Do you think that there can ever be a chance, a world in which something happens to you?
You are conscious.
You are not under the influence of any substance.
You are wide awake.
You are alert.
You are fully functioning.
You're not ill.
You're not feeling dazed.
And then something happens, either right in front of your face or something happens to you and you do not remember it.
Is that possible?
And then one day, 20 years later, you suddenly remember this moment that you had.
Is that something that actually happens?
Are repressed memories real?
It depends on who you ask.
Pick a side and welcome to the memory wars.
This was a huge thing back in the 90s, the memory wars was.
There is one side of people who believe that your mind is so powerful that you can repress these traumatic memories deep into the back of your brain and then they can come back to you when your brain decides that you are safe enough to start working through this trauma.
That these memories are hidden, but the signs of something being there is not hidden.
So these memories still influence your behavior, your emotions, maybe even physical symptoms.
But these memories themselves are repressed.
You have no recollection of them for a really long time.
Then you have the other side of people who believe that this is not a real thing, that you cannot just forget a memory and then suddenly remember a memory.
And the stakes for the memory wars are very high.
You're talking about criminal convictions, multi-million dollar lawsuits, families being ripped apart.
If all you have is a memory from 20 years ago, how do you know who is telling the truth?
It could be likely that if you ask someone from the false memory syndrome foundation, they would tell you that they're all lying.
This isn't real.
You cannot have repressed memories.
The people who say they do, you know, they're lying and the memories are false.
They're untrue.
That's why we call it false memory syndrome.
Now I will note this is not like a real syndrome that's recognized by the DSM-5 or anything, but I guess you could throw syndrome behind anything.
They say this is real.
False Memory Syndrome Foundation.
This is a non-profit organization that believes that people are following the trend of recovering repressed memories for all sorts of reasons attention to feel special, to feel traumatized, to feel victimized.
They're accusing their incredible parents, who have birthed them, who have raised them, of being abusers.
Church leaders are losing their positions in their community because someone recovered a memory 20 years later of abuse.
And if it's not stopped, the False Memory Syndrome Foundation says the world is going to be ripped at the seams because this is pretty much I mean an epidemic.
They state on their website that they created FMSF for three reasons.
One to seek the reasons for the spread of false memory syndrome that is so devastating for families.
Two, to work for ways to prevent it.
And three, to aid those who are affected by it and bring their families into reconciliation.
The foundation argues that we can never really know what happened so many years ago.
But without independent external corroboration nobody can really differentiate between a true memory and a false memory.
And without evidence, I mean, it just can't be real.
Either the abuser must admit it or someone must have witnessed it, to have seen it, which is a very interesting outlook, considering if someone is abusing a child, they typically don't like to say so and they typically don't like people to be around watching, but nevertheless,
FMSF and skeptics of recovered repressed memories, they say it was like a trend in the 90s.
A lot of people were recovering repressed memories.
A lot of high-profile books came out at the time is what they argue.
You could just pick it up at the bookstore and they'll say, are you a survivor of incest?
Here's a checklist.
And they would include things like anxiety, depression, eating disorders.
And then that would make you feel like maybe I was.
They state that these books are the reason that people start believing that they were abused as a kid.
They would provide you step-by-step instruction guides, if you will, on how to recover such repressed memories.
Some would even encourage collaborative memory recall.
With one book reading, let yourself imagine, let yourself picture what might have happened to you.
Occasionally, you may need a small verbal push to get started.
Your guide may suggest some action that seems to arise naturally from the image that you are picturing.
Skeptics say that a lot of cases false memory implantation happens by way of quote, suggesting things to people.
Guided imagination, you know, taking them through imagination exercises when they can't remember something.
Sexualized dream interpretation.
Oh, you have a dream of this.
Maybe it goes back to your childhood.
Hypnosis, giving people books to read that advance the theory of repression.
Putting them in group therapy when they don't have any memories and they listen to a lot of other people talk about childhood abuse, exposing them to other forms of suggestive psychotherapy.
Those are why people have these repressed memories.
And they say boom.
That's all it takes for this new memory to form, for you to believe that you were abused as a child.
They say the more people around you that have been victimized, the more likely you are able to even picture your own victimization.
Which could be, or it could just be that a lot of people have been victimized.
What do we know, right?
I will say the false memory syndrome foundation aren't particularly the most convincing people out there.
However, one thing that has stuck with a lot of people and I'm just saying netizens out there on the debate of whether or not repressed memories are real is that a lot of research so far has shown that emotional and traumatic events are typically remembered better, and not worse, than mundane experiences.
So studies on trauma survivors consistently show that traumatic memories they tend to be very intrusive, persistent.
They're difficult to forget rather than inaccessible.
So they state that in neuroscience, when your body has a spike in adrenaline and norepinephrine, it actually strengthens memory consolidation through the amygdala, which makes emotional memories more durable over time.
It's like adding extra strength to it so it never disappears.
This is human adaptation, because remembering threats helps us avoid them.
But that's just what research shows.
That doesn't mean that's the only way that our brains work.
In fact, trauma makes brains work in very strange and unreasonable ways.
Other scholars argue differently, such as Jennifer.
She's a doctor, and we'll get into Jennifer in a second.
She states that children who are abused by their caregivers are in an impossible situation.
So a lot of people who have her past memories, it's from their childhood.
And she states a lot of it is because when you are being abused by your caregiver as a child, there's no reason for your brain to keep it in your mind as a threat.
Because there's nothing you can do about it.
It's not like you can avoid the threat any longer.
This is your caregiver that's abusing you.
You don't have a choice.
Not that anyone who is abused has a choice, but it's harder to do threat assessments as a child versus an adult.
Okay, what does that mean then?
If I go to the grocery store and I get whacked, and this is like obviously a much simplistic analogy that has.
No, I don't want anyone to think that I'm comparing the severity of SA or anything like that.
But if I go to the grocery store and I get hit with a cart...
I'm going to remember that as an adult because I don't want to get hit with a card again.
But as a child I mean.
That's why children are so reckless with their bodies, sometimes because there's less of a threat assessment.
That can be done when you're that young.
And so she's saying if you were abused as a child, your brain might not remember it and keep it at the forefront of your memory because there's no way for you to avoid that threat next time.
Whereas an adult, you may feel like you could try to avoid it.
Again, not saying that SA is avoidable by any means.
That's interesting.
Your brain might try to think that it is.
I mean, these kids are dependent on the ones that are harming them, which means they may adapt.
This allows the child to fake security in their parental relationships.
Maintain that relationship that is necessary for survival.
It's almost betrayal blindness.
That's what she calls it.
Also, it can be argued by those with repressed memories that, yes, the memory formation is there.
I mean, clearly the memory is there.
It's not like it disappeared.
It's not like you didn't form the memory.
It's not like you threw it away.
It's just stored in a way that's difficult for you to recall.
Basically, disassociative amnesia.
And this is highly studied and highly recognized.
Is this the same thing as the repressed memory?
There's differences between the two, but a lot of people actually think when you really hone in on repressed memories, they think it's like a variation of disassociative amnesia, which there's not a lot of debate on whether or not disassociative amnesia exists or not.
So people are just saying this seems like a different, almost like a fragment of that.
Yeah.
This debate on whether or not repressed memories are real was so big that it was dubbed the memory wars.
Doctors from both sides wrote paper after paper to disprove the other party and in the end nobody comes to a freaking agreement.
But regardless of what the doctors are arguing and a lot of people have experiences like firsthand accounts of recovering repressed memories one netizen writes for me it always starts with like a feeling.
It feels like something is trying to get my attention, but i don't know what.
I just know that i'm forgetting something important.
That's like the feeling that you have in the beginning, like i keep.
I don't know what it is, it's just bothering you.
That could last for weeks and then i'll get an image.
Usually it's a blip of something And it lingers very unsettling for a few days, a few weeks, whatever.
And then something happens and then I suddenly will remember.
And with that memory, it's not even just like the memory I remember.
The appropriate feelings that were repressed just hit you like a brick at once.
It probably varies from person to person, but that has been my experience.
Hmm.
Another person online writes, repressed memories are absolutely real.
I mean they could occur, because the experience is just too painful to process, so your brain tries to forget it.
But your brain can't really forget serious trauma any more than your leg can forget getting broken.
The imprint remains.
You could also repress a memory simply because it doesn't seem worth remembering.
So for me personally...
This is the netizen.
Abuse was so frequent and so extreme in my childhood, I didn't even register it after a while.
It was as normal as eating breakfast.
I don't remember most if all of the breakfasts I've eaten as a kid.
A lot of my memories started to come back in my 20s, after I left my parents, and it took a really long time to piece them together and I compulsively doubted myself.
I kept saying things like, it couldn't have been like that for a lot of reasons.
You know, it could have been this.
Someone would have done something to stop it.
No, sane people would behave... differently.
One clinician states, it's not what you really think it is.
Like people try to make repressed memories seem like something, but honestly she says I've never seen a patient recover repressed memories.
I'm not sure they're considered real.
The clinician writes, what is real though is memory disturbance during trauma.
So she's just saying there's so much connotation with repressed memories.
We just call it memory disturbance.
Memories may be missing.
They may be incomplete.
They may be warped.
And it's not that these memories are corrected in any way for you to remember, but the memories you do have will be associated with other memories and sensations and experiences that you already have on file in your brain.
Some of these memories can be surprising because you may not have thought about them in a really long time and the emotions attached can be surprisingly intense.
So think of your memory like a computer.
It's not designed to pull things out of the recycling bin, but it does take all the junk that's sitting on your desktop and tags it with things sensations emotions, images that are related, and then they file them away properly.
So the way that they're explaining it is like sometimes you will have this very specific experience trigger that file to be automatically opened.
Like a file that you didn't even remember you had.
And that is precisely what happens to Mary, repressed memories.
So Before we get into it, a few really big disclaimers for this episode.
There are mentions of extremely difficult subjects like animal abuse, torture and death, as well as child abuse.
Essay trafficking torture, ritualistic abuse.
There are mentions of DV, essay, and intergenerational incest.
And lastly, there is a discussion regarding hate groups such as the KKK, as well as other violent ideologies.
Please pause the video whenever you begin to feel uncomfortable or need a break.
This is part one of a two-part series on Mary Knight, who is a survivor of ritualistic child abuse, and this is her quest to figure out if her memories are real.
This episode is going to lay the groundwork.
It's going to introduce you to some of the unbelievable I mean, dare I say, professionals who have made it their life's work to discredit child abuse survivors such as Mary.
And, in the meantime, as you wait for part two on our series with Mary Knight, which is a really, really special passion project we're excited to show you, I highly recommend checking out Mary's memoir My Life Now and her documentaries as part of her own investigation to see if her memories are real, all of which is going to be linked in the description.
With that being said, let's get back to Mary and the False Memory Syndrome Foundation.
Mary says that she remembers when she was young.
I mean, this is really young.
She recalls wearing a white dress that would get dirty rather quickly.
She watches as she sees her dad hang a rope from a tree branch and her mom comes around and ties the rope around her neck.
There's other people there.
The first man holds Mary as a child and quote, does icky stuff to her.
She is in a lot of pain but ultimately, when he's done, he just looks at her like he almost did her a favor.
Quote you're lucky i didn't drop you.
You know you would die if i did.
That's the look that he's giving her, because she's being suspended in the air while he is abusing her and it's the rope is tied around her neck.
So if he did drop her it would have been very bad, Mary says.
That day there were other men in rapid succession of one another.
Each time she thought about dying and all she could think about was wanting her mom to take care of her and save her.
And this is like her primary feeling in this moment.
Until finally, the rope is cut.
She falls to the ground and the rope is like falling on her like a snake.
And, as a final act of true untethered evil, they throw dirt on Mary before finally urinating on top of the dirt.
As Mary is laying there, she says again, she just wanted her mom to save her.
She writes in her memoir, if I just know that my mom cares about me, I will be okay.
But when she looks up and she sees her mom, it's like her mom is looking at a dirty animal and not even a person, not even her daughter, which at the time Mary says that hurt more than with the men and the violence all day that happened.
Mary writes about herself as a little girl and she says, quote the only thing the little girl looks forward to is being dead.
Eleanor Goldstein is a big member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and she has her own book out, which is not the best read.
I will tell you that.
I read the book.
But she writes about how, quote, false memories like Mary's are tearing families apart.
The book is all about what?
False memory is a lie?
One of the books that she wrote, and yeah, I don't know why they write so many books.
I'm talking about the False Memory Syndrome Foundation.
But one of the books that she wrote is a collection of stories of parents who are accused by their adult children of abuse.
They don't talk to any of the victims.
She doesn't talk to any of the survivors.
She doesn't talk to any of the adults that were kids that are accusing their parents now.
She just talks to the parents and they all have their own little chapter in the book.
And they write about how these quote-unquote false memories like Mary's are tearing families apart.
Yes, Eleanor Goldstein knows Mary, and Eleanor Goldstein believes that Mary is lying.
What proof does Eleanor Goldstein have?
Not really any.
But she writes in her book imagine what it's like to have the person you have loved nurtured, idolized your child suddenly turn against you and accuse you of the most horrendous crimes imaginable.
That is what is happening in the US today.
And Mary decides after she uncovers her repressed memories.
And now Mary is going to meet with Eleanor Goldstein, a prominent member of False Memory Syndrome Foundation.
She's also going to meet with the founder, Pamela Fried, the founder of False Memory Syndrome Foundation.
People who have spent their life saying that people like Mary are lying.
Mary wants to go and talk to them.
Mary says around that time, her mother had passed away.
But with, you know now, filming a documentary.
Mary has a documentary which, like I said, I'm going to link all below.
But she said, talking to these people, I mean I'm sure it's bringing up a lot of these unresolved feelings about her mother being deceased.
And there's a lot of mixed feelings, with the feeling of familial connection to her mom, which wasn't there with her dad.
But regardless, she's feeling that and she's feeling angry.
She's feeling betrayed.
She's feeling hurt.
And she says, as I prepared for the interview, with Eleanor Goldstein and Pamela Fried.
It was obvious to me that I had not gotten over the loss of my mother.
So I decided to bake cookies for Pamela with my mother's recipe.
False Memory Syndrome Foundation believes that therapy is the triggering problem.
When a patient, a person, meets a therapist who has a steadfast belief that there is a strong link between past essay and current individual pathology, they might persuade the patient to remember past abuse that the foundation believes did not happen.
One very high profile psychologist who has inserted herself into studying so-called false memory syndrome.
She states to understand who we are and why we are the way we are, many therapists encourage us to go back to our childhood and find out what happened to us there.
If we are in pain, we are told there must be a cause.
If we cannot locate the cause, we might not have looked deep enough.
If we have looked deep enough and we have found something, but we don't believe it, we might be in denial.
And on goes the search to find the truth of our lives and the memories we have, and the memories we have lost.
Some people have stated that they believe repressed memories being uncovered in therapy is quote that's how you turn a 2000 eating disorder patient into a 200000 eating disorder patient.
So a lot of the doctors who don't believe in the repressed memories being true, they think it's a way for therapists and clinicians to get more money out of patients.
Because, oh, you're just depressed and anxious.
Well, maybe I could solve it in three sessions.
But now if I tell you that your entire life is a lie, then you might need a few years.
Which is a very dangerous stigma to place on therapists, who already have such a strong stigma that they're working against.
But these doctors believe that many psychologists are trying to make more money by convincing their patients that they are deeply, deeply traumatized and They need to uncover, unpack and process all of that trauma.
One author who has studied disassociative amnesia.
They think that disassociative amnesia even is not real.
They write, I don't think there's good evidence of it.
Traumatizing children actually find it hard not to think about the terrifying events.
They typically have lots of nightmares and flashbacks.
In contrast, recovered memories of trauma can often be traced back to suggestive therapy techniques such as journaling, dream interpretation and hypnosis.
With the foundation website writing, They state that once the patient remembers the therapist quote, patients may be advised to cut off contact with anyone who does not support their new beliefs, thus eliminating any opportunity for alternative explanations.
Finally, some patients may cling to these abuse memories because they provide an answer for their psychological pain.
The foundation continues.
When callers ask questions about if their recovered memories are true, we generally urge them to consider how these memories came to them.
If repeated and suggestive questioning, inappropriate group therapy practices, imagination exercises or memory enhancement techniques such as hypnosis were involved.
We caution callers that, although they may believe that they are remembering more, no evidence supports using these techniques for uncovering historically reliable memories.
Hypnosis and truth serum are especially unreliable for these purposes.
In a book written by Eleanor Goldstein, she writes about what happens to trigger repressed memories.
And she puts repressed memories in quotes.
She says.
Typically a successful, intelligent woman goes to a therapist with a problem perhaps about her marriage, her children, an unexplicable illness like an eating disorder.
She emerges from therapy with the belief that all of her problems are related to childhood sexual abuse.
And after perhaps first accusing a babysitter, a cousin, a family friend or a teacher, the parent is accused.
Not allowed to present a defense and abandoned, perhaps even sued.
There is a growing belief that sexual abuse of all sorts engulfs our nation.
Celebrities have told their stories of incest and rape and dozens of books have been written.
Talk shows, newspaper, and magazine articles tell the details which horrify us all.
We appear to be a nation of depraved sex maniacs.
Mass hysteria is being created by the media, which leads us to believe that a large portion of adults in our society are perpetrators of heinous crimes, and our children are in constant danger from almost everyone they may come in contact with, especially family members.
The consequences of this mass hysteria are devastating, since it is believed that sex abuse is common.
Therapists teachers, doctors are all looking for it everywhere, and many are finding it even when it doesn't exist.
But, of course, regardless of what someone believes, there are a few strange things, such as the False Memory Syndrome Foundation is a nonprofit more or less raising awareness.
And I want to say lobbying or rallying against, quote false memory syndrome which again, is not a recognized syndrome.
But they will sometimes pay psychiatrists $110,000 to write a paper to debunk repressed memories.
And you're telling me there's no bias there?
Yeah.
How do we know that they paid?
Because it's a nonprofit.
So a lot of their stuff is public information.
They will pay like a Harvard psychiatrist who has a very strong name in the field.
And then when you read paper done by Harvard psychiatrists, you're thinking OK, maybe this is legitimate.
Turns out it's funded by the False Memory Syndrome Foundation.
And how it even shows how much they paid him.
Wow.
And everyone will take this paper at face value without realizing that they got paid a fat fee for it.
I mean, I think there is no doubt that hypnosis can create a state of suggestibility.
I don't think anyone is arguing that.
I also do think that the power of suggestion and I do think memory is a wishy-washy thing in the sense of I think no one has an airtight memory.
I think you could remember someone wearing a red shirt, but it was a blue shirt.
But overall most people and most psychiatrists agree that typically the gist of what happened, you do have a strong grasp on that, especially for traumatic events, especially for anything in particular that is of importance.
I'm not doubting that the power of suggestion can be huge on humans, but I'm not sure how it implants full blown memories of prolonged childhood abuse that coincide with other major life events that people have.
I mean, I tend to agree with this one netizen who sums it up very well.
And they write, here's what my therapist told me about quote unquote false memories.
Memories that are completely made up and have no basis in reality, they can exist.
They can. but must be repeatedly and continuously reinforced in order to be maintained.
And false memories cannot give you trauma.
You would not have trauma responses without the trauma.
For example, if someone tells you over and over and over again that you were in a really bad car accident, but you just don't remember it.
Your brain can convince you that you can remember such a thing and you could probably even visualize it.
But it wouldn't make you scared of driving.
It wouldn't give you flashbacks of an accident that never happened.
And once that person stops the reinforcement of that memory and false beliefs associated, it usually fades and eventually completely goes away.
Unless you're saying that all these therapists across the nation are just CIA-level, MKUltra-level brainwashers, which doesn't seem to be the case.
Also, I just don't see why someone would subject themselves to something like having these repressed memories.
There are very clear emotions associated with having these come back up.
False Memory Syndrome Foundation and their members make it seem like people just can't wait to be victims of their parents.
They can't wait, which is a very silly take without any nuance.
One netizen writes it feels horrible.
I had signs of csa, like i would pee myself a lot at school growing up um, but i didn't remember any of that.
But they say that um the the netizen says you know, one day they urinated on themselves at work as an adult and they just started crying in a way that was irrational.
An adult who urinates on themselves at work?
Yes, you might start crying because it's embarrassing, but it was almost like a mental breakdown of a crying.
And they state that I even hugged my boss, who happens to be a raging asshole, so I would never hug them.
Like that's how caught off guard I was.
I was terrified.
Every time I have one of these repressed memories, I feel like the world is spinning.
I get this weird feeling.
It's familiar.
I mean, I guess I used to feel that after stuff would happen and my brain would block out the memories.
I'm still in shock and I don't want to believe what happened.
Repressed memories are weird.
In fact, it's not like people don't doubt themselves.
Again, the false memory syndrome foundation makes it seem like you have this vague memory that comes up in a hypnosis session and then you make it your life's mission and you're like ah, this is my new life.
This is my new whole personality.
But most people who have repressed memories come back up.
They spend years believing it's not true.
They spent years doubting it.
They spent years trying to find reasons why it's not true, to confirm that this is a false memory.
But it's not confirmed.
Nobody wants to be traumatized.
Nobody wants these things to have happened.
And oftentimes, therapists won't even believe you.
One netizen writes online, "'I don't know if I've suffered from childhood essay.'"
But I was reading the book The Body Keeps the Score recently and then I got to the section where he talked about Julian being assaulted by that priest and I immediately had a memory resurface of taking a shower with my mom when I was a child and I remember being incredibly upset about something and hating the stinging of water in my face.
I remember her naked body in front of me being eye level with her privates.
I had this very strong feeling of wanting to get out, but I just knew that if I got water on the floor, I knew I would get yelled at or beaten.
I don't know what this means.
I don't know if she did something to me or had me do something to her, but that particular section of the book triggered this random memory, which I completely buried.
I brought it up with my therapist, outlining that I've always had an irrational fear of women's private parts.
They make me so uncomfortable, and I never knew why, but he glossed over it and moved on instead to focusing on my marriage issues.
Mary says...
I decided to use hypnosis as a way to regain memories.
And I taped the hypnosis sessions.
She taped the sessions to make sure that she was not guided into any sort of conclusion.
And she, Mary, let us go through her tapes.
Mary says that's the thing about the memories.
She had to not only go through the process of trying to verify if these memories are real, but also sort out which ones were manipulated by her parents and which ones were not.
So, for example, there is one incident where Mary is certain that she had witnessed people being slaughtered.
She says this is when she was five years old.
She was told to stand outside the isolated family property.
They lived in the countryside.
They don't have any neighbors.
And all you can see is like the top of this random hill from the outside of the house.
She sees figures moving on the hill, mainly shadows.
I mean, clearly it's her dad and a few other men.
And there's like this wooden work table up there.
And quote, although I could not clearly see what they were doing, I could see that they had knives.
I was told that they were sacrificing unborn babies.
She says i was instructed to stay still for what seemed like a very long time, and what i remember most vividly about this incident is just how much my feet hurt.
I was wearing tan saddle oxfords and white socks, as young children often do, you know.
I stood on the outer side of one foot and then on the other foot.
I squeezed my toes together as tight as i can.
I stood on my heels.
I tried anything to stop my feet from burning.
She remembers all of these sensations vividly.
And she does remember seeing on this hill flesh, like a lot of flesh.
It looked at the time like young babies, fetuses being mutilated.
But that's when she's five.
Mary knows that's not what happened.
I mean, this is an example of how her parents would make her feel fear.
She thinks that they likely purchased an animal and as a five-year-old, you are told what you're seeing and you believe it.
She believes that there's no way that they were slaughtering actual fetuses or babies, but probably some sort of animal, and showing her what they're capable of so that she would stay quiet.
And the biggest thing with the FMSF the False Memory Syndrome Foundation is that they believe any and all allegations of abuse like these based on memory and not medical analysis or CCTV camera footage or just like a hey, I know what happened because I was there.
They believe that they all need corroborating.
How do you corroborate that?
And it's interesting because during the interviews that Mary has with Pamela and Eleanor Goldstein, They act like Mary doesn't have any corroborating evidence, like zero, none.
But Mary does.
Mary's cousin actually remembered abuse nine years before Mary did.
She reached out to Mary to tell her that she had been abused as a kid by her father.
So this would have been Mary's uncle.
Mary remembers, I had just become a mother.
I brought my infant son with me.
I sat with her on an old faded couch.
I breastfed my son while I listened to her heartfelt recollections and when she finished.
So this is the time when mary was working as a social worker, so she's very good at listening to people.
She's also very good at identifying gaps in stories, because you know you're interviewing parents to see if they're fit enough to take care of their children and you have to be able to realize when people are lying or it doesn't make sense.
And she tells her her cousin i believe you and her cousin's face falls Because clearly she does not want to hear that.
Mary says she wanted me to say that she was wrong.
I mean, no one wants to believe that their own father essayed them.
There was another cousin.
Mary really tried to get in contact with her, but they drifted apart.
Eventually, she runs into her own cousin at, of all places, Survivors for Child Abuse Conference.
Mary didn't even realize it was her cousin that she had been searching for, and that cousin thought that Mary was ignoring her on purpose in the hallways.
Eventually, they exchanged emails, but Mary took down the wrong email, resulting in them losing contact for another year until finally they met up two years later and Mary asked her were you essayed by our grandfather?
Because that's what Mary remembers.
The cousin says yes.
Not really expecting any sort of answer, she asks, did my father ever essay you?
The cousin tells her yes.
She says, he wasn't somebody who physically touched me, but almost coaching others somehow.
Taking pictures as well, encouraging others to be involved in sexual acts with me, and filming them.
Which is exactly what Mary recovered in her repressed memories.
And she hadn't told her cousin this.
She had these memories of being filmed and that CSAM was being created.
Furthermore, the church that Mary used to go to, the Church of Christ.
She went back to try and figure out if any church members were known to be abusers, because she had these recollections of being abused in like a Bible study room in that church.
And she couldn't really investigate much because the police didn't want to help her.
And it's not like she can just conduct interviews with people and hope that they give her a confession that would lead them straight to prison.
However, Jimmy Hinton he is the minister of the Church of Christ in Pennsylvania and also a very good friend of Mary's jimmy's sister had a very similar experience to mary.
Jimmy became the minister after his dad had been the minister of this church for 40 years.
He's adjusting.
He's like trying to be a dad, trying to be a minister, and that is when his adult sister alex, is like jimmy i need to talk to you and she tells him that she has these repressed memories of their father, the minister, abusing her.
Alex is actually interviewed and she's asked you know, I understand that you felt like you had a pretty happy childhood, but in 2011, you started having flashbacks that remind you of the abuse that occurred.
What can you tell me about that?
Alex says, I saw this picture of my dad touching me in an inappropriate way.
But it was one of those things at first.
I tried to shrug off the image in my head like that didn't really happen.
You know what I mean?
Like maybe it was an accident.
Maybe I'm not remembering something correctly.
You know, I just kept trying to brush it off.
It was just like bits and pieces.
I didn't have a full memory of it, so I couldn't quite put it together.
Then in 2011, I was 20 years old.
My dad had asked me to help him babysit kids a couple of times, So he was still babysitting after he retired as a minister, like church kids.
I took them swimming and it was just like small things that the kids would say of like, can we sleep over at his house today?
And just like he just gave her a weird feeling, and Where the kids said, if they can sleep over at the dad's house.
Yeah.
Not that relatives can't be abusers.
Obviously, clearly they can.
But it's like your old minister from the church.
I can't imagine ever sleeping over at my minister's house unless there was like a Bible study with a lot of church leaders involved and like.
Or like you usually have sleepovers at the church is what I recall growing up religious.
Not that I'm religious anymore, but it's just weird.
And so she just has this weird feeling about the whole thing.
So you're saying these kids has done that before.
They've slept over it.
That's why then when they brought it up, she was like, that's weird.
And it's giving her more flashbacks.
Yes.
And it's like triggering these feelings in her.
And that's when she says, quote, I finally put it together that yes, that did happen to me.
Looking back, what kind of impacted the abuse that you suffered have on your life?
I struggled with anxiety and depression ever since I could remember.
I had horrible insomnia as a kid.
I was afraid to go to bed or sleep in my own bed.
When I was probably 13, 14 is when I had severe depression and I just didn't know why.
I would sit at home and I would just cry.
But I couldn't put into words why I was feeling what I was feeling.
Looking back now, all of it makes sense.
But since the memories were repressed, there was nothing coming up like.
Oh, this is why I'm feeling depressed.
However, the police, unlike what they do for Mary, which they just tell Mary hey, your memories mean nothing and it's past the statute of limitations
Goodbye.
They actually do investigate.
They primarily investigate because they argue that he is a former minister, community leader, who is in charge of babysitting kids.
So they just bring him in for a quick little questioning.
And during the interrogation, he confesses. like a confessional.
He confesses to S saying not just his own daughter.
And again, these are repressed memories.
She didn't have quote unquote evidence of it.
She confesses to S saying not just his own daughter, but more than 20 children over the span of 40 years.
And after he is arrested he calls his son Jimmy, the new minister, to tell him I'm really glad you guys caught me, because my next victim was going to be your daughter.
Jimmy, his granddaughter.
Yeah.
Wow.
And this is all from Alex's repressed memory resurfacing.
Yes.
And they end up finding CSAM on his devices.
The victims were between the ages of four and seven years old.
And now the 69-year-old preacher is going to serve 30 to 60 years in prison.
Side note, that's another strong similarity of Alex and Mary's story.
Both of their dads are very active members of the church and, from an adult perspective, nobody thought that they were creepy.
Like, you know how some people, you say, oh, they just give me a creepy vibe.
Neither of them were ever, they never had reputations like that.
They were all seen as well-to-do men.
Jimmy, the minister's, son of the predator.
You know the son of the predator.
He states when I go and I do seminars of abuse now I say, if you're looking for the weird guy who's hiding in the bushes, or even the guy that's awkward to be around, you're looking in the wrong place.
By definition, a successful PDF file pedophile is somebody that you would least expect.
I wish I could stand here and tell you that my dad was this and that and he was creepy and we knew all along he was a deadbeat, he was this, he was physically, verbally abusive because
If he was all of those things, it would be easier to wrap your mind around how he was able to do all the things that he did.
But he wasn't any of those things.
A lot of people in the church.
You know Jimmy is very religious and he tries to teach other churches about how to identify perpetrators.
And he says you know, you go to a church where someone is accused and all the adults say no, he's such a nice guy though.
There's just I mean, he has a wife, he has children, and I've never seen him be creepy.
Jimmy says, everything you're saying, you're describing my dad.
And look what happened.
However, the main difference between Mary and Alex's cases are again just the outcome of the case, because Jimmy Hinton believed his little sister and he went to the police and they were willing to open an investigation.
The police listened, they found the evidence and Jimmy also depressingly states they got really lucky.
We got lucky enough to find current victims, because if it were just his sister, it would be past the statute of limitations.
And he says, think about that statement for a minute.
We were lucky enough that he had current victims who are young enough to fall within the statute of limitations.
Jimmy also says about his sister what most people say about anyone who has repressed memories.
I mean, she just had no reason to make that up.
Like, there was absolutely nothing to gain by making it up.
In fact, most people who have repressed memories... their whole family life is torn apart.
Even their extended family members don't want to believe them.
They don't talk to them.
Like you're shunned from the community.
People who then date you, they think, oh, are you going to make allegations about me?
It's hard to make friends.
Like they're not living a great life.
No one is sitting around them being like, oh baby, who hurt you?
It's miserable.
They're alienated from everyone and mary specifically was disinherited by her family and cut out of a multi-million dollar will.
She lost family members who didn't believe her.
She felt alienated by a lot of people.
I'm not saying that the hidden family situation confirms mary's memories, but it's very interesting to note.
The thing with Mary is that she's very open to questions about her memory.
She was like her own biggest skeptic in the beginning.
Mary says I thought the best way to truly question myself was to directly question people who, like my parents, say recovered memories are false.
There was an unhealed part of me that wanted to believe that my memories were false, so that I could imagine my parents were respectable people.
But instead she says, I am certain that my memories of childhood essay are true.
I did not remember my abuse until I was 37 years old.
Even as a child, I had no conscious memory of the atrocities except while they were occurring.
Besides, what motive does Mary have to lie?
Whereas I don't know if the same could be said for the members of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation.
Dr. Jennifer is a psychology professor at the University of Oregon.
And she starts recovering these repressed memories when she is a full blown adult of like childhood essay.
She's married.
She's got two kids.
She has a great job, but she just has so much anxiety.
She works in the she works in the campus.
Yeah.
As a psychologist.
Yeah.
She's a psychology professor.
Oh, she's a professor?
So she is like, she knows the field.
And she has, you know, she has a loving husband.
She has two kids.
Everything in life is going well.
She's got a great job with job stability, but she just has this like unexplainable anxiety.
And as a psychology professor, she's like, let me just go to a therapist and talk it out.
Because maybe it's like...
I had a dream that the eggs burned down the house.
Like she's like, it's probably nothing, okay?
So she goes to the therapist and she starts talking to the therapist and she does state if I really had to pinpoint, the only thing that is giving me a little bit of anxiety is my parents are coming over for Christmas break.
So is my sister.
They're going to visit for Christmas.
And I don't know why I have anxiety over that.
Like maybe it's anxiety because you need to host.
Maybe it's like you want your kids to be on their best behavior.
And the therapist asks her, have you ever been abused by your parents?
Immediately, she's like, no, no.
Conversation moves on.
Later that day, Jennifer suddenly has this disturbing flashback almost.
And over the course of the next few weeks.
She says I remembered that my father had molested me when I was a young child.
And then around that time her sister Gwen calls her and is like hey, I'm not coming to your house for the Christmas family gathering.
And it's not because of you.
Like, I love you, Jennifer, but I'm not coming.
Like, you do know that our family is weird, right?
Like, something is seriously wrong with our family.
You know that, right?
And then she drops this weird bomb.
You know our father was s8 as a kid.
Right, jennifer says this was like a weird moment of just things started connecting and like she did always think it was weird that her dad always wanted to talk to them about the book lolita, he would also get um pin art impression of his private parts and hang them in the living room.
So, like what?
Like it's, i guess it's artwork of his down there and he would hang it in the living room.
I'm so sorry.
I think it's like when you get pins, like it's a canvas and they like oh, a pin art of his private parts, and what?
Suddenly Jennifer starts seeing these things as what they are, which is just really really strange and inappropriate.
But they don't really compare to the flashbacks that start coming in.
She states that the earliest memory that came in was when she was three years old.
Her father was abusing her in the bathroom.
It lasts until she's a teenager, which means that this abuse lasts over a decade and she's just now remembering it.
Jennifer confronts her parents about it and she says that her dad's response is so unsettling.
You would expect that they're disoriented, highly confused, that the parents are outraged, but oddly, it felt like he was almost prepared, almost like he's expecting it.
So, instead of working through this with jennifer which is what i would imagine parents who what would they would do if these were truly false memories, like they claim, or trying to figure it out together as a family, they retaliate and her parents decide, 18 months after her accusation, that they are going to start the false memory syndrome foundation.
Pamela Freid is Jennifer Freid's mom.
Pamela and Peter start false memory syndrome foundation.
The insane part of all of this is that Peter the dad, he actually admits that Jennifer's childhood was fine strange.
Okay, he understands that maybe it wasn't appropriate all the time.
He says, quote I'm quite prepared to say the attitude I thought was appropriate of being open about things of a sexual nature.
In retrospect may have been wrong.
It's very vague.
To give you more context, he would work at home in the living room wearing nothing but a robe and he would sit with his legs spread all the way apart.
He would drink a lot at home.
He was very erratic.
He would give speeches about how their family was superior to everyone.
They weren't the type of family to eat iceberg lettuce.
They were the type of family to eat romaine lettuce.
He would yap about how meat tastes better when you slaughter the animal yourself.
He believed that classical music was superior and, I mean…
You're thinking, what a cultured and well-traveled man, right?
No, he allegedly proclaimed Indian food was disgusting and smelly.
The sad part is Jennifer didn't even want her dad to apologize.
She just wanted her mom's support during all of this.
And instead, her parents gear up just in case Jennifer decides to sue.
Jennifer writes a letter to her mom.
The content of your letters suggests to me that you're putting an effort in a legal defense.
I do not have any intention of attempting to use the legal system to heal wounds from years ago.
Meanwhile, Pamela is already raging a campaign against her own daughter through her foundation.
She wrote articles about her own daughter, who she dubbed Susan, which it was not that hard to find that.
It's Jennifer.
But regardless, she says, Susan was experimenting with drugs as a teenager, so her brain is fried.
Obviously, she can't retain a single memory, like a banana.
And maybe she's making up all these lies because her sex life with her husband now sucks and she's jealous of her mom's professional success and she's upset because she doesn't like being a mom and she nursed her son for far too long and that could be psychologically damaging.
Also, she has a history of mental health disorders.
So that's probably why she came up with this allegation and not because, you know, it could be true.
Pamela and Peter are also just a strange couple, not just because I think that their ideas and fundamental values are unburdened by the anchors of wisdom, but because they have their own history.
Pam and Peter Fried, before they were husband and wife, were step-siblings.
Pam's mom married Peter's dad when Pam was 12 and Peter was 14.
That's a pretty young age to become step siblings.
And they went to the same high school.
They allegedly start dating, become intimate.
And at 18, they get married.
And nine months later, they give birth to Dr. Jennifer Fried.
Peter did open up to Pam about how he was essayed when he was seven to 11 years old.
And Dr Jennifer Fried says you know, these are a lot of things.
That I remember is my mom had this weird thing where she just had this rage in her towards me.
My mother also didn't like to touch me.
Jennifer says, just to have some sort of physical contact with her mom.
Jennifer would massage her feet as a kid.
And a lot of people believe that this could be because her mom was jealous of Jennifer.
Anytime their dad was around, Jennifer would say, recall that her mom would grow even more distant and even more cold.
And there would be ones that she was sitting on her bed, kissing her high school boyfriend.
So Jennifer Fried is sitting on her bed, kissing her high school boyfriend.
And her dad is just like watching through the crack of her open door.
She caught her dad once reading her diary and he claims that she left it out because she wanted him, her dad, to read her diary.
I've never met a teenage girl that wanted her parents to know anything about her personal life.
He also says that he's not bothered by the fact that he was essayed as a kid, Peter Fried.
He says it's technically abuse, but studies have been done and many, many people aren't really terribly bothered by it.
He's invited his former molester into their family home with his wife and his kids.
So there's that.
Who was it?
It was like a local musician.
Wow.
There are at least some 2000 families that have worked with the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, mainly because they are parents who have been accused by their own children of abuse.
And it's pretty clear what the biggest motivator for these parents are.
They cared about not getting sued.
You know, and it's interesting because the False Memory Syndrome Foundation would also help fund and initiate a series of lawsuits against well-known therapists whose patients have recovered memories.
They would initiate lawsuits to take them down for malpractice.
They had like $8 million to work with.
They had a lot of money.
One trauma therapist, the author of the book The Body Keeps the Score.
He says these lawsuits had a chilling effect.
While not all trauma therapists were sued, many of us suddenly felt under attack.
As for Pamela, she's asked, how do you know you're not helping abusers?
And so for someone who claims to be so married to the science which I haven't seen strong evidence of quite yet, but regardless, Pamela says we're a good looking bunch of people.
You know, graying hair, well-dressed, healthy, smiling.
Just about every person who has, you know, attended our meetings is someone you would surely find interesting and want to count as a friend.
I highly doubt that.
This is so crazy.
Yeah.
Like what they're saying is how is she a?
Is she a doctor?
You said no, she was a teacher.
Uh, her daughter is a doctor and she's like no, my daughter is a liar, because nothing she says even make any sense.
Like i haven't heard anything legitimate.
That's like makes me go.
Oh okay, i see your point.
Instead, she's like we're well-dressed, interesting people and my daughter was troubled team.
So like what is she saying?
Yeah, i think she.
She is a.
She gives me the intelligence of a baked potato.
Pamela fried's right hand woman, who has also written books with pamela eleanor goldstein, also interviewed by mary for her documentary am i crazy?
Mary spoke with her and the documentary name is am i crazy?
Yeah yes, am i crazy.
And mary also spoke with eleanor goldstein's daughter, dr stacy charlotte, Who also has recovered memories of childhood abuse.
Wait, so let me get this right.
Yeah.
Pam Fried is the wife.
Pam Fried, right?
Pamela Fried, yes.
Pam Fried.
We call her Pam Fried, right?
Yeah, we call her Pam Fried.
I think it could be Pamela Fried, but yes.
No, it's Fried.
Yes, okay.
It is Fried.
Pam Fried.
We call her Pam Fried.
Yeah.
And her daughter is a doctor.
Yes.
Has repressed memory.
And then the other ghost team is the second woman.
Mm-hmm. her daughter is also a doctor and she also had repressed memory, right?
And they want us to believe them and not the daughters.
Also another thing with Dr Jennifer Fried.
She says I mean to come out as an abuse survivor when I was like a doctor and being a professor it's career suicide.
It's career self-exit.
Especially at the time that I came out with my accusations.
It's not a time where people are rallying around survivors, especially in academia.
Wow.
It's not like 2025.
Yeah.
And even 2025, look what's happening in the Hockey Canada case.
Like no one is, it's crazy.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But she says that she also had recovered memories.
So it seems like almost all the members of this foundation have a strong motive to say that these are false memories.
They have a lot of skin in the game.
Eleanor tells Mary during their interview we have to help each other, forgive and understand and have empathy and not carry grudges forever and ever.
She says, bizarrely, he touched me.
Oh my God, he touched me.
And therefore he touched me and he's dead.
He's dead.
Like he's dead to me, I guess is what she's saying.
And just with all due respect, these individuals are insane.
Eleanor Goldstein tells Mary, I don't think sexual touch is the horror of horrors.
I think we make a big to-do about nothing.
I don't think sexual touch is the horror of all horrors.
I don't think so.
I think we make a big to-do about nothing.
She also says that if a child is being essayed by their uncle, for example, the child should punch the uncle in the arm and scream get out of here, Uncle Irving, leave me alone.
Say, get out of here, Uncle Irving.
Leave me alone.
And walk away.
So you think the little kids should be responsible?
I think at a certain point, if it's uncomfortable, they should speak up for themselves and be responsible themselves.
I carry a grudge from century to century.
But if there was sexual touch, do you think the family should still stay together?
Of course.
Even if there was?
Absolutely.
Yes.
I feel my frontal lobe lose density the more that I listen to Eleanor Goldstein speak.
The foundation has also worked closely with Ralph Underwager, who Ralph has some interesting takes.
And by interesting, I mean, we should probably lock him up for a very long time.
He's asked a very simple question of is choosing being a pedophile a responsible choice for the pedophile?
Choosing being?
What's that?
Yeah, that's what i'm saying is like you know how you can choose to be a nice person.
They're saying is choosing being a pedophile a responsible choice for the pedophile?
I don't even know what that question means.
I think the minute that you ask that question, you should probably go to jail.
The only thing that could be answered so simply is there is no responsible choice and a pedophile.
I mean you're choosing to be emotionally ethically, morally corrupt and you are choosing to commit a.
He doesn't say that.
He does not say that.
And also, I didn't say this, but your cellmates should figure out what you've done.
Anyway, but Ralph Underwager responds, certainly it is irresponsible.
You know, what I have been struck with is I've come to know more about and understand about people who choose pedophilia is that they let themselves be too much defined by other people.
What?
Exactly.
Defined by what?
Who?
Prosecutors?
The DOJ?
Like, what do you mean defined?
He continues.
Usually there is an essentially negative definition.
Pedophiles spend a lot of time and energy defending their choice to be pedophiles.
And I don't think a pedophile needs to do that.
I think they can boldly and courageously affirm what they choose.
They can say what they want is to find the best way to love.
Pedophiles are too defensive.
They go around saying you people out here are saying that what I choose is bad and that it's no good.
You want to put me in prison.
You're doing all these terrible things to me.
I just want love.
I have to define my love.
I believe this is in fact part of God's will.
Oh, he's a fed.
He's not, but I wish he would have been, right?
They have the right to make these statements for themselves as personal choices.
Now, whether or not they can persuade other people, you know, that they are right is another matter.
I believe that God's will is that we have absolute freedom, no conditions, no contingencies.
The solution that I'm suggesting is that pedophiles become much more positive.
They should directly attack the concept, the image, the picture of a pedophile as an evil, wicked and reprehensible exploiter of children.
He also thinks that women hate pedophiles because women are jealous that men are having connections with children instead of them.
So is he another member of the group or what?
Okay, so he's a doctor.
He's a doctor, but not an MD.
So he's not like a psychiatrist.
He's a doctor in ministry.
So he has like a PhD in ministry. which there's nothing wrong with that.
But he works at the foundation and he uses the name doctor and there's a strong implication that he is some medically trained individual.
But he is not.
So he actually spoke a lot about how repressed memories are not real.
And then he turns around and is also a very suspect person who could potentially be a pedophile.
I'm just saying.
I mean, anyone could be a pedophile, but like he definitely could be a pedophile yeah, what are?
What are those statements that he's making?
Yeah, and he's worked closely with the foundation like, these are the people that are working with the foundation, but that yeah but, but that's.
That's like making them look so much worse.
Yeah, it's already bad, but you this, whatever this guy's saying, is making it even worse.
So i don't even know how they raised like eight million dollars, raised a million dollars from the, from just members.
Yeah, These people must be very desperate.
Yeah.
Ultimately, I think the foundation just has some arguments, debates and statements that are free from the chains of sensibility and intelligence.
Eleanor Goldstein writes since essay of a child is the worst crime we know of, to be falsely accused of such a crime is the worst thing that can happen to a person.
Okay.
I feel like there's worse things.
Another person who joined the foundation after being accused of SA from their own kids, they write.
The problem, of course, with accusations of SA is that the accused person is assumed to be guilty.
It's like the old when did you start beating your wife?
Problem don't know what problem they're talking about.
One netizen writes i can tell you that false memory syndrome is not, and has never been, officially recognized thing within the dsm and that the former organization that promoted this idea was run by wealthy parents who abused their kids and used their wealth and influence to cover it up, and the rotten mango team.
We decided that we were going to go to washington to meet with mary to figure out if she was telling the truth.
Not that we have any sort of authority in this, not that our opinion would matter, but just in terms of we were really captivated by her story.
We were captivated by these debates and the memory wars.
And we definitely tried our best to be objective.
Before we went, we would have these mock debates where we would each pick a side, either the side that believes in repressed memories and the side that does not.
I will say that each time that someone was on the side that does not believe in repressed memories, I mean there's a lot of frustration.
I feel like it was hard to come up with good arguments on why someone's repressed memories are false.
But again, we're not medically trained.
We have not studied trauma survivors in that type of environment.
But to us, the logic just did not logic as well as believing the victim.
And we tried our best to remain objective when we went to Washington to meet with Mary.
I mean, we wanted to question everything.
And I will say that when the Rotten Mango team got back, I think it makes even less sense to us than even before we went to Washington that Mary would ever lie about something like this.
That people would ever really lie.
I mean, again, yes, you could argue that statistically, there must be some people who lie.
There must be some people who lie to get car insurance claims.
There must be some people who lie to get in positions of power.
I mean, people lie all the time.
There must be some small statistic of that.
But it just doesn't make sense that a mass majority of people with repressed memories would lie about it.
Mary is a highly accomplished individual.
She currently works as a child clinician.
She helps children process their emotions.
She's also a respite foster parent.
Foster parenting is a laborious, emotionally exhaustive job and these foster parents they get two days off a month without their foster kids.
But those two days off the month, who's going to watch the foster children?
They go to respite foster parents like Mary and Jerry.
And Mary is very well aware of the process of trauma, dealing with trauma, how to recover from trauma.
The feeling is like she seems so in tune with not only her emotions, but the emotions of everyone around her.
And every single aspect of Mary's life then and now aligns with what she has been saying.
The cats.
When Mary and her family lived in the countryside, she distinctively remembers that they had these kittens in the house, these baby kittens.
And Mary's parents would force her and her sister Ruth to watch while they – the parents would throw the kittens at the wall like they were baseballs.
And Mary says she remembers the walls shaking when the cats would hit the wall.
And if the kittens weren't dead by then, Mary says that her parents would dunk them and grab them by the neck and dunk them in water, drowning them.
Mary writes.
Ruth and I were told that if we ever reported our abuse to anyone, the same things that happened to our kittens would happen to us.
And this is not a one-time thing, by the way.
Mary says that at another point, another time a cat and her kittens were hanged, one at a time, in front of her.
But the crazy thing is Mary has another vivid memory that she recalled later on where her mom was telling people that came over like house guests, family friends, that Mary had killed kittens before.
And naturally Mary doesn't want to believe her, but she does recall this one time where her parents had brought home new kittens.
She's terrified that they're going to end up tortured and ultimately end up dead.
So she decides that she's going to put them in warm clothes and hide the kittens away from her parents.
She puts them in a little suitcase.
She takes them to like this little greenhouse in the back of the house, puts them on the top shelf, hiding them.
She remembers sneaking away once to check up on them and they looked like they were asleep.
She thought they were asleep, but they were dead because Mary is young.
She doesn't understand the concept of oxygen and suffocation and, in Mary's desperate attempt to save these kittens from a very torturous death, she ended up suffocating them, which probably in hindsight, is less painful for the kittens.
But this is not just something that someone gets over.
This is not something that your therapist can brainwash you to believe.
The only way that Mary says that she could feel like she could finally heal from this was to adopt her own cat.
She started going to this cat shelter multiple times.
She wanted to find the perfect companion.
She went multiple times to see if she clicked with any specific cats.
And there's this one cat named Kenya that she really wanted to adopt.
And she was like, okay, I'm ready.
The only thing is she was just about to get married to Jerry.
They were just about to leave on their honeymoon, which would take maybe a few days.
So she's asking the shelter, can we hold Kenya for a week? until I get back from the honeymoon?
And they're like, no, we can't.
So instead of going on their honeymoon, Mary and Jerry cancel the honeymoon.
And the day that they're supposed to leave, instead of getting on a flight, they go to the cat shelter and they adopt Kenya.
In Washington, the Rotten Mango team went with Mary to a cat cafe.
Oh, she also has this like really cute cat dress.
I'm sure you've seen it already if you're watching the video version, but we took her to a cat cafe.
And from the first moment that everyone was sitting down, this little cat jumps on top of Mary and stays put for the entirety of the time.
And it's funny because everybody is sitting there.
There's like 20 cats.
No other cats.
I mean, cats are coming by.
They're saying hello, but none of them are just sitting on top of anyone else but Mary.
And Mary was laughing and she said, you know, this cat looks like Kenya too.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Crazy.
Also, Mary is a huge activist.
So a lot of videos out there of her.
You know it was.
It was actually hard for us to gauge mary's personality outside of her work, because she's so.
I mean, activism is at the forefront of everything and that's mainly what she talks about.
But it's like hanging out with your mom or your grandma, depending on, i guess, your age, and she's a grandmother, so i don't think she's going to be offended by me calling her that.
She insisted that since you know the rm team were in bellingham, that we visit village bookstore.
It's probably like one of the cutest bookstores in existence.
Mary did book signings there for her book and the employees already knew her.
She just has this very maternal energy about her.
Everything she does she goes over and beyond for everyone for her family, for her children, for her foster kids, for her child patients, for her friends, even for the rm team.
And another element is we were on reddit and a lot of people were saying that when you read some parts of mary's book they thought that her memories sounded too vague.
She doesn't want to mention specifics.
And I don't think that's a reason to doubt someone, especially when privacy is a huge concern.
But I will say that one thing we thought was interesting is like Mary is very open with anything that has to do with her, which she highly values everyone's privacy, her foster children, her friends, her family members.
Even if we're in her house and we're walking by and she'll see something and she'll be like oh, look at that bookshelf.
Oh, wait, no, please don't put that in there.
I don't want people to see their name.
She's just very protective of people's privacy and the people that she cares about.
So i think that was a moment it clicked for us because i could see why maybe some redditors i mean i don't see why redditors are mean about it, but i could see why some people are saying oh, it just feels a little vague, it just doesn't feel tangible, but i think it's the fact that mary is so respectful of other people's privacy.
I think that was a huge thing and a person she was like that.
Her husband is also like.
He does like 50 push-ups a day.
It's crazy.
Me and him had a competition and i lost.
By the way, Jerry is 76 years old.
And in Mary's book, she writes, I have a great marriage.
Although my husband sometimes wonders about my many excuses to buy round oak tables.
We have not one, not two, but three of them.
And one of the most interesting things is Mary also writes in her book the fact that I do not have continuous memories of my childhood abuse made it impossible for me to bring any of my perpetrators to justice.
I regained memories at the age of 37.
But she does have boxes of journals that she's kept for decades and she's gonna pass this on to someone who has also, like they, connected on a very deep level and it's just the way that she keeps these catalogs.
Again, there's no way that she just like sat in a hypnotherapist office and then walked out and was like you know what, you're right.
Everything is so meticulously documented.
I mean, there's so much.
She even has letters from her parents.
She shared some with us which I thought these letters were so odd.
And I'm sure every parent acts differently.
But a few things that we noted is the whole RM team.
Everyone kind of has a different level of attachment and relationship with their parents.
Some of us are a bit more in a rough dynamic.
Others of us are in a very healthy dynamic with our parents.
I was just personally trying to understand two things.
I don't think first of all, And all of us were like yeah, you can't convince me that my father abused me.
And Mary was 37 years old when she recovered her repressed memories.
We're not at that age yet, but I'm assuming that our identity and our relationship with our parents only gets stronger as we age.
Like maybe, if i'm like super young and i'm five and you're like, oh you don't know, this guy is red sometimes, maybe you could convince me of that.
But at 37 years old it just seems implausible for someone to be convinced of such vivid memories that they were abused by their parents.
But let's say, somehow you do convince me.
I also think that there is no way that if my father is truly innocent, he would write me letters like this after being accused of abuse.
All i have to say is that these letters that mary's father has written her are just Strange.
They're weird.
What do Ted Bundy, Harvey Weinstein, Jerry Sandusky remember?
Jerry Sandusky Clark, OJ Simpson, Bill Cosby, the Oklahoma City Bombers, Ghislaine Maxwell?
What do they all have in common?
High profile?
They have all used the same defense witness, Elizabeth Loftus.
Dr. Elizabeth Loftus is often known as the doctor when it comes to memory.
And she is a firm believer that repressed memories are not real.
And it's very interesting because she might have a very strong financial motive to do so.
But what do I know?
I'm sure testifying for these defendants, they come with a price and an exact one, $600 per hour.
$600 per hour.
And I'm sure that these defendants Ted Bundy, Harvey Weinstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, the Night Stalker, the police officers accused in the Rodney King beating Bill Cosby she has testified for the defendants in each of these trials.
All of these defendants probably would rather victims not be believed.
Elizabeth Loftus believes that when it comes to her press memories and of course, just like the others, she always puts like quotes around it.
She says On one side you have true believers who insist that the mind is capable of repressing memories and who accept without reservation or question the authenticity of recovered memories.
On the other side are the skeptics, who argue that the notion of repression is purely hypothetical and essentially untestable, based as it is on unsubstantiated speculation and anecdotes that are impossible to confirm or deny.
The true believers claim the moral high ground.
They insist that they are on the front lines, fighting to protect children from sexual predators and assisting survivors as they struggle through the arduous healing process.
The implication, unspoken but not unheard, is that anyone who refuses to join the true believers in their quest to uncover the hidden past and to gain legitimacy for the concept of repression is either anti-woman, anti-child, anti-progress, or at the worst extreme, dirty.
Example, a practicing pedophile or Satanist.
During Harvey Weinstein's trial, she testifies.
False memories, once created either through misinformation or through these suggestive processes, can be experienced with a great deal of emotion, a great deal of confidence and a lot of detail, even if they are false.
Her biggest thing in these trials, when she's testifying for the likes of Ghislaine Maxwell, is that memories are fragmented.
Memories are not reliable.
Any neuroscientist will tell you, yeah, we know.
All memories though, not just false memories that you claim are real, all memories.
And I'm saying like false memories, like she's claiming false memory syndrome, right?
All memories are fragmented.
All memories are incomplete and tend to fade over time.
That's just the nature of memories in general.
And while certain details like an eye color or what someone is wearing at what times or what time someone arrived at someone's house may be incorrectly recalled, people almost always remember the general outline or gist of what has happened.
For Ghislaine Maxwell's trial.
Elizabeth Loftus argues that quote even traumatic experiences can be subjected to post-event suggestion that can exaggerate, distort or change the memory.
So she is like the most famous memory doctor everybody calls for.
Like hey, so her whole job is just to say whatever that person is saying is not reliable because memories could not be trusted.
Is that it?
Which for some reason always like never really applies to the defendant.
And out of the 300 plus times that she has testified in the court system, she has only testified for prosecutors one time, while she's charging 600 an hour.
In an interview, Elizabeth Loftus says that she thinks that people can forget and remember things in a very ordinary way.
And she knows that people don't like her.
She says, "...I know the prejudices and fears that lie behind the resistance to my life's work.
I understand why we want to believe an eyewitness who says he did it.
He's the one.
I sympathize with the need to own the past, that is, to make it one's truth."
As for why people accept these repressed memories Elizabeth writes in her book, was there something inherently wrong with her?
A mental illness of some kind?
A psychological flaw?
An inability to separate fact from reality?
Surely only a fragile, troubled individual would allow herself to become convinced that a false memory was actually real.
And if she were so vulnerable, so easily misled, wouldn't that indicate that, in fact, something terrible had occurred in her past?
She says, or it could just be quote simply she could have had the misfortune to run into a misguided and overzealous therapist.
Or perhaps the problem is with therapy itself, a profession that has become our new religion, offering quick and easy answers for life's complex and essentially unanswerable problems.
She also states that sometimes people have this internal conflict about their childhood and to have these quote unquote false memories of clear-cut abuse would be easier to cope.
Quote creating a fantasy of abuse, with its relatively clear-cut distinction between good and evil, may provide the needed logical explanation for confusing experiences and feelings.
And one of her most well-known experiments that she still cites, even in the Harvey Weinstein trial in 2020, is her very famous lost in a shopping mall experiment where she gathered a group of participants together and you had two people, two family members.
You had an older family member and a younger family member.
And the older family member is like, hey, remember that time you got lost in the shopping mall?
When you were like five and you're like, no, I didn't.
I never got lost in a shopping mall.
They were like, yeah, you did.
You were like freaking out.
You cried.
The whole family went to the shopping.
Oh my God, it was like a whole ordeal.
They're like, no, I never got lost in a shop.
You don't remember?
They basically convinced them that they got lost in a shopping mall.
Out of 24 participants, six of them state that they either believe in it fully or believe in it half a little bit.
Well, that's different, though.
That's like you're telling me hey, remember when you were a child.
You're like oh sure yeah, I can believe you, but still doesn't mean.
I recall what happened.
Exactly.
So she uses this experiment and a lot of people actually use this experiment to say in many cases participants believe the false memory.
There are so many problems with this experiment.
Okay, first of all, family members are convincing you that it happened because they were there.
This is not a therapist convincing you that you were abused, because this family member is convincing you of a shared experience.
A therapist was not there with you during your childhood.
Not only that, in another study that Elizabeth did, she ends up getting rid of like five subjects, which could be a highly ethical problem, because why did she toss them out of the study?
Is it because they weren't going to provide the results that she wanted?
No.
Then another thing even with the lost in the shopping mall participants 24 participants is already such a small group, and implanting false memories of getting lost in a mall as a kid is nowhere near as traumatic and as serious as being essayed by a caregiver more oftentimes than not.
And there is nothing shameful with being lost in a shopping mall as a child.
To admit that. someone on the opposing end actually did their own study and they were trying to implant false memories of you getting an enema which is like when you clean your butthole you put liquids in your butthole and you flush them out to clean your butthole okay all the participants are like no i did not i did not get an enema how dare you that is so true yeah this is the is that it that was her whole point to to oh boy that's the dumb as experiment whole point and it's even more dumb okay because i don't know why the people that don't believe in repressed memories they act like hypnotism is a bewitching spell where you could just like make people do crazy things and yes okay fine cia mk ultra that was a real thing but you cannot say that all of these therapists in middle america in florida in new york city are cia level brainwashers And yes, the power of suggestion is huge.
And there have been instances of people who kept watching the 9-11 tapes and they eventually thought that they were there at 9-11.
But these are really, really rare occurrences.
And to make things even weirder is that, well, first of all, Elizabeth Loftus is not a clinician.
She's actually never studied how people process traumatic experiences.
She only studies memory.
And memory is hard to study.
So that's great.
So she's testifying at all of these trials, but psychiatrists who actually work with trauma patients, like the author of The Body, Keeps the Score.
He says, trauma often overwhelms the central nervous system, so the brain may not be able to register it fully when it happens.
That's why delayed memories of abuse are not uncommon.
Another clinical psychologist at Harvard Medical School that has studied trauma for 25 years states you know the fact that traumatic memories are storied by your brain.
Okay, so the fact that these traumatic memories you know how.
The argument is that you're more likely to have strong memories of trauma because your adrenaline it spikes and it makes the memory formation much stronger.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That is like a separate thing.
You can form these memories.
You can encode something into your brain short term, and you can store it away very strongly.
I mean, that is entirely different from whether or not you can retrieve this memory.
So retrieving the memory is different from forming a memory.
I see, I see.
It's saved into the computer, but doesn't mean... You can open the file.
Yeah, it doesn't mean... Yeah, yeah, yeah, I see.
So they're like, I mean, technically you're not really arguing the same thing right now, so it's a little weird.
So they're saying it's odd, right?
Also, there have been some clinicians who state it is in their practicing theory that a lot of patients actually forget remembering
Like they will remember this memory over time.
So it's not just like all of a sudden they remember it decades later.
It's like they'll remember it and then they'll repress it again and they'll forget remembering it.
Huh.
Okay.
So they've had instances of that, and a lot of people think that is probably also accurate.
Like you remember it.
You're repressing, your brain represses it, and then you even forget remembering it.
Okay, wow.
And the last thing that's problematic about Elizabeth Loftus' experiment is that well, first of all, you can't even tell if someone is having a false memory.
Because how do you know if these participants are having a false memory or if they're just picturing a mall where they got lost, a mall that they have been to?
Like to objectively say what is a memory is very difficult.
So a lot of different doctors have pointed out.
It's just they write.
Judgments about whether somebody has a false memory or not are almost always made by the experimenters and not by the person themselves.
Almost never have they actually asked the person how convinced are you that this actually happened to you?
Hmm.
And again, I actually don't think any of this is related.
Even if you can prove to me that false memory syndrome is real and that you can implant false memories into someone's head, I think it's a completely different topic from repressed memories.
Just because you can cause a car accident doesn't mean naturally occurring car accidents don't happen.
It's like very strange that this is always intertwined.
And a lot of other doctors are like, yeah, this has no correlation really.
In defense of Loftus.
I guess to some degree she does state there's little doubt that actual childhood SA is tragically common.
Even those who claim that the statistics are exaggerated still agree that child abuse constitutes a serious social problem.
I don't question the commonness of childhood SA itself, but ask here about how the abuse is recalled in the minds of adults.
Specifically, how common is it to repress memories of childhood essay?
She says she doesn't know the answer to that.
Though she will act like she does when she testifies for defendants accused of heinous crimes, and i think sometimes it's best to just look at how people act, at the very least, when you boil it down, mary is living the life that aligns with what she says.
She does everything that aligns with her trauma, how she's recovering, how she's healing and how she wants to help others.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth Loftus writes about how she hated when victims are not believed.
Quote, I do not want to see a return of those days.
Not so very long ago, when a victim's cries for help went unheard and accusations of essay were automatically dismissed as fantasy or wish fulfillment and shunted away into the backwaters of the public conscience.
Wait, I don't get it.
Why is she writing that?
If she's defending the?
Yeah, she's just saying that a lot of people think that she's against SA victims, but no, she's just here for the truth.
Meanwhile, she's testifying for defendants like Ghislaine Maxwell, Ted Bundy, Harvey Weinstein.
When someone's words and actions do not align in such a strong, repulsive way at least in my personal opinion you have to wonder excuse my language like why the fuck not?
Why is it not aligning?
Loftus does try to say that she is not the one deciding someone's innocence or guilt, just educating people on eyewitness testimony and saying quote.
And while I do agree with that sentiment at its core, did you really have to go and testify for over 300 different trials, with most of them being people accused of sexual abuse?
Is she related to Mary's case or no?
Yes.
And Mary has actually confronted Elizabeth Loftus for her documentary, Am I Crazy?
One netizen sums it up really well.
Elizabeth Loftus did not prove that repressed memories aren't real.
She argued well that certain types of memories can be implanted or fabricated through suggestion.
Also the fact that Loftus testified on behalf of Glenn Maxwell, Harvey Weinstein, Ted Bundy, etc.
Raises serious red flags for me.
It doesn't discredit her research itself, but the fact that she's endorsing her work being used in this manner doesn't exactly indicate her to be a person with a sole interest of finding scientific truth.
She's also asked, don't you care about the victims of these crimes?
To which she says, yes, of course I care.
But as an expert witness, I try to make sure that two victims do not emerge from this crime the genuine crime victim and the innocently accused person.
I repeat, she testified for Ghislaine Maxwell, Harvey Weinstein, Ted Bundy, the Night Stalker, the police officers accused of beating Rodney King.
Elizabeth Loftus straight up said that for Ghislaine Maxwell's trial that the financial reward for victims could make the human brain create a false traumatic memory.
That's fucking crazy.
The prosecutors questioned her.
How'd you come to that scientific theory?
And she says I am not aware of any studies on that, but based on my research it's definitely possible.
Oh, this woman's crazy.
Yeah.
She said that in court.
Wow.
Wow.
Wow.
What a joke.
Elizabeth Loftus was also heavily involved in the False Memory Syndrome Foundation with Pam Fried and Eleanor Goldstein.
She's asked, like, is this foundation basically just lobbying that false memory syndrome is a thing?
And she says, I don't know.
I mean it's, would you say, that people who are concerned with about pancreatic cancer and form a foundation to try and deal with it and support research and educate people that they're a lobby.
But like pancreatic cancer is a very real thing that's medically recognized.
False memory syndrome is not.
So I just like for someone who is, I mean, on paper, very well educated.
I don't know where this analogy is coming from.
This comparison is bizarre.
Speaking of problematic foundation members another member of the false memory syndrome foundation he says a child under two really doesn't have memories of anything that happened.
So, as far as we know, children who have been physically abused in any way abused and it doesn't seem to have any later effect on them.
And moreover, we know that most abusive children under two most real essay that occurs has to do with touching and usually not violent penetration.
He says the touching is more so out of curiosity and exploration by the offender, the criminal, the felon.
This person literally said child under two?
Yeah.
There's no... Sexually touching a young kid has no...
But so many different clinicians have come out to say actually they may not remember it, but it has severe implications.
Like a lot of clinicians believe in more so the body keeps the score.
Like your body does not forget trauma and it processes things differently.
And it could even lead to things like chronic pain.
But he says usually not every violent.
It's not usually violent under two, not violent at all.
It's kind of like, for example, if a two-year-old child saw their parents murdered, they wouldn't remember that.
That'd be a very terrible thing to observe for a two-year-old child, but they wouldn't remember it and therefore they wouldn't be affected by it.
Elizabeth Loftus has stated in an interview subsequent to her participation in Mary's documentary.
So Mary talked to her briefly for the documentary.
And, you know, I think it's very interesting.
Everybody who doesn't believe Mary, they're just upset that they can't convince Mary.
But I'm like, if you can't convince Mary, it's maybe you just don't have what it like, maybe what she, it just doesn't make sense.
And they just get very butthurt about it.
Like Eleanor Goldstein, I believe she said something along the lines of like why did you come here if you're so convinced?
Yeah.
Elizabeth Loftus has stated in an interview more recently that for Mary's documentary she says, quote it was awful.
It was sort of ridiculous.
I don't know why she had this camera on me with this side view the whole time.
I felt just very sort of misled and I felt sorry I cooperated.
And she's asked, did you feel like you were misrepresented?
No, just misled.
I don't know.
I thought she would be more open-minded.
Wow.
And then she is asked about how in the documentary, Mary's documentary, Eleanor Goldstein is very aggressive with Mary and not a nice person at all, in my opinion.
Okay.
But she says, I understand that Goldstein was, you know, one of those devastated family members.
And if they have a kind of anger about what happens in their family, you almost can't blame them.
You can't blame who?
Eleanor Goldstein for being like a raging mean person.
Mm-hmm.
Meanwhile, Mary, what she said about the interviews?
She says, will say that i dreaded each of these interviews.
I felt physically ill as the interview time approached.
I will never do something like that again.
I do not suggest other survivors do what i did.
But she says that she felt like she had to because she wanted to talk to the people who don't believe her, although that she already knew that these were real.
But it's just.
It's interesting that there are still people out there that don't believe in repressed memories.
And that is where I leave you with part one.
In part two, you're going to hear from Mary herself.
We traveled to Washington.
She also came to Atlanta to talk with us.
We spent a lot of time with Mary and her husband Jerry, and she goes in depth on how she actually uncovered these repressed memories, what that feeling was like, what hypnosis was like, what all these different therapies were like.
She also goes in depth on all the things that her parents did to her when she was a child, that her parents were part of the KKK.
How they killed people in front of her.
How she was forced to mutilate her own sister's body and lay in a coffin with her.
How she was hung from a tree.
The cat torture.
I mean, there's just so much that Mary has to share.
So please stay tuned for part two.
But I know that a lot of you guys are very active and you guys don't even like to wait a day, right?
And I totally agree.
And even if you have the time, I suggest first going to check out Mary's documentaries on YouTube.
She has a whole channel.
One of my favorite pieces that she's ever done is Am I Crazy?
And it's just her trying to figure out if her repressed memories are real.
And I think the fact that she's so objective and trying to even question her own beliefs.
It just makes so much sense.
The way that she breaks it down in her head, The way that she's trying to get to the answer it clicks.
And a lot of people say it helped them understand what they were going through.
And there's just so much in there.
She's interviewing all of the people that we talked about today.
Pam Fried, Eleanor Goldstein, Elizabeth Loftus.
She also has a book, which is incredible.
I'm going to link below.
It's called My Life Now.
The book goes even more in depth than the documentary.
I think it's just like if you're a visual learner or if you like to read books, I read both of them.
There are so many different things happening in both of them.
I think it's very interesting.
I think even the book, it gives more insight on how she felt while making the documentary.
So there's a lot of behind the scenes of that and what it was like to confront Elizabeth Loftus and confront all of these people.
Please go check those out.
And with that being said, stay tuned for part two to hear from Mary and be safe.
