That he was, but I'm suspicious by nature. Something is not right here.
He did a much better job summarizing by email:
Who I am and why I'm interested in this:
I am a freelance journalist, with clips in Dissent, Global Post, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, etc, and with on-air credits for 60 Minutes. I was looking into doing a piece for the Yale Alumni Magazine about Alan Slifka, who recently passed away, and was a major donor to Yale (he was a Wall Street guy and worth hundreds of millions). While researching Slifka, I started finding this information about his wife, Riva, which made her seem more than a little fishy. I have a certain amount of interest in uncovering information that Riva Ritvo is a fraud - I'd like to try and run an article, possibly in New York Magazine or something like that - but I've never met her and have no personal vendetta.
My view at this point is that she diagnosed and treated autism and Asperger's patients without a license and posed as an expert on autism without possessing the degrees she claimed to have. That would be serious misconduct, but I would need to know a lot more about her clinic and about her before I could make any claims or write an article.
What I've found:
From the late '80s to 2004, Riva Ritvo claimed to be a practicing psychologist, specializing in autism and Asperger's, and claimed to have a a master's and Ph.D in neuroscience from USC.
Here is a resume she posted online, which features her guest speaker appearances and her participation in scientific papers during this period:
http://www.ringsurf.com/online/2554-autism.htmlIn 2004, someone outed her phony credentials, when she padded her resume in a wedding vow that ran in The New York Times.
Here is the Times' article with the correction included:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/15/style/weddings-celebrations-riva-ritvo-alan-slifka.htmlAfter she was outed for not possessing the degrees she had, Ritvo got a Master's and Ph.D from the California Graduate Institute, an unaccredited school in Westwood. However, she never got a license to practice psychology in California.
Here is the California verification page where she should appear if she were a licensed psychologist:
http://www2.dca.ca.gov/pls/wllpub/WLLQRYNA$LCEV2.ActionQuery
Riva Ritvo continues to advertise herself as a practicing psychologist, saying that she has been 'diagnosing and treating individuals with autism spectrum disorders for over twenty years,' which would mean that she was handling cases without any credentialing or licensure.
Here is a link to her website:
http://www.rivaariellaritvo.net/aboutus.htmlFrom the little I know of her personality, she seems to be uniquely unqualified to be a practicing therapist.
Here is the URL for her outburst on Wrong Planet in 2007:
http://www.wrongplanet.net/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=43232&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=45Again, she claims to have run a clinic for 'the past ten years.'
She is currently listed as a clinical instructor at the Yale Child Study Center, which may be not so coincidentally related to her husband's having given $3 million to the Child Study Center.
Here is information from Yale mentioning her husband's donation:
http://www.medicineatyale.org/v6i1_jan_feb_2010/index.htmlWhat I would like to know:
It's not clear to me if Riva Ritvo was lying about her practice altogether - if she wanted her Beverly Hills crowd and Yale to think that she was a practicing psychologist - or if (much worse) she really saw a decade or two decades' worth of patients without licensure or credentials. I've talked to L.A. clinicians who've heard of her practice (mostly they've heard of her ex-husband, who was a prominent researcher at UCLA) but none of them knew anything much about it.
I'd like to talk to anyone who has visited the Ritvo Clinic or had professional contact with Riva Ritvo, either in L.A. or at Yale, to try and get a sense of how actively she was practicing psychology.
Thank you for your help on this.
Best regards,
Sam Kahn
