676: Here’s Looking at You, Kid

26:42But you love Charlie Brown. Who was the wisest character on the Peanuts cartoons? Linus. Yeah. And he had a blankie. He was five.

26:57He wasn't five. All right, he's eight or whatever he's supposed to be. No, you're right. He was old enough to have. He's a child. No, he is a child. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

27:14Gary Goldman. He tells the story of his football years and lots of other stories in his book, Misfit, Growing Up Awkward in the 80s. To find out when he's coming to a town near you or to see him on video, go to GaryGolman.com.

27:34Coming up, a 17-year-old tries to understand a moment that shaped her whole life. Fortunately for her, there's video. Unfortunately for her, it's more complicated than that. That's in a minute. From Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues. Support for This American Life and the following message come from AT &T, where you can get the iPhone 17 Pro for all your summer moments. It's center stage front camera. Auto adjust the frame to fit everyone into group selfies. Right now at AT &T, ask how you can get iPhone 17 Pro on them with eligible iPhone trade-in, any condition. Requires trade-in of iPhone 15 plus or higher, excluding iPhone 16E and 17E.

28:16Requires eligible plan. Terms and restrictions apply, subject to change. Visit att.com slash iPhone for details. Support for This American Life comes from Mattress Firm. If your partner moves through the night, your sleep can suffer. Mattress Firm's sleep experts are trained to match you with the right mattress for how you actually sleep, like the Tempur-Pedic Adapt, which helps absorb motion for deeper rest. For the great sleep you deserve, visit Mattress Firm and save up to$500 on select Tempur-Pedic adjustable mattress sets. They make sleep easy. Restrictions apply. See mattressfirm.com or store for details.

28:57Support for This American Life and the following message come from Easy Cater, the workplace food platform. Easy Cater helps organizations order food from favorite restaurants, meet dietary needs, and stay on budget. with employee meal programs, flexible payment options, and 24-7 customer support all on one platform. Learn more at easycater.com. This is American Life, Myra Glass. Today's program, here's looking at you, kid. Stories of adults telling kids what they should think of themselves and kids trying to make sense of what they're told. Today's show is a rerun. We've arrived at Act 2 of our program, Act 2.

29:34Grownups know things. that, um, that title is actually a line from Ward of the Flies. Piggy says it, that grownups have a cup of tea and talk things through and then everything is all right. That's how grownups do it. It's hopeful. And of course, you know, wrongheaded. So often things don't work out that well here in the adult world. But, um, in the story, it's this moment where a bunch of boys chime in with their desire that they could turn to adults. And in this next act, a girl turns to an adult with that same kind of hope, that the adult will set things right. But over time, the adults that she turns to simply do not agree about some very fundamental things about her.

30:13Eleanor Gordon-Smith reported this story for a book she wrote. I got interested in uncertainty years ago. There's a kind of uncertainty that we all live with where you don't know the answer, and it's not a big deal. Like what time the bus is coming, who left the front door open, where that pen went. But I wanted to know about the opposite. High stakes uncertainty. Where the facts aren't decisive, and it hurts to not know what to think. Where there are big consequences. It affects your whole life. I wanted to know, is it possible to just sit in that kind of foundational doubt? Or do you just have to flip a coin and pick something, anything to believe?

30:53Which is how I got interested in Nicole Klumper. She's 40 now, but this starts when she was 16. and she just couldn't catch a break. She was in foster care after her dad, who had sole custody of her for most of her life, had a stroke and died. She'd bounced around between friends' houses but wound up in a group home. I just felt very adrift in the world and unanchored. Having lost my father, my best friend, I was so alone and I just, I was reaching out for something to feel connected to. She started really wanting to know about her mum. She lived nearby, just a couple hours drive. But they hadn't seen each other in more than 10 years.

31:39The custody court hadn't even allowed visits. And Nicole didn't know why. A quick warning, what I'm about to go into mentions different kinds of abuse. Nicole had a foggy thought that her mum might have done something bad to her as a kid. She remembered saying something to someone when she was young about her mum burning her feet on a stove and remembered something about a sexual abuse allegation. But could that be right? Surely she'd remember those things actually happening. But she didn't. What if her dad had just made her say those things about her mum? It had been a really ugly custody battle.

32:14Each parent said all kinds of things about the other. What if her dad wanted custody so bad he invented all these awful stories? There was so much about her mum that Nicole didn't know. So she arranged to meet her mum in person. They did. They started seeing each other more regularly. But it always felt off. Once, she remembers sitting next to her mum at dinner and putting her head down on the table in front of her. She rubbed my back and it was very, very uncomfortable and I had a pretty strong reaction to it. Nicole says they didn't talk about any abuse.

32:53And then, in the middle of that doubt A piece of evidence seemed to fall from the sky And with it, the promise of knowing what had happened in the custody dispute Dr Dave Corwin phoned Nicole He was the child psychiatrist in the custody battle that had split Nicole off from her mum And he had videotapes of interviews he'd done with her when she was a very young girl It had been his job to investigate the abuse allegations He'd had a question. He was speaking at a conference. Would it be okay if he showed those people the tapes? Nicole remembered Corwin. She remembered that he'd been nice to her as a kid.

33:29She said, yeah, he could use them. But could she see those tapes too? He agreed and recorded their meeting. I don't know the effect because it's never been done to my knowledge. This will have on you. So I'm sitting across from Dr. Corwin and there's a video camera. I'm getting ready to watch the tapes of myself at five years old. And he went through a very lengthy informed consent. At this stage, you're 17 years old. What I'm doing is I'm doing this informed consent directly with you. Here's the issues as I understand them. And then it's up to you. Finally, we got to the point where he was going to shut off the video camera so that I could watch my five-year-old self.

34:20And he asked me, you know, what do you recall? Why don't we start with, if you could just tell me what you can recall of that time? I think I described one of the offices that he did one of the interviews in, a striped sweatshirt that I was wearing at the time. He was wearing a sweatshirt that was striped this way, okay? I don't know why when I think of these interviews, that's the first thing I think of. 17-year-old Nicole says she can't remember whether her mom really did hurt her. I told you, I guess, I told the court that my mom burned my feet on a stove, and I still don't remember if that's in fact how I was burned.

35:05Really, that's the most serious accusation against her that I remember. That's what I'm having a problem remembering. I've come here trying not to determine already that she's done it or that she's guilty. And I've come here trying not to say, well, she didn't do anything and I refuse to believe she's done anything. I'm here to, I really want to know. And then Corwin brings up the allegation of sex abuse. David Corwin literally asks me, do you remember any allegations of sexual abuse? Concerns about possible sexual abuse? No. And my initial reaction is actually no. I remember that was part of the accusation.

35:44And then he starts to speak and I say, wait, hold on a second. I don't remember anything. Yeah, I do. 17-year-old Nicole's whole demeanour changes at this moment. It's instant and kind of strange to watch. She becomes completely still and she's staring into middle distance. What do you remember? I don't know. Oh my gosh, that's really, really weird.

36:10I accused her of when she was bathing me or whatever, hurting me. And that's when I started to recount some details of a memory that came back to me. As you're saying that to me, is that you remember having said those things or you remember having experienced those things? I remember it happening that she hurt me. Hurt you? How? She hurt me. She... There's tissues right to you right away.

36:49But see, I don't know if it was an intentional hurt. She was bathing me. And I only remember one instance. And she... She hurt me. She put her fingers too far where she shouldn't have, and she hurt me. That's the first time I've remembered that since saying that when I was six years old. I remember. I remember being... Yeah, I remember it happening. Okay. It was like a movie set where the walls, there's no roof. Like I was sitting up on the walls, looking down into a bathroom, and my biological mother bathing, you know, younger me.

37:45And she touches me inappropriately, and that's where the memory stops. So it's like you're watching it from outside of yourself, from above. Yes. But I could feel the pain, though. And I remember saying that it's like I took a snapshot of the pain. A picture of the pain and what was inflicting the pain. It was my biological mother.

38:16Even before she saw the tapes, Nicole at 17 felt she'd got the certainty she wanted. She remembered her mother actually hurting her. She watched the videos of herself as a small girl anyway. Corwin shut off the recorder while she did. And this remarkable thing happened. Nicole saw herself as a young girl, describing the very same abuse, almost verbatim. I've seen the videos. It's the 80s, a very small Nicole is in pigtails and white stockings. Corwin's in a big plaid shirt and shaggy hair. And he asks right away about Nicole's mum. What's she like? Me. Why is she mean? Hurts me. How does she hurt you?

39:03Like sticks her finger up my vagina, about up to there on my finger. When did she do that? All the time when she gives me a bath. What did you say to her when she did that to you?

39:25I said, don't do that. I said, ouch. She says her mum burned her feet over a hot stove. Corwin tries to figure out if Nicole knows the difference between what's real and what's make-believe. He asks her to separate things like President Reagan, real, which she knows, from things like Superman, make-believe, which she also knows. He gets her to swear on her oath as a brownie that what she said about her mother is real. She does. she holds three little fingers up in the brownie salute. On my honour, I will try to serve God in my country. There are other concerning details about Nicole's mum. Once, she had dropped Nicole off to see Dr Corwin for one of their recorded sessions.

40:08And Nicole, who'd seemed happy to be recorded and speak clearly into the microphone when her dad dropped her off, is suddenly concerned that the microphone would broadcast what she's saying into the waiting room where her mum sits. Corwin asks her about the abuse she described the week before. Does she remember talking about that? A little bit, Nicole says quietly. A little bit. Okay. Wait, tell me the little bit that you remember.

40:34Like, does them talk out to the waiting room? No, it doesn't. They can't hear us, okay? They can't hear us out there. And you're safe here, okay? And I'm not going to, after we get done talking, I'm not going to tell them what you tell me. Okay? It's just between you and I right now. OK, she whispers, before going on to talk about being burned and touched in the bath. In another interview, Nicole says her mother's told her to lie. When's my dad going to be back? I don't know. He's in court. I guess. What's he in court about? My mother. What about your mother? Do you know? That she's threatening me.

41:19That she what? Threatening me. Threatened you? How's that? Threatened me that if I didn't lie to the CPS, that she would do something bad to me. She's talking about CPS, Child Protective Services. If you didn't do what? Lie to the CPS man. That she would do something bad? To me. Well, when did she say that? So that's the video of six-year-old Nicole. Corwin then asks 17-year-old Nicole how she's feeling about what she just saw. She says there are some questions that might never be answered. But her biggest question, about why she didn't grow up with her mum, that had an answer. She was sure her mum had abused her.

42:10But I do have an explanation in my mind, and I can now realise that it's not my fault. and I can put that chapter behind me and I can go on. And yeah, I do think it's a very healthy thing to not run from something.

42:31For Nicole, the tapes and her memory proved what had happened to her as a kid. It was a relief. She'd been worried that she was going to learn that her dad really did coach her to lie about her mum. Now she could put that aside. She could remember him the way she always had, as her best friend and a good dad. But then Corwin published a case study about Nicole. He didn't use her name, he called her Jane Doe. But Corwin's case study became part of a huge dispute that was fracturing psychology in the 90s. It was called The Memory Wars, and the argument was about whether repressed memories, adults suddenly remembering trauma, were real.

43:09Some scientists believed repressed memories were possible, others said no way. Nicole's videotapes and Corwin's article were co-opted by the side that thought repressed memories were real. They thought Nicole's case proved it. Corwin hadn't seen this coming. I've spoken to him. He says he wasn't on either side.

43:36Dr Elizabeth Loftus read Corwin's article with one eyebrow firmly raised. She was a psychology professor at the University of Washington and a big deal. It was her experiments that proved memories are malleable. And she was a star witness in high-profile court cases where she argued that eyewitness recollections aren't reliable. So when the memory wars began, she knew which side she was on. She thought repressed memories were almost never real. She wrote a doorstop of a book called The Myth of Repressed Memory. And when she read the Jane Doe case, she was alarmed. I knew that people were using this case as the new proof of repressed memory.

44:14It was being discussed academically. It was being introduced into court cases to prove that repressed memory is real and has been proven. It was being used against people whom I thought were innocent because they were on trial in their cases. And so we had to get to the bottom of it. Part of her suspicion was the message, and part was the messenger. She'd seen Corwin testify in court on another case, a patient accused their therapist of abuse, and she didn't find him persuasive there either. I already had a suspicion about Corwin and his judgment, I think, going into this situation because of the work I had seen him do on this other case and how he had pretty much helped to ruin the life of this poor female psychiatrist who was the accused person in this other case.

45:11You're saying that the female psychiatrist was accused of abuse? Yes, by, I think, a former patient. And Corwin was saying that that had happened. In so many words, yes. He was an expert for the accuser. Loftus decided to investigate the Jane Doe case. She wanted to know whether the abuse had really happened. But to do that, she needed to know the real name of that little girl. Rather than ask Corwin, which would be normal for a researcher looking into someone else's study, she decided to dig around on her own. Loftus knew where to start. Clues in the tapes. At some point in the tape, he called her Nicole.

45:51And I just made a little mental note. Hmm, her name is Nicole. He said something like, and when you were living in Fresno. And I thought, hmm, it has something to do with Fresno. That kind of thing. She contacted a private investigator to run down some tips. She searched death records for Nicole's father. She found dozens of matches. And she started narrowing them down, closing in on the real Jane Doe. Nicole, meanwhile, was thinking very little about her time as Jane Doe. She'd left foster care and was making her own life as an adult. She'd joined the Navy. She was learning to fly military helicopters.

46:32And she'd decided to become a psychologist. She says because she wanted to be like Corwin. She felt safe when she was talking to him as a kid, like she was being listened to. She wanted to make other people feel that way. She started acing her psychology classes at night while she trained as a pilot during the day. A couple years into her military service, stationed in Hawaii, she got an odd phone call from a close family friend. She said, hey, there's something going on. There's a private investigator looking for you. What did you think? oh my gosh, why on earth, what on earth, what is happening now?

47:12And I knew within moments of hearing the words private investigator that this had something to do with Dave's journal article. It was the only thing she'd ever been part of that might be interesting to an investigator. She called Corwin, who learned Loftus was behind it. Loftus interviewed Nicole's foster mom, former stepmom, family friends who knew her growing up. She'd even interviewed Nicole's biological mom and said she might have been wrongly accused. Nicole, hearing about Loftus, was like, absolutely not. Why did you want her to stop? I felt intruded upon. I felt violated. Very vulnerable, very exposed.

47:58And I understand that that probably sounds weird, given that I had already given Dave my consent to publish a story about intimate details of my life. But there's a very, very big difference between someone asking you to investigate parts of your life and someone doing so without your knowledge or permission. I did exchange emails with her, and I asked her to stop what she was doing. And what did she say? In so many words, no. Did she ask you any direct questions while she was looking into the case? No. Did that strike you as kind of odd? It struck me as kind of infuriating. Nicole complained to Loftus' university, who told her to stop investigating the Jane Doe case.

48:47I just got the call from some administrator on my campus saying, you know, are you looking into this case? I said, yes, I'm looking into this case, and they came and seized my files. I mean, I couldn't believe this was happening. When can the administrators come to your office and just take your files? Loftus was eventually cleared, and she published her findings on Jane Doe. She argued that the abuse might never have happened. Of course, this was the opposite of what Nicole had believed and clung to since she was 17. Loftus printed eight pages worth of doubts in a magazine and called the article, Who Abused Jane Doe?

49:32When Nicole heard the article was on stand, she took a friend from her military base and drove 50 miles to Barnes & Noble, where they stood side by side reading it. It was so hurtful. It was so ridiculous to me that someone basically interviewed everyone in my life who had known me when I was a child, except me, and then went ahead and patchworked together this story that just so happened to completely support her hypothesis. How dare she? She just had no right. she just had no right to do what she did. Whose story is this? This isn't just her story. This is the falsely accused mother's story.

50:26This is a whole, other people are part of this story. I don't think one person gets to just decide, I'm going to only tell the story one way and only let people tell it who believe me uncritically. What about the other people in the story. I thought I was investigating an accusation against a possibly innocent person. I don't think the claim is that you should have just believed her uncritically. I think Nicole says that the way that you went around this research was sort of traumatizing and demoralizing to her. It made her feel like she didn't have any control over her own records and her own confidential information from her childhood.

51:10Can you put yourself in her shoes at all? Can you understand why she feels like this was a trespass?

51:18Well, yes. I mean, I think she, she had her way of telling her story. And, and she didn't want there to be another way. And then that might be upsetting for her. I don't, I, it doesn't seem to me like what she was upset by was that there was another way of telling the story. I think what she found upsetting was that you found out who she was and looked into her life without asking her or without thinking about her.

51:54Well, don't you think that that's what journalists do all the time? Usually when you write a story about someone, you contact them or you ask them what they think of the things that you've found out?

52:12Actually, you know, there were times when I would have liked to have talked to her. I think I even wrote up some questions that I might want to ask her. But in the end, we decided that it was just too risky. Risky how? I just remember there were going to be conditions. and it just made us nervous. And so we decided we would just publish what we had found out through many, many other sources

52:53and leave it at that. And that's what we did. Nicole sued with the help of a lawyer who took her case for free. They went after Loftus and everyone who'd helped write the article for 21 complaints from defamation to invasion of privacy. But even though she was angry with Loftus, Nicole read her article over and over again until something happened that she wasn't expecting. She found herself agreeing with Loftus. A little. It planted a seed of doubt. It did. Yes. What was that like to feel like there's this thing that you've been so certain of for so long that you felt like you had resolution of with Dr.

53:34Corwin and seeing those tapes, and then to have it be the subject of doubt again, what did that do to you?

53:45It made me feel very small. It made me feel very insignificant, as though my opinion on my own, the events of my own life, were the least important. Nicole started changing her mind back and forth, over and over. Some days she thought she'd been abused. Other days, she thought she'd lied about it.

54:18I have to say, as someone who spent months looking into Loftus' article, it is really hard to work out the responsible thing to think. When I first read it, I remember thinking, game over. There's no way Nicole's mom abused her. But as I looked into each claim Loftus made, what had seemed like a 9 on the convincingness scale turned out to be more like a 4. Like, Loftus found a report from another psychologist who'd interviewed young Nicole, who said she sounded mechanical and rehearsed when she talked about abuse. Loftus told me that was the evidence that impressed her most. But I don't know. He says, quote,

55:06And Loftus interviewed Nicole's stepmom, a woman who'd been there for the custody battle. She told Loftus that she and Nicole's dad had tried to win custody with what she called the sexual angle. Loftus heard that as sinister. But did she accidentally reveal that she'd had an agenda? Or did she just use sexual angle as an unfortunate shorthand, like saying, we won custody with the abuse thing? And take the burns. Loft has found out that Nicole has a fungal condition that makes skin peel like a healing burn. But there are photos of young Nicole's feet with big blisters. Could they be explained by a fungus?

55:42It genuinely torments me, I still don't know what to think. Every piece of evidence seems to pinball back and forth like this. I went mad trying to find out the answer. I thought, if I read enough court documents, I'd finally find the one thing that no one else had, the thing that would give me certainty either way. Of course, I didn't. And Nicole didn't either. She sat, every day, in the suspended animation of not knowing, caught between two really distressing ways of seeing her past. In one, her mother abused her. In the other, her father manipulated her into lying. And because she lied, her innocent mother was cut out of her life and wrongly accused of abusing her child.

56:23It just created this back and forth that I continue to live with today. It did happen, it didn't happen. Some days I fall somewhere in between. How disorienting was it to feel like you had the truth and then you lost it? disorienting is a good word, but I don't think it fully captures. It goes to my identity. It really goes to the heart of who I am and who I thought I was and who I think I am. The most important, the key memory on which I rebuilt and then rebuilt again, my identity, has now been called into question. It's just frustrating multiplied by a million. It's just so, so frustrating. there is an intangible to be gained from the process of transition from being a victim to becoming a survivor.

57:41And in my case, now all of a sudden, am I neither? I don't know. Am I either? I don't know. Nicole's lawsuit against Elizabeth Loftus dragged on and on over five years. all the way out to the California Supreme Court. In the end, Nicole lost. The First Amendment protected Loftus as a journalist. And Nicole had to pay legal fees, nearly a quarter of a million dollars, which she could not afford. The court garnished her military wages. She quit the Navy, lost two houses, and her car was repossessed over all this. She filed for bankruptcy.

58:25These days, instead of being stuck between believing she was abused and believing that she wasn't Nicole's found a third option She tries to care a little less She can't dial down the uncertainty So she tries to dial down the stakes I'm never going to know I'm never going to know And even after all these years I think I still thought that at some point I would come to a solid decision, yes or no. And really, really, I'm never going to know. And that just has to be okay. There's so much that Nicole can't be certain of. So she hammered out a certainty about herself. She found a way forward. She became a pilot.

59:14She got two master's degrees and a PhD in psychology. She's now a therapist, like she's wanted since she was six. And she's never cut her mum out of her life. Nicole's mum has always said that she never abused Nicole. She maintains that today. And she says she didn't tell Nicole to lie to Child Protective Services. Her mum's in her 70s. They live in the same state. It's not an easy relationship. There's a possibility that I ruined my biological mother's life. there's a tremendous amount of guilt associated with that. We're close for, well, we're relatively close for a period of time and then things sort of fall apart again just as they have.

59:56When was the last time that you spoke? Five months ago. And what was that like? It's still awkward. It's still very pressured, if you will. she still wants very much for me to believe that she never did anything to me and and I still don't know so it's it's really really hard to move past that major sort of elephant in the room do you ever talk about it no is she able to accept that you might just not know

1:00:41No, I think she really wants me to believe that she didn't. Do you think you could? Do you think there's anything that could change your mind? No. The waters are so muddy now, there's no... I'll never know, one way or the other. Nicole is no more certain about what happened today than she was when she was 16. She never flipped a coin and picked something to believe. But she landed on a certainty about what to do, but doesn't rest on what to believe. It doesn't matter what the evidence says. She wants her mom.

1:01:24Eleanor Gordon-Smith teaches ethics at the University of Southern California. A version of this story is in her book, Stop Being Reasonable, How We Really Change Our Minds. I'm just wondering

1:01:43Wondering

1:01:48I'm oh so tired Wondering Well Program was produced today by Neil Drumming and Emmanuel Berry. The people who put our show together includes Whitney Dangerfield, Aviva de Kornfeld, Hilary Elkins, Damian Grafe, Mickey Meeks, Joe Nelson, Catherine Raimondo, Nadia Raymond, Robin Semi, and Alyssa Shipp, Lily Sullivan, Christopher Sotala, Matt Tierney, Julie Whitaker, and Diane Wu. Our managing editor for today's program was David Kestenbaum. Additional production help on today's rerun from Molly Marcello. Special thanks today to John and Joe Taché, aka The Jetsons, Amy Bertain, Michelle Johnson, and Keith Woods.

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