Eleanor Gordon Smith

Like saying, we won custody with the abuse thing.

And take the burns.

Loftus 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?

It 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.

How disorienting was it to feel like you had the truth and then you lost it?

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.