Khalid Adem - The Trial

The Trial

Adem denied he had excised his daughter's clitoris or asked anyone else to do it. His defense lawyer conceded that the girl had in fact had her clitoris removed, but implied that Fortunate Adem's family—immigrants from South Africa--might have been responsible.

Adem's lawyer argued that Fortunate's accusations were the result of the acrimonious divorce and custody battle the couple went through in 2003, during which Fortunate received sole custody of the girl. The fact that the crime had occurred in 2001 and yet was not reported by Fortunate until 2003 was used to suggest the accusation was spurious and vindictive, as the wound would have caused the child great pain and would have required constant cleaning.

Fortunate claimed she did not discover her daughter's amateur clitoridectomy until an argument with her husband in 2003 about the practice of female genital cutting, during which, according to Fortunate, Khalid Adem implied it had already occurred to their daughter. The two were divorced several months afterwards, and Fortunate was awarded sole custody of the girl.

Khalid claimed the reverse, that it was Fortunate who had revealed to him that their daughter had had her clitoris removed, and that she was falsely accusing him to obtain leverage for the custody battle.

Lawyers for the defense raised the question of why Adem, an urban Ethiopian who grew to adulthood in the United States, would have felt compelled to perform the cutting, especially since none of his immediate family (i.e. his sisters) are circumcised. Moreover the operation in his native Ethiopia is virtually always performed by women. The defense also tried to cast doubt on the veracity of the testimony of Adem's daughter, who was two years old at the time of the incident, but was seven by the time she testified before the court. Defense attorney W. Mark Hill brought in psychologist Jack Farrar to raise the question of false memory. The fact of the clitoridectomy was not disputed by the defense. The prosecution's inability to identify the "second man" who allegedly helped Adem perform the operation was also used to imply the story was false.