This is a clip from the 1991 hearing of Anita Hill, a law professor who accused then-Supreme
Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexually harassing her while working as her supervisor.
Over the course of three days, Hill was bombarded with questions meant to highlight inconsistencies
in her story.
The goal of these questions wasn't to prove Thomas was innocent.
It was to prove that Hill's memory was faulty.
Soon enough, senators were suggesting that Hill might be imagining things.
Orrin Hatch even suggested she had confused her real life with a scene from The Exorcist.
And it worked.
By the end of the hearing, more Americans supported Thomas than had before Hill had
testified, and he was confirmed to the Supreme Court.
Twenty years later, history is repeating itself.
Another woman is being grilled over her allegations against a Supreme Court nominee.
She could not recall key details.
She's already told the Washington Post she can't remember various details.
We're supposed to believe that she precisely remembers that Kavanaugh is the assailant
when she can't even say where the assault took place.
But this fixation on how well a victim can remember exactly what happened to them: It's
bullshit.
And experts say it's getting in the way of us taking credible sexual assault allegations
seriously.
In the weeks since Christine Blasey Ford accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her
at a high school party, a lot of attention has been paid to Ford's memory of the event.
Ford admits that she can't remember some important details, like the exact date of the party,
whose house it was at, or how she got there.
Notes taken by Ford's therapist in 2012 also state four boys were in the room during the
time of the assault.
But Ford says there were two and says the discrepancy was due to an error on the therapist's
part.
Those gaps and inconsistencies have triggered a barrage of speculation about whether Ford's
memory can actually be trusted.
How reliable is a memory from 1982?
She can't tell you where it was, how she got there.
A Washington Post columnist even suggested that Ford might have Kavanaugh confused with
a lookalike, asking, “Is there a Kavanaugh doppelganger?”
You can see this focus on memory especially on Fox News.
This is nothing.
She's not sure when it happened, where it happened.
Alleged victim does not know the address, the date, the owner of the house.
Why?
This chart shows that Fox talked about Ford's allegations in the context of memory more
often than the other cable news networks.
And it's easy to guess why.
Why?
We have this expectation that for an allegation to be credible, the victim has to be able
to recall exactly what happened to them, in detail.
Most of us think memory works like a video camera, accurately recording events we see
and hear so that we can review them later.
So if a victim can't remember certain details, we view them as suspicious.
After all, if they can't remember everything, how can they even be sure they got raped?
But if you talk to experts who study memory, they all say the same thing: That's not how
it works.
Human memory is faulty.
We're prone to forget or misremember information, even if we experienced it clearly.
And I could show you a study on this, or we could just do an experiment.
I started this video by showing you a clip of the Anita Hill hearing.
Do you remember what Hill was wearing?
Who was the first senator you saw speaking?
What year was the hearing?
Are you sure you saw the clip?
Now you might be thinking, “Yeah, but if I was getting harassed or assaulted, I would
remember more.”
But actually, the opposite is true.
You tend to narrow your focus when you're in a traumatic situation.
There are certain parts of it you remember better and other parts that your brain said,
“That's peripheral, I gotta focus on staying alive.”
It's worth remembering what Ford is accusing Kavanaugh of.
She says he pinned her down, groped her, and covered her mouth.
She worried that he might inadvertently kill her.
Imagine trying to remember that Anita Hill clip if you watched it while fearing for your
life.
In a piece for Time magazine, researchers James Hopper and David Lisak explain that
intense fear affects the hippocampus, impairing our ability to store contextual information
like the layout of a room or the passage of time.
This doesn't mean memories are useless.
Victims remember big, core details about what happened to them.
But they often recall those memories in ways that look suspicious to the rest of us.
Many survivors try not to think about what happened to them.
And so when people start to ask them very detailed questions, it is not unusual for
there to be some inconsistencies.
Details of that day before or after may not be clear in their mind.
But the part that they are clear occurred would be the violation.
In one survey, researchers asked people who had experienced attempted or completed rape
to recall their experiences and then compared their stories to people describing other intense
experiences.
The study found that memories of rape were rated as less clear and vivid, less likely
to occur in a meaningful order, and less well-remembered than other intense memories.
If people are expecting that a victim should be able to just replay a video and describe
it the same every time, that's not how the brain works, and that's not how the brain
works for any kind of trauma, not just sexual assault.
In other words, we're holding trauma survivors to a standard that most of them won't be able
to meet.
And when they fail that standard — when they forget something or contradict themselves
— the punishment is brutal.
Anita Hill was famously described as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty”
after her hearing.
Ford has been accused of being a political operative…
Political smear masquerading as a sexual assault allegation.
Of being hypnotised…
Was there hypnosis?
Are they using confabulation?
And of being mentally deranged.
She's going to look like the loon that she is.
If you're wondering why so many women are hesitant to come forward, this is why.
Days after Ford's story went public, a second accuser, Deborah Ramirez, came forward with
allegations that Kavanaugh had thrust his penis in her face during a party in college.
Ramirez told the New Yorker that watching the smear campaign against Ford had made her
frightened to share her own story, which she knew would be attacked due to gaps in her
memory.
In the case of Deborah Ramirez, that's a very sketchy allegation.
She didn't remember very well.
She's had a lot to drink, she said.
She had a lot to drink.
None of this is to say that we shouldn't question or investigate allegations of sexual assault.
An investigation is exactly what Kavanaugh's accusers are asking for.
But as long as we expect trauma victims to have crystal-clear memories of what happened,
we're going to keep finding reasons to doubt them, regardless of how credible their allegations
are.