Case of AIDS, secrets heads to Illinois supreme court

SPRINGFIELD -- Imagine the nightmare.

Your son has AIDS. He brings home his fiancée to meet the family and you think she's great. But soon your son's health is deteriorating and his fiancée asks what's wrong with him.

Do you have a responsibility to tell her? What if you lie?

These are among the many questions being put to the Illinois Supreme Court as the justices ponder what to do in a case with far-reaching legal and moral implications.

On the surface it boils down to whether a Cook County woman is entitled to collect a $2 million judgment she received against her fiancé's parents for allegedly misleading her about their son's health. He ultimately died and she too ended up with AIDS.

Had the parents been honest, the woman claims she would have sought testing, learned she was HIV positive, sought treatment and possibly stopped her infection before it progressed and irreversibly destroyed her immune system to the extent it has.

In response, the parents claim they too didn't know until their son's final days. Their attorneys question why an intelligent woman wouldn't simply get tested rather than base her health decisions on the parents' word.

And AIDS activists say had the parents spoken up, they would have violated a state law strictly protecting the confidentiality of those with AIDS and HIV and could have been sued by their son. In fact, the woman in this case is kept anonymous, referred to only as Jane Doe in court records because of this law.

"This would just throw that all out," said Ann Hilton Fisher, executive director of the AIDS Legal Council of Chicago, which filed legal documents backing the family in the appeals. "We've just basically said we no longer put a premium on confidentiality."

It's a showdown of nightmares. Parents confronted with the reality of outliving a child and quite possibly in denial about why. A single woman in her 40s finding love only to learn the man she hoped to marry kept a secret that would not only kill him, but potentially her as well.

Legal experts say it is the first case of its kind anywhere.

The family's attorneys say if the verdict and $2 million award stand, it will open a legal Pandora's box that could result in any perceived lie becoming the basis of a lawsuit.

During recent arguments before the state's high court, David Novoselsky, one of the family's attorneys, said if indeed the parents misled the woman it was wrong. But that's a moral issue for them to reconcile, not the Illinois Supreme Court.

"Is it a sin? Yes. We're now converting it into law," Novoselsky told the justices.

"If this is converted from a moral duty to a legal duty … we're now getting into theology," he said. "This court … should not enforce morality."

Supreme Court Chief Justice Bob Thomas questioned where it would stop if this verdict stands.

"Are we going to open up every human relationship to litigation?" asked Thomas.

But the attorney representing the infected woman rejected such arguments as legal red herrings that distract from the underlying issues. Alyssa Campbell said the law has long held people responsible for what they say, especially if their lies result in harm.

"Once you speak, you must be truthful," Campbell told the court.

According to court records, the two met via a personal ad in April 1996. He was 41. She was 44. She'd tested negative for HIV in 1991 as part of an insurance exam. He'd apparently known since at least 1992 he was HIV positive but didn't tell her.

After a few months of dating, the couple was talking of marriage and babies and first engaged in unprotected sex in late August 1996. At that point the fiancé was committing a crime. Illinois law requires those diagnosed with HIV to inform their partners of the risk of infection. There were never any charges because he died shortly after his fiancée learned of his status.

Also in August 1996, she first noticed her fiancé appearing unsteady on his feet. And within weeks she experienced flulike symptoms often associated with the onset of HIV infection. She did not go to a doctor.

Over the following months and years, her fiancé's health would dramatically worsen while the woman was repeatedly told by his parents, one of whom was a prominent food and drug attorney, that he was suffering from heavy metal poisoning and, later, Lyme disease. The parents handled their son's care.

Meanwhile, the woman's health also deteriorated. By the end of summer 1999, her hair had begun falling out, her gums were bleeding and sores appeared on her skin, all of which she attributed to the stress of caring for her ailing fiancé.

It wasn't until November 1999 that the woman, at a doctor visit with her fiancé, learned that the man she'd been with for more than three years was HIV positive. He died of AIDS later that month. She also tested positive.

Initially, the woman sued her dead fiancé's estate only to find he had nothing. She then sued his parents, acknowledging it was their son who infected her, most likely before she even met them, but claiming they knew he was HIV positive and had a duty to not mislead her.

The woman claims the parents are to blame for her infection remaining undetected and untreated and progressing to full-blown AIDS.

She claims she once said to her fiancé's mother that, "If I didn't know better I would say he looked almost like a man who has AIDS. Could he have AIDS?" The woman said the mother assured her he did not.

The mother denied that conversation ever occurred. She and other family members also denied a former son-in-law's claim that he heard the parents talking about their son having AIDS almost a year before the fiancée learned.

Ultimately a Cook County jury held the parents liable and awarded the woman $2 million. An appeals court overturned the verdict and award, saying it was never proven the parents knew their son's HIV status and it was unreasonable for the woman to base her health decisions on the word of her fiancé's parents, who weren't medical professionals, especially when she could easily have been tested.

"A prudent adult in a new relationship who is aware of STDs would be concerned under such circumstances about having been infected with HIV," the appeals court said in the ruling that set the stage for the current Illinois Supreme Court appeal.

Justices gave no indication of when, let alone how they would rule. There is no immediate deadline for their decision.