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A once-celebrated Harlem doctor who claims that an alternate personality — one of at least a dozen that inhabit her body — got her busted for peddling phony prescriptions says the two of them have since come to terms over their looming trip to the slammer.
Dr. Diana Williamson told The Post that “Nala” — a preteen alter ego purportedly manifested by years of childhood sex abuse — is “deeply remorseful” and that “we don’t have any bad feelings toward each other.”
“Nala is part of me, and I obviously feel bad about what happened, but I don’t have any hard feelings toward Nala,” Williamson said.
“She was naive in her thoughts, and she didn’t understand what was going on fully. She thought she was doing favors for people. She didn’t realize it was a crime.”
Williamson also disclosed her troubled mind is home to even more than the 12 “alters” identified by a government expert who confirmed her controversial diagnosis of “dissociative identity disorder.”
But she refused to let any of them emerge during an hour-long interview in the Murray Hill office of her longtime shrink, saying, “It’s like protecting your children.”
“I would assume that they’re as scared as I am,” Williamson said after a reporter asked to meet Nala or any other personalities. “I just want to protect them.”
Williamson — who was lauded by Crain’s New York in 1998 for her work with minority AIDS patients — recently revealed her mental illness as part of a bid to avoid prison for her role in a drug ring.
The feds say Williamson, 56, deserves up to 14 years behind bars for scheming to defraud Medicaid out of more than $300,000 by writing bogus OxyContin and Percocet prescriptions for about 30 patients at a Harlem clinic.
The impoverished “straw buyers” then sold the 27,000-plus pain pills to a ring led by convicted drug dealer Lenny Hernandez, which peddled them on the street for up to $33 each.
Williamson pleaded guilty instead of mounting an insanity defense, which her lawyer, Jonathan Marks, said would probably have been too hard for a jury to accept.
But she’s seeking a “noncustodial sentence” on grounds that the federal prison system can’t handle her myriad medical conditions, which include severe asthma and anaphylaxis that have required six hospitalizations this year alone.
Williamson said she has no memory of writing the phony prescriptions and blames Hernandez and a former longtime patient who “duped” Nala into the scheme — even though they thought they were talking to Williamson.
She said Nala “had just no concept of what was going on with the pills.” She just knew that by writing these prescriptions these patients got some financial reward. What Nala did was really a misguided effort to help people that had no social means to support themselves, and that’s why I can’t be too angry,” she said.
“When money began to come back was when we realized that Diana was in over her head, that Nala was in over her head, and that there was something going on that wasn’t quite right.”
At that point, Williamson said, Nala began “giving away the money in order to, I guess, continue to help the patients, so we paid for tuition and for funerals and for rents for people, and a whole host of things.”
Williamson said she was in the process of quitting the Citicare clinic when the feds charged her and eight others in August 2010, capping an undercover sting that Williamson says came after a patient got busted and ratted her out.
At a court hearing last week, Manhattan federal Chief Judge Loretta Preska was openly skeptical of Williamson’s claim of multiple personalities, noting that it hadn’t kept her from success in her chosen career.
Williamson countered that she had wanted to become a doctor and help people since age 13, and that “the parts cooperated with that goal,” although it took her six years, instead of four, to earn her medical degree.
Columbia-trained psychiatrist Dr. Paula Eagle, who began treating Williamson for depression in 1991, diagnosed her with dissociative identity disorder the following year after repeated reports of amnesia and “lost time.”
Eagle said she feared that if Williamson gets any prison time, she won’t even be able to serve the “death sentence.”
“Her medical conditions respond to her state of stress, and I think she’d probably die before she got to jail, honestly,” Eagle said.