Psychosis, Birth Control Pills, and an ‘Oblivious’ Father

Cora Vides’s Attorneys Lay Out Insanity Defense in Attempted Murder Trial

Cora Vides | Credit: Luke Stimson

As the attempted murder trial of Cora Vides enters its third week, defense attorneys are introducing evidence and witness testimony they say proves Vides was fully separated from reality when she stabbed her friend in the neck as the two high school seniors had a heart-to-heart conversation about their lives and their futures.

Vides is charged with first degree attempted murder, with prosecutors alleging the unprovoked attack at her family home was “willful, premeditated, and deliberate.” She has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity and faces a maximum possible sentence of 11 years to life in prison.

Vides’s attorneys argue their client’s untreated mental illnesses, exacerbated by outside stressors, are to blame for her actions that night. “Generalized psychosis, dissociative disorder, anxiety disorder, gender dysphoria — those can be comorbid factors,” defense attorney Robert Sanger said of Vides’s multiple diagnoses. “In other words, they can act together.”

Sanger said a new birth control medication Vides was taking was also known to cause “significant side effects,” including depression. Vides’s older sister, Maya, testified that a month before the stabbing, Vides told her she was cutting herself. Maya responded that she’d also struggled with self-harm and suggested Vides try the same oral contraception she’d been prescribed, which helped balance her hormones. Vides did so, but complained to friends the pills made her feel even more “off.”

Vides’s parents, meanwhile, were ignorant of the depth of their daughter’s distress, Sanger said. “Her parents are loving people,” he said. “They love their daughter. But sometimes people don’t really see or want to see what’s happening in their own home with their own child. It’s very difficult.”

Vides’s mother was managing her own “severe depression,” Sanger went on, and her father was often “oblivious” to the family’s troubles. “He didn’t deal with it,” Sanger said. Joshua Vides — a now-retired Microsoft executive, who gave Vides the switchblade knife she used in the stabbing and later posted her $1 million bail — would also not accept his daughter’s recent disclosure that she was nonbinary. “He does not seem to understand or accept her sexual identity, or virtually anything else,” Sanger said.

Cora Vides’s defense attorney Robert Sanger | Credit: Luke Stimson

Before the criminal trial began, the family of the victim successfully sued the Vides family for negligence and received what was described in court documents as “significant” compensation. The victim, Georgia Avery, underwent a full reconstruction of her larynx following the stabbing and still grapples with the lingering effects of PTSD.

Prosecutors have noted on more than one occasion that Vides’s attack on Avery, during which she also stabbed Avery in the back and leg and tried to smother her, took place on Valentine’s Day. Vides had come out to Avery as bisexual that same night, and a few days earlier had given her a drawing of an angel playing a violin, which Avery also plays.

Testimony this week from one of Vides’s friends, Amy Anderson, revealed Vides had previously come out to Anderson as bisexual, with Vides also expressing romantic interest in her. Anderson, however, rebuffed Vides’s advances, after which she began to distance herself from Vides.

Though Vides was lucid before and after the stabbing, Sanger maintains she was not in control when she attacked her friend and had no “specific intent” to kill her. He emphasized how Vides had an “empty stare” as she struggled with Avery and seemed to “snap out of it” when Avery begged her to stop.

“This was not a rational act at all,” Sanger said. “People who commit attempted murders, let alone premeditated and deliberate, have a purpose and they have a plan. This occurred in the 2,200-square-foot Vides house in Ms. Vides’s room. There was no plan for an escape or a plan for anything.”

Sanger also pointed to Vides’s statements to police as evidence that mental illness, not Vides herself, was driving her actions at that moment. “I didn’t want it to happen,” Vides told detectives in an audio recording played for jurors. “It was just happening.”

Testimony from multiple psychiatrists will begin this Thursday. The trial is expected to continue through July.