Crook v. Murphy

Crook v. Murphy was a 1994 civil case from Washington in which Lynn Crook, the oldest of six children, successfully sued her father for recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse. One of her sisters testified to an abusive event she had always remembered, corroborating Crook's memories. This decision is noteworthy for what it says about Richard Ofshe, a sociologist who testified against Ms. Crook: “Just as [Ofshe] accuses [therapists] of resolving at the outset [to find] repressed memories of abuse and then constructing them, he has resolved at the outset to find a macabre scheme of memories progressing toward satanic cult rituals and then creates them.” There is a detailed excerpt from the Los Angeles Times about how Ofshe and Watters misrepresented the facts of this case in their book, Making Monsters. Ms. Crook has written a response to Ofshe and Watters, which was published in the Journal of Child Sexual Abuse.