TROY -- Speigletown therapist Daniel John Cole is accused of beating, raping and stalking one of his past patients.

A past patient of Cole's, who was featured in two stories in The Record and goes by the name of Sarah Miller, filed a $900,000 civil lawsuit against him in Rensselaer County Court on Sept. 21.

Miller, who's real name is being withheld by The Record, says she turned to Cole for professional help last year at a low point in her life: She was addicted to several different drugs and was ending an abusive marriage.

Instead of offering her professional help, she alleges, Cole initiated an intimate relationship with her and victimized her. She said that Cole kept her in a rodent-infested basement inside his Speigletown home for three months.

During that time, she alleges, Cole repeatedly abused her and raped her. Following her escape from the Speigletown home, she says, he stalked her, forcing her to relocate through the state's Crime Victim's Bureau (sic).

"I don't want to give the false impression that I was imprisoned there for months, but there was a period of time where, yeah, I could not leave," Mille(T n the other hand, if I stand up and say these things and don't use his name -- and he is victimizing another two or three women -- and he is approaching them and putting himself out there and beating them -- and another woman turns up in the ER, I am not going to forgive myself."

"I hope he doesn't hurt anymore women before he is stopped," Miller added.

Because she was with Cole of her own consent, criminal charges cannot be enforced. Also for that reason, a he-said, she-said situation has arisen with regard to the lawsuit.

Miller's lawyer, Lee Greenstein, explained that the case is civilly actionable because his client is alleging two things: that Cole manipulated the transference phenomenon within the therapeutic relationship and that he exercised negligent treatment and malpractice.

What it comes down to, he said, is whether or not a dual relationship, that of a patient and social worker as well as that of a man and a woman who are sexual with one another, existed.

"He had a professional responsibility to keep appropriate boundaries between himself and my client, who was effectively his patient," Greenstein said. "She trusted him. She trusted his professionalism and he acted out his own sexual desires rather than being concerned about his patient.

Cole will have 20 days to respond to the $900,000 lawsuit once he is served. Greenstein said Friday that he had not y et heard that Cole had been served. Once the 20 days is up, a default judgment on the case will be made if Cole fails to respond.

"She has been through emotional and physical trauma and is still dealing with the consequences," Greenstein said. "The amount of money you put in the complaint is generally an amount more than you expect. We haven't necessarily determined what we feel the case is valued at."

Criminal charges filed by the woman after her escape were dismissed by State Police in Brunswick because there was a lack of proof.

Sr. Inv. Tom Aiken worked on the woman's case at the time and has said he believes what she is alleging is true.

"There was nothing we could charge him with based on the facts of the case," Aiken explained. "As bad as it was, she readily admitted that she never said no. As much as you know and I know that it was abuse, there was nothing we could charge him with because of how the facts laid."

Aiken said that he and another officer who worked on the case believed her story.

"We saw her as a credible person and we believed everything she was telling us," Aiken said, explaining that there are interviewing techniques that investigators are trained to use to determine whether or not someone is telling the truth.

The State Police then directed the woman to file a complaint with the State Department of Education, which she says she did at the beginning of this year. She was told, however, that the investigation could take as long as five years.

Cole was licensed as a social worker with the State Education Department in 1994 and is currently registered until September of 2002. His license is clean and no disciplinary action has been taken against him since 1994.

If the complaint filed against him is still under investigation, it would not appear on his record until the board's investigation is complete.

In April of this year, another one of Greenstein's clients, Cindy McKay, won a civil case against Joseph Ciani in Schenectady County that Greenstein says sets a precedent for this case. He added that the circumstances of the two cases parallel one another.

Ciani was McKay's social worker and their relationship evolved into a psychotherapeutic treatment, according to the $1.27 million verdict in McKay's favor.

Upon completion of its investigation, the Board of Education could revoke Cole's license, Greenstein explained. The civil lawsuit does not have the power to do that. Cole, who has an unlisted telephone number, could not be reached for comment.

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