"A Kind of Witch Hunt"

By Ellie McGrath

Sex and psychology in Oklahoma City

The ornate lobby of the Skirvin Plaza Hotel is jammed with ranchers wearing sweat-stained Stetsons, scuffed boots and $500 pinstripe suits. On the lawn of the nearby state capitol, black rocker arms pump oil from deep within the earth.

This is Oklahoma City (pop. 378,000), an amalgam of cowboys and oilmen, of good-ole-boy morality and Bible-thumping religion. Adultery and homosexuality are still on the statute books as illegal; so too is public drinking.

But for several years, Oklahoma City's residents have been both horrified and titillated by a scandal that involves money, politics, sex and revenge--and some of Oklahoma's most prominent citizens, politicians and psychologists. As one participant observed to a friend, "It's better than Soap or Dallas. Who could have ever thought this one up?" Who, indeed.

At the center of the storm is bushy-browed, Greek-born George Barkouras, 43, who arrived in the city in 1971 with $1,000 and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Kiel in West Germany.

He joined his cousin Psychiatrist Marcus Barker at the Oklahoma City Psychiatric Clinic. Six months of on-the-job training enabled Barkouras, a compelling personality, to attract patients from a colleague, Richard Sternlof. Sternlof resigned and opened his own clinic, the Timberridge Institute.

Within a few years, Barkouras, smartly turned out in well-cut European suits, was de facto head of the clinic and was earning $250,000 a year. His patients included members of Oklahoma City's most powerful and socially elite families. He and his German-born wife Marga lived in a $200,000 modern house, drove Cadillacs and maintained a summer retreat in Loutraki, a Greek resort city.

But Barkouras had ambitions to transform psychoanalytic theory. He developed a set of theories that castigate Freud's approach as too narrow to account for human behavior. The Barkouras doctrine integrates some Freudian concepts with ideas from philosophers like Plato and Heidegger. Two samples of Barkouras' insights: "Man is the eventfulness of life" and "Neurosis is attractive but health is irresistible." According to Barkouras, many mental patients are not ill, only confused. In 1976, at a convention of the Oklahoma State Psychological Association, some 1,000 professionals assembled to hear his theories, which were hailed by then Governor David Boren in a letter to the society. Said Boren: "For the first time, Oklahoma is making a significant contribution of worldwide importance in the realm of social sciences." Barkouras' opponents in the audience booed.

For a time, Barkouras continued to build his empire. He organized a foundation "dedicated to the enrichment of human life," which included a school for exceptional children, financed in part by contributions from rich patrons. At the school he set up a maze that was used in play therapy with children. He wrote books, gave lectures and enrolled Ph.D. candidates as students.

Then, some of Oklahoma City's mainstream psychologists counterattacked. Sternlof complained to the State Board of Examiners that Barkouras was practicing psychology without a license. Barkouras' successful defense: he was a lay analyst and needed no license.

What caused the Barkouras empire to begin unraveling was a series of messy divorces. First, a colleague, Robert Phillips, was divorced in 1977 by his wife Wilma, who charged that he had forced her to attend sessions with Barkouras in an effort to "destroy her personal identity." Next, Marga divorced Barkouras on grounds of incompatibility. Her lawyer, George Miskovsky, referred to Barkouras in court as "a big, strong stud lay analyst." Finally, in a quieter proceeding, Kay Delaporte, a patient of Barkouras' and a teacher at his school, sued her husband Chris, an administrator in the U.S. Interior Department, for divorce, charging that he was a homosexual. He complained that Barkouras was behind the action.

As a result, Barkouras claims, he acquired a powerful enemy. Chris Delaporte, who has been involved in Oklahoma politics for eight years, helped get his friend Larry Patton named U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Oklahoma in 1977. Another friend of Delaporte's is Boren, who was elected a U.S. Senator in 1978.

When a fire caused $185,000 damage to Sternlofs Timberridge Institute in 1979, Patton asked a grand jury to investigate. A juror told TIME: "They said Barkouras was the Jim Jones of the Oklahoma City jet set. I never really knew what they were trying to get him on. Our grand jury was on a kind of witch hunt."

The jury decided that no indictment of Barkouras, or anyone else, was warranted.

In an effort to stop the "witch hunt," Barkouras last February told the Rev. Gene Garrison, a Baptist minister and close friend of Boren's, that he was prepared to expose Delaporte and Boren as homosexuals. In Boren's case, it was an old charge--and one that he denied during his Senate campaign by publicly swearing, on a white-bound Bible, that he was heterosexual. Barkouras took no further action, but a few weeks later Jack Anthony, 28, an heir to an Oklahoma department-store fortune and a student of Barkouras', was arrested at 4 a.m. while changing a wiretap connected to Sternlofs home phone. Soon afterward, traveling in seven cars, 14 FBI agents went to Barkouras' foundation to seize records. At a preliminary hearing an assistant to Patton shouted, "Anthony is the pawn of Barkouras!" The jury found Anthony guilty of wiretapping. At the sentencing, Judge Lee West compared the feud between Barkouras and his critics to a street-gang rumble. The Justice Department and FBI are now investigating whether officials may have gone too far in their search for evidence against Barkouras.

Meanwhile, all lay analysts have been barred by the state legislature from practicing in Oklahoma. Observes Miskovsky, Marga Barkouras' attorney: "Football, politics, oil and sex are all considered sports in Oklahoma. Barkouras gave people something to talk about because he was playing in all of them. Except football." --By Ellie McGrath. Reported by Jonathan Beaty/Oklahoma City

With reporting by Jonathan Beaty

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