David Pilgrim posts…
Later this year the book Witness for the Prosecution I have written with Ashley Conway* will appear from Karnac Books. Below is a taster of some the arguments it contains, focusing on implications for British psychologists and the BPS.
The ‘memory wars’ (Crews, 1995) seemed to splutter to an end in the BPS in 2021 when Daryl O’Connor, the Chair of the BPS Research Board, pulled the plug on a working group on memory and the law. He argued that a consensus could not be established about producing a revised report. (Those on the group, despite their disagreements, were not happy with this arbitrary decision.). O’Connor was embedded in a partisan sub-culture supporting one side of the ‘memory wars’, which had begun in Britain at Leeds University when Martin Conway was Head of Psychology.
Homophily (the ‘birds of a feather’ effect in professional networks) is well known in sociology (McPherson et al 2007). In the case of the false memory movement in Britain the academic departments in Leeds, City University (where Conway moved to) and Portsmouth became its nodes of flourishing. Conway’s leadership role is noteworthy. He chaired the BPS guidance group in 2008 (four of its ten members were from his department in Leeds). By 2011 he had joined the Scientific Advisory Board of the British False Memory Society (BFMS) and went on to archive their records at City University. Their fate became unclear. Some, or all, were shredded after the Society collapsed in 2024 for lack of funding.
Mystery shrouds these events but deceit, in one way or another, is central to the history of the false memory movement. Its roots were in clandestine CIA-funded work, and it fetishised the denial of personal experience when challenging those recounting histories of abuse. Cynicism about complainants was turned into scientific rhetoric and trauma-obsessed therapists were the cause, meaning that both accused and accuser were simply the victims of psychotherapeutic norms. This tells a good story but is it an honest and plausible one?
Martin Conway remained key player in the false memory movement until his death in 2022. In one particularly irritable meeting I attended about exploring a new memory and law report, prior to the O’Connor decision, Conway fumed out prematurely, muttering angrily ‘we have to follow the science’. His published guidance on this had been set out in Conway (2012). To his annoyance, some in the meeting were pointing out, quite properly, that the ecological validity problem in psychology raised a question about what exactly science meant in the case of our discipline.
Some of us with a clinical background were particularly cautious, given what we knew about the understated prevalence of child sexual abuse, the culture of denial about it in society and the proven impact of childhood adversity on mental health. Those doubts were to be a sticking point in the failed consensus adjudicated on by O’Connor by declaring the group now defunct. Had it continued, dirty washing about the false memory movement and the over-claiming of experimental psychologists about the open system of everyday life might have been washed in public.
Early in the meeting that I attended Conway declared that he was on the Scientific Advisory Board of the BFMS. At the very moment of his swansong, that Board was encountering significant problems. Two of its members were exposed in the press for their sexual misconduct. The first was Karl Sabbagh and the second Dan B. Wright. This is pertinent given the skewed obsession the false memory movement had had, since the early 1990s, with false positives. For them only the accusers’ accounts should be a matter of scientific focus and memory frailty though ubiquitous (as commonsense does tell us) can be ignored when it comes to those accused.
I return to Andrew Mountbatten below but will look first at Sabbagh and Wright to illustrate that the false memory scientists clearly had their a priori biases. This matters because the normal caution we have, quite rightly, to discount ad hominem reasoning can be challenged, when and if bias is clearly present in scientific work. Where bias is demonstrable then legitimate attention can be paid to the personal motives of the researchers involved (Coady, 1992, Walton, 1998).
The cases of Sabbagh and Wright
In September 2019 Karl Sabbagh was sentenced at Oxford Crown Court for grooming a 14-year-old girl online for sexual contact. He received a 45-month sentence and was placed for life on the sex offenders register. The 77-year-old was married with four children and during his time of imprisonment he remained as a named member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the BFMS.
His offending was intercepted by the police in a Dublin hotel, where he was on the brink of assaulting his victim. Prior to this he had sent her money, jewellery, a vibrator and footage of himself masturbating. He had asked her to stop shaving her pubic hair and to send him lewd pictures of herself. The court heard that these indecent images were classed in the British system as ‘category A’, which is the most serious grade (involving penetration, sexual activity with an animal or sadism). The Communications Director of the BFMS, Kevin Felstead, removed him and his name but after quite a while. Felstead admitted that he only knew of the conviction because a journalist from Third Sector had emailed him with the story in 2021. Sabbagh would have probably remained on the Board until the closure of the Society, had the journalist not intervened (Delahunty, 2021).
In 2009 Sabbagh published Remembering Our Childhood: How Memory Betrays Us. On its cover was a fulsome endorsement from Elizabeth Loftus, the doyen of the experimental wing of the false memory movement in the USA viz:
A terrific book. Sabbagh’s journey into childhood memory shows keen insight into how it works and what it means. He offers a masterfully original and beautifully written perspective on one of the most fundamental aspects of the human mind.
Hiding in plain sight in the book is Sabbagh’s argument that paedophilia is harmless and a moral panic. The book was a megaphone for the false memory movement. It had been written with the encouragement of not just Loftus but also another fellow British FMS Board member Lawrence Weiskrantz, Emeritus Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford.
Sabbagh was an experienced and well recognised writer, but he had no specialist research knowledge about ‘memory science’, and so the endorsement of Loftus and Weiscrantz gave his ersatz writing gravitas. The false memory movement has contained many dilettante experts who had their reasons to offer their services to enlighten the public. In the USA these included Mark Pendergrast, Pamela and Peter Freyd and Eleanor Goldstein. During the 1990s all of them faced accusations of abuse from their daughters, now grown up. Together they demonstrate what happens when the interest work of careerist experimental psychologists and partisan campaigners comes to together in a synergistic PR campaign.
If Sabbagh was a dilettante memory expert that was not the case with Dan B. Wright, who was a professor and well published in the field. Two years after Kevin Felstead had to remove Sabbagh from the BFMS Scientific Advisory Board, he was obliged to repeat the exercise (Hargrave, 2023). This was in May 2023 and yet again Felstead faced the public embarrassment of his ethically dubious advisors, after contact from a journalist. The case stretched back to 2012 in Florida and was then reported in the press in 2022 in Nevada (Longhi, 2022). At the time of the investigations against him for sexual misconduct, Wright was already on the Scientific Advisory Board of the BFMS.
Felstead seemed to be perplexed by his presence in the organisation, saying to the Hargrave (ibid) that “I have never had any contact with Dan Wright whatsoever. No email, no verbal contact, nothing at all.” Given Wright had been on the Board for over a decade the latter seemingly was not functioning. Maybe Felstead had forgotten about him (our memories do play tricks). Maybe the Board had recently become moribund, or it had always been a fig leaf of legitimacy for Felstead and his aims. Did academics on the Board in Britain not know of the Florida scandal? We probably will never know, though we do know that deceit has been a leitmotif of the false memory movement.
This is the Wright story in summary. In 2021 he had recently been appointed to an endowed Chair at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. A reporter on the Las Vegas Review-Journal summarised a serious case of sexual harassment that had occurred ten years previously, when Wright worked at the Florida International University (FIU). Wright had been the director of the legal psychology program at FIU. There, in 2012, he was investigated for making sexually inappropriate comments, stalking women in his department and ‘creating an intimidating work environment for women’. The original report from FIU revealed “a level of inappropriate behavior and lack of professional judgment, involving women, that rises to the level of harassment based on their gender,”. When the reporter in Nevada asked Wright for his reflections he said, conveniently: “That was a number of years ago…I’m trying to get on with my life.”.
The investigation and report revealed that Wright:
1 Would make comments about his penis to women in public.
2 Made comments about two students being together sexually. He told one student about a sexual dream he had had about her and another that he had imagined her in a lingerie pillow fight.
3. Texted women for inappropriate and non-work-related reasons, telling them that he was thinking of them.
4 Constantly interrupted women while they were working and repeatedly asked them out (witnesses said that Wright “does not take ‘no’ for an answer.”)
5 Touched women without their permission, including by putting his hand on their waists or the smalls of their backs, or by putting his arm around their shoulders.
6 Try to get female students to be alone with him, earning the label from peers as the “Dirty Dan Trick”.
Wright flatly denied all these accusations, so was he suffering from a false memory (i.e. had he forgotten a pattern of events implicating several women that had really happened?) Was he implying that the ten complainants were suffering a false memory (i.e. remembering things that had never happened to them?). These two questions put together highlight why the false memory movement has been biased and tunnel visioned in its interest. It wants to focus on the second question and point up that those reporting sexual abuse in court were suffering from a memory implantation at the hands of trauma obsessed therapists. This lop-sided attention is why the ad hominem caution can be parked on reasonable grounds, when we appraise those in the false memory movement.
The credibility problem for the false memory movement
Just because the US False Memory Syndrome Foundation and the British FMS have now closed (in 2019 and 2024 respectively) it does not necessarily mark the permanent demise of the false memory movement. Both the family activist wing and the experimentalist wing of the movement have to some extent been re-configured in new or existing organisations, such as the ‘innocence projects’. These singularly define rough justice as being about those falsely accused. A challenge to that position has been increasingly evident in the past ten years.
Sabbagh wrote his book before Jimmy Savile went from hero to zero overnight at the end of 2011. The #MeToo movement meant that the journalistic fawning over Elizabeth Loftus was subsequently tempered considerably (cf. Abramsky, 2004). Journalists have had to weigh up how to approach accounts of historical abuse (continue to fete a female public intellectual or stand by female survivors of abuse?). The false memory defence has been used mainly against women on behalf of men accused. Maybe the false memory movement has had a feminist by-pass. This point applies not just to Loftus but to the mothers of abused victims opting to support their husbands and instead disparage their daughters (e.g. Goldstein and Farmer, 1992; Freyd and Goldstein, 1997). After Goldstein died, her daughter reporting abuse offered a view of her mother in an open letter online attacking the leadership of the FMSF (Sharlet Stacy (2021, December 3). Open letter to Freyd, Loftus and the FMSF. Open Letter Posted To “DISSOC” Email Listserv).
Some women had responded robustly about the bias against victims in the 1990s. Jennifer Freyd, in the wake of abuse by her own father went on to become a Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon in 1992. She pointed up ‘betrayal trauma’ and ‘DARVO’ (Deny Attack and Reverse Victim and Offender) and queried ecological validity but her arguments did not dent the false memory movement (Freyd, 1996) Another woman, the clinical psychologist Anna Salter, was sued in the courts for complaining of the damage being done by the false memory defence and the lack of evidence that therapists routinely implanted memories (Salter, 1998). The latter litigation, which failed, was from Hollida Wakefield and Ralph Underwager (1992). Underwager (resonating here with the Sabbagh case) had argued in an interview in a Dutch paedophile magazine Paidika that paedophilia was a God-given blessing and should be celebrated. Wakefield was more cautious in the same interview – she stayed on as advisor to the FMSF, but Underwager resigned to ward off a PR disaster, once news of the Dutch confession crossed the Atlantic (Geraci, 1993).
Prior to the formation of the FMSF during the 1980s, Underwager had headed up VOCAL (‘Victims of Child Abuse Allegations’) and defended hundreds of parents accused of child sexual abuse. He argued that communist inspired social workers were removing children from good American Christian families. He lobbied to abolish child protection legislation. Much of the VOCAL ideology about taken for granted false accusations spilled over in the 1990s into the false memory movement. If an accused parents said that they had been falsely accused, then they were clearly telling the truth.
Today is not the 1980s and 90s
More recently the cultural landscape is different. The fall out of the Epstein scandal has resonances everywhere. The amused fascination that Elizabeth Loftus had offered to journalists and her fawning acolytes in psychology either side of the Atlantic has been disrupted by a fundamental question about her credibility. (On the fawning point see for example One on one – with Elizabeth Loftus | BPS).)
Two publicly filmed scenarios point to the declining credibility of the false memory defence. In 2020 Loftus acted as a defence witness for Harvey Weinstein. The prosecutor and Assistant District Attorney, Joan Illuzi-Orbon, asked this question: “Have you ever written a book called ‘Witness for the Prosecution?’” Impassively she replied ‘No’. Many in the courtroom laughed loudly knowing that she was famous for being the lead author of a book called ‘Witness for the Defense’ and that she had no interest in offering help to accusers (Loftus and Ketcham, 1991). The glee in the audience offered a new public cultural marker about the credibility of the false memory movement.
In the second example, a year later (22nd November 2021) District Judge Alison Nathan granted Ghislaine Maxwell permission to call Elizabeth Loftus as an expert witness. Loftus repeated the stereotypical position of false memory findings, thereby casting doubt on the testimony of (any) complainant. Loftus simply introduces doubt from a distal body of knowledge in the academy, pouring a jug of cynical cold water over any human testimony. This really is not like DNA testing case by specific case. Maxwell was found guilty, which was par for the course. She is now spending 20 years in jail for trafficking female minors.
The false memory defence has proved to be fairly useless in practice for defence teams; most of Loftus’ innumerable criminal1 cases have still culminated in guilty outcomes (Hoult, 2023). Judges and juries come to reasonable decisions despite those in the false memory movement bemoaning their scientific illiteracy (French, 2018). The condescension from the movement is premised on the notion that only the false memory experimentalists are offering the world science in the public interest. The problem for those like Loftus and French is that their self-confident and patronising stance has not won the memory wars for good reason.
An example about judicial norms changing is the experience of another false memory expert Lawrence Patihis, from Portsmouth and ex-colleague and admirer of Loftus. Recently (September 2025) he was asked by the defence to “help educate” the jury on how memories work. However, he had his expert witness testimony rejected by a court in Michigan USA, because the judge said it would “open the door to jury confusion”. The point here is not whether it would have led to confusion (who knows?); it is that judges no longer uncritically treat false memory proponents as they would any other expert witness. Similar rejections by judges were emerging about Martin Conway’s expertise in court prior to his death.
Given the closure of both the FMSF and the BFMS, one remaining option now for those experimental psychologists peddling the false memory defence is freelance lobbying to be an expert witness (see for example https://lpatihis.wixsite.com/lawrencepatihis). For campaigners like ex-BFMS boss Kevin Felstead other options are to set up a consultancy with sympathetic defence lawyers (see https://memoryandinjustice.co.uk/.) Both have also joined forces with FACT (https://factuk.org/) a generic home for those claiming to be falsely accused or victims of past miscarriages of justice, set up by the ex-MP Harvey Proctor.
Thus, for now at least, both campaigners like Felstead and academics in the Loftus tradition are carrying on their work in new organisational forms. However, their opponents also show no sign of going away. Not only has survivor-based research challenged the false memory movement (Cheit, 2014; Crook, 2022; Hoult, 2023), some more sanguine experimentalists have urged caution when partisan claims become entangled with empirical findings. The original ‘lost in the mall’ study was disavowed by its originator (James Coan) and other memory experimentalists have rehearsed cautionary evidence (Brewin et al, 2020; Andrews and Brewin, 2024). Coan is important for his innovative ‘lost in the mall’ study. He went on to be Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia and remained angst ridden about his creative youthfulness, as he explained here to a journalist:
I’m slow enough on the uptake that it took me a while to realize that the study I was doing was making people who had been sexually abused feel like I was their enemy,” he tells me. “That was completely devastating to me.” Although he has been asked to testify about false memory in countless court cases, Coan has always refused. He just doesn’t think the mall study is sufficiently relevant. In her excitement, he thinks, Loftus may [subsequently] have ‘mischaracterized’ what started out as an undergraduate assignment for extra credit. “I got five points,” Coan says. “Five points and decades of grief.” (Heaney, 2021 (emphasis added); https://www.thecut.com/article/false-memory-syndrome-controversy.html)
And it is not just Coan who exercises restraint in the face of the dangers of overclaiming about false memories. Take the encyclopaedic tome Memory now in its fourth edition (Baddeley, et al, 2025). The authors mention Elizabeth Loftus about witness statements and Martin Conway about autobiographical memory but many key names and their published work, from the sub-culture of memory experimentalists I mentioned at the outset, are simply missing from the book. Maybe Baddeley et al do not get involved with discussing the ‘memory wars’, because they know that they are dirty wars and might toxify the brand of mainstream experimental psychology. More than that, they engage respectfully with clinical research and weigh up the evidence on recovered memories. That respect has been pointedly missing from the discourse of the false memory movement. The latter disparaged clinical research. A lack of engagement with it means that the false memory experimentalists literally do not know what they are talking about. None of them are mental health workers but are very certain about what happens in the clinic.
For example, they deny that dissociation can account for delayed memories – when it can. They argue that dissociation is simply a conceptual smokescreen to re-insinuate the psychoanalytical concept of repression, when it is nothing of the sort. Dissociative phenomena, including dissociative amnesia, are conceded by therapists who are out with the psychodynamic tradition or even hostile to it. They generalise about the use of hypnosis and guided imagery as being commonplace with no empirical evidence to defend that claim of high prevalence. The dominant models of psychological therapy do not deploy these techniques. They talk of ‘repressed memory therapy’ as a given, even though the latter’s existence has no evidential basis – where is the published practicum or its training institute? They confuse the legitimate exploration of childhood adversity, which is good practice in mental health work, with evidence of false memory implantation. This a catalogue of misunderstanding, wilful or otherwise, and blind ignorance.
Moreover, were hypnosis that effective at radically altering our view of the world, then most mental health problems could be erased in a few sessions. Ironically the progenitor of the false memory position, Martin Orne, could not deliver evidence to his CIA paymasters that such major erasures and replacements were feasible (i.e. the scenario of The Manchurian Candidate). Although he became the recruiter in chief for the FMSF he was always ambivalent about what could be said case by case. Within a few years he was pulling back from the more strident totalising claims of the FMSF and its new public intellectual Elizabeth Loftus (Orne, 1995; Ceci and Bruck, 1995). Despite that, he remained on the Advisory Board of the Foundation until his death in 2000.
But probably the most important weakness in the false memory movement is not its failure to win the scientific argument, but a cultural turn against those who trivialise sexual crimes or undermine their fair-minded appraisal. The false memory movement for a long while helped to feed a culture of denial alongside claims about the ‘parental alienation syndrome’ and the moral panic thesis about the scale of child sexual abuse. In the latter regard its seminal leader Stanley Cohen pointed out that the problem with child abuse was not moral panic but ‘moral stupor’ or ‘chilling denial’ (Pilgrim, 2018).
More widely, critics have been concerned with the moral role of evidence or ‘epistemic injustice’ (Fricker, 2007). The false memory movement by only obsessing about one form of injustice (for those accused of crimes) has lost any credibility – what about the injustice for legions of victims who find no redress? The false positive message has drowned out the false negative one. This has culminated in a ‘punching down’ effect. Psychological knowledge has been used for the powerful not the powerless. If this is in doubt look at who has employed Loftus: Robert Durst, Harvey Weinstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, O.J. Simpson and Michael Jackson. Under the radar other rich financial interests were evident, when Loftus worked for the defence of employers being sued for asbestos related disease by ex-employees (Hoult, 2023; Durst v. 3M Co., No. 20-C-74 KAN, Initial Designation of Experts and General Objections to Designations for Oct. 2020 Trial by Bechtel Corp., 23 (W.Va. Cir. Ct. July 21, 2020).
Returning to recent newsworthy elite interests, special pleading by Epstein’s associates includes their own lack of memory about the facts. Peter Mandelson could not remember his email exchanges with Epstein and argued that he was conned by a narcissist (possibly it takes one to know one in this case), so he was a victim just like the trafficked girls were. He knew nothing of the latter because he was a gay man and Epstein would thus not involve him in knowledge of his crimes – really? He supported Epstein when the latter was arrested sending supportive messages in 2008. Why?
But the best story implicating hazy memory from this group of elite mutual backscratchers has been left to a royal: the very public undoing of the former Prince Andrew. In his BBC Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis (September 19th, 2019) he stated that “I have no recollection of ever meeting this lady, none whatsoever.”. Shown a photograph of him with her, when she was 17 years of age, accompanied by Ghislaine Maxwell, he denied any recollection still. In February 2022 he paid ‘the lady’, Virginia Giuffre, an estimated £12 million pounds, while continuing to claim innocence of any wrongdoing. On July 25th, 2025, Virginia Giuffre committed suicide. After being banished by the royal family and stripped of his titles, the police removed Andrew’s gun licence, probably on sensible grounds.
Dirty wars and dirty history
The memory wars, like all dirty wars have led to dire consequences and many unanswered questions. Andrew’s ostracization will probably not be the last story we will hear about the Epstein scandal. Will a verdict on Epstein’s purported suicide in prison become clearer? Will Andrew keep telling us stories about untraceable bookings in pizza restaurants? Why did he pay millions to a woman he had never met? For our purposes here though, will Elizabth Loftus and her acolytes any longer have any utility for defence teams? Will her appearance in support of Ghislaine Maxwell be her swansong?
Apart from the punching down image and the matter of epistemic injustice, ‘memory science’ has been saturated with deceit from its early days in the Cold War. Orne, and others like Ewan Cameron in Canada working for the CIA deceived and abused their subjects who were children (Ross, 2006, Torbay 2023). Social psychology experimentalists went on to normalise deceit (Milgram is the best known to psychology undergraduates). James Coan quickly worried about what he had unleashed and quite understandably backed away.
When the experimentalists in the false memory movement insisted on reducing the memory wars to an epistemic matter, they evaded their own moral and political context (Pope, 1997). This reflected a form of naïve realism dating back to the turn of the 20th century, when positivists genuinely believed that they offered disinterested knowledge, which would create verifiable covering laws applicable across time and space. They were wrong and Karl Popper dissenting from his elders in the Vienna Circle to produce his critical rationalism pointed out why. He also noted that science was a social activity requiring reflexivity and humility. Arrogant ‘disinterestedness’ was thus removed as an option but those on one side of the memory wars did not get the memo.
At the turn of this century post-Popperian philosophers have refined and extended that attack on positivism (Pilgrim, 2022). The memory experimentalists with their tunnel vision about false positives advance a form of scientism that is a hundred years out of date. It appeals to the idea that psychology as a single discipline can claim optimistic scientific incrementalism, by simply repeating the closed system logic of the experiment over and over again. However, to use a phrase from Don Bannister (1968), unfortunately for experimental psychologists, the ‘test tube talks back’. The survivor researchers noted earlier have made that point clearly.
Moreover, Viennese contemporaries from the early 1930s, Paul Weiss and Ludwick von Bertalanffy who were experimental biologists, spawned General Systems Theory. This had two impacts. First, it pinpointed the error of transferring the findings from closed systems to open systems, offering the serious caution for psychologists about ecological validity (Adolph, 2019; Smedslund, 2016; Uher, 2021). Second, it required that we review whether human science should rely on case specific retroduction not deduction from experiments (Bateson, 1972; Pilgrim, 2022). That second point gets to the heart of why judges and juries do not give the false memory defence credibility. It is not, as French and Conway claim because they are scientifically ignorant, it is because they exercise good judgment, when faced with competing accounts from complainants and those they accuse in very specific circumstances.
Finally, in its official policies the BPS has swallowed the story of scientific incrementalism, mainly because those favouring one side in the memory wars captured the policy apparatus (the homophily across Leeds, City University and Portsmouth) (Conway, A. and Pilgrim, 2022). Loftus was lionised and the law and memory group, dominated by the experimentalists, shut out the concerns of clinicians.
With time, this may not be a ‘good look’ for the Society. To cite Faulkner (1951), ‘the past is not dead, it’s not even past’. Epstein and his narcissistic elite friends have set many hares running to still be caught. Moreover, the official inquiries into child sexual abuse in this country and Australia have jeopardised the prospects of the false memory movement having any abiding credibility (Goodman-Delahunty et al, 2017).
There is more in the offing, and the BPS is not likely to come up smelling of roses when the history of the false memory movement is told in all its gory details.
* Please note, that to avoid any confusion, Ashley Conway is not related to Martin Conway. All references to Ashley Conway are indicated by the use of his initial.
Blog Administrator notes:
We have covered the debacle of the Memory and Law group on the blog previously (see here, here, here and here); clicking on “False Memory Syndrome” and Memory and the Law Group in the list of categories to the right of the screen will also give access to other posts.
Blog Administrator notes:
2 February 2026. Minor typographical changes made and the distinction between Ashley and Martin Conway clarified.
Footnote 1 Edit added 3 February 2026.
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