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MOIRA JOHNSTON'S LETTER-TO-THE-EDITOR IN RESPONSE TO STANTON'S STORY IN THE COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW July 29, 1997 TO: ATTN: RE: "U-TURN ON MEMORY LANE," JULY/AUGUST 1997 ISSUE Dear Editor: I read Mike Stanton's article on recovered memory, U-TURN ON MEMORY LANE, with anticipation, since it was the product of a year at Stanford reseaching this epic social issue &emdash; a rare opportunity for deep investigation by a journalist who has shared a Pulitzer Prize. But a year was, apparently, not enough to free him of the biases that seriously compromise the piece as a work of objective journalism. As a National Magazine Award winner who has just completed three years writing a book on the landmark recovered memory trial, RAMONA V. ISABELLA, I feel compelled to comment. Sadly, Stanton permitted his biases to shrink his search for a whole and balanced story. His voices are mostly those of recovered memory's most ardent champions. He gives the all-important scientific, legal, political and historical dimensions short and superficial shrift. Instead, he relies on the woolly dogma of recovered memory ideologues without critical examination of its worth or agendas. Like the troubled young women of the incest survivor movement, he looks for blame for the memories' growing troubles outside the memories themselves. And, indeed, troubles are cascading upon recovered memories &emdash; in courts, in scientific and public opinion, in retractors' revelations, in the published cautions of the major medical and mental health organizations of four nations, and in the reforms being forced on suggestive therapy techniques by insurance companies hit by multi-million dollar malpractice awards against therapists. Superstars Colin Ross, Renee Fredrickson, and Lenore Terr are being sued. Bessel van der Kolk, creator of the elaborate dissociation theory of recovered memory he has argued in courtrooms across the land, has removed himself in embarassment as an expert witness in memory cases. Eileen Franklin, the survivor movement's prime poster child, stands accused of lies and perjury, and sued by her father. Stanton's targets are mainly the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and what he sees as a gullible press manipulated by FMSF's educational juggernaut. No serious journalist who has looked skeptically at the recovered memory phenomenon is immune from Stanton's jabs -- the New York Times' Daniel Goleman, the New Yorker's Lawrence Wright, Frontline's Ofra Bikel, the Wall Street Journal's Dorothy Rabinowitz, and on and on. And yet he lavishes sympathy on Katy Butler as a journalist wronged by the cancellation of a Newsweek article by, he reports, a conspiracy orchestrated by the FMSF. Had he watched Butler through the Ramona trial as I did -- arriving at the courtroom with what I saw as a journalistic conflict of interest (on assignment from the L.A. Times to report the trialwhile also a contributing editor to a national therapists' magazine which had embraced recovered memories), befriending and bonding with the Ramona women so publicly that she earned the distrust of the "other side" and alienated the press corps &emdash; he might have seen threads of the survivor agenda weaving through her skillfully-crafted efforts "to tell both sides of the story." Stanton's thesis that recovered memories have been getting bad press because the media have been conned by the FMSF's press releases is simply indefensible. I started with a mind so open to recovered memories that, after Eileen Franklin's flashbacks of her father raping and killing her childhood friend convicted George Franklin of murder in 1990, I took the prosecuting attorney to lunch to check out this marvelous new power of the mind. Sharing the nation's remorse for having ignored too long the real issue of incest and child abuse, eager to "Believe the Child," and trusting Eileen Franklin's Alice-in-Wonderland quality, I hoped these memories might be a tool to root out all the secret monsters disguised as regular dads. That same guilt was expressed legislatively as nearly half the states rushed to extend their statues of limitations to permit adults with "delayed discovery" of the damage done to them by childhood sexual abuse to sue. It was only after sitting through seven weeks of the 1994 Ramona trial, the first that permitted a father to sue the therapists he charged with planting false memories of childhood sexual abuse in his daughter Holly's mind -- only after three years of investigating all sides and aspects of the controversy from direct sources -- that I arrived at the position of skepticism with which I conclude SPECTRAL EVIDENCE. The FMSF was very helpful in providing information on the legal cases, but were a small part, overall, of my research. Where Stanton sees puppets of FMSF propaganda, I see responsible journalists reporting the news. The news is that the alleged massively repressed-and-recovered memories which are at issue have simply not been able to withstand scientific, legal, and ethical scrutiny, and are on the run. The Ramona jury's verdict that Holly Ramona's memories were false and two therapists guilty of malpractice set the pace for what is being called "science intensive litigation," which imposes rigorous scientific testing of the "memories" in depositions and in pre-trial hearings, hearings which are increasingly halting recovered memories at the courtroom door as inadmissible evidence. As I write this, observers of the memory wars await the California Court of Appeal decision that could bring definitive closure to the wars -- or prolong them past the millennium. If the court declares Holly Ramona's memories inadmissible in the lawsuit she has brought against her father, it would reinforce similar recent decisions from the New Hampshire Supreme Courts and Texas' and California's appellate courts; it would become binding law in California and, because of the seminal influence of Ramona, have repercussions throughout the U.S. A recent graph summarizes this larger story; measuring the numbers of reported recovered memory accusations and lawsuits, the line climbs steeply to 1992, then plunges in 1994 and levels off to a relative trickle today -- the classic rise and fall of a mass psychogenic hysteria. But this is not the story Stanton told. Where did his bias come from? Perhaps from the three-part series he wrote for the Providence Journal-Bulletin on professor Ross E. Cheit's lost-and-found memories of sexual molestation by a camp counselor, abuse he corroborated by similar confessions from a dozen other campers and by a taped confession by the abuser. Stanton literally wraps that story, beginning and end, in the words of one of the most influential voices for the recovered memory and incest survivor movements, Dr. Judith Herman, setting a tone of advocacy. Cheit's compelling experience, says Stanton, "constitutes what experts call some of the best evidence of recovered memory of chidhood abuse." Stanton uncritically assumes the credibility of the memories, taking Lawrence Wright's reportage of the Ingram case to task for "virtually ignoring the many documented instances of recovered memory." But does Stanton have any solid basis for his assumption? The answer matters, for recovered memories, assumed to be true, have been hurled like thunderbolts at fathers like Gary Ramona, destroying careers, lives, reputations; they have ravaged, at a minimum, 20,000 American families over the past decade and created the most divisive mental health controversy of our time. Is Ross Cheit's convincing experience even an example of the "recovered memories" that are at issue? Several of our most credible memory scientists have led me to argue: No. Stanton quotes Harvard's Daniel Schacter, out of context, as seeming to support the notion of recovered memories. A broader reading of Schacter's work, and my hours of interviews with him, cast a far different light on recovered memories than Stanton's. We must differentiate, I've learned, between the two distinctly different kinds of "memories" experienced by Ross Cheit and Holly Ramona. Holly's "memories" are the classic stuff of the hysteria: massive and instantaneous repression of twelve years of horrendous sexual abuse escalating from sexual touches through anal, oral and vaginal rape to forced copulation with the family dog. All traces of these events, it is claimed, slumbered in traumatic memory until, under the care of a therapist for depression and bulimia at age 19, Holly retrieved them as conscious flashbacks of what she came to radiantly believe were real events. The jury found no viable corroboration, and named her memories false. But in a culture raised on Freud, it is a seductive scenario, and elaborate biological/psychological theories have been created to explain how it occurs &emdash; a stew of repression, dissociation, traumatic amnesia, PTSD, hormonal overloads, hippocampal shutdown, and PET scans which "show" traumatic memory. But impeccably credible scientists like Schacter, Joseph LeDoux, Larry Squire and James McGaugh can find no explanation in neuroscience for how this could occur. Or for how a Holly Ramona could show none of the usual symptoms for traumatic amnesia, or for the serious dissociative and posttraumatic stress disorders claimed for her; the most obvious anomaly is that true trauma is, almost always, indelibly remembered. And memory is extraordinarily vulnerable to distortion, suggestion, and the planting of false elements, as memory scientist Elizabeth Loftus argued in the Ramona trial -- an embarassing fact the memory side has been forced to accept. And then there are Ross Cheit's memories of abuse. Confined to one summer, involving the stroking of his genitals by a man he admired, leaving him little more than "ashamed and confused," their pattern is entirely different from Holly Ramona's. While Holly's images are replete with screams and the repulsive smell of her father, Cheit's recognition of his abuse as horror -- as the intolerable betrayal of a child -- came as the intellectual discovery of an adult, which rings true. Schacter believes that the corroborated cases of abuse memories, like Cheit's, "come closer to the rubric of ordinary forgetting and remembering...I don't think you need any of this fancy neuroscience. You just need gradual forgetting, a little bit of conscious avoidance, and directed forgetting. Over time the memory decays. There's some of it left, and with appropriate cues you can recover it. I think that fits just about all the evidence of documented cases -- Ross Cheit, Fitzpatrick...But that doesn't get you to the Holly Ramona-type case, to believing that all this happened and was suddenly recovered." In sum, no methodologically sound, controlled research studies have yet proven that "repression" of the massive kind, and its reliable retrieval, exist. In light of the above, the use of the words "repression" and "recovered" for all memories of abuse is dangerously imprecise. Giving equal credence to both categories risks casting a cloak of doubt over the recall of genuine child abuse like Cheit's, and permits the dubious memories to camuoflague their growing discredit under his authentic colors. Stanton ends his piece with a cry that voices other than FMSF's must be heard. Believe me, they are. His article only strengthens a disturbing chorus of survivor rhetoric currently speaking out from influential forums: from the Harvard Law Review, the ABA's Judges Journal and keynote addresses at psychologists' conferences, from academic journals and the briefs and testimony of major legal cases. I've watched and documented the argued rationales for recovered memory shift, under pressure, from repression to dissociation and traumatic amnesia to, now, the claim that these are merely ordinary memories, to be held to no higher a standard than any other memory. Argued by Northwestern law professors Mertz and Bowman in the Judges Journal and by Holly Ramona's lawyers in a Los Angeles superior court, it is, of course, a sly expedient -- a desperate attempt to leapfrog the pre-trial tests and get the memories before a jury, where anecdote and sentiment might win the day. Does Stanton see how cynical this is? And why does his investigative eye ignore the political forces which fuel the memory wars, primarily Freud-based clinical psychotherapy under siege, and a radical branch of feminism whose goal, as stated by clinician Laura S. Brown, is "the subversion of patriarchy in the client, the therapists, and the therapy process"? This group, in my view, has callously exploited thousands of unhappy Holly Ramonas, urging them to wield their incest memories, false or true, as weapons against the perpetrator patriarchs they see lurking in every home; I hold them responsible for urging the confrontations, lawsuits, and severing of family bonds which, in seeking to destroy patriarchal power, irretrievably destroyed thousands of American famililies. Brown's recent resounding defeat for the presidency of the American Psychological Association by a candidate committed to restoring science to a place within the APA is a noteworthy sign of change. But that's another story. No, these are not ordinary memories. These are a phenomenon unsupported by science, driven by political engines, doing intolerable damage. During his year of reseach, I wish Mike Stanton had seen that. MOIRA JOHNSTON is a National Magazine Award-winning investigative journalist, author of six books of non-fiction. Her book on the recovered memory wars, SPECTRAL EVIDENCE: The Ramona Case: Incest, Memory and Truth on Trial in Napa Valley, has just been published by Houghton Mifflin.
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