{CA} Justices OK lawsuit against researcher accused of privacy breach

AP via SFGate ^ | 2/26/7 | DAVID KRAVETS

[SmithL]

San Francisco (AP) -- Researchers could be liable for damages if they obtain private information through false pretenses, the California Supreme Court ruled Monday.

The case, which attracted widespread attention by media groups who urged the court to dismiss it, concerns a University of California, Irvine, psychologist who published an article about a Solano County girl, who at 17 allegedly remembered she was sexually abused by her mother as a child.

The psychologist, Elizabeth Loftus, set out to investigate an article written by another scholar who suggested the anonymous girl had repressed memory. Through court records, Loftus learned the girl's identity and interviewed her foster mother in 1997.

That interview was the main topic of the 101-page, 5-2 decision by the state's high court allowing Loftus' subject, Elizabeth Taus, to sue her for invasion of privacy.

To secure the interview, according to the foster mom, the psychologist said she was the superior of a psychiatrist who had treated the girl and who had written the paper about her repressed memory. The foster mother said she never would have spoken with Loftus had she known that she was not affiliated with the treating psychiatrist.

Loftus is a critic of repressed memory, which says victims during therapy sometimes remember horrible events that they mentally had sealed off.

Among other things, the foster mother revealed to Loftus that Taus, now a Navy pilot, became promiscuous and started using drugs when she remembered her abuse as a child — "the kind of very personal and potentially embarrassing or detrimental information as to which a person ordinarily would possess a reasonable expectation of privacy," Chief Justice Ronald George wrote for the majority.

The court ordered a trial on whether Loftus acquired the interview under false pretenses.

[SmithL]

Repressed Memory IS a crock, but so is gaining an interview under false pretenses. No wonder Legacy Media hates this suit.

[sarasmom]

"Repressed memory" is merely a human learned social skill, not a "crock".

If I did not repress the memories of the abuse I endured as a child, I would have been unable to successfully function as an adult.

That doesn't mean I suddenly, spontaneously, "remembered" certain noxious childhood traumatic events.
Just that I finally stopped pretending that certain events didn't actually happen, just so the family/neighborhood/community pervert wasn't openly punished by the law, and my family wasn't "publicly shamed" for my bit part as the innocent victim.

After all, the perverts can't stop themselves, can they?
And who wants to deal with them?

[TASMANIANRED]

Repressed memory is sometimes a crock but not always.

Study was done in Sweden a few years ago.

They started with children who had been treated in ER for a sexual assault.. There was 100% confirmatory evidence with the medical records to go with it.

Years later many of the adults denied recall of the event.
Some of them might have lied but not all of them..