The Good Doctor

Michael Brown made it big in the hand clinic business. But as his wife discovered, there was a much darker side to this dynamic surgeon.

Comments (0) By Tim Fleck Thursday, Jan 24 2002

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Once a week Brown gets supervised overnight stays with the girls at a safe house. Darlina says she's afraid to let the children play outdoors regularly because Sophie's mosquito bites once prompted Brown to accuse her of child abuse.

Darlina has been in therapy since last January, and says she only now is learning to cry about the experiences of the past few years. Previously, her lawyer Wendy Burgower says, the woman would describe the violence as if it was happening to someone else, and would laugh at odd moments.

Brown's TV ads show a devoted father with daughter Sophie.

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She's still a long way from living a normal life.

"I don't trust men. I don't want to be with a man," Darlina said in the civil case. "I don't want a boyfriend. These girls mean everything to me, and without them I would be lost."

Brown is now living with a 27-year-old woman and her three-year-old daughter in a new home in the Memorial area, and Darlina says she accepts the fact that he'll haunt her life until their children reach adulthood.

"If he's going to come get me, there's nothing I can do about it," she says in the same tone of resignation as her conversation on the doctor's homemade video. "If I kept thinking about it, I'd go crazy."

"Darlina is a consummate liar," stated the doctor before the last trial. "This marriage has been a fraud…And my little girls don't need to be in the custody of a woman who is capable of doing that. You don't know her like I do. She's a con artist, and she's probably conning you-all too."

"I'm stronger now than what I ever was with him," concludes Darlina. "I hope he gets help, but I don't think he's gonna get it. He hasn't taken responsibility for anything he has done yet."

With a criminal trial still uncertain, it remains to be seen whether any entity, even the Montgomery County district attorney's office, is capable of making the doctor face up to that task.