"False memories of sexual abuse lead to terrible miscarriages of justice/To avoid the innocent being convicted, police, lawyers and judges must understand the fickle nature of human memory."

No! That's not a new article. That's from 2010, in The Guardian, but I'm reading it now because my son John posted it yesterday on Facebook.

Typically such cases occur when a vulnerable individual seeks help from a psychotherapist for a commonly occurring psychological problem such as anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and so on. At this stage, the client has no conscious memories of ever being the victim of childhood sexual abuse and is likely to firmly reject any suggestion of such abuse. To a particular sort of well-meaning psychotherapist, however, such denial is itself evidence that the abuse really did occur....

During therapy, and often as a result of "memory recovery" techniques such as hypnotic regression and guided imagery, the client may gradually develop clear and vivid memories of abuse having taken place, typically at the hands of parents and other family members.

On the evidence of a huge amount of well-controlled research, we can now be confident that these memory recovery techniques are highly likely to give rise to false memories – apparent memories for events that never took place.

For contrast, here's WaPo yesterday: "The junk science Republicans used to undermine Ford and help save Kavanaugh."

Mara Mather, a professor at the University of Southern California, has performed laboratory studies in which volunteers are given electric shocks or subjected to loud noises while they look at a set of symbols — to find out which ones they remember while their brains are flooded with the same chemicals released during trauma.

“I guess the Republicans have been debating why does she forget getting home, but that sounds very plausible," she said. “It focuses the brain on whatever stands out at that moment. The things that are not standing out are even more ignored.”

Like other researchers, she could not recall a single case of a sexual assault victim misremembering a known attacker — save for rare instances in which people, often children, were coached into falsely accusing friends and family members....

IN THE COMMENTS: Michael K said: "I initially thought she had recovered memories but I have come to the conclusion that she is lying."

The Senators and pundits were operating under rules of engagement that put it off limits to inquire into whether Christine Blasey Ford might be lying. That led them into a lot of discussion of the mysteries of memory, and if the science got weak or bad, it might be because it stood in for something else that they were committed not to talk about. I'd like to see some serious defense of whatever good memory science there might be out there, but the WaPo article is not serious. It's propaganda, purporting to straighten us out on the science, but exploiting science in service to a political end.

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The 2018 Nobel Peace Prize awarded for "efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict."

The NYT reports on the 2 winners:

Dr. Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynecological surgeon... works in one of the most traumatized places in the world: the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. In a bare hospital in the hills above Bukavu, where for years there was little electricity or enough anesthetic, Dr. Mukwege has performed surgery on countless women who have trudged into his hospital a few steps away from death.....

“I have seen what has been done to them. I have heard them tell me that armed attackers raped them and killed their husband, raped them and killed their children. I now understand this in a different way and my thoughts are with the women of my country who have suffered so much.”

[Nadia] Murad was abducted alongside thousands of other women and girls from the Yazidi minority when Islamic State overran her homeland in northern Iraq in 2014, and she was singled out for rape by the group, also known as ISIS.

Whereas the majority of women who escaped ISIS refused to be named, Ms. Murad insisted to reporters that she wanted to be identified and photographed. She embarked on a worldwide campaign, telling and retelling her story of suffering to the United Nations Security Council, the United States House of Representatives, Britain’s House of Commons and numerous other global bodies.

Ms. Murad has said that she was exhausted by having to repeatedly speak out, but she knew that other Yazidi women were being raped back home: “I will go back to my life when women in captivity go back to their lives, when my community has a place, when I see people accountable for their crimes.”

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Was Lindsay Lohan simply mistaken in believing she needed to save these children from sex trafficking?

I'm reading "Lindsay Lohan gets punched in the face after accusing refugee parents of trafficking, trying to take the kids" (Fox News)(video of the incident at the link). I know it's easy to make fun of Lindsay Lohan, but what does she know, and shouldn't we care?

“Guys, you’re going the wrong way, my car is here, come,” Lohan is heard yelling at the children who continued to follow their parents as she chases them down the street.

How do we know the adults are their parents?

“They’re trafficking children, I won’t leave until I take you, now I know who you are, don’t f--- with me.”

How does she think she knows they are sex traffickers?

While trying to get the children's attention, the actress, who spent a few years living in Dubai, can also be heard shouting Arabic phrases in a what sounds like a Middle Eastern accent.

Lohan speaks Arabic, apparently.

“You’re ruining Arabic culture by doing this. You’re taking these children they want to go,” she said before yelling at the boys, “I’m with you. Don’t worry, the whole world is seeing this right now, I will walk forever, I stay with you don’t worry.”

Lohan tries to take a child's hand, and, in the middle of her own live-stream video, gets punched in the face.

I do not know what is going on there. I also don't know what if anything happened with Christine Blasely Ford and Brett Kavanaugh, decades ago in a Maryland house. But we're spending weeks peering into the distant past of 2 hyper-privileged Americans, and some unknown number of children right now are, it is said, dragged into sex slavery, and we let that be merely a passing tale of celebrity weirdness. That Lindsay Lohan. What was she thinking? But it's not really a story about 2 children arriving in Moscow from Syria and a laughable actress punched in the face. It's a story of thousands of children, all over the world. Do people even care if Lohan was wrong or right? Why are things so distorted and out of proportion?

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Ambiguity of the day (from GQ): "If your friend says she wants to cut off every dick in a five mile radius, let her!"

The article, by Marian Bull, is "How to Talk to the Women in Your Life Right Now," and by "right now," she means:



There's quite possibly a lot of good advice there. But what made me select this — out of everything — to blog was the absurd, grisly second meaning of "If your friend says she wants to cut off every dick in a five mile radius, let her!"

ADDED: I'm reminded of a poster I saw in Amsterdam back in 1993. I made a drawing — previously, blogged here — in my "Amsterdam Notebooks":

"PUBLIC CASTRATION IS A GOOD IDEA/VICTIMS OF RAPE DEMAND JUSTICE."

What called that to mind was my discussion with Meade as he was writing this comment:

"If your friend says she wants to cut off every dick in a five mile radius, let her!"

And then tell her: Only five miles? "No artificial limits as to time or [distance] should be imposed on this [mass amputation]."

And then run, old man. Run like hell.

I had suggested that Meade could avoid attracting language/anatomy pedants by using the word "amputation" instead of "castration."

I'm also reminded of the Ernest Hemingway story, "God Rest You Merry Gentlemen" (1925). Summary:

Two physicians sit in the Emergency Room of a Kansas City hospital on Christmas Day.... The doctors are telling the narrator of their most interesting encounter of this holiday season: a distraught adolescent, in a religious frenzy, had come in requesting castration for his "awful lust." The two docs managed to blunder the encounter so sufficiently that the boy left, only to return a few hours later bleeding dangerously from his penile self-amputation. The self-centered conversation returns to verbal ego-play between the two physicians, without a hint that either has considered the magnitude of the medical malfeasance against the boy.

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"When public life means the ransacking of people’s private lives even when they were in high school, we are circling a deeply illiberal drain."

Writes Andrew Sullivan in "Everyone Lost at the Ford-Kavanaugh Hearings" (New York Magazine).

A civilized society observes a distinction between public and private, and this distinction is integral to individual freedom. Such a distinction was anathema in old-school monarchies when the king could arbitrarily arrest, jail, or execute you at will, for private behavior or thoughts...The Iranian and Saudi governments — like the early modern monarchies — seek not only to control your body, but also to look into your soul. They know that everyone has a dark side, and this dark side can be exposed in order to destroy people....

The Founders... carved out a private space that was sacrosanct and a public space which insisted on a strict presumption of innocence, until a speedy and fair trial. Whether you were a good husband or son or wife or daughter, whether you had a temper, or could be cruel, or had various sexual fantasies, whether you were a believer, or a sinner: this kind of thing was rendered off-limits in the public world....

[In totalitarian societies], the private is always emphatically public, everything is political, and ideology trumps love, family, friendship or any refuge from the glare of the party and its public. Spies are everywhere, monitoring the slightest of offenses. Friends betray you, as do lovers. Family members denounce their own mothers and fathers and siblings and sons and daughters. The cause, which is usually a permanently revolutionary one, always matters more than any individual’s possible innocence. You are, in fact, always guilty before being proven innocent. You always have to prove a negative. And no offense at any point in your life is ever forgotten or off the table.

On the subject of family members denouncing each other, remember that ad we were just talking about, with 6 siblings telling people not to vote for their brother. "I couldn't be quiet any longer," one sister said with emotive intensity. I predict that the day is coming when a Supreme Court nominee's own children come forward and report random sexist microaggressions heard over the dinner table.

I remember long ago when I was a young law professor sitting next to a federal judge who wanted to tell me how to become a federal judge. (Weirdly, the Judge was Alex Kozinski.) I told him I didn't want to be a judge, because it's better to be a law professor: You have more freedom of speech and behavior — freedom to be an individual. You don't have to continually present yourself as sober and conventional for years and years and years. Who wants to live like that? But now, a quarter century later, the standard of how constrained you need to be is unfathomably strict. Who will be left to aspire to such a cold, lifeless prize? And we, the people, are the losers, because these Justices of the Future will have little to do with the rest of us fallible humans. How will they understand what is at stake?! Why would they value freedom of speech, when they let theirs go when they were 10?

I'm reminded of President Nixon's nomination of G. Harrold Carswell. There were a few reasons why this was a bad nomination, but what was so memorable about it was one Senator's effort to defend him against the charge that he was "mediocre":

Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a little chance? We can't have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos.

We don't need a mediocrity on the Court, of course. We don't want the representation of mediocrity, but we do want flesh and blood people, not nine abstemious, over-careful, controlled strivers who've excluded all daring and fun from their lives going back to the age of 10.

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Julie Swetnick "said she witnessed Judge Kavanaugh... lining up outside a bedroom where 'numerous boys' were 'waiting for their "turn" with a girl inside the room.'"

"Ms. Swetnick said she was raped at one of the parties, and she believed she had been drugged. None of Ms. Swetnick’s claims could be independently corroborated by The New York Times, and her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, declined to make her available for an interview.... Unlike two other women who have accused Judge Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, one who went to college with him and another who went to a sister high school, Ms. Swetnick offered no explanation in her statement of how she came to attend the same parties, nor did she identify other people who could verify her account.... In her statement, Ms. Swetnick said that she met Judge Kavanaugh and Mr. Judge in 1980 or 1981 when she was introduced to them at a house party in the Washington are... She said she attended at least 10 house parties in the Washington area from 1981 to 1983 where the two were present. She said the parties were common, taking place almost every weekend during the school year. She said she observed Judge Kavanaugh drinking 'excessively' at many of the parties and engaging in 'abusive and physically aggressive behavior toward girls, including pressing girls against him without their consent, "grinding" against girls, and attempting to remove or shift girls’ clothing to expose private body parts. I also witnessed Brett Kavanaugh behave as a "mean drunk" on many occasions at these parties.'"

The NYT reports today.

If the allegations are true, there must be many, many other witnesses. Where have they been all these weeks? And why would she go to "at least 10 house parties" if they were as she described?

The NYT suggests there's a gap in the account because Swetnick doesn't say how she got to go to the same parties as Kavanaugh. We're told Swetnick grew up in Montgomery County, Md., and graduated from Gaithersburg High School — a public school — in 1980 and attended the University of Maryland. That puts her in a less elite crowd. She's also 2 years older than Kavanaugh and graduated from high school 3 years before he did, so it makes it a little hard to picture them at the same parties. Did older, state-college women go to parties with prep school boys years younger than them? If they did and the boys raped them, repeatedly and systematically, how could the boys get away with it, and why are there not many more women coming forward with the same allegations? And why are we getting this through Michael Avenatti?

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"At the time of the assault, I was 30 years old, and a fit confident athlete. I was strong, and skilled, with great reflexes, agility and speed."

"Instead of being able to run, jump, and pretty must do anything I wanted physically, during the assault I was paralyzed and completely helpless. I couldn't move my arms or legs. I couldn't speak or even remain conscious. I was completely vulnerable, and powerless to protect myself... After the assault, I wasn’t sure what had actually happened but the pain spoke volumes. The shame was overwhelming. Self-doubt and confusion kept me from turning to my family or friends as I normally did. I felt completely alone, unable to trust anyone, including myself.... Bill Cosby took my beautiful, healthy young spirit and crushed it. He robbed me of my health and vitality, my open nature, and my trust in myself and others."

Today, at the sentencing hearing, reported in The Daily Beast.

ADDED: The judge has sentenced Cosby to 3 to 10 years in prison. And he "must undergo monthly counseling for the rest of his life and report quarterly to authorities. He'll be in the sex offender registry. The LA Times reports.

Let's remember that Cosby had gotten away with it until a comedian named Hannibal Burress made some jokes in 2014:

“Bill Cosby has the fuckin’ smuggest old black man public persona that I hate,” Buress said at the time. “He gets on TV, ‘Pull your pants up black people, I was on TV in the ‘80s! I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom!’ Yeah, but you rape women, Bill Cosby, so turn the crazy down a couple notches.” Buress also asked members of the audience to “Google ‘Bill Cosby rape’” when they got home, joking that it would have a whole lot more results than a search for his name, “Hannibal Buress.”

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"I'm a sentimental sap, that's all/What's the use of trying not to fall?/I have no will, you've made your kill/'Cause you took advantage of me!"

That's a 1928 song with lyrics by Lorenz Hart.

I'm thinking about it this morning after reading the questions Michael Avenatti proposed that the Senate Judiciary Committee ask Brett Kavanaugh: "Did you ever witness a line of men outside a bedroom at any house party where you understood a woman was in the bedroom being raped or taken advantage of?” and whether "he ever tried to prevent men from raping or taking advantage of women at any house party." I called "taken advantage of" a "strange locution." You're inquiring about rape, but you're lumping it together with sex where there's "taking advantage."

I'm so hot and bothered that I don't know
My elbow from my ear...

Or — to read Ronan Farrow in The New Yorker — you're so drunk you don't know a plastic penis from a fleshly one.

Here I am with all my bridges burned
Just a babe in arms where you're concerned
So lock the doors and call me yours
'Cause you took advantage of me

The Wikipedia article about the song says it "can be sung by either gender, but has traditionally been sung by women." Here. Check out the feeling when a man sings it (and here's my 2005 post "Songs transformed with the sex of the singer"):



I have no will, you've made your kill...

What's the use of Brett Kavanaugh trying not to fall?

I'm just like an apple on a bough/And you're gonna shake me down somehow...

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With the devious use of the disjunctive "or," Michael Avenatti raises a cloud of "gang rape" suspicion around Brett Kavanaugh.

I'm reading the shockingly titled Daily News article "Brett Kavanaugh and pals accused of gang rapes in high school, says lawyer Michael Avenatti."

“We are aware of significant evidence of multiple house parties in the Washington, D.C. area during the early 1980s during which Brett Kavanaugh, Mark Judge and others would participate in the targeting of women with alcohol/drugs in order to allow a ‘train’ of men to subsequently gang rape them,” Avenatti said in an email to Mike Davis, chief counsel for nominations for the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Gang rape??!!!

Yes, Avenatti wrote "gang rape" in his email to the Committee. And not just one gang rape — multiple gang rapes. What is the sudden, breakout hysteria?!

Avenatti did not disclose any details or identities of his witnesses.

All eyes on Avenatti. What a trickster this man is! Let's look at what he dropped on the public last night, just as we were hearing the weird new allegation that came out in The New Yorker. We'd barely had the chance to begin to process the story of a Yale college woman who, while seemingly too drunk to be sure if she was looking at a real penis or a fake one, saw Brett Kavanaugh pulling up his pants and heard — as she remembers it — somebody say his name. And then along came Avenatti to waggle his teaser at us. Boldface added:

Avenatti hinted at the nature of his allegations when he suggested to the Senate Judiciary Committee a series of questions to ask Kavanaugh.

One of his questions: “Did you ever target one or more women for sex or rape at a house party? Did you ever assist Mark Judge or others in doing so?”

Also, Avenatti suggested asking Kavanaugh: “Did you ever attend any house party during which a woman was gang raped or used for sex by multiple men?”

And: “Did you ever witness a line of men outside a bedroom at any house party where you understood a woman was in the bedroom being raped or taken advantage of?”

Avenatti also said Kavanaugh should be asked if he ever tried to prevent men from raping or taking advantage of women at any house party....

Are those the questions Avenatti used when collecting his witnesses — with "rape" never asked about independently from "sex" (or the strange locution "taken advantage of")?

Should Kavanaugh opponents welcome Avenatti's entrance onto this scene? I hear in him the echoes of a longstanding fight against fraternities and the accusation that they are a conspiracy of rapists. We got deeply into this issue back when Rolling Stone published its piece on the University of Virginia which turned out into a fiasco for those who sprung at an opportunity to describe a specific incident to stand in for all the bad behavior they wanted to alarm us about. Here we go again. I assume — but what do I know? — that there is horrible sex going on in the context of college drinking parties. I assume a lot of young women and men get hurt. They are used for sex and taken advantage of and — especially if you broadly define the word — raped.

You could cast aspersions on every man who ever belonged to a fraternity that held drinking parties. But should that serious problem be suddenly dumped on Brett Kavanaugh?

What Avenatti is doing resonates with something I wrote on September 18th: "The question that can destroy Brett Kavanaugh: Have you ever been so drunk you could not remember what happened?"

College happened. There is a drinking culture. It's tied to cheap, drunken sex. Can Kavanaugh assure us that he was never anywhere close to that?

Are you and everyone you care about free of the fraternity gang rape stink? If Kavanaugh falls, are you ready for the fall of every man who had drunken sex in college?

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"Men, Tell Us About Your High School Experience."

Fill out this form, just in case you want to tell on yourself before anybody else does.

The NYT wants you to trust it with your information:

We want to hear from men about their high school experiences. A Times editor may contact you with follow-up questions. No information you provide will be published without your permission.

But Christine Blasely Ford didn't want her name to come out, and yet it did. Is the Times more trustworthy than Dianne Feinstein?

Given the stakes these days and the low standard of what counts as sexual abuse — like Cory Booker's reaching for a breast a second time — why would anyone volunteer anything? I understand the value of having an open and honest conversation about these things, but hasn't that route been closed off by the shocking dire consequences to Brett Kavanaugh (and Al Franken and Louis CK, etc.)?

But the NYT has a form it would like you to fill out. The first question is:

Did you ever, as a teenager or younger man, behave toward women in ways you may now regret? If so, how? And how has that experience stayed with you over the years?

Won't this drag in a thousand "Cat Person" and Cory Booker stories? If you've got anything in the Kavanaugh-as-told-by-Blasey category, you'd have to be irrational to put it in writing. Or maybe just old or dying and not looking for another step of professional or social advancement.

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Cory Booker and Brett Kavanaugh — Chris Cillizza pushes away whataboutism, but we might reach for it anyway.

"What makes Cory Booker's groping incident different than the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh."

That's the CNN headline for a piece by Chris Cillizza.

The automatic, easy, snarky answer: He's a Democrat.

I still haven't read the article, and I hadn't previously noticed there was a "groping incident" about Cory Booker. Is it an allegation or something we know happened? Anyway, to give an nonsnarky answer — again, before reading the article — I'd say: Cory Booker has a limited term and faces reelection. Brett Kavanaugh is up for a lifetime appointment.

Let's read this piece now:

New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker wrote in the early 1990s -- while a student at Stanford -- about an incident on New Year's Eve 1984 (when he was 15) in which he groped a female friend's breast after the two of them had kissed.

"With the 'Top Gun' slogan ringing in my head, I slowly reached for her breast," Booker wrote of that night. "After having my hand pushed away once, I reached my 'mark.'" The point of Booker's column was how that moment, and his work on the issue after, had changed him -- and his views on women, consent and assault -- forever. "It was a wake-up call," Booker wrote in his Stanford column. "I will never be the same."

You're already consensually kissing. You try to touch her breast and are pushed away, and you try again and — what? — the end of the story is missing. But, holy God, if that's what ruins your life these days, the world has gone mad. I wonder whether college-student Cory was bullshitting when he claimed to be changed forever by this "wake up" call. But, again, I don't know the end of the story. Did the woman take him to task for trying again? And what's the "Top Gun" slogan? Maybe Cillizza isn't telling the story straight.

So the difference between the 2 stories — and this is my opinion, not Cillizza's — is that Booker's story was a story he told on himself, as part of posturing and instructing about how to be a good man. I don't know if it's true, but he chose to tell it and tell it that way. What really happened? I have no idea. Kavanaugh is suffering through someone else's telling of what is purportedly his story, and it's not told in the template of how he became such a good man, but to frame him as secretly evil. Within that other person's story, he is brutal and ugly, not boyishly copping a feel that he later lavishly regrets.

Back to Cillizza:

The rise of the #MeToo movement and the cavalcade of high-profile men admitting to behavior that ranges from boorish to criminal has opened eyes and forced uncomfortable and important conversations. The accusations against Kavanaugh are another moment to examine our assumptions and talk openly about how we should bets [sic] approach these situations -- both now and going forward.

Oh, yes. Let's have a conversation about everything! Talk openly! How do you think that will go? Place your "bets."

What we don't need amid all of this is an epic bout of "whatboutism" [sic].

Yeah, don't come after my guy while I'm going after your guy. That's whataboutism! I want you to stand down while I take all my shots. Funnily enough, that's how all these "conversations" tend to go when we're encouraged to have a conversation about some hot subject.

What Booker did as a teenager wasn't right. And he has been and will be judged by voters on them. But to turn Booker into a political missile to prove hypocrisy misses the mark. This isn't about Booker. This is about Ford, Kavanaugh, and how we, together, figure out the right way forward.

Yes, tell us what this is about.  You call out "whatboutism" — AKA whataboutism— but I'm going to call out your "what-it's-about-ism." You don't get to restrict the subject to exactly the scope you like. When you do that, it's "what-it's-about-ism" (my coinage).

But of course, everything's different from everything else. We can talk about differences and samenesses. Don't tell me what to do.

IN THE COMMENTS: Nonapod said:

"an incident on New Year's Eve 1984 (when he was 15) in which he groped a female friend's breast after the two of them had kissed. 'With the 'Top Gun' slogan ringing in my head'"

Top Gun came out in 1986. This whole story is an anti-strawman.

Wow. I found 2 typos in Cillizza's piece — "whatboutism" and "bets" — so maybe "1984" is another typo.

Anyway, checking the release date of the movie — it is indeed 1986 — I found the "slogan," I believe. It's "I feel the need... the need for speed!" That's such a stupid sex slogan.

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