Washington: Nine-term Republican state legislator Henry Rayhons, 78, has been charged with third-degree felony sexual abuse, accused of having sex with his wife in a nursing home on May 23, 2014, eight days after staff members there told him they believed she was mentally unable to agree to sex.
According to a New York Times report, there was no question that Donna Lou Rayhons had severe Alzheimer’s.
In the days before she was admitted to a nursing home in Garner, Iowa, last year, Donna, 78, could not even recall her daughters’ names. One day, she tried to wash her hands in the toilet of a restaurant bathroom, the report added.
There is no allegation that Donna resisted or showed signs of abuse. And it is widely agreed that the Rayhonses had a loving, affectionate relationship, having married in 2007 after each had been widowed.
“It really is a huge issue, and somewhere down the line we are going to have to confront it,” said Derek Beeston, a social work professor at Staffordshire University in England who has studied sex and dementia.
