Teen-Age Girl Says She Lied to Mother to Get Out of Chores : Courts: Attorney for mother accused of child abuse tries to paint daughter as a difficult, stubborn child.

Under cross-examination Monday, the teen-age daughter of an affluent Westlake woman on trial for child abuse testified that she often lied to her mother to get out of doing homework and chores that she considered boring.

Defense attorney James M. Farley at one point asked the 16-year-old girl why she frequently lied to her mother.

“Why?” the teen-ager said. “Because it was a pain in the butt to do what she told me.”

The girl’s adoptive mother, 51-year-old Charlotte Russo, faces one count of felony child abuse for allegedly biting the girl and one misdemeanor count of child abuse for locking her in the family’s racquetball court.

The teen-ager has testified about being beaten and hosed down by her mother, and fed nothing but peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches for seven months.

Before a Ventura County Superior Court jury Monday, Farley tried to paint the girl’s testimony as unbelievable and her behavior as that of a Farley asked the teen-ager repeatedly why she didn’t keep up with her schoolwork when she knew that was the condition of moving back into the main house with her family. She replied that she found the homework boring.

“If things are boring, you don’t like to do them, do you?” he asked.

“Who does?” she said.

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Although attorneys for both sides agree that Russo incarcerated the girl inside the racquetball court bathroom and that she bit her daughter, they differ on the nature of these incidents.

Prosecutors contend that the mother’s treatment of the girl went beyond discipline into physical and emotional torture. But Farley has sought to portray Russo as a concerned parent who tried to help an unruly child.

During two hours of cross-examination Monday, Farley suggested that the arguments between the girl and her mother didn’t begin until the girl was in seventh grade and began to lie about her schoolwork.

But the teen-ager, who was adopted by Richard and Charlotte Russo when she was 1, said her problems with her mother began before that. The Russos have four biological children who are now adults, and two younger adopted children, including the 16-year-old.

“It was her attitude toward me,” she said haltingly. “She would always complain how I ate, how my hair looked. She would criticize me.”

In previous testimony, the girl has said she was forced to act like a maid for her family, doing chores at their nine-bedroom home from the time she got home from school about 2:30 p.m. until after 5 p.m.

Her mother, she said Monday, was hard to please.

“She just wanted everything perfect,” the girl said. “If you missed a spot on the carpet, she’d make you re-vacuum the whole carpet.” And if Russo thought that her daughter’s homework was messy, she would demand that she copy it over, the girl said.

“Did you think she was trying to help you do better?” Farley said.

“I don’t know her motives,” she said.

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Trying to poke holes in the girl’s accounts to county social workers, Farley questioned her about the dates and circumstances of certain incidents, including when her mother allegedly held the girl by her ankles over a banister inside the racquetball court.

The girl stuck to her account, saying her mother only pulled her back up to the second-story landing after the teen-ager admitted that she had lied about her homework.