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This is basically a weak "he said, she said" case from over 30 years ago. It's a joke . . . ^{Presumptively} This is crude Stalinist politics. Nothing more.

I don't care about sophisticated theories about Memory.

. . . whereas I am alarmed at naive theories of memory which allow the cynical to practice on the credulity of the gullible.
After my mother died 5 years after an Alzheimer’s Disease diagnosis, I remarked to a medical professional that I thought I had learned a good bit about memory. He replied that I probably had an Associate Degree’s worth of understanding of the subject from my experience.
I observed in Mother’s behavior and understanding the fact that we all remember only part of our experience, and when we try to remember something we often call to mind facts related to the question at hand, and conclude the answer by interpolation from those facts that we do remember. It tends to work, a lot of the time, getting the information we want/need from our brains. But it is a thought process - it isn’t a simple table look-up.
The key point is that, having “refreshed” your memory with the fact that things happened in a certain sequence and you can pin things down by going by what you remember, you also tend to remember your conclusion which you inferred from what you did remember. Now your memory of a long-ago event is colored by a conclusion you have drawn recently. By this mechanism you actually alter a memory in the process of accessing it.
(In the case of Mother’s Alzheimer’s Disease, what happened was that her (accurate) memories became sparser as time went on but she continued to rely on interpolating between the memories that she did retain. And that meant that her “memory” - actually conclusions from her memory - became wildly inaccurate. Not just “I don’t know” but “remembered” - wildly inaccurately).
The conclusion is that the possibility of generating of “very definite memories” inheres in a process such as psychotherapy. Note well - generating not actually recovering but generating - “very definite memories” which might bear no relation to reality at all.
As you say, litigating a 35 year ago memory is a joke. But litigating a “recovered” “memory” is a travesty.