In 1985 Washington, DC plastic surgeon Dr. Elizabeth Morgan accused her ex-husband, dentist Dr. Eric Foretich, of sexually abusing their daughter Hilary, then two years old.
After a police investigation was unable to substantiate Morgan's claims, a judge ordered her to allow the child to visit her father without supervision.
[3][4][5] In 1989, Representative Frank Wolf of Virginia introduced the bill that became the District of Columbia Civil Contempt Imprisonment Limitation Act (H.R.
[5] After being detained for 25 months, Morgan was released from jail shortly after the act was passed into law in September 1989, and subsequently moved to New Zealand to join her parents and her daughter.
On December 16, 2003, the act was overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, who ruled that the law was so narrowly written that it targeted Foretich and treated him as a danger to his child without formal charges, illegally punishing him.