Tales from A False Memory Road Show

”Believe me when I say to you,

I hope the Russians love their children too”

Sting

The British False Memory Society (BFMS) was founded for the legal defence of people accused of abusing children. At their annual conferences they invited people to talk about legal matters. See the photograph of an invitation to their 1999 AGM below where the speaker was the lawyer Christopher Barden from the USA.

Photograph of an invitation to the BFMS AGM in 1999

The BFMS were interested in research about the nature of memory to aid legal defence. One strand of this research has been to ask therapists and psychologists about their beliefs about memory, and then contrast these beliefs with their definition of the science of memory. In an earlier blog I noted that one such research project had been awarded a grant of £9,200 from the Odin Charitable Trust (which also bankrolled the BFMS). (1)

Now Patihis and co have written a new article about the beliefs of practitioners regarding EMDR, memory, dissociation etc. Full article: In a UK sample, EMDR and other trauma therapists indicate beliefs in unconscious repression and dissociative amnesia

I wish therapists and psychologists would get wise to these questionnaires about their beliefs. It must be flattering to have someone wanting to know what you believe, but its a trick.

One aim of this article might be to be stop EMDR being used in psychotherapy funded by the NHS. Another longer term aim might be or to kick out Dissociative Identity Disorder from the next DSM. It’s also keeping up a steady offensive against Bethany Brand and her co-researchers producing evidence that treatment for dissociative disorders can actually make people get better – by making sure  that the latter spend less time doing research and more time responding to attacks  on their work. (2)

But Patihis also works as an expert witness for people accused of sexual crimes and appeared at the autumn 2024 FACT conference together with a solicitor. See The British False Memory Society and the Church of England – THE FALSE MEMORY TROPE COLLECTION. So my opinion is that the article has a direct practical purpose here also.

The references in this article are basically a who´s who of the False Memory movement. First up is unsurprisingly Loftus. Then there’s

Otgaar (ex BFMS)

Crews (ex FMSF)

Ofshe (ex FMSF)

Pendergast ( (spoke at 1996 BFMS AGM)

Above: Photograph of invitation to BFMS conference, 1996

La Fontaine  ( who amongst other things defended the BFMS in the Evening Standard 10.11.1999)

Mair (ex BFMS)

Leif (ex FMSF)

McHugh (ex FMSF)

Kilstrom (apparently invented the term False Memory Syndrome)(3 )

McNally ( researched the similarities between people who say they were sexually abused as children and those who say they have been abducted by aliens) (4)

Merckelbach ( Dutch equivalent of the BFMS)

Spanos ( started the idea that DID is a social contagion)

Wade (ex BFMS)

Ost (ex BFMS)

Aldridge (ex BMFS)

Thats’s quite a re-union!

 Above: Photograph of a subscription form to join the BFMS as a professional.

Above: Photograph of an information form about joining the BFMS as a professional.

Footnotes

(1) This fact used to be on the CV of Chris French. But then it disappeared. Disbelieve me if you want. The disappearance of original sources is also part of the False Memory story.

(2) See for example Brand, B.L., Dalenberg, C.J., Frewen, P.A. et al. Trauma-Related Dissociation Is No Fantasy: Addressing the Errors of Omission and Commission in Merckelbach and Patihis (2018). Psychol. Inj. and Law11, 377–393 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12207-018-9336-8

(3)Pope (1996) wrote that it was Kilstrom who first defined False Memory syndrome. This fact used to be on the Wikipedia page for False Memory Syndrome (in my memory) but has now gone.

(4) There is an extraordinary video of McNally making this claim in 2004 at the Karolinska  Institute in Stockholm in  Richard McNally: Memories of past lifes and space alien abduction – YouTube. 

( in progress)

When started my previous blog THE FALSE MEMORY TROPE COLLECTION, I found an online picture to use as a heading – a newspaper clip that read ”She has got false memory”. To the right of the text there was a photo of 17 year old girl. I clipped away the picture of the girl because it was actually the text I was after, and I felt uncomfortable about using her image to write about myself

The girl whose image I had clipped away became Virginia Giuffre née Roberts, a 41 year woman and mother of three, who has just died, reportedly by suicide.

When I used that newspaper clip as the heading for my blog, I didn’t understand the history of the photo attached or how it related to what I was blogging about – the so-called false memory people. I understand more now. So this blogpost is my tribute to Virginia Giuffre because  in sharing that photo with the world, she gave from her own pain to others. Because it´s a tribute I’ve tried to keep her name in focus and have moved as many other names as possible down to the footnotes. 

The picture itself was originally a snapshot she kept private for many years before showing it to a journalist ( 1).

The  photographer who first made a copy of the photo for the Mail on Sunday has said

 ”She handed me the photograph, I just put it on the table in the hotel room and I copied it. I think I took over 30 frames, which is …  overkill for copying one photo, but I thought I didn’t want to get it out of focus, or get it wrong, because I knew how important it was. Then I turned the photo over and I took …  three frames of the back of the photo. The back of the image showed it was developed on March 13, 2011 at a Walgreens in the United States. It was a normal 6×4 print that you would have got from any developer at the time,” (2)

She also handed the original photo to the FBI (who visited her in the wake of the journalist) in the hope that they would investigate Epstein.

In 2022 a Guardian journalist wrote  that that the picture itself had become a symbol for Virginia Guiffre’s case against Prince Andrew. 

“She has accomplished what no one else could: getting Prince Andrew to stop his nonsense and side with sexual abuse victims,” (3)

Since Giuffre’s passing, another Epstein survivor, Joanna Sjöberg has said:

”For Virginia, half called her a hero while the other half called her a liar. That’s the risk you choose when you become a public figure. I cannot imagine the battle she had within herself to simply stay sane”  (4)

How does this relate to so-called false memory?

When the website of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF) was in business,  their website used to post news alerts every month or so. Their last update was in My 2019.  Epstein was arrested in July 2019 and after that the FMSF issued no further news alerts. At the end of the year a single sentence appeared which said the organization was no more. (5) This meant that when Loftus was an expert witness for Maxwell,  the FMSF was no longer around.

In the UK, the BBC Newsnight broadcast an interview with Andrew in 2019 where he denied having ever met Giuffre. The interviewed was described as a car crash. Andrew said, “I don’t remember that photograph ever being taken. I don’t remember going upstairs in the house,” (6 ) He was not seen as credible and was removed from some of his official royal duties. 

A couple of years later when Maxwell tried to use the false memory defence in her trail,  Andrew’s spokespeople changed the information they gave to the media.  Attention shifted focus from Andrew´s memory of  a Pizza Express restaurant to  Virginia Giuffre´s possible false memory. 

The headline caption that I used a clip of for my blog was from the Sunday Mirror. ”She has got false memory” was blasted across their front page.  Above it was a cation about an actress who doesn’t like undressing as part of her work,  and another caption offering a 200 pound supermarket voucher. The small print next to the picture of Virginia Giuffre and Andrew reads that the Prince’s defence want to question her psychologist about false memory. 

The New Stateman did an article which was largely critical of Maxwell’s false memory defence. However it also interviewed a BFMS advisory board member without mentioning his connection with the BFMS. (7) The I Paper then interviewed the communication person for the BFMS.(8) The June 2022 BFMS newsletter then reported on this article

By the time July 2022 BFMS newsletter came out, Andrew had agreed on a financial settlement with Virginia Guiffre. (10) So the attempt to threaten with the false memory argument did not succeed.  Perhaps Virginia´s steadfastness put one of the final nails in the false memory coffin

This interview with the BFMS was also the organisation’s last mention in a British news publication. Thats is, apart from articles in which the BFMS was asked why a person who had received a prison sentence for a child sex offence and another person with a documented history of sexual harassment, were  members of the their advisory board.(11) The BFMS denied any knowledge about this and closed at the end of 2023. (12)

So-called false memory and photography

Ever since photography started people have been discussing how photographs relate to reality. So its hardly surprising that  false memory advocates have wiggled their way into these discussions too.

In 2002, one of the original members of the BFMS advisory board was had his work computer seized by the police. He protested this, saying that he had legal clearance to give advice on pornography.  He also said that the images that the police had seized had been sent to him for consultation by the BMFS.(13) Quite why the BFMS needed his expertise on this is not something I have been able to find out.  What did such images have to do with therapists implanting false memories? His name disappeared from the list of BFMS advisory members after that, and no mention or explanation of this was given in their newsletter.

IN 2000 one of the people who had worked with Elizabeth Loftus infamous ”Lost in the mall study” moved to New Zealand. (14)(15) Here she did research with another person who later joined the BFMS advisory board.(16) The research was about how fake photographs could create false childhood memories. In 2002 they published an article called ” A picture is worth a thousand lies: using false photographs to create false childhood memories”.(17) There’s now actually a whole subset of articles about how editiing photographs can lead to false memories.

 In the leadup to Giuffre’s settlement with Andrew, an articles appeared in several British newspapers saying that a ”friend” of Andrew thought the photograph of him, Giuffre and Maxwell was a fake. The friend said that in reality Andrew is taller than in the photo and his hands ”chubbier”.(18)

DARVO and that photograph

DARVO is an acronym for  Divert Attack Reverse Victim and Offender.(19) It describe the tactics of the False Memory people and other perpetrators who divert attention away from themselves to the person doing the accusing. The photograph that  Virginia Giuffre shared of herself, Andrew and Maxwell became a  weapon in her fight for justice. It also became an object of DARVO with a myopic focus on whether Andrew had been photoshopped.

The antidote to this DARVO would be to focus on what is not being shown by the photograph. Which in this case is all the other visual documentation that was made by the Epstein and Maxwell. Apparently when Epstein was specifically asked whether he was trying to blackmail Andew by trafficking Guiffre,  he refused to answer. (20) 

One of the lawyers who has represented other victims of Epstein says that the FBI has seized visual documentation but:

”They have yet to release any of the video tapes that were recorded in his home, both in the US Virgin Islands as well as Manhattan, and Palm Beach that the FBI has in their custody. release the tapes. ” (21)

One of the effects of DARVO is that when Virginia Guiffre allowed that photo to be copied and talked openly to the media, her personal character came into sharp focus. Another lawyer has said this week that he had to test her carefully before agreeing to take her on as a client, because even if she made innocent mistakes, she would be judged by the media.(22)

This DARVO also diverts attention from asking if the Metropolitan police should investigate Andew, by focusing instead on how ”chubby” his fingers are in the photograph.

Finally

The journalist who interviewed Prince Andrew in what is now known as the  car crash Newsnight interview, has spoken this week about muttering heard when contradictory news reports came out about Giuffre’s health in the weeks before she died. She had been asked if she now thought Giuffre was ”unhinged”. Then after hearing about Giuffre’s death she wrote that the muttering stopped.

”Somehow a dead victim was a believable victim. And it made me feel really uneasy because it suggests that we can only believe victims of sexual abuse once they’ve literally lost their lives to suicide. As if that last act of self torture proved that they were speaking the truth all along……. We have to believe woman whilst they are alive. We cannot wait for them to die before we say, oh OK, maybe she was in pain……. Virginia Guiffre was subjected to myriad multiple abuse and she did the hardest thig of all by speaking out, trying to hold those in power to account.” (23)

Being accused oh having a false memory was just a very small part of the challenges Virginia Giuffre faced, but it has resonated with me. Her bravery must have influenced many people in many different ways.  I hope she can now rest in peace and I wish her family well.

Footnotes

(1) The journalist Sharon Churcher for the Sunday Mail

(2) The photographer was called Michael Thomas ” Controversial Prince Andrew photo not a fake: photographer | Otago Daily Times Online News

(3) Edward Helmore for the Guardian.  How a picture came to symbolize the Prince Andrew sexual abuse case | Prince Andrew | The Guardian

(4) Daily Mirror Second Prince Andrew accuser has chilling 7-word response to Virginia Giuffre’s suicide – The Mirror

(5) False Memory Syndrome Foundation

(6)  How a picture came to symbolize the Prince Andrew sexual abuse case | Prince Andrew | The Guardian

(7) This was Chris French Prince Andrew and the false memory wars – New Statesman

(8)  I Paper.  False memory experts, used to discredit alleged victims, may be called by Prince Andrew

(9)  BFMS newsletter. Vol 30. July 2022

(10) BBC Prince Andrew pays settlement ending sex assault case

(11)  Third Sector Charity reports itself to regulator after Third Sector alerts it to sex offender on advisory panel | Third Sector

(12) Third Sector Research charity closes after 30 years due to lack of funding | Third Sector

(13) Child-abuse expert to sue police after raid on home | Times Higher Education (THE)

(14) Crook, Lynn False Memories. ( This is from my memory! I need to check this)

(15) Maryanne Garry Profile | University of Waikato

(16) This is former BFMS advisory board member Kim Wade

(17)  Garry and Wade A picture is worth a thousand lies: Using false photographs to create false childhood memories | Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

(18) See for example Prince Andrew’s supporters say his ’chubby’ fingers prove photo of him with Epstein victim is fake 

(19) DARVO — Jennifer Joy Freyd, PhD.

(20) Jeffrey Epstein refused to say if he blackmailed Prince Andrew over ‘sexual encounter’, documents reveal | The Independent

(21) 2510 fashion3 16×9 se

(22) ‘Come CLEAN!’ Virginia Giuffre Lawyer DEMANDS Apology From Prince Andrew. David Boies interviewed by Piers Morgan

(23)  Emily Maitis  https://x.com/i/status/1917245917109121059

(according to the false memory people that is)

”The telling example of Thomas Quick—Sweden’s most notorious serial killer who confessed to 39 murders—pinpoints the inherent dangers of accepting “therapeutic truths.” Quick’s psychotherapist, the charismatic Margit Norwell, dogmatically assumed that her clients who entered therapy had been abused in childhood. She subsequently helped Quick to recover repressed memories of murder, memories that turned out to be false. Thomas Quick was subsequently wrongfully convicted of eight murders. The last of these convictions was thankfully overturned in 2013, following the largest forensic investigation in Sweden since the second world war (Josefsson, 2015). ” 

Josefsson’s bestseller is called ”The man who stopped lying” in English.  The subject matter is complicated. A lot has been written about this case – both academic and non-academic. Felstead and Patihis refer only to Josefsson’s version. They mention the murders that Sture Bergwall ( the man known as Thomas Quick) falsely confessed to committing. However they make no mention of the crimes that he did commit.  An alternative description of Bergwall¨s crimes has recently been published by Bruno and Lundström (2025).

”Quick / Bergwall sexually assaulted four boys. One of the boys had been admitted to a children’s clinic where Quick first forced oral sex on him then attempted to strangle him. He was first charged with attempted manslaughter and then  was sentenced to in- patient  forensic psychiatric care. Several years later the situation repeated itself. Quick stabbed a man with a knife in Uppsala but was not charged as he was still under psychiatric care. In 1991 he was sentenced to inpatient psychiatric care for, amongst other things, a violent robbery. This was a hostage situation where Quick threatened to kill a family and he thrust a knife into a wall as well as a bed where a child was sleeping” ( translation mine).  

When he conducted research for the book, Dan Josefsson used a journalistic method that he called Wallraffing (after the German journalist Gunter Wallraff). That is, he pretended to be a journalist writing about one specific subject when in fact, his intention was to write about something else. This allowed him to gain interviews using hidden cameras with psychotherapists and psychologists which would probably would not have been possible had he had made his intended purpose clear. Josefsson himself has said that wallraff is really just a fancier word than lie and the information a journalist gets has to stand in proportion to that lie (Thunander 2013). This method was approved by Swedish public television, which produced an accompanying documentary. But does it meet the standards of an academic publication?

Psychologist and blogger Daniel Kraft (Kritik mot Dan Josefssons bok och dokumentär om Quick-fallet – Det känsliga barnet) suggests that when Josefsson chose to use the Wallraff method, an extreme form of journalism using hidden cameras and hiding his true intention, he actually painted himself into a corner. He could only justify this method by uncovering the most extreme repressed memory explanation and falling into the Loftus camp. The method itself didn’t leave him with any space for ambiguity.  

It strikes me that Kraft’s explanation here explains a lot about the position of the FMSF, BFMS and other false memory organisations. They were not primarily researching memory, they were defending people accused of abusing children. So they didn¨t have the space to explore the nuances of memory. They had to hammer their point home even to the point of making themselves look ridiculous.

At least Josefsson admitted he lied to get the information he wanted, while Felstead and Patihis pay homage to thing called Objective Truth without aknowledging the hidden cameras they used to create their objectivity.

References

Bruno, L and Lundström, C. När manskoren sjunger allsång. Parabol (2025). Parabol | När manskören sjunger allsång

Felstead, K and Patihis, L There is only one truth, the objective truth, in recovered memory cases – Felstead – Legal and Criminological Psychology – Wiley Online Library

Josefsson, D. (2015). The strange case of Thomas quick: The Swedish serial killer and the psychoanalyst who created him. Portobello Books.

Kraft, D Kritik mot Dan Josefssons bok och dokumentär om Quick-fallet – Det känsliga barnet

Thunander, G. ”Wallraff är egentligen bara ett finare ord för att ljuga”. Dagens Media.  21 oktober 2013

The Telephone Information Sheet for the British False Memory Society (BFMS) has just been published in the appendix of an academic paper ( Felstead and Patihis 2025). The information sheet shows that people who rang up the BFMS to report that they they had been falsely accused, were asked specific questions such as whether the person accusing them had self-harmed and whether they were a feminist or not.

Telephone information sheet for the British False Memory Society

Telephone callers were also asked if the ”accuser” was religious or had an eating disorder. They were asked a mysterious question about CTH. I couldn´t figure out what this was at first, but then I worked out that it stood for, ”Courage to Heal” , which was a book that they thought brainwashed people into having false memories of abuse.

It was also a bit disconcerting that they were gleaning information about hospital units and previous mental health history, given they simultaneously asserted that their accusers had NO mental health history prioir to being brainwashed.

No such questions seem to have been asked about the person claiming to be accused. They were simply asked their occupation and how many children they had.

Reference

Felstead, K & Patihis, L. British False Memory Society: Caseload and details by year (1993 onwards). Journal of Legal and Criminal Psychology. Published online: 29 March 2025

British False Memory Society: Caseload and details by year (1993 onwards) – Patihis – Legal and Criminological Psychology – Wiley Online Library

Inside the Archives for the Unexplained in Norrköping AFU

About a month or so ago I visited the ”Archives for the the Unexplained” in Norrköping, Sweden. (AFU. )This place used to be called the UFO Archive but now it deals with all things ”unexplained” and therefore they have changed their name. Their cataogue is available online and I¨d seen they had copies of the FMSF (False Memory Syndrome Foundation) newsletters and the BFMS ( British False Memory Society). So I was kind of curious.

Things to do with UFOs are not normally part of my world, so going there felt quite weird to be honest. I was a bit nervous too.

But I needn’t have been, because the archivist called Anders and the other volunteers who worked there made me feel very at home and I was offered coffee and doughnuts as soon as I came in the door. I told Anders I wanted to see some BFMS newsletters and followed him down into the cellar to retreive them.

” We have more of the American ones” he explained.

”No thank you, I can see them online, I’d just like to look at the British ones”

We could have been discussing cookbooks. It was so refreshing for me to be talking in a neutral way about things that have given me so much pain.

So we brought the newsletters up to the table with the coffee and doughnuts and looked through the contents. There was lots of interesting stuff there but for now I¨ve just put a few photographs at the end of this blogpost.

As I was leaving Anders asked me where I was from as he couldn¨t place my accent. Was I from former Yugoslavia or Bosnia? That suprised me as most people can tell I’m British was soon as I start talking Swedish. But he hadn¨t made that connection. And therefore I realised he hadn¨t made any connection between me and the BFMS newsletters.

And with that it felt like some kind of string connecting me to the BFMS had been cut. I was no longer bound in some way. I had this strange feeling in my hands: It was as if yellow puss was flowing out of them, like they had been infected in some way. And that infection was now gone.

And then when I left the archive I signed their visitors book in my own name – without hiding behind a psuedonym.!

I also took some pictures of the river that flows through Norrköpng so I’m putting them here too