<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Prince Andrew remembers what he did on 10 March 2001. In his famous Newsnight<\/em> interview<\/a> with Emily Maitlis three years ago, the Duke of York says he remembers taking his daughter Beatrice to a birthday party at a Pizza Express in Woking somewhere between 4pm and 5pm that day. \u201cI remember it weirdly distinctly,\u201d he says. \u201cGoing to Pizza Express in Woking is an unusual thing for me to do.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n What he doesn\u2019t remember is meeting Virginia Giuffre<\/a>, who has accused the Duke of sexually assaulting her that night and on two other occasions when she was 17.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In fact, Prince Andrew mentions his own memory 18 times during the 50-minute Newsnight<\/em> interview, mostly to describe things he does not remember about Ms Giuffre. \u201cI have no recollection of ever meeting this lady \u2013 none whatsoever,\u201d he says at one point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n https:\/\/buy.tinypass.com\/checkout\/template\/cacheableShow?aid=Xi7fMnt7pu&templateId=OT38VD6MY21E&templateVariantId=OTVPRPHBR1ZY9&offerId=fakeOfferId&experienceId=EXYKFMOE89R7&iframeId=offer_1c60ab708f62d08f4d8e-0&displayMode=inline&pianoIdUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fid.tinypass.com%2Fid%2F&widget=template&url=https%3A%2F%2Finews.co.uk<\/p>\n\n\n\n Presented with a photo appearing to show him with his arm around Ms Giuffre, the royal insists that \u201cwe can\u2019t be certain as to whether or not that\u2019s my hand on her\u2026 because I have no recollection of that photograph ever being taken.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n As far as his own powers of recall are concerned, memory appears to be black and white for Prince Andrew. If you remember things, they happened. If you don\u2019t, they didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n But the royal has not afforded Ms Giuffre the same logic. Prince Andrew\u2019s lawyers last month demanded access to the 38-year-old\u2019s mental health records<\/a>, claiming that Ms Giuffre \u201cmay be suffering from false memories\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As they build up a defence for a potential sexual assault trial later this year, the Duke\u2019s lawyers also want to ask Ms Giuffre\u2019s psychologist, Dr Judith Lightfoot, about subjects the pair discussed at therapy sessions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To Elizabeth Loftus, a distinguished professor at the University of California, Irvine, this is a strong indication that Prince Andrew is laying the groundwork for two possible defences in the potential trial: that Ms Giuffre is a liar, or that her memories have been corrupted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She says: \u201cWith Prince Andrew, I do have to say that if Virginia\u2019s memories are not accurate, and do not reflect some authentic truth, then how come she\u2019s saying it? She could be saying it because she\u2019s just a complete liar. Or she could be saying it because she\u2019s come to believe in what she\u2019s saying.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Professor Loftus, 77, has helped popularise the notion of false memories<\/a>. The term first made its way into courts around the world in the defence cases of several child abuse trials<\/a> in the 80s, as a method of discrediting \u201crepressed memories\u201d that suddenly appeared to spring up among children going through counselling. But a false-memory defence is now the reflex of the rich and famous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For most of the psychologists i<\/strong> spoke to, its transformation is almost single-handedly the product of Professor Loftus\u2019s testimony in a string of recent high-profile cases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The cognitive psychologist has appeared as an expert defence witness at more than 300 trials, including those of OJ Simpson, Ted Bundy, Michael Jackson and Bill Cosby.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She was called by Harvey Weinstein\u2019s lawyers in 2020<\/a> to cast doubt on the memory of Annabella Sciorra, an actress who had accused the former Hollywood film producer of rape in the early 90s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At Ghislaine Maxwell\u2019s trial in New York in December<\/a>, for which Professor Loftus was paid $600 an hour, she described to the jury experiments in which she and colleagues had successfully planted false memories in study participants\u2019 minds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cEven traumatic experiences can be subjected to post-event suggestion,\u201d she said. \u201cFalse memories \u2026 can be very vivid, detailed. People can be confident about them, people can be emotional about them, even though they\u2019re false. The older the event is, the more susceptible people are to having post-event suggestion contaminate their memory.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Speaking over Zoom from her California office, Professor Loftus says that she took on those cases because everybody is entitled to a fair trial, even the so-called \u201cmonsters\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMedia coverage can play a role in these cases. I\u2019ve seen some where somebody is portrayed in the media as being such an awful<\/em>, terrible<\/em>, bad<\/em> person,\u201d she says, throwing her hands about the room, \u201cthat it can make somebody feel that what happened to them was more awful<\/em>, terrible<\/em> and bad<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe idea that there\u2019s so many people around who somehow think that Maxwell\u2019s a guilty monster and that I\u2019m a bad person for even playing a role on the defence \u2013 that disturbs me greatly. I mean, if we decide that unpopular people don\u2019t deserve a defence, that we\u2019re just gonna let the media string them up, then who\u2019s next?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n i <\/strong>understands that the Duke\u2019s legal team have no current plans to call a false memory witness, but that they are not ruling it out. And if Prince Andrew\u2019s team does choose to call one to testify, Professor Loftus has not cast herself out of the running.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIf the case is going to rest on the fact that she\u2019s a liar, then they\u2019re going to be finding a different kind of expert, because I don\u2019t study deliberate liars,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIf the case is going to be a case where maybe she\u2019s come to believe something that they insist is not true, that never happened, then I could see a role for a memory scientist.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The notion of \u201cfalse memories\u201d has gained currency in recent years, largely due to the string of celebrity sexual assault trials in which Professor Loftus has been involved. But the theory is in its early days, and has only begun to shoulder its way into courts over the past few decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The British False Memory Society (BFMS) was established in 1993, on the heels of international panic over claims of satanic child abuse in the 80s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The organisation echoed the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF), a US group set up a year earlier by an American academic accused by his own daughter of child sexual abuse. Peter Freyd and his wife Pam claimed that they were among an expanding group of parents whose now adult children had been exploited by therapists who encouraged the recovery of \u201cfalse memories\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt first happened in the US, but what we had at the time was sort of an epidemic of middle-class families whose daughters had been into therapy, most of them had been university educated, and basically they just said that they suddenly remembered things happening to them in their childhood,\u201d says Dr Kevin Felstead, communications director at the BFMS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dr Felstead first became involved in the world of false memories after his sister\u2019s death in 2005. Carol Felstead, from Stockport in the UK, was found dead aged 41 under mysterious circumstances. Medical notes disclosed to her family after her death showed that she had spent two decades accusing her parents of sexually abusing her as part of a satanic cult.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s a horror story. My mother went grey pretty much overnight. She couldn\u2019t understand why her daughter would make allegations like that against her,\u201d says Dr Felstead. The notes revealed that Carol began to get intense headaches aged 21 for which medical professionals were unable to find a cause. She was passed on to consultants, and then psychologists, and then eventually to a hypnotherapist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAfter two or three sessions the woman giving her hypnosis wrote something like, \u2018It\u2019s become clear that Carol has been systematically, emotionally, physically and sexually abused. Carol can\u2019t remember these things but further details will be revealed in due course.\u2019 Well if Carol can\u2019t remember it, then who\u2019s saying it?\u201d says Dr Felstead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Carol\u2019s case has become a paradigm example in false memory cases involving what\u2019s known as \u201cregression counselling\u201d, where repressed memories suddenly appear to spring back to life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The notion of repressed memories has its roots in Freudian psychology, but enjoyed a boom in the late 80s and early 90s, when Third Wave feminism saw a surge in women entering therapy and talking openly about sexual assault. Repressed memories are certainly possible, according to most psychologists, but extremely rare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Studies have shown that while victims might not remember the exact details of a traumatic episode \u2013 what time of day it was, what they were wearing, whether it was in the bathroom or in the hallway \u2013 they usually remember that the event in question was traumatic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The BFMS has spent the best part of two decades attempting to discredit the \u201cmedieval quackery\u201d of regression counselling while raising \u201cpublic awareness of the inherent dangers of false memory\u201d. Unlike its US counterpart, which dissolved in 2019, the BFMS also runs a helpline for people in Britain who consider themselves falsely accused and offers to link them up with a false memory expert to testify in court. According to Dr Felstead, the group has around 4,000 files in its archive and is rapidly adding more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When somebody gets in touch with the BFMS, a member of the group will have an initial chat with them and look out for \u201cthe usual alarm bells\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI won\u2019t take your case if alarm bells don\u2019t ring,\u201d says Dr Felstead. \u201cThe main one is obviously whether the person they\u2019re accused by has been to any form of counselling that has led to the allegation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n For years the group largely handled child-abuse allegations. A landmark libel case in 2002, where two Newcastle nursery workers were awarded \u00a3200,000 each in damages, helped popularise the notion of false memories across UK courts. The High Court ruled that Dawn Reed and Christopher Lillie had suffered \u201cdevastating and ruinous\u201d allegations that they had sexually abused children in their care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the number of court cases where the accused are seeking a false-memory defence against adult sexual assault victims has rapidly increased in recent years. Since 2000, 108 false memory cases have gone through UK courts alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe\u2019ve got university professors accused at the moment,\u201d says Dr Felstead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThis is so widespread across society right now \u2013 the idea that you can go into counselling and suddenly remember these things that you previously had no memory of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI\u2019m a historian. My background\u2019s the history of crime and sexual violence, and in the 2,000 or so assault cases I studied the female victims were badly let down by the current justice system. They weren\u2019t believed, their sexual antecedents were dragged up to discredit them. And then since Savile, it\u2019s swung the other way. And that\u2019s a problem.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n A global push to \u201cbelieve all victims\u201d in the wake of revelations about disgraced BBC presenter Jimmy Savile<\/a> and the #MeToo movement<\/a> has been tethered by the steady rise of false memory experts in sexual assault trials, says Dr Felstead \u2013 notably Professor Loftus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But critics have been quick to note that in her 50-odd years in the profession, the cognitive psychologist has almost exclusively testified for the defence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Figures in the legal community have claimed with increasing vigour that Professor Loftus is helping normalise the \u201cgaslighting\u201d of victims in sexual-assault trials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cShe\u2019s like a cartoon character,\u201d says Wendy Murphy, a professor of sexual violence law at New England Law in Boston and a former sex-crimes prosecutor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cA false memory expert is an unjust thumb on the scale. It\u2019s not just unfair on the victims, it\u2019s unfair on the public.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"Professor](\"https:\/\/wp.inews.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/PRI_222497440-760x495.jpg\")
![\"FILE](\"https:\/\/wp.inews.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/PRI_220336240-760x430.jpg\")