Tony Rosato is a prisoner of his own mind.
And his wife is concerned that the troubled Toronto comic, who has spent the past eight months in a Kingston psychiatric hospital but refuses treatment, is deteriorating.
Recently, the 53-year-old actor ripped up papers his psychiatrist handed him declaring him "incapable of making his own treatment decisions," says Leah Rosato, 31.
"The impression I'm getting is that he (Tony) is going downhill," she told the Star last week. She wants him to have a follow-up brain scan – one in 2005 showed an abnormality – and, if necessary, be forced to take medication and receive psychotherapy.
Three years ago tomorrow, the former SCTV and Saturday Night Live star was first incarcerated for his bizarre behaviour. On May 5, 2005, Rosato went to police in his wife's hometown of Kingston to report, once again, that his wife and baby daughter had gone missing, replaced by impostors. Police charged him with criminal harassment and threw him in jail for almost 800 days, until his trial last summer, which had been expedited by intense media scrutiny.
At his sentencing in early September, a judge handed Rosato a conditional discharge (with no conviction) and a probation order under the Criminal Code requiring Rosato to "reside" at Kingston's Providence Care Mental Health Services for a maximum of three years. He could leave if medical experts decided he was well.
But after eight months at the facility, Rosato still adamantly refuses any treatment. "It's actually enforced confinement," he said of his situation in January. "It's clearly a Catch-22." Rosato declined to speak to the Star again last week.
Rosato is widely seen as an egregious example of a mentally ill person who falls through the cracks.
"People like him (Rosato) don't belong in the criminal justice system," says Michael Bay, a mental health lawyer who teaches in the psychiatry department at Hamilton's McMaster University, and who founded Ontario's Consent and Capacity Board, an arm's-length tribunal that deals with matters under the Mental Health Act and the Health Care Consent Act. "They belong in the mental health system. It was a mistake for the police to charge him, a mistake for the superiors of that police officer to push that forward. It was a mistake for the Crown to continue with prosecution, and it was a mistake of the various judges not to throw this thing out.
"Over the last several years, the government has poured tens of millions of dollars into mental-health diversion. But it appears there are some people in authority who still haven't gotten the message."
Leah says that back in January, she "pressed" Dr. Michael Chan, her husband's psychiatrist, to explain why after all these months Tony wasn't getting help.
Chan told her, she recalls, that he required "evidence, actual first-hand evidence that Tony was not well enough to make his own treatment decisions."
So that month, Leah went to the courts, paid for transcripts of her husband's rambling testimony, and hand-delivered them to the psychiatrist. Last week Leah, who lives frugally with the couple's daughter, now 3, in subsidized housing, wondered why she had to pay $100 for transcripts she thinks he should already have had.
Valerie Hopper, a spokesperson for the Ministry of the Attorney General, sent an email to the Star last week stating that Leah, who had not submitted a bill to the Crown or the hospital, would be reimbursed. Hopper also said either Chan or the hospital could have requested the transcripts.
After Rosato's refusal to sign the papers, Chan told Leah that, as her husband's doctor, he would have to find a substitute decision-maker.
Leah says Chan warned her that she, as a complainant to police, was ineligible. But Bay says that in most cases a wife, even though a former complainant, would be eligible "unless considered by the Divorce Act to be separated."
Chan declines to speak about Rosato. "Unfortunately I can't tell you anything about him. That's because of the privacy laws."
Rosato has been diagnosed with Capgras syndrome, in which the sufferer imagines those close to him have been replaced by substitutes.
But the former comic, who got his start at Toronto's Second City comedy club, doesn't buy any of it. "I don't have an addiction," he told the Star three months ago. "I don't do drugs. I don't have any mental health issues either."
For that reason Rosato refuses treatment – or a transfer to Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, even though he wants to be in his hometown, says his lawyer, Daniel Brodsky. Brodsky says the Toronto institution's name is a stumbling block for his client.
Rosato's friends, improv artist Adrian Truss and actors Jeffrey Knight and Derek McGrath, drove to Kingston in February to try and persuade him to transfer to CAMH. But they got nowhere.
Another friend, New York film producer Sonny Grosso, describes Rosato's story as "the most confusing case I've ever encountered in my life." Grosso, who talks to Rosato regularly, hired him more than 20 years to star as police informant Whitey Morelli in the TV series Night Heat.
When Rosato's case nears resolution, Grosso, a former police officer whose work on a massive heroin bust was the basis for the film The French Connection, says he will be making a movie about this.
The title? "Justice Denied."
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