emotion, even in times that one might expect they'd be more reactive and intense," Weitz said.
Weitz said that her reactions could be construed as defense mechanisms, possibly related to her accusations of years of sexual abuse from her father George Anthony and her brother Lee Anthony.
In her interviews with the doctors she detailed accusations of sex abuse that were mentioned during her murder trial.
She said her father molested her from age 8 to 11 which Danziger recorded as "disgusting, demeaning, intercourse, oral, everything."
Although the father stopped when she was 11 or 12, she claimed her brother Lee molested her from age 12 to 15. "Sometimes wake up to him or wake up bro over my head or unclasped. Wake up once his hands on my chest," the doctor read from his notes from the interview with Anthony.
She claimed that her father assaulted her again when she was 18. "Tried to fight back when I was older. I'm not a big person," the doctor quoted her as saying.
Referring to her calm during the jailhouse interviews, Weitz said in his deposition, "Clearly, Miss Anthony has adopted survivor behavior as she advanced into adulthood, and she exhibits extreme sensitivity in areas related to her family interactions, most specifically with father and brother."
Weitz said that Anthony's behavior could be the same in both the scenario that she killed Caylee and in the scenario that she did not harm her daughter.
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