Stephanie Soo

All memories are incomplete and tend to fade over time.

That's just the nature of memories in general.

And while certain details like an eye color or what someone is wearing at what times or what time someone arrived at someone's house may be incorrectly recalled, people almost always remember the general outline or gist of what has happened.

For Ghislaine Maxwell's trial, Elizabeth Loftus argues that, quote, even traumatic experiences can be subjected to post-event suggestion that can exaggerate, distort, or change the memory.

Which I'm for some reason always like never really applies to the defendant.

And out of the 300 plus times that she has testified in the court system, she has only testified for prosecutors one time.

while she's charging $600 an hour.

In an interview, Elizabeth Loftus says that she thinks that people can forget and remember things in a very ordinary way.

And she knows that people don't like her.

She says, "...I know the prejudices and fears that lie behind the resistance to my life's work.

I understand why we want to believe an eyewitness who says he did it.

He's the one.

I sympathize with the need to own the past, that is, to make it one's truth."

As for why people accept these repressed memories, Elizabeth writes in her book, was there something inherently wrong with her?

A mental illness of some kind?

A psychological flaw?

An inability to separate fact from reality?

Surely only a fragile, troubled individual would allow herself to become convinced that a false memory was actually real.

And if she were so vulnerable, so easily misled, wouldn't that indicate that in fact something terrible had occurred in her past?

She says, or it could just be, quote, simply, she could have had the misfortune to run into a misguided and overzealous therapist.