“I realized I was wanting to back out for selfish reasons, and I didn’t want to live with that feeling about myself,” she told me. She resisted the job for about four months, but Weinstein and his lawyers eventually prevailed, persuading her to fly to New York and testify on his behalf, in exchange for fourteen thousand dollars, only ten thousand of which was ever paid. Over the phone, she told his lawyers, “He’s a bully, and I’ve experienced that bullying myself.” She didn’t realize that Weinstein was on the line until he piped up: “I’m sorry if you felt I was bullying you.” “If the MeToo movement had an office, Beth’s picture would be on the ten-most-wanted list,” her brother Robert told me.īut after the conversation in Argentina, and after reading more about the allegations, she referred Weinstein to a different memory researcher. Miller, one of the founders of cognitive psychology, once said in a speech to the American Psychological Association that the way to advance the field was “to give psychology away.” Loftus, who is seventy-six, adopts a similar view, seizing any opportunity to elaborate on what she calls the “flimsy curtain that separates our imagination and our memory.” In the past forty-five years, she has testified or consulted in more than three hundred cases, on behalf of people wrongly accused of robbery and murder, as well as for high-profile defendants like Bill Cosby, Jerry Sandusky, and the Duke lacrosse players accused of rape, in 2006. “It is not fixed and immutable, not a place way back there that is preserved in stone, but a living thing that changes shape, expands, shrinks, and expands again, an amoeba-like creature.” “Our representation of the past takes on a living, shifting reality,” she has written. According to Loftus, who has published twenty-four books and more than six hundred papers, memories are reconstructed, not replayed. Her work helped usher in a paradigm shift, rendering obsolete the archival model of memory-the idea, dominant for much of the twentieth century, that our memories exist in some sort of mental library, as literal representations of past events. Loftus, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, is the most influential female psychologist of the twentieth century, according to a list compiled by the Review of General Psychology. But, when Weinstein finally got through, she said, “basically he just wanted to ask, ‘How can something that seems so consensual be turned into something so wrong?’ ”
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In response, she got a series of frantic e-mails saying that the conversation couldn’t wait.
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She couldn’t figure out how to receive international calls in her hotel room, so she asked if they could talk in three days, once she was home, in California. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.Įlizabeth Loftus was in Argentina, giving talks about the malleability of memory, in October, 2018, when she learned that Harvey Weinstein, who had recently been indicted for rape and sexual assault, wanted to speak with her.
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