11/24/21 Call with Gail Goodman

11/24/21 Call with Gail Goodman • PhD from UCLA in developmental psych, focus on cognitive development and memory development in children v. adults • Postdoc — went to some law school classes at UDenver, got interested in children's eyewitness testimony about childhood sexual abuse • Lot of research into memory for traumatic events for child sexual abuse • Done lots of studies, published a lot in peer-reviewed journals • Early in career federal funding: emotional effects on kids of testifying about sexual abuse. Later sampling with older adolescents and adults — memory of abuse incidents and legal involvement • Research on children's accuracy of reports, true memory and false memory, kids who have been removed from the home — publishing follow up on long-term memory of same people • Has also done work on adult memories of childhood sexual abuse • Has read about JE/GM online, but has not interviewed victims in this case or GM/JE • Has testified as an expert before, including for the federal gov't. Fed, state, family court. Mostly in criminal cases. Has not kept track of her testimony — mostly a researcher, not a hired gun. Gets asked to testify a lot. Very rough estimate is 40 times, including 3x for Ravi Sinha (has moved around DC, Oregon, Facebook), and a couple times for DOJ in NM and SF, 5-6 times in federal court. Used to try to keep it almost exactly balanced between prosecution and defense, but in the last few years it's more for the prosecution but still consults for the defense. • True/false memory: o Often the laboratory/contrived tasks don't generalize well to real world/traumatic memory o There's much more accuracy for CSA cases o There are omission errors — people leave things out, could be big or small. Not everything gets into memory, because not always encoded o Kids don't disclose CSA in many cases. No findings true of everybody o People are quite accurate about sexual abuse even if it happened many years before o She publishes on this topic • Had not heard but surmised that the defense was calling Loftus o Loftus and Goodman have a history of disagreeing on certain points. Loftus once said that Goodman thinks memory is more accurate than Loftus does, and Goodman thinks Loftus is right o Loftus's work: artificial, methodological problems. Goodman: real-world cases o Loftus specializes in memory errors. Goodman has found what appears to be false memory in actual samples. Not total disagreement, but significant disagreement on frequency o In contrived settings, actual victims are traumatized, may seem to have a worse memory b/c focused on trauma 3534-001 Page I of 2 SUBJECT TO PROTECTIVE ORDER PARAGRAPHS 7, 8, 9, 10, 15, and 17 EFTA_000 10240 EFTA00159888 • "Hidden talents": actual victims may learn to remember/focus on different things, so may not do as well on memorizing word lists • People who experience CSA in adolescence are more complete in reports later on o 3-5 yo are much less complete, but error rate of commission errors (i.e. false allegations) = basically 0 • Have looked at trauma-related issues. People with PTSD/more depression are more accurate w/r/t CSA than other victims (opposite of lab results) • Women victims tend to be more forthcoming than men, and men have less access to early emotional memory • Have looked at memory of past conversations for forensic evaluations. People more accurate about abuse-related questions than other questions. Doesn't see contamination of misleading questions 20 years later • Loftus is famous for using misleading questions to say memory = malleable. Goodman: that's wrong, in part b/c Loftus-style study even I year later can make someone more accurate. They may detect the misinformation question. • Doesn't watch TV or movies, but have read some press— more about JE than GM. Gov asked Dr. Goodman to avoid press to extent possible 3534-001 Page 2 of 2 SUBJECT TO PROTECTIVE ORDER PARAGRAPHS 7, 8, 9, 10, 15, and 17 EFTA_00010241 EFTA00159889