Shrink-rapt

Was Lori Deveny’s psychologist the victim of identity theft?

Ever since former Oregon attorney Lori Deveny’s state and federal sentencing hearings, I’ve had the nagging suspicion that she committed one final crime in her last days of freedom: the identity theft of her own psychologist, Dr. Constance Pederson.

I say this not only because Deveny is a convicted identity thief who forged prolifically, but also because Dr. Pederson’s musings about the disgraced attorney’s psyche are 100% bonkers — not at all like the carefully considered opinions of a mental health professional who’s been licensed for 30 years.

Dr. Pederson’s purported thoughts about Deveny are mostly sealed in the courts’ records, but a few quotes made their way into publicly available sentencing documents… and they sound an awful lot like the unsolicited opinions of some tipsy rando you just met at a bar:

Given that Dr. Pederson’s alleged opinions were used to form the basis of a second doctor’s report, and given that there is no evidence that the second doctor ever actually spoke to Dr. Pederson, it is entirely reasonable to question the legitimacy of it all, and ask:

Did Lori Deveny fabricate medical records and other material and launder it through a doctor’s psychological evaluation?

Now, you might think that this is flat out impossible… that it’s just too daring a move for a forger to submit forgeries as evidence in federal court. Or maybe you believe that it’s impossible because prosecutors would have verified the information.

But consider this: Dr. Pederson did not testify on behalf of her alleged patient, she wasn’t even at the hearing; and the second doctor — who did appear — was not asked any questions about Dr. Pederson’s input.

Additionally, since the psychological report was for sentencing purposes only, it was not subjected to any kind of evidentiary scrutiny by prosecutors… and those prosecutors were clearly distrustful of the report’s accuracy, so it’s not a big leap that it might also be flat-out fraudulent.

Even though Deveny is now in prison and will continue to be for at least the next decade, this issue remains important because of Dr. Pederson’s professional reputation, but also because Bob Deveny is no longer around to defend himself against his wife’s claims that he was an abuser.

And that’s where my suspicion that an identity was stolen gets even more acute:

Bob Deveny was a patient of Dr. Pederson for several years before his alleged suicide in 2018, which occurred the very day that his wife’s decades-long, Ponzi-style career of forgery and theft was likely to be exposed.

Then, after his death, Lori Deveny became a patient of Dr. Pederson.

With that knowledge, Dr. Pederson’s alleged quotes about her former patient Bob Deveny are a disturbing tangle of probable HIPAA violations, borderline ethics, and hearsay about a man who supposedly killed himself while under her care.

Those are all things that an experienced and reputable psychologist would know to avoid speaking of period, let alone so casually and colloquially.

It’s entirely reasonable to keep coming back to the conclusion that experienced forger, fraudster, and thief Lori Deveny stole one more identity on her way to prison, in a desperate effort to save herself from a lengthier stay there.

It didn’t work, and she had to have known that it wouldn’t… but that’d never stop someone like her from trying.