Marshalling the Media - False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF)

Marshalling the Media - False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF)
By Katy Butler
Psychotherapy Networker - March/April 1995

In less than three years, the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF) has catalyzed a national debate about therapeutic accountability, denial, and the nature of memory. But it began with a painful dispute within a single family that of Pamela and Peter Freyd of Philadelphia, and their daughter Jennifer, of Eugene, Oregon over a shared and equivocal past.

Their account of their once-private difficulties is contained in two documents. The first, by the mother, Philadelphia educator Pamela Freyd, was published anonymously in October 1991, in a small-circulation Minnesota journal called Issues in Child Abuse Accusations. I t was entitled, "How Could This Happen? Coping With A False Accusation of Incest and Rape."

The second was delivered as a speech by her daughter, cognitive psychologist Jennifer Freyd, at a mental health conference in Ann Arbor. Michigan, in the summer of 1993, more than a year after her mother and her father founded the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. In that speech, later republished in a small newsletter for incest survivors, Jennifer Freyd said, "I remember incest in my father's house."

By all accounts, the trouble among the Freyds began or surfaced a week before Christmas in 1990, when Jennifer Freyd went to her second therapy session with a Ph.D level licensed clinical psychologist who was part of a medical group in Eugene, Oregon.

Freyd was 33, married, with two children. She was also a tenured research professor at the University of Oregon, a former fellow of the Guggenheim and National Science Foundations and an expert on memory. A colleague has described her as a "tough cookie."

But she didn't seem so tough as she sat in the therapy office speaking of her agitation at her parents' impending Christmas visit and a lifetime of uneasiness with her father. During the session, her therapist asked her if she had a history of sexual abuse.

Freyd said no. But later that evening, according to a carefully researched account by Stephen Fried in the January 1994 issue of Philadelphia Magazine, she found herself trembling, overwhelmed by intense and terrible flashbacks of male genitals.

Her agitation continued until two evenings later, when her parents Pamela and Peter, a brilliant and unconventional mathematician who had entered a treatment center for alcoholism in the early 1980s arrived for Christmas. Over chicken dinner that night, Jennifer Freyd later said, her father talked at length, in front of her young children, about how lesbians use turkey basters to inseminate themselves a conversation that Pamela Freyd saw as nothing more than a good-humored and open family discussion.

That night, Jennifer Freyd found herself so inexplicably afraid for the safety of her children that she asked her husband to sleep outside the children's bedroom door.

The next morning, she and her family fled the house, and her husband later phoned the elder Freyds to ask them to take a cab to the airport and fly home. Jennifer, he told them, had remembered being seriously abused by her father.

"I have no memory of that," said Peter Freyd. according to Philadelphia Magazine. "Either I'm psychotic or she's under someone's control."

Not long afterward, Jennifer at her distressed parents' urging but against her therapist's express advice sent her father, via e-mail, an account of vivid recollections of abuse ranging from a molestation in the bathtub at age 3 or 4 to a rape at age 16. She suggested that her parents read The Courage To Heal.

She also began, for the first time in her life, to question what she saw as lifelong family patterns of sexualized conversation and invasiveness. She said she had told about 20 friends about her memories of abuse, including her children's teachers and many of the people the elder Freyds had met on previous visits to Eugene.

To Pamela, who believed her husband's denials almost immediately, the changes in her formerly affectionate and compliant daughter amounted to a shocking and frightening "personality change." She and her husband consulted her former psychiatrist, Harold Lief, who suggested Peter Freyd take a lie detector test and came to believe the eider Freyds. Pamela also went to the library, read the literature of the incest recovery movement, and became convinced that her daughter had manufactured false incest beliefs through exposure to suggestive self-help books and a trigger-happy therapist.

For several months, all of the Freyds communicated frantically by e-mail. Peter Freyd took the lie detector test and passed it, but that had little effect on his daughter.

Things went from bad to worse. The elder Freyds fruitlessly offered to fly Jennifer's therapist to Philadelphia to show her tapes of the lie detector test and other evidence that they said demonstrated Peter's innocence. Meanwhile, Jennifer told her paternal uncle and her sister, both of whom believed and supported her. Jennifer has been quoted as saying that her sister, referring to their shared childhood, responded to her disclosures by saying, "So that's why you had all those locks on your door."

In the summer of 1991, after repeated e-mail exchanges and after negotiations between Jennifer and her mother to arrange a family therapy session failed, Jennifer announced via e-mail that she was cutting off contact for a few months.

That fall, against the express advice of Lief, an anguished Pamela Freyd anonymously published her side of the family story as "Jane Doe." She said she could continue loving her daughter by regarding her as "temporarily deranged" She blamed her daughter's therapist for what Jennifer reported as memories. And in her search for psychological stresses that might have generated what she thought were delusions, .she questioned Jennifer Freyd's academic productivity and inaccurately said that her daughter had left an earlier university job after being turned down for tenure. (In fact, Jennifer Freyd had left one university after being refused a decision on early tenure, and had gone to the University of Oregon because it offered her tenure at 29.) In the article, Pamela Freyd also revealed intimate details that her grown daughter had confided to her about her first marriage, her present marital life, her experiences with breast feeding, her teenage drag experimentation and her college-age anorexia.

Nothing in the article revealed Jennifer Freyd's identity, but in the course of the next year, as Pamela solicited support for her fledgling False Memory Syndrome Foundation, she sent her article to mental health professionals all over the country and spoke to the press, sometimes identifying herself as "Jane Doe."

Four of Jennifer Freyd's departmental colleagues at the University of Oregon received copies of the article while she was being considered for promotion to full professor two from Pamela Freyd directly, one anonymously, and one from a research psychologist who had become a member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation board.

Jennifer Freyd, who is now a MI professor at the University of Oregon, has barely spoken to her parents since.

In March 1992, not long after the "Jane Doe" article was published the elder Freyds incorporated the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and asked psychologists, psychiatrists and academics, including experts in memory ironically, their daughter's field to join its scientific advisory board. They also asked Jennifer Freyd, who", not surprisingly, declined Peter Freyd, referring in a general way to the Foundation's parent-members, later wrote to Jennifer, "I still insist on thinking of. . the Foundation as being primarily a way of communicating with our daughters.''

The Freyds placed classified ads looking for other accused parents and listed an 800 number that rang in the Minnesota offices of psychologists Hollida Wakefield and Ralph Underwager, publishers of Issues in Child Abuse Accusations and frequent expert witnesses for the defense in child sexual abuse cases. By February 1992, after two supportive columns appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Freyds had been contacted by 180 parents who reported they had been falsely accused of abuse. Pamela continued to contact the press, and a stream off avorable coverage began. More parents called after The New York Times published an article headlined "Childhood Trauma: Memory or Invention?" In April 1993, the San Francisco Examiner published a six-day, front-page series called "Buried Memories, Broken Families"; and Time later published "lies of the Mind."

Jennifer Freyd did not speak publicly about her family for two years after the e-mail confrontation with her parents. Then, in August 1993, visibly pregnant with her third child, she spoke in Ann Arbor before an audience of mental-health professionals. .She refrained from elaborating on what she called her "recovered memories" of events that she acknowledged she could not prove. But she described a long history of what she characterized as invasive and sexualized interactions with her father that she had never forgotten. She said that since she bad told her parents of her recovered memories of abuse, they had invaded her privacy, contacted her elderly mother-in-law and embarrassed her to academic colleagues and family friends.

"I am being punished," she said, "at a national and professional level... for my private and personal memories." The debate was only partly about memory, she said. It was also about "a family in pain"

But at the same time, she revealed intimate details about her parents' private life. She said her parents continued to minimize her father's history of :heavy drinking, and that he had been a "late-stage alcoholic" by the time he was treated for alcoholism in the 1980s and quit entirely. She said he referred to himself as a "kept boy" when describing a year of sexual abuse, at the age of nine, by a nationally known male artist

"At times I am flabbergasted that my memory is considered false' and my alcoholic father's memory is considered rational and sane," she said. "Am I not believed because I am a woman? If Peter Freyd were a man who lived in my neighborhood during my childhood instead of my father, would he and his wife be so believable? If not, what is it about his status as my father that makes him more credible?" She denied her memories had arisen, as newspaper stories and her mother sometimes suggested, through hypnosis. "Terrible therapeutic things did not happen to me," she said. "And yet my story is told as though they did. .. For my parents' sake I hope they can find a way to look inward, to do their own healing, instead of waging a kind of war at the national level"

Jennifer Freyd's speech fell into a black hole, receiving little attention except among professionals in trauma therapy, in the newsletters of incest recovery groups and in Philadelphia Magazine, to which she granted an interview in January 1994. Since then, she has refused to be interviewed by the press. Pamela Freyd continues to say publicly that she knows of no cases in which memories of repeated sexual abuse, over many years, that surface during therapy-as her daughter's did were found to be   corroborated.

In the wake of the Freyd family's dispute,  news coverage of false and recovered   memory has equalled, and sometimes eclipsed, combined coverage of all other issues relating to incest and child sexual abuse.

Between mid-1993 and mid-1994, for example, the three leading news magazines ( Time, Newsweek, and U .S. News and World Report) published 54 pages concerned with child sex abuse. After subtracting 20 pages devoted to Michael Jackson and the Menendez brothers, media researcher Michael Males discovered that 17 pages were devoted to "false memory" and 17 to all other questions related to the sexual victimization of children.

By the end of 1994, more than 300 articles on "false memory" had appeared in magazines and newspapers. Headlines included, "When Tales of Sex Abuse Aren't True," ( Philadelphia Inquirer) "Beware the Incest Survivor Machine" (New York Times Sunday Book Review), and "Cry Incest" (Playboy). Only a handful mentioned the ambiguous nature of the Freyd family's own story. Only a few reporters seemed aware of two excellent research studies, one by FMSF board member Elizabeth Lotos and the other by Linda Meyer WilIiams of the Family Research Laboratory in New Hampshire, suggesting that between 19 percent and 38 percent of sexual abuse survivors have a period of amnesia for abuse.

With some exceptions notably the Boston Globe and US. News and World Report articles quoted a predominance of experts who were members of the FMSFs scientific advisory board without listing their affiliation with it or searching out opposing academic views. On the whole, says psychiatrist Judith Herman, author of Father-Daughter Incest, the coverage "favored the position of those accused of sexual abuse, allowing them to claim the support of educated opinion, while relegating their accusers to the realm of 'mass hysteria.'"

In an article published last spring by Harvard's Nieman Foundation for journalism, Herman argued that only one side of the false memory debate the accused parents were organized and eager to speak to the media, while the other side composed of incest survivors and their therapists often didn't want to identify themselves and wanted mostly to be left alone.

The rules of journalism, Herman said, assume that the truth will emerge out of an intellectual contest between two equally matched opponents who come forward and aggressively press their points of view. "These rules, she said, "are made for the public world, the world of war and politics, the world of men ... The same principles that ensure a reasonable degree of equity in conflicts between men do not ensure equity in conflicts between men and women, parents and children. Rather, they guarantee an advantage to those who command status and power in the public realm; they favor men over women, parents over children."

The False Memory Syndrome Foundation has a yearly budget of about $700,000, funded by dues and by larger grants from more wealthy members, supporters and family foundations. Its members run about 48 local parents' action and support groups in the United States and Canada. In Seattle, as many as 400 people attend local group meetings. Many of its active and vocal volunteers are, like executive director Pamela Freyd, the wives of men who say they have been falsely accused.

The Foundation puts out a newsletter ten times a year and acts as a non-profit public relations group, distributing selected research about memory and advocating deep skepticism about "recovered memories." Lawyers have been featured speakers at a number of recent FMSF events and have been mentioned in its newsletter. "Although we do not actively promote or fund lawsuits, we feel that this may be one avenue that retractors and parents have to hold therapists accountable," said a spokeswoman for the Foundation. The Foundation also acts as a support group for accused parents, provides them with some information when they want to file complaints with state mental health licensing boards, and advocates its cause with professional associations.

Nobody knows how many cases of false accusation and/or suggestive therapy are represented by the families of the Foundation, which does not investigate its members' accounts. But it continues to raise questions about the therapeutic misuse of hypnosis, sodium amytal, incest symptom "checklists," unconfirmed beliefs in Satanic conspiracies, and heavy-handed suggestions that incest must lie behind all eating disorders, sexual difficulties, substance abuse or depression.

The Foundation's large advisory board of M.D.s and PhD.s conveys the impression to the media and the general public that an overwhelming scientific consensus favors the Foundation's position on the rarity of the delayed recall of traumatic events. But, as in every human conflict, especially those involving the more than 200 competing dogmas of the mental health field, "experts" on both sides are motivated and informed not only by research data and the search for abstract scientific truth but by personal experience and education, allegiance to a particular psychological tradition, deeply felt beliefs about human nature, what constitutes probable and improbable behavior, and what constitutes convincing evidence.

The scientific advisory board includes many eminent research-oriented psychologists and several biologically oriented psychiatrists and several prominent older psychoanalytically oriented psychiatrists, but no younger female therapists who have worked closely with incest survivors; and some perennial expert witnesses for parents and other aduits accused of child sex abuse.

Perhaps the best known are: a Biologically oriented psychiatrists Harrison Pope, jr., M.D., chief of the Biological Psychiatry Laboratory at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass; and Paul McHugh, M.D. of Johns Hopkins University.

Clinicians concerned about suggestive therapy and excesses in incest treatment, including George K. Ganaway, an Atlanta psychiatrist who treats dissociative disorders and psychiatrist August Piper, Jr. of Seattle, who wrote in a recent Foundation newsletter that he hoped to find ways to bridge the "chasm" between the two sides of the false memory debate.

« Cognitive psychology researchers Elizabeth Loftus of me University of Washington and Uric Neisser of Emory University. They and others have shown that normal memory is malleable, that adults sometimes have vivid but erroneous recollections, and that some people, especially children, can be persuaded to report traumatic events that never took place.

They are not therapists and give little credence to research and clinical accounts reporting total amnesia and later recall of traumatic events. "Memory is distorted every day," says Neisser, "while the scenario postulated by these people happens rarefy, if ever." For the past 20 years, Loftus has also appeared frequently as an expert witness for the defense in criminal trials, casting doubt on the validity of eyewitness identifications.

Psychiatrist Martin Orne, an early board member who has spent a lifetime publicizing the suggestive effects of hypnosis. A veteran psychiatrist and nationally known forensic hypnosis expert, he was poet Anne Sexton's psychiatrist, the early 1990s, Orne told Sexton's biographer, Diane Middlebrook, that he believed that Sexton's reports of sexual abuse by her alcoholic father were "pseudomemories." (Sexton had alcohol problems, sexually abused her own daughter, wrote a play about incest, and became sexually involved with her next psychiatrist before committing suicide.)

Richard Ofshe, a sociologist at the University of California at Berkeky and a researcher into persuasion techniques used in cults and other authoritarian communities. He was co-awarded a Pulitzer Prize, along with the editors of California's Point Reyes Light newspaper, for reporting about Synanon. More recently, Ofshe has studied persuasion by police who extract confessions and by the incest recovery culture. He was promi-nently featured in a 1993 New Yorker magazine account, which became the book, Remembering Satan, about Paul Ingram, a sheriffs deputy in Olympia, Washington, who confessed to molesting his two daughters and then, under suggestive interrogation, to increasingly bizarre satanic cult rituals and group sex.

Ofshe, in an experiment to prove Ingram's suggestibility, persuaded Ingram, before trial, to "remember" a sexual abuse crime that Ofshe had actually invented, {He told Ingram that Ingram had been accused of forcing his children to have sex with each other, and within hours, Ingram said he'd visualized the scene and confessed to it.) Ofshe and New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright have widely publicized their view that Ingram was probably innocent of everything except suggestibility. The judge in the case found Ofshe's expert testimony on this point unconvincing and found Ingram guilty of molesting fats daughters. The judge noted that Ingram had confessed to those crimes within hours of being questioned by junior colleagues in his department, and before he was subjected to suggestive interrogation and intense psychological and religious "counseling."

In 1994, another Washington state judge described Ofshe's testimony as "cynical" and unconvincing and awarded $150,000 to Lynn Crook, who had sued her parents on the basis of "recovered: memories" of sexual abuse. Ofshe, who appeared on behalf of Crook's parents, testified that Crook had been led, by books like The Courage to Heal and suggestive therapy, into false memories of abuse progressing toward delusions of satanic ritual Superior court judge Dennis Yale disagreed Just as [Dr. Ofshe accuses therapists] of resolving at the outset to find repressed memories of abuse and then constructing them," Yule said, "(Qfshe)| has resolved at the outset to find a macabre scheme of memories progressing toward satanic cult ritual and then creates them,"

In 1993, Ofshe and psychologist Margaret Singer sued the American Psycho-logical Association, the American Sociological Association, and 12 individuals, charging them with having conspired under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) to discredit them as expert witnesses and deprive them of income. The defendants disagreed with Ofshe and Singer's views on brainwashing and coercive persuasion in cults, and the APA had rejected as "lacking in scientific rigor" a draft report on persuasive techniques in nonconventional religious movements written by a committee headed by Singer in 1987.

The suit was dismissed within weeks by the federal district court in New York on the grounds that although the defendants expressed disagreement with Ofshe and Singer, there was no evidence of a criminal conspiracy. A similar suit, filed later in California and opposed with the assistance of the American Civil liberties Union, was dismissed last year on First Amendment grounds. Ofshe and Singer have appealed.

Hollida Wakefield and her husband Ralph Underwager, a psychologist, Lutheran minister, and former FMSF Advisory board member. Both run the Institute for Psychological Therapies in Northfield, Minnesota, where the FMSFs original 8 00 number was answered.

Underwager has appeared as an expert witness for the defense in more than 200 sexual abuse trials. He and his wife co-edit Issues in Child Abuse Accusations, which promotes the view that most sexual abuse accusations involving children stem from memories implanted by faulty clinical techniques rather than by genuine sexual contact.

The Supreme Court of the state of Washington has held that Underwager's views are not accepted by the scientific community.

In the mid- 1980s, Underwager testified in a preliminary hearing in Australia on behalf of Tony Deren, whom the Australian press had nicknamed "Mr. Bubbles" because he was accused of sexually assaulting children in the whirlpool bath of his wife's daycare center. In the hearing, Underwager presented as scientific consensus the notion that there are nine "false positives" or false accusations of child abuse for every one genuine case. He also testified that children rarely remember or describe sexual events accurately. After his testimony at the hearing, charges against Deren were dropped.

The "Mr. Bubbles'' case caused a scandal in Australia, and was the subject of an investigative report by "60 Minutes Australia" a television news program. Subsequently;, Anna Saltier, a New Hampshire psychotherapist, and Patricia Toth, a former prosecutor, spoke at several sexual abuse conferences publicizing their opinions that Underwager had severely misstated me research in "Mr. Bubbles" and other child abuse cases. Underwager and Wakefield later sued Toth and Salter for defamation. A federal appeals court dismissed the suit The court's opinion stated that Tom and Salter had come to their views on the basis of their research, and mat their opinion that "Underwager is a hired gun who makes a living by deceiving judges about the state of medical knowledge and thus assisting child moles-ters to evade punishment" -were sincerely held and did not constitute defamation.

Underwager and Wakefield were closely involved in founding the FMSF in 1992, and Underwager spoke frequently as an expert on its behalf on television programs and in newspaper articles. That role ended in 1993, after an interview with Underwager and Wakefield, conducted in 1991, was published in Paidika: the Journal of Paedophilia, which is published in English in the Netherlands, In the interview, the couple stated that they thought pedophile relationships, while never positive, could be a neutral event in a child's life, and said that condemnatory attitudes in the United States made it impossible to conduct research to explore that possibility.

Paidika quoted Underwager as saying, "Paedophiles need to become more positive and make the claim that paedophilia is an acceptable expression of God's will for love and unity among human beings." He also blamed "radical feminism" for child sex abuse hysteria and opposition to pedophile sex.

In the same interview, Hollida Wakefield said, "It would be nice if someone could get some kind of big research grant to do a longitudinal study of, let's say, a hundred twelve-year-old boys in relationships with loving paedophiles . . . that is impossible in the U.S. right now."

Underwager now says "at no point have I approved or condoned sexual contact with children." In a 1993 interview with the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, he said in response to criticism of the Paidika interview that he thought pedophiles must begin to take responsibility for their actions and that the interview was a means of speaking to the "intellectual and political leadership of pedophiles in Europe" as a means of primary prevention.

After the Paidika interview appeared, Underwager agreed to resign from the FMSF's Professional and Scientific Advisory Board. Hollida Wakefield remains a member.

IN INFLUENCING PUBLIC OPINION, the FMSF has been a remarkable success. "Major changes in thinking have begun to take place," says Pamela Freyd. "Three years ago, people were strongly advocating the use of hypnosis. Now people are extremely cautious. Three years ago, people were saying that if somebody had a memory, it must be true, and they don't say that any more. When we first started, the assumption was that all the families were guilty. Now people may give all kinds of different estimates, but they recognize the fact that there is a problem." On a personal level, however, things are no better between Pamela and Jennifer Freyd. "Why won't she speak to me?" Pamela asks. "Why are the grandchildren not allowed to see me?" She still hopes, eventually, for reconciliation. "I probably would just have to die," she says, "if I couldn't keep some hope."

Ethics Complaint filed against prominet FMSF Board Member: APA Declines to investigate

The following article appears in TREATING ABUSE TODAY magazine, November-December 1995/January-February 1996

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NOTES FROM THE CONTROVERSY

ETHICS COMPLAINTS FILED AGAINST PROMINENT FMSF BOARD MEMBER:  APA DECLINES TO INVESTIGATE

In December 1995, two women filed ethics complaints with the American Psychological Association (APA) against Elizabeth Loftus, PhD, regarding her published statements about two legal cases involving delayed memories of sexual abuse. Citing procedural considerations, however, the APA has declined to investigate the women's ethics complaints.

Jennifer Hoult (a concert harpist living in New York) and Lynn Crook (a Washington State consultant) each filed separate complaints with the APA, alleging that Loftus mischaracterized the facts of their legal cases in published articles. Both women brought successful civil suits because of the sexual abuse that the fathers (and the mother, in Crook's case) perpetrated against them during their childhoods. At their trials, they presented corroborative evidence that met the requirements for judicial proof of their allegations.

Loftus serves on the Scientific and Professional Advisory Board of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, Inc (FMSF). She also had been an active member of the APA since 1973, but she resigned in January 1996, shortly after the filing of the complaints. In a brief telephone interview with TREATING ABUSE TODAY, Loftus confirmed her resignation from the APA, but she denied any knowledge of the ethics complaints. She also cautioned that TREATING ABUSE TODAY should not state or imply that she resigned from the APA to avoid investigation of the ethics complaints.

When the ethic complaints were filed against Loftus, Jeffrey N. Younggren, PhD chaired the APA Ethics Committee. During his tenure in this position, Younggren appeared as an expert witness in many trials involving so-called "false memory syndrome," generally as a witness for accused perpetrators or against therapists accused of implanting "false memories." At the time Hoult and Crook filed their complaints, Younggren and Loftus were both working as expert witnesses on the same side of the same case. When asked about this coincidence, however, Loftus stated that she had no knowledge of the fact, because she worked on many cases simultaneously and didn't always know which expert witnesses were scheduled to testify in any particular case.

Responding to a query from Crook regarding the relations between Loftus and Younggren, Marguerite Schroeder, a senior investigator in the APA Ethics Office, stated that, if Younggren had faced such a conflict of interest, he would have recused himself from the matter. She further stated that Younggren hadn't been made aware of the ethics complaints against Loftus, and so had played no role in the decisions regarding them. According, however, to the Rules and Procedures of the APA Ethics Office, "complaints are evaluated initially by the Chair of the Ethics Committee [Younggren] and Director of the Ethics Office" ("Rules," 1992, p. 1614). Crook and Hoult filed their complaints on or before December 18, 1995, and Loftus submitted her resignation on January 16, 1996. In her response to Crook's query, Schroeder offered no explanation as to why Younggren hadn't been informed of the two complaints, even though they were filed nearly a month before Loftus's resignation.

According to both Crook and Hoult, Schroeder stated that APA policy generally bars the resignation of members when they're under the scrutiny of the Ethics Committee. Schroeder, however, further stated that Loftus hadn't yet come under the Committee's scrutiny, and that she hadn't been informed of the complaints against her, even though Crook and Hoult filed their complaints nearly a month before Loftus submitted her resignation.

Based on these procedural considerations, the APA Office of Ethics declined to investigate the ethics charges. Schroeder told Crook and Hoult that it's "unusual" for a member to resign in the time frame between receipt of a complaint and a committee decision regarding appropriate action. When such a resignation does occur, however, Schroeder indicated that the APA no longer has any authority to pursue ethics complaints against the member.

Both Hoult and Crook have contested the APA's decision. In a strongly worded letter of objection to Schroeder, Crook argued that APA policy clearly bars the resignation of a member under the scrutiny of the Committee. She asked that the APA immediately rescind Loftus's resignation and proceed with an investigation of her complaint. Hoult asked for the same actions, as well as asking the Ethics Office to send her the procedures for filing an ethics complaint against the Ethics Committee.

A review of the APA's published guidelines regarding investigation of ethics complaints seems to bear out the objections lodged by Hoult and Crook. Information provided to complainants states that "the date of filing is the date on which we [staff of the Ethics Office] receive the correctly complete APA [ethics complaint] form" (APA, 1995, p. 2, emphasis added). The Rules and Procedures further state, "Plenary ethics proceedings against a member are initiated by the filing of a complaint" (APA, 1992, p. 1 622, emphasis added). These two statements taken together would seem to indicate that Loftus came under the scrutiny of the Ethics Committee on the date of the filing of the complaints, and thus the APA should have barred her resignation, as stated in the Rules and Procedures.

REMEMBERING DUBIOUSLY

In her complaint, Hoult alleges that Loftus used distortion and misstatement of fact to seriously misrepresent Hoult's legal case. In 1988 Hoult brought a civil suit against her father, alleging that he had raped and otherwise sexually abused her throughout her childhood. After several years of legal wrangling, the case finally went to trial in June 1993. On July 1, 1993, the jury returned a verdict in favor of Jennifer Hoult, awarding her $500,000 for the suffering caused by her father's incestuous abuse. All higher courts have upheld the jury's decision, including the first circuit appellate court. When Hoult's father petitioned the US Supreme Court, his petition was rejected as untimely. At some point during all these proceedings, Hoult's father joined the FMSF.

In the March/April 1995 issue of SKEPTICAL INQUIRER (a publication of the Committee for the Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, or CSICOP), Loftus published an article titled "Remembering Dangerously." Subsequently, this article appeared as a resource document on separate Internet home pages maintained for CSICOP, for the FMSF, and for Loftus at the Department of Psychology, University of Washington. In the article, Loftus reviews a number of high-profile cases involving delayed memories of child abuse. The introduction to the article, giving a cartoon view of the legal process, indicates Loftus's general approach to the cases she reviews.

We live in a strange and precarious time that resembles at its heart the hysteria and superstitious fervor of the witch trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Men and women are being accused, tried, and convicted with no proof or evidence of guilt other than the word of the accuser. Even when the accusations involve numerous perpetrators, inflicting grievous wounds over many years, even decades, the accuser's pointing finger of blame is enough to make believers of judges and juries. (p. 20)

Of the several cases reviewed in the article, Loftus includes "the case of Jennifer H" (p. 26). Though Loftus ostensibly offers Hoult a degree of anonymity by using an initial for her last name, she actually identifies Hoult by citing the case (Hoult v. Hoult) in the article. In an interview with TREATING ABUSE TODAY, Hoult stated that Loftus's article distorts her case through a broad range of unethical practices. Among others, Hoult asserts that Loftus misrepresents her competence, expertise, and personal motivation to speak as an expert on trauma and abuse. As many others have already pointed out, Loftus has never worked as a clinician and thus lacks training or clinical experience in child psychology, trauma, the processes of traumatic memory, the evaluation of alleged sex offenders, and child sexual abuse generally. In this regard, Hoult alleges that Loftus violated a number of APA ethics guidelines, including the need for truthfulness and candor, misuse of influence, and making claims outside the area of her expertise.

Hoult also alleges that Loftus used mischaracterization and omission of facts to misconstrue Hoult's legal case against her father. She pointed out many inaccuracies that support this allegation. In the article, for instance, Loftus claims that "Jennifer was a 23-year-old musician who recovered memories in therapy of her father raping her from the time she was 4" (1995, p. 26). Actually, Hoult began to remember the abuse at 24, at which time she was an artificial intelligence software engineer. Records in the case show that the bulk of her memories emerged outside of therapy. Furthermore, Hoult never stated that the rapes began when she was four, a "fact" apparently created by Loftus for the purposes of her article.

In another passage, Loftus claims that Hoult "remembered one time when she was raped in the bathroom and went to her mother wrapped in a towel with blood dripping" (1995, p. 27). A review of court records, however, shows that Loftus has added two elements of her own making: the memory of the rape itself (the trial transcript shows that Hoult never claimed to remember a "rape") and the blood-soaked towel (again the transcript shows that Hoult only reported a small amount of blood between her legs, which wasn't visible to the mother until Hoult dropped the towel from around her body). Hoult argues that these misstatements by Loftus put her in violation of several APA ethics guidelines, among them ethics in media presentations and ethics regarding matters of law.

IT'S MAGICAL. IT'S MALLEABLE. IT'S . . . MISREPRESENTATION.

In October 1991, Lynn Crook brought a civil suit against her parents based on her delayed memories of childhood sexual abuse perpetrated by her parents. Loftus testified as an expert witness for the defense. On March 4, 1994, the judge in the case ruled in Crook's favor, awarding her $149,580 in damages against her parents, who chose not to appeal the case to any higher court.

In the January/February 1995 issue of PSYCHOLOGY TODAY, Jill Neimark published an article titled "It's Magical. It's Malleable. It's . . . Memory." In her article, Neimark quotes Loftus, who gives an abridged and (according to Crook) seriously distorted account of her case against her father. In this part of the article, at the heart of Crook's ethics complaint, Loftus summarizes the legal case as follows:

Sometimes [Neimark states, summarizing Loftus] the memories become so seemingly fantastical that they lead to court cases and ruined lives. [Quoting Loftus] "I testified in a case recently in a small town in the State of Washington," Loftus recalls, "where the memories went from 'Daddy made me play with his penis in the shower' to 'Daddy made me stick my fist up the anus of a horse,' and they were bringing in a veterinarian to talk about just what a horse would do in that circumstance. The father is ill and will be spending close to $100,000 to defend himself." (Neimark, 1995, p. 80)

In an interview with TREATING ABUSE TODAY, Crook stated that Loftus's 79-word direct quote describing her case contained nine misstatements. "Loftus reworded events I recalled, and incorrectly claimed that a 'fantastical' memory had resulted in my filing this case." Crook pointed out, for instance, that Loftus contradicted her father's own sworn testimony that his health was "excellent." Crook also argues that Loftus should have pointed out that she (Crook) won the case, after presenting evidence that included testimony from two of her sisters who also remembered incestuous abuse perpetrated against them by their father.

Among other ethical concerns, Crook alleges that Loftus introduces the idea of memory progression ("from . . . to"), even though this claim had failed to hold up during the trial itself. During Crook's trial, Richard Ofshe, PhD, another prominent FMSF board member who testified for the defense, claimed to see a "progression" in her memories that called them into doubt. The judge in the case specifically dismissed Ofshe's attempt to cry "false memory" based on memory progression:

Finally, Dr. Ofshe characterizes plaintiff's memories as a progress toward ritual, satanic cult images, which he states fits a pattern he has observed of false memories. It appears to the Court, however, that in this regard, he is engaging in the same exercise for which he criticizes therapists dealing with repressed memory. Just as he accuses them 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 ritual and then creates them. (Lynn Crook v. Bruce Murphy and Lucille Murphy, Superior Court of the State of Washington In and For the County of Benton, #91-2-0011-2-5)

Despite the judge's statement, rendered from the bench, Loftus resurrected the "progression theory" in the PSYCHOLOGY TODAY article. According to Crook, Loftus should have indicated that her opinion had been rejected by the court, and that her failure to do so constitutes a violation of APA ethics guidelines dealing with truth and candor.

According to Crook, Loftus also transformed another memory, her recollection of the event involving the horse. In the quoted passage, Loftus does seem to imply that the memory involving the horse emerged as an elaboration and distortion of Crook's earlier memory involving her father, an implication that Crook denies. Crook also points out that Loftus omitted important information given by the veterinarian who testified during the trial. Though Loftus chose to present the possibility of anal penetration of the horse as a wholly fantastical absurdity, the veterinarian (who testified for the defense) pointed out that it's a common practice in veterinary medicine.

JUST TO BE BELIEVED

Crook told TREATING ABUSE TODAY that she hopes Loftus will be asked to corroborate all cases that she reports to the media. "I'm dismayed," she stated, "that Loftus would use her position as an expert witness in my case to try to prove to the public that I was yet another victim of 'repressed memory' therapy." Crook further stated that PSYCHOLOGY TODAY should have contacted her to check the facts of the case before they published Neimark's article.

While researching this story, TREATING ABUSE TODAY contacted the magazine's editor, Hara Moreno, to ask about the magazine's formal fact-checking policies. Oddly, Moreno became extremely hostile. She demanded to know "on whose authority" we had undertaken our investigation. She further stated that we didn't "know anything about anything," and that she would only speak with the APA about the ethics complaint. We tried in vain to get Moreno to understand that we didn't want her to discuss Crook's complaint, that we only wanted to know the formal fact-checking policy of PSYCHOLOGY TODAY. We never did get an answer. The editor of SKEPTICAL INQUIRER never returned our call to discuss that magazine's fact-checking policies, despite a promise from Brian Karr, the executive director of CSICOP, that the editor would speak with us.

In "Remembering Dangerously," Loftus warns that "supposedly de-repressed" memories could "trivialize the genuine memories of abuse and increase the suffering of real victims who wish and deserve, more than anything else, just to be believed" (1995, p. 29). Hoult argues that Loftus used her scientific credentials in an unscientific effort to trivialize her memories of violent abuse. "I've proven the charges against my father in a court of law," Hoult stated, "before a jury of his peers. I am believed, by my family and my friends." Hoult went on to say that she expects ethical treatment from people who call themselves scientists, including Loftus.

Loftus in fact cites scientific considerations as the reason for her resignation from the APA. In her letter of resignation, she claims that the organization had "moved away from scientific and scholarly thinking." Loftus further stated that she had decided to resign "to devote her energies to the numerous other professional organizations that value science more highly and more consistently." During her tenure as an APA member, Loftus served "as President of two distinguished divisions (Experimental Psychology and Psychology/Law)," a fact she points out in her letter of resignation.

Alice Eagly, PhD, who presently chairs the APA Board of Scientific Affairs, expressed puzzlement over Loftus's abrupt resignation from the APA. Eagly dismissed Loftus's attempt to draw a "global judgment" regarding APA's commitment to science. She pointed out that the APA fosters a great many scientific endeavors, and that it publishes the premiere scientific journals in psychology.

Loftus stated in her resignation letter that she resigned largely because of the increasing drift of the APA "away from scientific and scholarly thinking and . . . towards therapeutic and professional guild interests." The APA, however, recently approved the FMSF as a continuing education sponsor, [for more information on the APA's action, please see "APA Approves FMSF as CE Sponsor" in the same issue of TREATING ABUSE TODAY (Vol 5 No 6/Vol 6 No 1).] and one of Loftus's colleagues on the FMSF Scientific and Professional Advisory Board (Ulric Neisser, PhD) also serves on the APA Board of Scientific Affairs. Neisser declined to comment on Loftus's resignation. TREATING ABUSE TODAY sent written requests for comment to the other members of the Board of Scientific Affairs; with the exception of Eagly, none responded.

Peter Freyd, PhD, co-founder of the FMSF, issued a puzzling Internet statement (February 8, 1996) regarding Loftus's resignation. Under the subject heading, "It's their stupidity, stupid," Freyd stated:

The RMT ["recovered memory therapy"] people certainly go in for believing whatever rumors they like. For the record: there are no ethics complaints against Elizabeth Loftus. She resigned from the APA because it has moved too far from science.

From his brief statement, Freyd appears to endorse Loftus's claim that the APA no longer holds a strong, consistent commitment to science. The APA, however, recently recognized Freyd's organization as a continuing education sponsor, a move that many see as evidence of Loftus's claim that the APA has indeed moved away from science by entering into a partnership with an organization (the FMSF) that promulgates pseudoscience. Pamela Freyd, PhD, the FMSF executive director, declined to comment on the ethics charges filed against Loftus and her resignation from the APA.

REFERENCES

• American Psychological Association. (1995). INFORMATION FOR INDIVIDUALS FILING APA ETHICS COMPLAINTS [Brochure]. Washington, DC: Author.
• American Psychological Association. (1992). Rules and procedures. AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST, 47, 1612-1628.
• Loftus, E. (1995, March/April). Remembering dangerously. SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, 19, 20-29.
• Neimark, J. (1995, January/February). It's magical. It's mystical. It's . . . memory. PSYCHOLOGY TODAY, 28, p. 44-85.