Trauma and Memory

The Science and the Silenced

Valerie Sinason, Ashley Conway, Valerie Sinason, Ashley Conway

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000421231
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Psicoanálisis

Trauma and Memory will assist mental health experts and professionals, as well as the interested public, in understanding the scientific issues around trauma memory, and how this differs from other areas of memory.

This book provides accounts of the damage caused to psychology and survivors internationally by false memory groups and ideas. It is unequivocally passionate about the truth of trauma memory and exposing the damaging disinformation that can seep into the field. Contributors to this book include leading professionals from the field of criminology, law, psychology and psychotherapy in the UK and USA, along with survivor-professionals who understand only too well the damage such disinformation can cause.

This book is a valuable resource for mental health professionals of all disciplines including those involved with relevant law and public health policy. It will also help survivors and survivor-professionals in gaining insight into the forces resisting disclosure.

Chapter 1

In conversation with Ross Cheit

Ashley Conway

10.4324/9781003193159-2

In this chapter, Ross is in discussion with Ashley Conway. He describes his personal journey with recovered memory, and the reaction to it. He relates the difficulty in providing enough evidence to make the false memory advocates acknowledge the veracity of survivors’ accounts. He also discusses false memory syndrome supporters’ success in the media and the difficulty in responding because of libel law.

Ashley: First, I know that you are not a psychologist – what are your professional qualifications?

Ross: I have a PhD in Public Policy and I have a law degree. I am professor of Political Science and International & Public Affairs at Brown University, Rhode Island, USA.

Ashley: What led you to write your brilliant book, The Witch Hunt Narrative (Cheit, 2014a)? Where is the beginning of this story?

Ross: It began with personal experience and I have made no secret of that fact. But when I look back to 1992, I was initially mortified at the thought people would know about this and not believe me. Anyway, I woke up one day with a strong recollection from a dream about a man I had not thought of for 20 years and I felt sick to my stomach. I thought of this man who was a counsellor at a summer camp I went to and realised he had sexually abused me. Had someone asked me directly before this if I had ever been sexually abused as a kid I would have said no. So, I woke up with this sick feeling, felt mortified and then my curiosity took over. I wanted to know what had happened and where he was, and my questions made me want to investigate this. There were times I felt I had prepared all my life for this moment as I had mustered skills that could help with this. I had practised law in Berkeley, California, where I had worked with a good private investigator and I had him find former boys, now men, who had been at the San Francisco Boys Chorus summer camp. He did a brilliant job of tracking down people who had been in this camp in the 1960s and I contacted people out of the blue asking if they remembered me. I then asked if they remembered Bill Farmer and I quickly discovered other victims of Bill Farmer, including a counsellor who had told the director of the camp. I ultimately proved a wide amount of abuse and cover-up. It happened to be that the final year of the camp was 1968, when I had just turned 13.

Ashley: You found other people who had that experience?

Ross: And other counsellors who did it. The private investigator tracked Bill Farmer’s history and he had gone from town to town where he held himself out as a religious figure, and he had been run out of various towns where he had been found out. There was a place where a judge’s son was abused, and the judge ordered him out. He did this five or six times. I will try and wrap this up, as this story could take the whole hour of our interview. It is compelling and involved issues after he was apprehended that were remarkable. Anyway, we found out where he was in a small town in Oregon and I had a phone number. I called that number as I wanted to confront him. And one night I got an answer. His wife answered. I said to tell him it is someone who knows him from a long time ago. He says “hello” and I say “hello, this is Ross Cheit. Do you remember me?” And he replies, “Yes. Yes. But I picture you as a 12-year-old”, which turned my stomach. I confronted him in direct terms and he asked if he could call me back and I said no this was his only chance to speak to me. My father, my late father, not an emotive man, said that this was the most remarkable conversation he ever heard. I didn’t know if taping the call was legal but it turns out I was in a state where there was one-party consent for recording. He fully confessed what he did to me and other kids. He then disappeared from that address and that state, so it was hard to trace him, but we did eventually find him in Corpus Christi. I went to the Chorus with an incredible amount of information. I had information about other victims, and I had statements from counsellors and I had a tape-recorded confession. What did I get in response? The lawyer for the Chorus said that the organisation had done “so well for so many kids”, and they criticised me for wanting to damage their reputation. The idea they just wanted to get rid of me was stunning, so we had a lawsuit. That would have been 1994. Right after we filed the suit, they went to a friendly judge and asked for the files to be sealed, claiming it would damage their reputation if it was made public. And the judge agreed without us there. I had so many things going for me, including a brother who is a clever lawyer and former journalist. We arranged to appeal the seal and we knew that all of the papers would be public at the appellate level for at least a day. So we made sure that a journalist saw the documents the day they were public. Within a year the Chorus settled with me, as I wanted an apology. In my mind it was never about money. It was about acknowledgement. But they still honour the woman who covered this up, so I was not as successful as I wanted. But I succeeded in many ways.

Ashley: And what happened to Bill Farmer?

Ross: We found him in Texas and served him with papers in my civil lawsuit. He never made an appearance, and I received what is known as a default judgement. I still had to appear and testify, and the judge awarded around $450,000. I never collected a cent.

California changed its statute of limitations during that time, as well, allowing for criminal charges in recovered memory cases to go forward if corroborated by multiple sources. I got two other men to stand with me and convinced a District Attorney to file criminal charges. Farmer was arrested in Texas and fought extradition, spending 17 days, I think, in a Texas jail. He was sent to California and immediately released because the lower court judge ruled that it was not clear whether the legislature really meant for the law to be retroactive.

Years later one of his kids rang me up to get help to have a restraining order so he couldn’t visit his grandchildren, and another kid rang me years later not wanting their dad to be on a transplant list. Since the lawsuit, I volunteered for years at the prison working with sex offenders as I wanted to understand how this man could do such things. And that work also gave me some empathy. Child molesters are responsible for what they do and should be punished, but they do not start out choosing this as a way of life. Many have had a horrid start in life themselves. But I don’t want to carry on about Bill Farmer.

Ashley: Yes. We could carry on for the whole conversation just on that …

On the topic of public disclosure by victims of abuse, it has been so powerful to watch the victims in the recent Nassar sentencing hearing make their statements [Larry Nassar was an American gymnastics national team doctor. He was accused of assaulting at least 200 young women and girls. He admitted to some of the accusations, for which he has received lengthy prison sentences]. I hope that will help a shift of views here in the UK. People having the courage to tell their stories, as you did.

Ross: I was just compelled to do what I did. I never called it courage. When I went to a lawyer the first thing he said to me was that I would be believed as I was a man. I knew intellectually that women were discounted but that hit me hard. I was so worried I would not be believed. But then thinking I was a white male with tenure and resources so if I did not do this, who would? I paid a real price in some ways, but it was also very successful.

Ashley: I have great respect for that Ross. I occasionally have colleagues asking me why I have done this work for 20 years. I suppose I have wanted to understand why people who disclose abuse have been called fantasists, or are accused of having “false memories”. My colleagues ask me why I want to be involved in such a contentious and demanding field.

Ross: I had a senior colleague who asked, “are you still studying that?” with disdain. He could not put words to it.

Ashley: In the coverage of that hearing I heard a definition of being complicit: Knowing what is going on, and doing nothing. I give the question back – and ask: How can you be a psychologist, understanding the reality of dissociative amnesia and recall, and not say anything? Why do we let people believe this does not happen, and why do we allow those who deny and minimise to have such a loud voice? I don’t understand that as a professional.

I remember reading a comment about you, from a FMS (false memory syndrome) advocate, I think, implying that your account was not accurate. What do you say to that?

Ross: The FMS has not denied that I was abused. But they have tried to discount my academic work because of my personal experience. They have also said “you must have remembered all along and were pretending you didn’t”, although there was no legal advantage for doing that and no reason I would have delayed taking the actions that I did when I remembered. One other critic, Mark Pendergrast (a freelance writer – see, e.g. Pendergrast, 2017), has said, “What happened wasn’t traumatic, and it only happened once” and therefore it was just “regular forgetting”. I have no idea how he can claim it only happened once. Anyway, they can’t deny the reality. But they have said that I never proved I forgot! How can you prove you forgot? I say, “look what I did when I remembered!”

Ashley: Bessel Van der Kolk (2015) makes a straight-forward point, that when we talk about traumatic amnesia in soldiers who have been in combat no one seems to argue with that. Early on in my professional life I worked with banks and other organisations where there had been armed robberies. I talked to many, many victims, and learned how they often had memory blanks and struggled to remember detail. They might have remembered seeing the gun, but not how many robbers there were.

Ross: They do attack the reality of this. Elaine Showalter has claimed that PTSD in the context of military people is phoney. There really are deniers of all of this. Already one of the Nassar victims has been accused of “illusory” memory. Mark Pendergrast said when one victim used the word “suppressed” that her memory must be “illusory”. No one in their right mind felt any of those victims were not genuine. This claim is so preposterous – I want this largely publicised.

Ashley: I guess that you are familiar with the Nicole Taus case? [Nicole Taus was the subject of a case study, who was assured anonymity. Elizabeth Loftus published information which made her identity very much easier to discover. See Kluemper, (2014). Taus now holds three postgraduate degrees in psychology].

Ross: I wrote why this was unethical from a journalistic point of view (Cheit, 2014b).

Ashley: I sent you a tiny analysis of Elizabeth Loftus’s TED lecture (Loftus, 2013) where, in my opinion, she inexcusably put Taus’s name up on a slide.

Ross: I was on a panel with Nicole Taus last year and she is now talking out publicly. However, they destroyed her life in many ways. In that TED talk Elizabeth Loftus makes statements about the facts of the case that are simply untrue. She said the mother was accused based on a recovered memory, rather than the statements of a little girl when she was 6 years old.

Ashley: I Have heard of Nicole Taus’s case being referred to as a “black swan case”. You are another black swan aren’t you?

Ross: Yes. I would rather be called that than a poster boy! [Both men laugh]

Ashley: There seem to be a lot of black swans! I wonder if you have a way of making sense of this? For example, for some of those “experts” who so vehemently deny the existence of recovered memory, do you think that there could be any amount of evidence that could cause them to say, “Ah, this person has recovered a genuine, accurate memory, and they were abused?”

Ross: I think that is the litmus test for if someo...