He Said, She Said Sexual Assault Accusations and the Nature of Memory

The September 24, 2018, online The Wall Street Journal carried the opinion piece “A Stumble Down Memory Lane” by Richard B. McKenzie with the subhead “Like Kavanaugh’s latest accuser, people often have ‘gaps.’ They don’t always fill them with truth.” While I am not taking sides on who is telling the truth in the Kavanaugh alleged incidents, I have been giving considerable thought to what is truth in a he said, she said sexual assault accusation when both the man and the woman absolutely believe they are telling the truth.

(This is the subject of my feature film screenplay THE TRUTHFINDER, one of the projects in my Mississippi Divide near future sci-fi world.)

Here is part of what McKenzie wrote in his Journal opinion piece about memories:

Memories are subject to serious flaws, given the limitations and imperfections of the biological and psychological processes of recording, retaining and recalling them. Memories aren’t computer files with exacting recall and retrieval functions. They are often disassembled and stored in “packets” in multiple brain locations. People don’t store the fine details of all daily experiences, because of neuron capacity limitations. Even important details can be missed or lost.

Hence the brain must be selective in which memories it stores and must condense them so that many details are left out. Many eyewitnesses and even victims of crimes don’t take note of the facial features of gun-toting assailants or the make and color of getaway cars.

In retrieving memories, people reassemble them and … fill in the blanks in the condensed version. That process is fraught with the risk of error, especially when heavy drinking or drugs are involved. Crime victims who forget key facial features of their assailants can distort their recalled and reassembled memories so thoroughly that they accuse the wrong person of the actual crime. See the parade of longtime prisoners released because DNA tests prove them innocent.

The more remote a memory is in time, the less reliable it tends to be, partly because of decay and partly because recalled memories can be corrupted by new information. New and old memories can be conflated, sometimes emerging as totally false memories. Memories can be warped by leading questions from therapists, lawyers, journalists or others.

Given this scientific explanation of memory, how are we to ascertain the truth in alleged sexual assault situations? I’m not sure, even if we lived in a future world where all human interaction was video recorded (images and audio) and available to be played back, that we would be able to know for certain in all cases what is the truth. And for now we have only our imperfect abilities to try to ascertain the truth.

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is the author of fiction and nonfiction books/ebooks. Phyllis is available by skype for book group discussions and may be reached at pzmiller@gmail.com

Her Kindle fiction ebooks may be read for free with a Kindle Unlimited monthly subscription — see www.amazon.com/author/phylliszimblermiller — and her Kindle nonfiction ebooks may also be read for free with a Kindle Unlimited monthly subscription — see www.amazon.com/author/phylliszmiller