Recovered Memories: Corroborated Examples

Case Studies and Historical Contexts

In the United States, Peter Freyd and Pamela Freyd stand as the two most notable proponents of false memories in sexual abuse victims. The Freyds founded the False Memory Syndrome Foundation when their eldest daughter accused Peter Freyd of molesting her as a child. Peter Freyd vehemently denied the allegation, and he and his wife set about attacking their daughter’s credibility. Freyd openly admitted being abused as a child; his wife later corroborated this by stating that her husband had been molested by a pedophile between the ages of 7 and 11. Freyd was not a clinician; he was a mathematics professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

As an academic, Freyd was able to recruit a variety of other academics and skeptics on the topic of repressed and recovered memories. Some of those academics joined his organization’s advisory board; other board members were individuals who held no clinical training like James Randi, a magician who was recorded on seven sexually explicit phone calls with seven different teen boys. The advisory board members were drawn from other organizations such as the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), whose members included the following individuals who served as advisory board members for the False Memory Syndrome Foundation:

• Paul Kurtz, chairman, who ran Prometheus Books, a publisher producing books on pedophilia. Kurtz was professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of New York at Buffalo, and chairman of CSICOP.

• James Randi, the aforementioned magician who was recorded having sexually explicit phone conversations with teenage boys, who authored various books published by Kurtz’s company Prometheus Books.

• Martin Gardner.

• Ray Hyman.

• Elizabeth Loftus, an academic who resigned from the APA rather than face an investigation for her unethical conduct.

• Loren Pancratz.

• Thomas Sebeok.

Vern Bullough was a board member of Paidika, the pedophile magazine which interview FMSF Board member Dr. Ralph Underwager, who argued for unlimited freedom and made it clear that he believed pedophilia should be within the bounds of that freedom during his interview. His interview is available in Paidika 9, over at investigationsinritualabuse.com. Bullough was also a board member of CSICOP, and his books were published by Prometheus.

Bullough has been lauded as an unfairly persecuted and even defamed academic; the Los Angeles Times cited accusations of pedophilia hurled at Bullough over his organization of a workshop discussing child pornography. The fact that Bullough was a board member of a quarterly periodical advocating for pedophilia, and his frequent articles on books like Male Intergenerational Intimacy-which is code for child rape-is omitted from the Times’s martyrdom of Vern Bullough. Also omitted from the Times is the overt statement of purpose for Paidika:

The starting point of Paidika is necessarily our consciousness of ourselves as paedophiles. It is our intention to publish an intellectual journal which will examine paedophilia within its cultural context, with emphasis on the humanities, history and social sciences. We shall be speaking, therefore, not only to paedophiles seeking a greater understanding of their identity, but also to members of the academic community open to objective investigations of the phenomenon.

The ground on which we stand is the emergence and evolution of paedophile consciousness and identity in history. We point back to the writings of J. A. Symonds and members of the early German sexual emancipation movement such as Benedict Friedlander and John Henry Mackay, where views of paedophilia as an identity and subculture were proposed. The contemporary development of this consciousness is found in the work of Frits Bernard, Edward Brongersma, Tom O’Carroll, Rent Schtrer and others. We intend to be a forum for the shaping of this consciousness.

But to speak today of paedophilia, which we understand to be consensual intergenerational sexual relationships, is to speak of the politics of oppression. This is the milieu in which we are enmeshed, the fabric of our daily life and struggle. There is no country where there are not proscriptions against even the most innocent consensual paedophile relationships. In the English-speaking countries, in particular, the facts of this politics are worsening, and these countries appear determined to impose their reactionary moral values on other nations. In the United States, for example, prison sentences of a century or more are not uncommon for consensual man/boy relationships, and in the state of Florida the paedophile can receive the death penalty for such relationships. Visual images that are part of a paedophile sensibility are also being assailed: in many places all nude images of minors are legally defined as pornography. Not only are our lives and culture under attack, but proposals are afoot in the United States and Canada to criminalize even discussions of lowering of the age of consent or the reporting of research that does not characterize paedophilia aschild abuse.

It is our contention that the oppression of paedophilia is part of the larger repression of sexuality, and that this repression in general represents an irrational expression of authority in government. The oppression of paedophilia is therefore dangerous in a wider sense than simply to paedophiles. We must address the reality of this oppression, and while we do not advocate behaviour that violates these laws, we shall attempt to counter the hysteria with calmness and reason.

We wish then to welcome and invite our readers’ participation. Through publication of scholarly studies, thoroughly documented and carefully reasoned, we intend to demonstrate that paedophilia has been, and remains, a legitimate and productive part of the totality of human experience.

“Consensual man/boy relationships” were the fount from which Vern Bullough and others like him drew their inspiration: False Memory Syndrome Foundation board members such as James Randi, who was caught on tape having sexually explicit conversations with teenage boys, as well as Ralph Underwager and his wife Hollida Wakefield, whose interview in Paidika was the grounds for his eventual resignation from the FMSF board. The reason for such academics to line up with a father who was accused by his daughter of sexual abuse are obvious: in the world of pederasts, and to their way of thinking, sexual abuse isn’t really abuse at all. It is something else entirely: an intergenerational relationship between an adult and child which is entirely consensual.

The reasons why a pedophile who views sex with children as consensual would want to invalidate a child’s memories is obvious: those memories could be the basis for a criminal investigation, prosecution, and eventual conviction and incarceration. The fact that the memories were repressed in the first place is evidence of the extreme trauma involved in sexual abuse.

Those who contend for false memories do so due to various motivations: some False Memory Syndrome Foundation board members such as Elizabeth Loftus constructed entire careers as “expert” witnesses for criminal and civil defendants. Loftus studied mathematical psychology at Stanford, earning her doctorate and being voted “least likely to succeed in psychology” by her fellow students, and then transitioned into a career advancing the notion that memories could be falsified. In short, Loftus argued that you could make people remember things that never happened.

In the study Loftus conducted in 1995, two years after her undergraduate student James Coan submitted his thesis based on a similar study, 24 subjects ranging in age from 18 to 53 were purportedly convinced by an older relative that they had been lost in a mall as a child.¹ By Loftus’s own account, only 6 of the 24 subjects had the false memory. The most obvious issue beyond the fact that Loftus failed to implant false memories in 18 of 24 subjects is this: she used parents or older siblings to implant a false memory for the remaining six subjects, not a therapist. All six subjects were able to identify the false memory, according to Coan, who Loftus then dropped as her co-investigator while simultaneously dismissing his six subjects.²

The six subjects cited by Coan as proof of false memory syndrome did not form false memories; if they had, the subjects would not have been able to later identify the false memories as false.³ ⁴ This is why Elizabeth Loftus dropped those subjects and Coan from her follow up research: Coan’s research subjects failed to support her hypothesis, which was that false memories of an event that never occurred could be implanted in a subject. As Blizard and Shaw make clear in their 2019 review of Loftus’s work:

Dropping subjects who fail to produce the hypothesized results is considered unethical, because it erroneously inflates the statistical probability that the published results were not merely due to chance. Similarly, the lack of a calculated error rate in the mall study may indicate an attempt to avoid publishing unwanted results (Murphy et al., 2013).⁵

Loftus and Pickrell provided one transcript from a subject in their published study, and that subject disputed details of the purported memory. The subject was able to correctly identify the false memory, which belies Loftus’s claim of false memories being implantable in subjects. The methodology and conclusions Loftus used in her studies were held up to scrutiny that she avoided when she published her findings in a non-peer reviewed journal, scrutiny that would later be applied to Loftus when she sat for a deposition in 2017:

“Loftus underscored her lack of a clear definition of false memory when queried under deposition (E.M. vs. Los Angeles Unified School District, 2017), “In the mall study … you said that there was no distinction between… a false memory and a partially false memory, correct?” She responded, “I don’t remember exactly how we defined what was partial and what was complete” (p. 281).”⁶

Elizabeth Loftus is a pseudo-intellectual and charlatan who testified in over 250 cases as an expert witness, providing the patina of substance to a phenomenon that does not exist, has never existed, and which has no evidentiary basis.⁷ The scant evidence that Loftus selectively cited in her study was not evidence at all; instead, it served to illustrate a conclusion that was exactly opposite of Loftus’s thesis and desired result: that even when research subjects are seduced into validating the lies of their older relatives, they can later identify those lies as false memories of an event that never happened.

There are those who have attempted to construct the technological basis for implanting false memories of events that never occurred; those individuals are transparent in their agenda, which is the wholesale manipulation of human populations towards an agenda of forced virtue towards the ends of climate change and globalism. Such individuals and the organizations and ideologies they serve freely admit that they lack the technological basis to implant false memories, and seem gleeful in their rush to run past the ethical implications of such technology and its application.

The general population lacks the cognitive wherewithal or the time to understand the critical question of why the False Memory Syndrome Foundation was formed, and why proponents of false memory as a syndrome were suddenly so eager to advance their narratives of childhood abuse being rooted in false rather than genuine memories during the late Eighties and early Nineties.

What Happened? A Review of Pederastic Motivations in Constructing False Memory Myths

As Joshua Kendall notes in his article “The False Memory Syndrome at 30: How Flawed Science Turned Into Conventional Wisdom”, states were beginning to allow sexual abuse victims to sue their abusers within specified timeframes after they remembered their abuse, rather than when the victims were abused. 19 states had enacted such laws by 1992; abusers were facing billions in potential liability related to the abuse they had committed against children.⁸ The statute of limitations in most states had previously limited liability to within four years after the victim attained the age of majority; after the victim turned 23, abusers could be assured that civil liability was barred by the statute of limitations.

Those who enjoyed raping children had long enjoyed the luxuries of a criminal justice system that was woefully inadequate to the task of holding child sexual predators accountable. Cross, Walsh, Simone, and Jones’s meta-analysis of child abuse prosecution rates found that mean referral rates for child abuse cases was 56% across four analyzed studies, “but the mean was not useful because of the variability in rates.”⁹ RAINN, citing from the FBI’s 2017 data, found that 98% of perpetrators of sexual assault went free, with 50 reports leading to arrest, 28 cases leading to conviction, with 25 perpetrators out of 1,000 being incarcerated.¹⁰

A mere 1 in 3 victims reported their abuse to law enforcement, according to Department of Justice Statistics.¹¹ Against the backdrop of these realities, those who perpetrate sexual assault against adults and children enjoy virtual immunity from prosecution and arrest for sexual abuse; in the late Eighties and early Nineties, the abuser was facing the prospect of increased civil liability for their acts if and when their victims remembered the abuse. Peter Freyd, the founder of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, was one of those alleged abusers. His daughter had remembered extensive childhood sexual abuse and trauma at the hands of her father.

Peter Freyd was himself the victim of child abuse at the hands of a pedophile. His daughter alleged this; his wife confirmed it. Freyd was facing reputational damage and possible civil liability from his daughter’s recovered memories of childhood abuse. He did what any reasonable person would do: he founded a nonprofit. Peter Freyd and his wife followed the establishment of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation with lawfare in the form of a defamation suit against Charles L. Whitfield, a trauma psychologist who discussed the Freyd allegations at three professional conferences in 1995, in the context of his belief that repressed memories were empirically valid.¹²

During correspondence with FMSF board member Ralph Slovenko, Dr. Whitfield cited a published letter by Jennifer Freyd’s uncle corroborating her allegations: Freyd’s uncle claimed he had witnessed the sexual abuse. Peter and Pamela Freyd were step siblings who were later married; while their daughter privately made her allegations against Peter, Pamela Freyd publicized those allegations against Peter in Ralph Underwager’s Issues in Child Abuse Accusations journal, in which she derided her daughter as a liar, an anorexic, and a sexually dysfunctional individual.¹³ Pamela Freyd then sent the signed article to her daughter’s employer, the University of Oregon, during Jennifer Freyd’s evaluation for a promotion to full professor.

Pamela Freyd’s crusade against her daughter went far beyond her daughter’s immediate employer; she bragged about sending the same signed article to “the 75 top clinical psychology departments” around the United States.¹⁴ The fact that her husband was an alcoholic who would be hospitalized for his alcoholism, and his propensity for discussing sexual topics with children-Peter Freyd admitting to discussing his own childhood abuse as a “kept boy” and male prostitute with his daughters, and his daughter claimed he held up a turkey baster and informed her two year old son that lesbians used basters for artificial insemination-Pamela Freyd impugned the veracity of her daughter’s recovered memories, even when those memories were corroborated by her husband’s brother.

The False Memory Syndrome Foundation Board of Advisors was staffed with pedophile apologists such as Ralph Underwager, and others who maintained professional and personal ties with pederasty advocates such as Vern Bullough. Even more troubling was the foundation’s affiliation with CIA affiliated MK-ULTRA psychologists such as Martin Orne and Louis Jolyon West. Jennifer Freyd’s allegations against her father were corroborated by her uncle, who claimed to witness the abuse in one of two letters he sent to PBS. Her father Peter was a victim of pederastic abuse as a child, but he represented the abuse to his daughter in her childhood as part of his past as a “kept boy.”

In the late Eighties and early Nineties, state legislatures were allowing for an expanded statute of limitations for victims to sue their abusers, dating from the day they remembered their abuse rather than the most recent occurrence of the abuse, or their attainment of majority when they turned 18. The False Memory Syndrome Foundation’s emergence was a direct result of this reality; those who sexually abused children were now faced with economic consequences even after they had evaded criminal culpability. For Peter and Pamela Freyd, those potential economic and reputational consequences led them to attack their daughter’s reputation and the validity of her memories of abuse.

Those who argued for false memories, such as Elizabeth Loftus, did so to invalidate actual memories of abuse which were corroborated by other witnesses and physical evidence. The goal was to exculpate child rapists, who Ralph Underwager and other board members did not believe were rapists at all.

Is choosing paedophilia for you a responsible choice for the individual?

RU: Certainly it is responsible. What I have been struck by as I have come to know more about and understand people who choose paedophilia is that they let themselves be too much defined by other people. That is usually an essentially negative definition. Paedophiles spend a lot of time and energy defending their choice.

I don’t think that a paedophile needs to do that. Paedophiles can boldly and courageously affirm what they choose. They can say that what they want is to find the best way to love.

I am also a theologian and as a theologian I believe it is God’s will that there be closeness and intimacy, unity of the flesh, between people. A paedophile can say: “This closeness is possible for me within the choices that I’ve made.”

Paedophiles are too defensive. They go around saying, “You people out there are saying that what I choose is bad, that it’s no good. You’re putting me in prison, you’re doing all these terrible things to me. I have to define my love as being in some way or other illicit.”

What I think is that paedophiles can make the assertion that the pursuit of intimacy and love is what they choose. With boldness they can say, “I believe this is in fact part of God’s will.” They have the right to make these statements for themselves as personal choices. Now whether or not they can persuade other people they are right is another matter (laughs).¹⁵

The interviewer, Joseph Geraci, was a pederast who wrote novels detailing older men engaged in the rape of young boys-as minors cannot consent to sex, any depiction of such activities involves child rape.¹⁶ This fact appears to be lost on Geraci and his interview subjects in the above referenced interview; Underwager encourages child rapists to say that their behavior “is in fact part of God’s will.”

Such statements are directly relevant to the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, founded as it was in response to Peter Freyd’s daughter remembering the incestuous sexual abuse he inflicted on her as a child. The empirical invalidity and self-serving purpose of false memories is obvious, considering the attitudes of the proponents of such a non-existent phenomenon towards child rape and their unethical and dishonest scholarship to substantiate the notion that memories can be falsified in a therapeutic or clinical setting.

Those who opposed the FMSF did so on a moral rather than empirical basis; in doing so, they failed to highlight the examples of recovered memories of abuse which were ultimately corroborated and proven by evidence.

Examples of Corroborated Recovered Memories

In 1994, Henry Bachmann sued Reverend James Gummersbach after recovering memories of being raped by Gummersbach in the basement of the Church of Immaculate Conception in St. Louis. His recovered memories began in 1992, and Bachmann was ultimately awarded $1.2 million in his litigation over the abuse.¹⁷ Bachmann’s claims were corroborated by multiple additional victims who alleged that Gummersbach sexually abused them in at least three parishes during the late Fifties and early Sixties.

Julie Alley successfully sued her father, William D. Alley, and her recovered memories of the abuse were substantiated by psychiatric records in Alley’s divorce which proved that Alley engaged in incest and sexual abuse, as claimed by Alley’s mother, sister, stepsisters, and stepbrother. William D. Alley was a member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation.

Claude Edward Foulk, the executive director of the Napa State Hospital whose adopted son accused him of abuse after recovering memories of the abuse, was sentenced to 248 years in state prison. His son’s allegations were corroborated by 13 other victims of Charles Foulk who came forward with their own abuse-which was outside of the statute of limitations. Foulk had preyed upon children who were placed in his home as foster or adopted children from at least 1965 onwards. Three of those male victims testified against Foulk at his criminal trial, thereby validating the recovered memories of his victim.

Marshall Adam Walker, a Colorado teacher who sexually abused multiple male students, was convicted in 2007 after one victim recovered memories of the abuse while watching a movie. Two other victims had continuous memories corroborative of the recovered memories of the third victim.

The Recovered Memory Archive details case after case in which recovered memories of childhood abuse were substantiated in criminal and civil cases by corroborative evidence. The cases cited above were pulled from the archive, and they stand as examples which rebut the claims of pedophile apologists and enablers such as those who lined up with Peter and Pamela Freyd to defame their daughter Jennifer Freyd, whose recovered memories and claims of abuse were corroborated by her uncle and other evidence.

Conclusion

Those who dismiss recovered memories as false memories do so without any empirical basis, and usually cite the work of those affiliated with the FMSF. In doing so, they betray their bias against sexual abuse victims and their open allegiance to sexual predators who utilized the FMSF to avoid criminal and civil culpability for raping children. Many of those who signed up with the FMSF were parents whose children had truthfully alleged that they had sexually abused them, and pedophiles who did not believe that sex with children constituted rape or abuse.

In the Hamblin case, such detractors are the family members of alleged ritual abusers who have dozens of accusers beyond Rachel, Eliza, and Katherine Hamblin. Those family members are the enablers of serial sexual predators, and should be viewed with suspicion themselves, subjected to greater scrutiny by the public and their community. No parent should allow their child to be alone with or supervised by the individuals who appear in the Hamblin Victims Statements, or any adult who cites false memory syndrome or satanic panic as a means of invalidating the claims of sexual abuse victims.

IRA is providing a list of those names appearing in the Hamblin Victims Statements, with page numbers where those individuals appear, so that readers may circulate these names in order to protect children from potential further abuse. All documents from the Hamblin case are available at investigationsinritualabuse.com. If you support our work by subscribing, reading, and sharing our content, thank you. If you want to support us by subscribing or donating, your subscription and donations will get you access to all five our sites for the price of one $8 a month or $50 yearly subscription. Protect your children.

Hamblin Victims Statements Index

1. Joshua Kendall, The False Memory Syndrome at 30: How Flawed Science Turned Into Conventional Wisdom, Mad In America, February 7, 2021. Avail at: https://www.madinamerica.com/2021/02/false-memory-syndrome/

2. Blizard, Ruth & Shaw, Morgan. (2019). Lost-in-the-mall: False memory or false defense?. Journal of Child Custody. 16. 1-22. 10.1080/15379418.2019.1590285.

3. Coan, J. A. (1997). Lost in a shopping mall: An experience with controversial research.

Ethics and Behavior, 7(3), 271–284. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11693894_

Lost_in_a_Shopping_Mall_An_Experience_With_Controversial_Research

4. Coan, J. A. (1993). Creating false memories. Senior paper. Washington: University of

Washington, Psychology Honors Program. a

5. Blizzard and Shaw, 8.

6. Id. at 11.

7. Pezdek, K., & Blandon-Gitlin, I. (2017). It is just harder to construct memories for false

autobiographical events. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 31(1), 42–44. doi:10.1002/acp.3269

Pezdek, K., Finger, K., & Hodge, D. (1997). Planting false childhood memories: The role of

event plausibility. Psychological Science, 8(6), 437–441. https://www.jstor.org/stable/

40063230?seq.1#page_scan_tab_contents doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.1997.tb00457.x

Pezdek, K., & Hinz, T. (2002). The construction of false events in memory. In H. L.

Westcott, G. M. Davies, & R. H. C. Bull (Eds.), Children’s Testimony. New York: John

Wiley & Sons.

Pezdek, K., & Roe, C. (1997). The suggestibility of children’s memory for being touched:

planting, erasing, and changing memories. Law and Human Behavior, 21(1), 95–106.

doi:10.1023/A:1024870127516

8. Testimony of Pamela Freyd, Senate Judiciary Committee, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania; May 24, 1994, p. 5. Pamela Freyd was the sole individual who testified in opposition to expanding the statute of limitations where civil liability for childhood sexual abuse was concerned.

9. Cross, et. al, Prosecution of Child Abuse: A Meta Analysis of Rates of Criminal Justice Decisions, Trauma Violence, and Abuse, Vol. 4, No. 4, October 2003 323-340. 330

10. Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Incident-Based Reporting System, 2012-2016 (2017).

11. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Felony Defendants in Large Urban Counties, 2009 (2013).

12. Pamela P. FREYD, et al., Plaintiff, v. Charles L. WHITFIELD, Civil No. L-96-627. (United States District Court, D. Maryland. July 18, 1997)

13. Doe, Jane (1991, Summer). How Could This Happen? Coping with A False Accusation of Incest and Rape. Issues In Child Abuse Accusations, 3(3).
Author identified in Freyd, Pamela. (1991, November 15). I am “Jane Doe.” Letter to Carole Roscielny.

14. Freyd, Pamela. (1993, September 6). Trial By Therapy. FMS Foundation. Unpublished Manuscript.

15. Joseph Geraci, Interview with Hollida Wakefield and Ralph Underwager, Paidika 9, pp. 2-12. Avail at: https://investigationsinritualabuse.com/mcmartin-preschool-case

16. BoyWiki, Joseph Geraci, avail at: https://www.boywiki.org/en/Joseph_Geraci

17. Associated Press. (1999, March 2). Man Awarded $1.2M in Abuse Case. AP News.