Miss Sweden and Bugs Bunny add up to a bad day in court for Ghislaine Maxwell - Elizabeth Loftus

 Miss Sweden and Bugs Bunny add up to a bad day in court for Ghislaine Maxwell  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/18/miss-sweden-and-bugs-bunny-add-up-to-a-bad-day-in-court-for-ghislaine-maxwell

The third witness was Professor Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist and specialist in false memory. An expert witness in perhaps as many as 300 trials, she asserted that fake facts could be implanted in people: “False memories … can be very vivid, detailed. People can be confident about them, people can be emotional about them, even though they’re false.” She told the jury “emotion is no guarantee that the memory is authentic”.

Prosecutor Lara Pomerantz noted that Loftus was being paid $600 an hour by the defence and that she’d written a book, Witness for the Defense.“You haven’t written a book called ‘Impartial Witness’, right?” said Pomerantz, whose voice is so high-pitched she sounds like a very scary bat.“No,” said Loftus, glumly.

Pomerantz moved on to Loftus’s research. She got the professor to cite the catchphrase of a figure in one of her studies– “What’s up, Doc?”. Loftus had shown that 16% of people said they’d seen Bugs Bunny at Disneyland, a false memory because the fictional rabbit is a Warner Bros character, correct? Correct, the witness had to agree. Hanging in the air was the thought that 84% didn’t see Bugs Bunny at the wrong theme park.

 Next, we were on a second study, where Loftus and co had tried to implant the false memory of people having had a rectal enema. No one did so, the point being that people remember trauma clearly. False memory did not have a good day in court. No wonder Maxwell seemed distraught.