Were the memories “recovered”?
Frederick Crews, whose latest book is the wonderful Freud: The Making of an Illusion, has a review-article on a new book about “recovered memory” and a criminal trial.
Until now the work has been almost entirely ignored by reviewers. Yet it comes with the strong endorsement of a world-renowned psychologist and memory expert, Elizabeth Loftus, and a leading expert on coercive interrogation methods and false confessions, Richard A. Leo. If they are right, Mark Pendergrast’s 391-page The Most Hated Man in America: Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgment can erase the shame of both Penn State and Sandusky, who languishes in solitary confinement, for 22 hours a day, in a maximum-security state prison.
Pendergrast is an independent scholar and science writer who has long been concerned with the psychology and disastrous consequences of falsely “recovered memory.” Like nearly all consumers of mainstream news, Pendergrast at first took the reports of Sandusky’s misdeeds at face value. But when, in 2013, he received a tip that there appeared to be a recovered memory aspect to the case, he was intrigued. After studying all pertinent documents, corresponding with Sandusky and twice visiting him, and interviewing family members, alumni of Sandusky’s Second Mile program, and other figures involved in the case, Pendergrast assembled an imposing argument against the consensus.
It’s unsettling. Could the Sandusky case be just another McMartin Preschool case?
Many factors contributed to the Sandusky debacle: a prurient misconstruction of well-meant deeds; excessive zeal by officials, police, social workers, and therapists; scandal mongering by the media that preempted the judicial process; the greed of abuse claimants and their lawyers; and a political vendetta against Penn State’s President Spanier by then Governor Tom Corbett. But the main ingredient in the witches’ brew, the one that rendered it most toxic, was something else: bogus psychological theory.
The indefinite and unsupported concepts of dissociation and repression, wielded without allowance for the distorting effects of suggestion and autosuggestion, lent forensic weight to nightmarish scenes that were “retrieved” in a climate of fright. Without that bad science, imparted first by therapy (Fisher) and then by social contagion (McQueary), there would have been no case at all against Sandusky. Attorney General Linda Kelly acknowledged as much in her triumphant press conference following the conviction. She praised the accusers for their courage and persistence in struggling toward a negation of their original statements to authorities. “It was incredibly difficult,” she proclaimed, “for some of them to unearth long-buried memories of the shocking abuse they suffered at the hands of this defendant.”
When you hear prosecutors talking about “long-buried memories” you should be suspicious. Long ignored or avoided memories are one thing, but buried ones are another.
What a travesty.
I can remember a radio interview, years ago after the ‘recovered memory’ mania and witch hunts finally subsided. It’s not easy to forget.
Two sisters, after ‘ recovered memory ‘ treatment by a ‘therapist’ decided that their father had sexually abused them, he was convicted and sentenced to a jail term. Some years later, after more ‘therapy’, they decided that their father wasn’t the abuser but they had been abused in a previous life.
Oy vey.
I forgot to mention that after the revelation, there was a significant period of silence on the radio, I presume that the interviewer was speechless.
Unfortunately, I cannot rule that out.
The case against Sandusky looked fair. But then more and more victims turned up. And that’s what makes me wonder.
Now that the question has been raised, I do hope there will be a proper investigation.
I find the part about the massaging of McQueary’s memory deeply unsettling. So many people – including lawyers – seem to be so naive about memory. Loftus’s research hasn’t been absorbed enough yet.
I do not know the truth in this case, but as the Sandusky ‘case’ mushroomed, I began to think of this one, just down road a piece from me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thurston_County_ritual_abuse_case. This one has a twist in that the accused was apparently induced to false memories (via Religion, wouldn’t you guess).
Yes. I read Remembering Satan back in the 90s with fascinated horror. It’s heartbreaking: the guy apparently really believed he’d done all that horrific (and wildly implausible) shit. Fred Crews on the “Memory Wars” – in the NYRB and later a book – underlined the whole thing. I didn’t connect them with the Sandusky case though, that I recall. I didn’t pay enough attention.
Rushes to judgment are bad and memories can be false. E.g. https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/internet/2016/12/movie-doesn-t-exist-and-redditors-who-think-it-does about shared memories of a movie that didn’t exist.
But. It’s also true that victims hate to report their own abuse and that it can take years to collect the courage. When one finally reports that helps others to come forward.
Just because accusations take years to surface and then can snowball doesn’t mean they’re false.
It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re true either. But if the social power was with the potential perp, I think it’s important to give the victims the benefit of the doubt. Don’t ignore evidence and do actively look for it, but be very careful of thinking the victims are misremembering. Given human attitudes to power, we’re so ready to give anyone who has it every benefit that assuming the victims are wrong is likely to be the easy answer.
I do not want ANY commiserations for this or thanks for ‘sharing’. At the age of 8, I was sweet-talked one evening into having a walk with a paedophile (I was a trusting child), and had then to endure his attentions in a wood on Barnes Common in south-west London. I have never forgotten the experience – I have never felt such utter loneliness in my life, before or since – and after 63 years remember every step of the way to the wood, every moment of what happened in the wood, and every step of my dash for home when I finally got away from him. I remember his appearance, the dark hair, the heavy spectacles, the raincoat, the limp. I also remember clearly the unwelcome attentions of certain masters at school. The English pianist James Rhodes, in comparison with whose terrible experiences the little I suffered pales into almost complete insignificance, has written about what he went through in an autobiography – an autobiography that he had to overturn a court order to publish. He certainly remembered what he went through. So I am extremely dubious where claims about ‘repressed memory’ are concerned.
Memory is always dicey. I had a catastrophic affair at 17-18, with long term repercussions and sorrow. Five years back, I learned that she had died, and was compelled to re-think my experience. It was NOT an easy process and the resulting knowledge is heavily tinted by the terms in which I’d thought about the experience for the 30+ intervening years. Even the basic sequence of events was murky and could only partially be reconstructed.
I haven’t read the Crews article yet. But the importance of reasonable doubt about memory shouldn’t be confused with attempts to obscure a real history of abusive actions. I’m sure at least SOME of the reports about Cosby or Weinstein have been distorted or inflated by investigators or dubious shrinks…but that doesn’t give either man a pass.
Well, Crews falls into the ‘why didn’t they report/leave?’ notion. I’m amazed he doesn’t grasp how easily the powerful can coerce the weak. The accommodation and enabling enjoyed by hundreds of pedophile priests should be more than adequate as an example.
I have had a horrible experience because of repressed memories. I never forgot my abuse, but I never talked about it – too ashamed, because I didn’t realize I wasn’t to blame, and I grew up in a fundy family. Years later, I finally got the guts to talk about it to my therapist (no hypnosis, no leading questions, no repressed memory, just up front talked to him), and eventually to my parents. My parents sided with my brother, and told him what I’d said. One day I was out on a field day with my PI, and she had the radio on to Dr. Laura (why? I don’t know; she didn’t believe much of what the woman said, but she listened to her) and I heard my brother calling in to her show. He was talking about me – and my younger sister – and the accusations of abuse and how they hurt him (gee whiz). Dr. Laura assured him that he was in the right, it hadn’t happened, because repressed memories are not real. (1) I did not claim, nor have, repressed memories. (2) My brother said nothing about repressed memories. (3) Dr. Laura jumped to an unjustified conclusion to give my brother the “benefit of the doubt”. (4) She gave my parents the out they needed to continue adoring their number one son as the saint they preferred to see him as.
I hope these turn out not to be another case of “repressed memories”. The crap surrounding repressed memories has made it easier for too many people to dismiss real abuse by pretending it was just a “repressed memory”, because someone chose to wait 20-30 years to talk about it because, well, it’s damn hard to talk about, and for some damn near impossible, and all the victim blaming drives so many of us into the dark shadows of self-recrimination and self-hatred.
Ugh, jeezus.
It’s a quandary. There are potential harms in both directions. Not recognizing a mistaken “repressed memory” is one source of harm; thinking a real (however long unreported) memory is a mistaken “repressed memory” is another source of harm.
Which is probably too obvious to be worth saying. I have nothing useful to offer, because it just is a very knotty problem.
I hadn’t realized the Sandusky case involved ‘repressed memories’, or I admit I would’ve been more skeptical right from the start. And in particular, the denial by the alleged victim of the shower incident is beyond disturbing.
That said, I note that Skeptic can’t seem to help from going from solid investigation/review to slut-shaming the mother of the initiating accuser:
Also, as a caption to a photo:
The photo in question shows nothing of the sort, beyond it being a selfie of a woman in a bar, who also acknowledges the existence of someone behind her with a jocular, “me at the saloon..who knows who that guy is..lol”.
This is then combined with some hearsay evidence from a neighbor who describes her boasting about her plans to scam the system to get money out of Pendusky (without even a hint of skepticism about the neighbor’s motives whatsoever) as ‘proof’ that she was of such poor moral character that she can be dismissed. The whole passage there just muddies the waters further when it needs clarity.
There’s some truth to the notion, though, isn’t there? Yes, we should reject the version where if someone doesn’t instantly report something they shouldn’t be believed later. And certainly people often feel trapped in a relationship and lie to keep the status quo when they feel the alternative might be even worse. But if they continue to willingly interact with someone, they seem at ease around them, and they flat-out deny anything has happened for years, then isn’t that something?
I found the article to be shocking. I assumed Sandusky was obviously guilty. I had no idea it was built on allegedly repressed memories, built over months. I had no idea the most damning eyewitness, someone who claimed to have seen a sex act, had initially just heard some sounds and become concerned about what they were. What a travesty.