Events Timeline

Cautionary instructions about the testimony of sexual abuse and rape victims arose from the statements of Matthew Hale in the 17th century, warning the jury to view the testimony of of sexual assault victims with exceptional suspicion. Such instructions often stated that accusations of sexual assault are “easily made, and, once made, difficult to defend against.” They served serve to silence the voices of women and sexual abuse victims in the court of law; according to Michelle Anderson (2004), “The cautionary instructions both derive from and exacerbate this expansive societal prejudice against rape victims.” This instruction was slowly abolished across United States; by 1980, 13 states had prohibited cautionary jury instructions on sexual assault. By 1990, 7 more states had joined them. At the present day, only 8 states issue cautionary jury instructions in cases of sexual assault.

Previously, courts required cases of childhood sexual abuse to produced corroborative evidence to be successfully prosecuted; such as medical records, eyewitness testimony, or other physical evidence that supported the child’s testimony. This requirement was slowly abolished across the United States in the name of respecting the integrity of a single victim's account. According to Tyler Buller (2017), 35 states had eliminated the corroboration requirement by 1974, with seven more states joining them by 1986. Nearly all states had abolished the corroboration requirement by the year 2000. In the present day, only 3 states maintain a limited corroboration requirement in certain circumstances.

Michelle Remembers was a 1980 book co-written by Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and his patient (and eventual wife) Michelle Smith. The book presents claims that Smith had been ritually abused as child in the 1950s, with detailed narratives describing physical, emotional, and sexual satanic ritual abuse. In their 1995 book, Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt, Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker refer to Michelle Remembers to back-up their claims that the emerging national attention towards child sexual abuse was a “witch-hunt” resulting from social hysteria. Nathan and Snedeker write that Michelle Remembers is one of the earliest examples of “False Memory Syndrome”, and claim that the popularity of the book influenced the national culture and the attitudes of prosecutors, therapists, and child protection workers, resulting in the development of a “recovered-memory industry” by the 1990s.

VOCAL is an organization in defense of people who believe they have been falsely accused of childhood abuse. It sought to alter the reporting and interviewing process for children involved in cases of sexual abuse. Ralph Underwager was a notable member of VOCAL, and played a key role in the establishment of the FMSF. VOCALS’ claims of nationwide hysteria, false accusations, and wrongful convictions established the rhetoric and purpose later adopted by the FMSF.

The Courage to Heal, a self-help book for survivors of sexual abuse, was a particularly significant scapegoat that false memory advocates blamed for creating ‘false memories’ of abuse. Claims that reading The Courage to Heal caused contaminated or false memories of abuse were found in the media, FMSF conferences, and legal cases as an argument for the defense. In one such example, Ralph Underwager asserted in the May 1992 edition of the FMSF newsletter that The Courage to Heal "encourages revenge, anger, fantasies of murder or castration, lawsuits and deathbed confrontations." Lynn Crook notes in her book False Memories: The Deception That Silenced Millions that in “the first three years of the Foundation’s newsletters included nearly 100 negative comments regarding Courage. The parents focused on one sentence: “If you think you were abused and your life shows the symptoms, then you were” (p. 22). To date, no study has found that reading that sentence or any other sentence in Courage has convinced someone that he or she was molested.”

Before 1989, victims of childhood sexual abuse who realized as adults that they were abused as a child were held to the same statue of limitations as all sexual abuse victims – a period of time in which one could bring charges for a crime, usually around 3-10 years for sexual abuse. Due to these restrictions, many victims could not sue their perpetrators. In 1989, Washington State passed the first law that allowed people to sue based on childhood sexual abuse within three years of remembering forgotten abuse, or realizing as an adult that always-remembered childhood incidents constituted abuse. 18 other states passed similar laws by 1992. States continued to raise the statute of limitations as the years passed. During the 1994 Senate Judiciary Committee on raising the statute of limitations in Pennsylvania, Pamela Freyd, the founder of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, was the only person who testified in opposition, concerned about “tarnished reputations.”

Most recognizable as the “Eileen Franklin Case”, the 1990 murder conviction of George Franklin was significant for its high-media profile and for being where Elizabeth Loftus got her start as an expert witness. After the spontaneous recovery of a memory of her witnessing her father killing her childhood friend 20 years earlier, Eileen Franklin reported her account to the police. Her father, George Franklin was arrested and charged based upon her account, and was eventually convicted and sentenced to life in prison. At the trial, Elizabeth Loftus testified for the defense about her research concerning the unreliability of recovered memory, the start of a long career as an expert witness for the defense. Loftus also provided commentary on the case in the media, and used it as evidence to impeach the idea of recovered memory as a whole in her 1994 book The Myth of Repressed Memory. Ultimately, the conviction was overturned in 1995 due to errors in the trial’s procedure.

Description: Anna Salter received a small grant from the New England Association of Child Welfare Commissioners and Directors to study claims that the standard procedures of interviewing children were suggestive and lead to false accusations. Upon receiving this grant, she used Ralph Underwager and his partner Hollida Wakefield as a case study – both were leading ‘experts’ on the subject of child interviews, claiming that standard interviewing was suggestive and that a majority of child accusations of abuse were false. Salter published a detailed review of their research, criticizing the “extraordinary number of distortions and errors” in their work. This was one of the first significant pieces of literature challenging Underwager's work and those who sought to dismiss claims of childhood abuse. Salter received significant harassment from Underwager.

Pamela Freyd wrote and published an anonymous article in Ralph Underwager’s self published journal Issues in Child Abuse Accusations titled “How Could This Happen? Coping with A False Accusation of Incest and Rape” about her daughter, Jennifer Freyd. It included sensitive details about Jennifer Freyd’s accusations of abuse, casting her in a negative light. Pamela Freyd circulated this article to Jennifer Freyd’s colleagues while she was being evaluated for a promotion to full professor, making it clear with a signed letter that she was the author. Later identifying herself publicly as the author, Pamela Freyd founded the FMSF with other parents drawn towards the article and referred to her by Underwager.

Eleanor Goldstein wrote two of the first popular books on ‘False Memory Syndrome,’ including Confabulations: Creating False Memories, Destroying Families, which contained Pamela Freyd’s anonymous narrative of accusations of abuse in her family. Both books were published by Goldstein’s company, SIRS. Goldstein’s books helped to further the ‘False Memory’ narrative, and were often listed in the FMSF newsletter for sale as a reputable source of information on ‘false memories’ (it was a collection of anonymous, unverifiable stories). The FMSF’s newsletter instructed members to “Visit your library or bookstore. If Confabulations is not available, ask to have it purchased.” Read more on ‘The FMSF’s Influence on Public Media’ page.

Herald v. Hood was a 1992 civil case in which Julie Herald sued her uncle, Dennis Hood, alleging sexual abuse beginning in 1962 from age 3 through 15. The memory returned while Herald was watching her 4-year-old daughter play with a friend. As a part of the case, Herald presented a taped telephone conversation in which her uncle indicated that she “had been the only one.” Two therapists also testified that at a meeting with Herald in their offices, he admitted sexually abusing her. She was awarded $150,000 in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages (Fields). The Ohio Supreme Court dismissed the appeal, finding that it had been “improvidently allowed”. This case is significant for its convincing corroborative evidence, and for its role in informing Ohio’s statute of limitations rules for civil tort cases based upon delayed discovery of childhood abuse.

Citations:

1. Fields, R. (1992, July 25). Witness Says She Felt Confusion and Guilt; Memory of Sex Abuse Comes Back by Observing Daughter, Court is Told. Akron Beacon Journal. 2. Herald v. Hood, 639 N.E.2d 109 (Ohio 1994)

The False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF) was established by Pamela Freyd, after her husband Peter Freyd, was accused of sexual abuse by their oldest daughter. Ralph Underwager, his wife Hollida Wakefield, Dr. Harold Lief (Pamela Freyd’s therapist), and “a group of about ten families” disputing similar accusations from their children joined the Freyds in establishing the FMSF. In February 1992, Pamela Freyd published the FMSF’s first newsletter. A 1-800 number was established for the foundation in March 1992. A few months later, in May 1992, the FMSF opened an office in Philadelphia. Read more on the page What was the FMSF?

In February 1993 the APA Council of Representatives voted to “establish a working group to review current scientific literature and identify future research and training needs regarding the evaluation of memories of childhood abuse.” This working group included six members, Judith Alpert, Laura Brown, Stephen Ceci, Christine Courtois, Elizabeth Loftus, and Peter Ornstein. The working group’s final report acknowledged a number of points of agreement: “(1) Controversies regarding adult recollections should not be allowed to obscure the fact that child sexual abuse is a complex and pervasive problem in America that has historically gone unacknowledged; (2) Most people who were sexually abused as children remember all or part of what happened to them; (3) It is possible for memories of abuse that have been forgotten for a long time to be remembered; (4) It is also possible to construct convincing pseudomemories for events that never occurred; (5) There are gaps in our knowledge about the processes that lead to accurate and inaccurate recollections of childhood abuse.” However, the two factions that arose from the clinical (Alpert, Brown, and Courtois) and research (Ceci, Loftus, and Ornstein) subgroups had strongly differing conceptions of memory leading to disagreement on the nature and mechanisms of “delayed remembering”, the nature of traumatic memory and if it differed from memories of nontraumatic events, and the nature, frequency, and distinctions of “pseudomemories”. The report, structured as a dialogue between these two dissenting groups, included landmark commentary on the clinical and scientific research on traumatic memories, and on the social, legal, and political ramifications of their findings.

The psychological community recognized early on that the phrase “False Memory Syndrome” was unscientific and unhelpful. In a letter to the editor in the APS Observer, 17 prominent psychologists described FMS as “a non-psychological term originated by a private foundation whose stated purpose is to support accused parents,” urging scientists and other scholars to spurn the phrase “false memory syndrome” for “the sake of intellectual honesty.”

'Memory and Reality: Emerging Crisis’ held in Valley Forge Pennsylvania was the FMSF’s first official conference. Over 600 people attended the conference, which included 28 speakers and a panel discussion. Of the 28 speakers, only one speaker supported the phenomenon of recovered memories, while all others supported the FMS position. Pamela Freyd wrote in the May 3rd edition of the FMSF newsletter that “this conference dispelled the pseudoscientific notions that have fueled the [FMS] phenomenon,” placing “repressed memories” in scare quotes.

In his two part series “Remembering Satan” for the New Yorker, journalist Lawrence Wright wrote about the criminal sex-abuse case against Paul Ingram, of Olympia, Washington. After Ingram was accused by his adult daughters of abusing them as children, the case developed into an investigation of cult satanic ritual abuse. Though Ingram was convicted on charges of rape, Wright makes a case for his innocence in his article, which captured the national mind and was eventually expanded and turned into a book. Wright has since been challenged, however, by Karen Olio and WIlliam Cornell, who called his interpretation of the events of the case into serious question in their peer reviewed article “The Facade of Scientific Documentation: A Case Study of Richard Ofshe's Analysis of the Paul Ingram Case”. Most historically significant, though, is Wright’s exaggerated and unsubstantiated claim that what he claimed happened to the Ingram family was “actually happening to thousands of other people around the country who have been accused on the basis of recovered-memory testimony. Perhaps some of the memories are real; certainly many are false”. This inflammatory claim captured the American mind; and yet Wright had no evidence nor had he done any investigation to back up this damning assertion.

Moving Forward, a newsjournal by and for survivors of childhood sexual abuse and other caring parties, broke news of an interview done by Ralph Underwager and Hollida Wakefield with the Dutch publication Paidika, The Journal of Paedophilia. An excerpt from this interview was reprinted in Moving Forward alongside an accompanying article describing FMSF reaction to being given notice of the matter. In their interview, Underwager and Wakefield seem to diminish, make excuses for, and even valorize paedophilia. In response to the question "Is choosing paedophilia for you a responsible choice for the individual?" Underwager responded, “Certainly it is responsible. What I have been struck by as I have come to know more about and understand people who choose paedophilia is that they let themselves be too much defined by other people. That is usually an essentially negative definition. Paedophiles spend a lot of time and energy defending their choice. I don't think that a paedophile needs to do that. Paedophiles can boldly and courageously affirm what they choose. They can say that what they want is to find the best way to love. I am also a theologian and as a theologian, I believe it is God's will that there be closeness and intimacy, unity of the flesh, between people. A paedophile can say: "This closeness is possible for me within the choices that I've made." Ultimately, due to the backlash in response to their statements in this interview, Underwager had to step down from the FMSF board. This also impacted his career as an expert witness for the defense in abuse cases. Hollida was allowed to remain on the board, and continued her career as an expert witness for decades after.

Eleanor Goldstein wrote two of the first popular books on ‘False Memory Syndrome,’ the second of which was ‘True Stories of False Memories.’ Both books were published by Goldstein’s company, SIRS. Goldstein’s books helped to further the ‘False Memory’ narrative, and were often listed in the FMSF newsletter for sale as a reputable source of information on ‘false memories. Once again, this book was a collection of anonymous, unverifiable stories – neither book is scientific. Read more on ‘The FMSF’s Influence on Public Media’ page.https://www.recoveredmemory.org/copy-of-what-was-the-fmsf

This conference presentation was the first time Jennifer Freyd spoke publicly about her accusations of abuse that spurred her parents to establish the FMSF. While it caused relatively little stir at the time, it was covered by several media publications over the following years. See Stephen Fried’s Coverage: 'War of Remembrance'. See Katy Butler’s coverage: ‘Marshaling the Media’. See Michele Landsberg’s coverage: ‘Incest: Stop the nonsense and get to the difficult truth.’

Michele Landsberg was one of the first journalists to challenge the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, in a time where most media sources favored the ‘False Memory’ narrative. ‘False Memory Label Invented by Lobby Group,’ was one of the first articles that exposed the False Memory Syndrome Foundation as unscientific. It covered the accusations of abuse behind the foundation’s establishment and its unscientific, “simple-minded propaganda.” Landsberg received considerable harassment from the FMSF after publishing this article.

Ellen Bass and Laura Davis were subject to multiple civil suits alleging that their book The Courage to Heal induced false memories of childhood sexual abuse in the plaintiffs. These suits, seemingly inspired by similar suits directed towards therapists for breaching their duty of care by practicing “recovered-memory therapy”, sought to hold Bass and Davis accountable for negligent misrepresentation for the content in The Courage to Heal. These suits claimed that Bass and Davis breached a duty of care towards their readers by encouraging readers to engage in “recovered-memory therapy” like practices, and therefore were responsible for inducing false memories of abuse in their readers. These suits were eventually dismissed, in part because applicable case law found that authors, like Bass and Davis, had no “duty of care” to the world of large.

In two groundbreaking studies, Linda Meyer Williams interviewed 129 women with medically documented histories of sexual abuse. Williams found that 38% of women were unable to remember the abuse 17 years later. Of the 80 women who recalled their abuse, one in 10 (16%) reported periods where they forgot the abuse. “These findings are important because they are based on a prospective study of all reported cases of child sexual abuse in a community sample. Because the abuse was documented in hospital records this is the first study to provide evidence that some adults who claim to have recovered memories of child sexual abuse recall actual events which occurred in childhood.” In a response to the first article, Elizabeth Loftus conceded that “Extreme claims such as "if you were raped, you'd remember" are disproven by these findings.”

One of the first early articles describing the FMSF, ‘War of Remembrance’ identified the ‘False Memory’ narrative and the FMSF as having stemmed from a private accusation of abuse. It dove deep into the family dynamics between Pamela Freyd, Peter Freyd, and their daughters. Everything from Peter’s alcoholism to Pamela’s therapist and their daughter’s descriptions of incest was described in-detail. This is the only journal that was granted an interview with Jennifer Freyd after her speech in Ann Arbor.

After being confronted by his daughter with accusations of childhood incest, Gary Ramona claimed his daughter’s memories were implanted and sued her therapist for damages. The Ramona lawsuit was the first of its kind, imposing liability to third-parties upon therapists. In an analysis of the Ramona case and California courts’ history expanding third-party tort liability titled “A Dangerous Direction: Legal Intervention in Sexual Abuse Survivor Therapy,” Bowman and Mertz found that the Ramona case was “atypical” and an “aberration even within California law.” The authors concluded that “the legal system should not permit third-party liability against the wishes of the therapist’s client” as Ramona was a “major diversion from the current state of tort law.” Gary Ramona claimed that the lawsuit proved his innocence on the subject of incest. While the jury concluded that the therapist wrongfully reinforced his daughters memories and was guilty of malpractice, “The jury foreman said that the jurors had decided that Holly Ramona had had her first mental images of abuse in early 1990 without any input from her therapist” and that they “had not broadly considered… whether incest had actually occurred.” In short, the case did not prove Ramona’s innocence, and only considered the therapist’s liability. Katy Butler’s article “A House Divided,” published in the Los Angeles Times, details the perspectives of Holly Ramona, her therapist, and Gary Ramona’s wife Stephanie. These often-unmentioned accounts counter the “idyllic life [Gary] Ramona had described,” telling a story of domestic violence, a slow recollection of sexual violence occuring before therapeutic intervention, and circumstantial evidence compiled by Stephanie.

Description: ‘Divided Memories’ was a four-hour documentary produced by PBS critical of recovered memory. The project was the first of its production value to argue that there was no scientific basis for recovered memory. Despite the show’s focus on the reliability of recovered memories, Ofra Bikel stated in an interview with The San Diego Union-Tribune that "I don't really care if there is such a thing as repressed memory or not - after a while, I put that argument behind me." Despite claims of a balanced program, ‘False Memory’ advocates were given significantly more airtime than recovered memory advocates. David Calof pointed out many critical errors, distortions, and mis-representations of empirical data on the show. Katy Butler’s article ‘Around the Network’ criticized Bikel for omitting corroborating evidence in cases of recovered memories, and claiming that she was unable to find any corroborated cases of recovered memory. Christine Courtois describes the show as using “bizarre practices to discredit work done in the clinical mainstream.” Bikel’s claim that she could not find any cases of corroborated recovered memories inspired this website. Read more on Ofra Bikel’s page.

Elizabeth Loftus’ study “The Formation of False Memories,” commonly known as the ‘Lost in the Mall’ study, purports that five participants were falsely convinced of being lost in the mall as a child. Loftus claims that this study provides “an existence proof for the formation of false memories.” However, the Lost in the Mall study has been criticized on multiple accounts: multiple subjects were thrown out of the data analysis, conclusions about internalizing false memories were not correctly drawn from the data, and the results are not applicable to many situations in which ‘false memories’ are claimed; including traumatic memories, memories of repeated or enduring events, and memories ‘implanted’ by non-family members (therapists). In an analysis of the study titled “Lost in the Mall: False Memory or False Defense,” Blizzard and Shaw conclude that the study “has received a minimal amount of critical analysis regardless of the vague and contradictory reporting of results, failure to report negative results, lack of definition of false memory, and conflation of informal observations with formal research.” In 2023, a replication of the original Loftus study was published. While it was methodologically sound, it did not address the study’s inapplicability to other situations where ‘false memories’ are claimed.

Two APA ethics complaints were filed against Loftus in December of 1995, citing her misrepresentation of facts in two cases regarding recovered memories. The complaints could not go forward and an investigation could not be conducted, as Loftus suddenly resigned from the APA less than a month later in January 1995. The first ethics complaint concerns Loftus’ misrepresentation of a child abuse case she was uninvolved in; Loftus altered and omitted facts to falsely characterize the recovered memories involved as unreliable, implausible, and implanted by therapy. The second ethics complaint, centered around a separate child abuse case, involved Loftus altering and omitting facts about therapy, corroborating accounts, and the accused’s testimony in order to falsely characterize the case as an example of implausible memories that ruin lives. Read more on Loftus’ page and in the article 'Beware of false prophets peddling false memory hype' by Michele Landsberg.

In short, betrayal trauma theory describes how and why someone may forget and later recall memories of abuse. The theory posits that there is a social utility in remaining unaware of abuse when the perpetrator is a caregiver. The theory draws on studies of social contracts to explain why and how humans are excellent at detecting betrayals; however, Freyd argues that under some circumstances detecting betrayals may be counter-productive to survival. Specifically, in cases where a victim is dependent on a caregiver, survival may require that she/he remain unaware of the betrayal. This book uses psychological, neurological and cognitive-science literature with impressive skill to find the distinction between fear and betrayal, illustrating the relationship between betrayal trauma and posttraumatic outcomes.

Loftus claims that she resigned because the APA “moved away from scientific and scholarly thinking.” However, the Hoffman report revealed that APA’s CEO Raymond Fowler notified Loftus of ethics complaints submitted against her, allowing her to resign from the APA less than a month later in January. Her swift resignation before the ethics complaints could be processed meant that the complaints could not be investigated. The Hoffman report goes against Loftus’ sworn testimony in court that she was not notified of the situation prior to resigning.

After an unprecedented California case where Gary Ramona sued his daughter’s therapist, Bowman and Mertz published an analysis of the case in the Harvard Law Review. They found that in an analysis of California courts’ history expanding third-party tort liability, the Ramona case was “atypical” and an “aberration even within California law.” The authors concluded that “the legal system should not permit third-party liability against the wishes of the therapist’s client” as Ramona was a “major diversion from the current state of tort law.” Mertz and Bowman assert that an “powerful and adequate” route to address malpractice is through the client themselves suing the therapist. If family members believe that they have been harmed by false allegations of abuse, they should “address their problems directly with the adult women and men involved,” and file a defamation or malicious prosecution suit against their children.

VanVeldhuizen v. Netherlands Reformed Church of Rock Valley was a 1997 civil case from Iowa in which Peter VanVeldhuizen sued on account of recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse perpetrated from 1966 to 1968 by Reverend J. Van Zweden of the Netherlands Reformed Congregation Church. VanVeldhuizen repressed the memory and did not recall the abuse until February, 1991, while undergoing psychotherapy. To avoid litigation, Dr. VanVeldhuizen agreed to the request of the Netherlands Reformed Church to submit the claim and all related evidence to the Institute for Christian Conciliation. In a 9-page letter, the Executive Director noted that, “[I]n the twelve years that I have been working in sexual abuse cases, I do not recall meeting a more credible witness.” Dr. VanVeldhuizen introduced a variety of corroborating evidence, including (1) testimony that Rev. Van Zweden sexually abused his grandson and (2) eyewitness testimony to one of the incidents of sexual abuse of Peter VanVeldhuizen by Rev. Van Zweden. The mediator concluded that “Peter has more than met the highest biblical standard of proof, which is actually required only in capital offenses, namely, that the sin be confirmed by the testimony of at least two witnesses.” After insisting on Christian Conciliation, the Church refused to go along with the findings. Dr. VanVeldhuizen sued and proved his case (again) in court. A Sioux County jury awarded compensatory and punitive damages, after VanVeldhuizen proved that Albert Bakker, a church official at the time, witnessed the acts but did nothing to stop them or to report them to the appropriate officials.

Though the ‘Day of Contrition’ conference was formally organized by the Justice Committee, the FMSF was responsible for helping it take place & advertised the event to their members. Many key members of the FMSF spoke at the conference, were listed as primary contacts for the conference, and acknowledged in the program as major contributors. ‘A Day of Contrition’ was a “protest” against “modern witch hunts” which consisted of false accusations and “imagined crimes.” The conference called for society to release and make reparations to those who were falsely convicted. Multiple convicted perpetrators of child sexual abuse, described as “Individuals recently freed from wrongful imprisonment,” were invited to speak at the conference. While introducing these former prisoners to the audience, Carol Hopkins stated that “there was no evidence in any of these cases” and told those invited, “essentially you have been prisoners of war.” This conference marks a significant overstep in the FMSF’s alleged focus on recovered memories: the conference was largely irrelevant to recovered memories in adults, instead generally attempting to exonerate people convicted of sexual abuse on children’s testimony.

In a review of the debate surrounding recovered memories of childhood abuse, Henderson covers five often-conflated questions on the subject, and then closely examines four books “that exemplify the issues in the debate over whether adults claiming memories of sexual abuse are telling the truth.” Henderson concludes that the two books that recognize the phenomenon of recovered memories (“Betrayal Trauma” by Jennifer J. Freyd & “Searching for Memory” by Daniel L. Schacter) emphasize the potential reliability of recovered memories, and argue that the accuracy of recovered memories must be determined on a case-by-case basis. In contrast, the two books arguing against recovered memories (“The Myth of Repressed Memory” by Loftus and Ketcham & “Making Monsters” by Ofshe and Watters) take the absolute position that there is no scientific proof in support of recovered memories, while omitting the ‘existence proof’ of documented cases of recovered memories. Despite claiming to be scientists focused on “facts” and “truth,” Loftus admits to having “dramatically re-created” case examples to further her arguments. Henderson argues that the authors have a “clear agenda” to attack psychotherapy and characterize people who argue for the potential reliability of recovered memories as “true believers” full of hate. Henderson concludes by reminding the reader that it is impossible to “make absolute, generalizable claims about memory” and states that “In the meantime, it would be an injustice to declare all recovered memory unreliable.”

Stanton received the Nieman fellowship at Stanford to write "U-Turn on Memory Lane” for the Columbia Journalism Review. In this article, he investigates the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and its media coverage, reporting how and why the foundation became popular with the press. He exposes the foundation as unscientific, and details the accusations of abuse that prompted Pam and Peter Freyd to originally found the organization. “The foundation is an aggressive, well-financed p.r. machine adept at manipulating the press [and] harassing its critics.”

Patricia Burgus sued her Psychiatrist Bennet Braun for malpractice and was awarded a settlement for $10.6 million dollars, and Braun later lost his license to practice medicine in Illinois. This high profile case dominated the conversation on suggestive therapy for years, and was viewed as a huge win for FMS proponents – who claimed that Braun was instrumental in training thousands of therapists to practice similar suggestive therapy. Though FMS proponents focus on Burgus’ accusations that Braun suggestively used hypnosis and implanted false memories of satanic abuse, Burgus credits her false beliefs primarily to the excessive doses of medication she was prescribed. Secondly, there were many signs of malpractice unrelated to memory; Burgus was kept inpatient for two and a half years, in which she was physically restrained, given potentially lethal doses of medication, lost custody of her children to the hospital, had photos of her naked body shown at a conference without consent, and real guns were given to her children as part of “therapy.” Burgus v. Braun is a case of malpractice that stems from Burgus’ lengthy institutionalization and Braun’s resulting complete control over her life. This dynamic is not present in everyday therapeutic relationships that FMS proponents claim to induce such ‘false memories.’

The Nebraska symposium on memory aimed to bring together leading researchers in the field of memory to explore a balanced, comprehensive, and updated set of perspectives on the so-called memory wars. The symposium provided a venue that supported the exchange of ideas, and served to highlight that the debate about recovered memories had moved towards reconciliation since the 1990’s. The organizer of the symposium, Robert Belli, compiled the publications presented at the conference into a book titled True and False Recovered Memories: Toward a Reconciliation of the Debate. In the abstract, he notes that “all of the contributors to this volume acknowledge that true recoveries characterize a substantive portion of recovery experiences.”

Maryland v. Huott was a 2014 criminal case which arose after Danielle Bostick came to remember that she was sexually assaulted by her swimming coach, Christopher Huott, beginning when she was 7-years-old. Bostick writes of hearing about the Rick Curl case in 2013, a case involving a swimming coach from the D.C. area who was charged and later convicted of sexually abusing a girl he had coached in 1986. Hearing news of Curl’s arrest, Bostick says: “I felt unsettled, but wasn’t sure why.” She did not identify herself at the time as a victim of her own coach. Within a year of hearing about the Curl case, Bostick approached the police with what she described as “little more than memory fragments and a gut feeling that I had been abused” by her own swimming coach, Christopher Huott. The police arranged for a monitored telephone call to Huott. As she described it, “for nearly two hours, [Huott] confessed to abuse more horrifying than I had imagined or feared" (Bostick). Huott was later charged with abusing Bostick; he eventually pleaded guilty to one felony count of child abuse and was sentenced to 10 years, the maximum penalty allowed at the time that the crime occurred (Lewis). This case is significant as an example where abuse more extensive than the victim had been able to recall was corroborated by the perpetrator’s confession, showing the nature of traumatic memory and recovery at play. It also serves as a reminder that cases involving recovered memory continue to come to light long after controversy over traumatic memory faded from the national focus that it held in the 1990s.

Citations

1. Bostick, D. (2014, November 13). ‘I feel whole.’ After 30 years, a woman confronts her abuser — and herself. The Washington Post.

2. Lewis, K. (2014, September 11). Maryland swim coach Chris Huott sentenced to 10 years in prison for child sex abuse. ABC 7: WJLA.

Description: Nearly a decade after their final newsletter was published, the FMSF dissolved. Its dissolution was announced quietly, through a paragraph in small text on the bottom of the FMSF’s website’s homepage. The paragraph claimed that “During the past quarter century, a large body of scientific research and legal opinions on the topics of the accuracy and reliability of memory and recovered memories has been created. People with concerns about false memories can communicate with others electronically. The need for the FMS Foundation diminished dramatically over the years. The FMSF website and Archives will continue to be available.” The FMSF’s dissolution was covered by the ISSTD and celebrated by survivors of childhood sexual abuse on twitter.

In a recent and thorough review of the so-called ‘memory wars,’ Heaney presents a well-researched critical analysis of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. It interrogates the Freyd family dynamic, various allegations against Peter Freyd, the establishment of the FMSF, modern science about trauma memory, and the lack of supportive science backing ‘False Memory Syndrome.’ It reviews a wide range of known history about the ‘memory wars,’ as well as presenting new and surprising information about the Freyd Family; these include Peter’s sexual advances on his graduate students, details about his enduring alcoholism and related behavior, sourced from interviews with both Pamela and Peter Freyd on the subject.