'Rockefeller' Was Unaware, Deluded: Defense Shrink

Others fed into his narcissistic personality disorder, she says

By A Ali, Newser Staff

Posted Jun 3, 2009 4:34 PM CDT

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'Rockefeller' Was Unaware, Deluded: Defense Shrink — Assistant District Attorney David Deakin uses a chart during cross examination of forensic psychologist Catherine Howe at the kidnapping trial of "Clark Rockefeller." (AP Photo)

Lawyers for accused kidnapper “Clark Rockefeller” began their insanity defense today with testimony from a psychologist who said he has a deluded sense of self-importance and fantasies of unlimited power, the Boston Globe reports. “If there is a continuum of narcissistic personality disorder, he is on the far end of the continuum,” she testified, saying the condition kept Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter from recognizing “the wrongfulness of his actions.”

The Bavarian con-man on trial for kidnapping his 7-year-old daughter clenched his jaw and appeared to be mumbling to himself as he listened to the doctor who had interviewed him for 16 hours said he had created his own grandiose reality. Under cross-examination, a prosecutor sought to undermine the psychologist’s diagnosis, instead painting Gerhartsreiter as a “hypothetical stone liar.”

(More Clark Rockefeller stories.)

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