In 1988, several years before the False Memory Syndrome Foundation’s existence, Dr. Anna Salter received a grant from the New England Association of Child Welfare Commissioners and Directors to study claims that psychologists and psychiatrists were asking leading questions to coerce or implant false memories of sexual abuse.  The Association was particularly concerned with this issue because they wanted to know if they had to tweak, or possibly overhaul, its standard interviewing techniques.

By then, Minnesota courts had deemed Rev. Dr. Ralph Underwager a suitable expert witness in scores of abuse cases, in which he testified for the defense.  Because of his advocacy of parents and other adults accused of pedophilia, through both courtroom testimony and his founding of Victims of Child Abuse Laws (VOCAL), he had put out substantial literature asserting what would later become the main tenets of the FMSF. 

Because FMS had yet to reach the national radar, the existing literature supporting those claims was sparse.   So, Dr. Salter concentrated on Dr. Underwager’s work and that of his wife, Hollida Wakefield.  Her plan was to review their research in order to evaluate the merits of their claims that standard interviewing techniques were coercive and leading, thus resulting in false accusations of child sexual abuse.

What she found, disturbed her.  While at first glance the articles appeared scholarly, with fundamental support from a number of studies, she discovered that, by and large, Underwager and Wakefield had grossly misrepresented these studies in order to make their case.*

On 10 December 1988, Dr. Salter discussed some of her findings at a meeting of the Tennessee Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.  Given five minutes to rebut specifics in a case made on behalf of Dr. Underwager (who was sitting in the audience), she made it clear that although she thought he had raised some valid questions, Underwager's work contained a large number of flagrant errors:

I do want to make it clear that those disagreements are not based on the point of view that he [Underwager represents] because I do believe you can raise some very valuable questions about some of the interview techniques that are used today, particularly leading questions, also multiple interviews and, in fact, some folks really are using some very coercive interview techniques that are likely to lead to error.  I also agree with him behavioral indicators of sexual abuse.... But, as an academic, I really get agitated with what I believe are just sort of misstatements of fact about the professional literature and since I only have five minutes to talk to you, I’ll only give a few examples....

...there has been so much concern among professionals about the statements that Dr. Underwager makes and their accuracy in the literature that I have been given a grant to develop rebuttal materials–to go through his literature and sort out what is accurate and what is not accurate and make that available to everybody.”

To Dr. Salter, this seemed a reasonable way to approach the disagreement: getting all sides together, discussing the issue rationally in a professional or academic forum, finding some common ground, and letting the merits of each case speak for themselves.  This is how academics normally conduct their business, and this was what Salter expected.  She initially thought that Underwager got his sources confused, or that he had a bad typo day, or that the guy at Kinkos printing out his materials had sabotaged him, or anything else that would explain the blatant errors riddling his books and published papers. As she reasoned:

I expected a back-and-forth academic exchange, vigorous no doubt, and even biting....but played out on a field I understood, with research as the context and logic as the tool.

That’s what Dr. Salter anticipated.  But instead of vigorous academic debate, she got her ass hauled into court.

Wakefield and Dr. Underwager didn’t bother with rebutting Dr. Salter in the academic or professional literature.  They made no attempt to claim that despite the errors in their studies their findings were nevertheless valid.  Instead, they filed a defamation suit against her, saying that she had accused them of ethical violations without notifying them first.  For good measure, they sued her multiple times, in different states, accusing her, among other things, of laundering grant money. 

Getting sued for exercising one’s expertise and professional judgment seems bad enough.  What made this worse was the subterfuge the Underwagers engaged in to make their case.  Dr. Salter received two phone calls from someone asking her help in rebutting testimony given by Underwager in court.  She assumed the calls and caller were legitimate.  A few weeks later, she received a transcript of the calls in the mail.  Underwager sent them to her, demanding that she retract the statements or he’d sue her.  At that point, Salter realized that the person on the other end of the line actually worked for Underwager and Wakefield as a private detective.  The Underwagers confirmed this later when, in deposition of one of the lawsuits, they admitted to hiring the PI to entrap Salter. 

Eventually, the American Psychological Association (APA) found Dr. Salter innocent of any ethics violation, writing, “....the committee voted unanimously not to find you in violation of Ethical Principles and to dismiss the complaint as entirely without merit.” 

Dr. Salter found more vindication in the legal arena, as one-by-one courts dismissed each of Dr. Underwager’s suits.  A District Court in California not only dropped the suit, but forbade the Underwagers from suing Salter again in the US.**  When Underwager appealed a suit in Wisconsin, judges handed down a ruling that seemed not only appropriate for him and Wakefield, but to the entirety of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation:

Both Salter and [her co-defendant Patricia] Toth came to believe that Underwager is a hired gun who makes his living by deceiving judges about the state of medical knowledge and thus assisting child molesters to evade punishment.  Persons who hold such opinions cannot be expected to look kindly on their subjects, and the law certainly does not insist that they shut up as soon as they are challenged....Underwager and Wakefield cannot, simply by filing suit and crying ‘character assassination!’, silence those who hold divergent views, no matter how adverse those views may be to plaintiff’s interests. Scientific controversies must be settled by the methods of science rather than by methods of litigation. [emphasis X. Dell]

In “Confessions of a Whistleblower,” Dr. Salter chided herself for her naivete.  She assumed, perhaps like most academics, that the False Memory Syndrome hypothesis was a legitimate scholarly concern, the credibility of which would sort itself out as other issues have done; that is, by weighing the arguments and counter-arguments of knowledgeable persons with honest disagreements.  In her view, she projected her expectations, and those of her colleagues, onto the actions of the similarly credentialed Dr. Underwager.  “Surely,” she quipped, “lying and deception do not occur among people who go to conferences, who write books, who testify in court, and who have PhDs.”  This experience taught her, however, that such was not always the case.

As to lying within academia, one can note that it does go on.  The problem is, being totally dishonest is somewhat difficult to get away with in an ivory tower.  When anyone makes any claim, especially an outrageous one, their peers usually dissect their statements ten thousand ways to Sunday.  If it becomes clear that the academician is lying, especially to promote or justify an ideological position, colleagues tend to call him or her out on it by denying publication in peer-reviewed journals, and by analyzing specific claims in the literature.***

Perhaps that’s why Wakefield and Dr. Underwager waged their campaign to silence what appeared to be valid professional criticism by taking their outrage to a forum where the rules of science and logic did not apply; namely to the public via the courts.   

As it turns out, even though they did not win any of these cases against Dr. Salter, Underwager and Wakefield came out to the good for two reasons.     First of all, when somebody sues you, no matter how frivolous the accusation, you still have to defend it.  You’ll therefore be pitting your resources against, what would eventually become, a well-financed organization that can outspend you.  If you don’t cry uncle and capitulate, you’re going to pay good money for lawyers.  Consequently, such tactics have had a chilling effect on anyone who raises even small objections to the notion of FMS. 

Second, even though you might win your lawsuit, the FMSF has had no compunctions about misrepresenting your case in its literature and public relations.  Jennifer Hoult and Lynn Crook, for example, found it necessary to file complaints to the APA against Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, whom they accused of misrepresenting the facts of their cases when writing about them.****

In this instance, Dr. Salter noted that Dr. Underwager later claimed to have actually won the lawsuit against her, despite the reality that they had lost.  Therefore, if you’re a layman, looking in on the debate from outside, you might come to believe that courts regularly rule against academics asserting the validity of delayed memory recall.

In summary, what Dr. Salter learned most well: the issue of FMS was not, nor ever has been an academic or scientific issue:

It is a political fight between a group of well-financed, well-organized people whose freedom, livelihood, finances, reputations, or liberty is being threatened by disclosures of child sexual abuse and--on the other hand--a group of well-meaning, ill-organized, underfinanced, and often terribly naive academics who expect fair play.

Other academics have seen their careers threatened, and in some cases go up in smoke.  What happened to one Seattle therapist, however, was utterly mind-blowing.
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*Dr. Salter gives a brief review of one of these misrepresentations in a 1998 paper titled “Confessions of a Whistleblower: Lessons Learned” (Ethics & Behavior, vol. 8, no. 2) as an example.  But in all, she found them “too numerous to cite.”

**The exact wording: Underwager was “....permanently enjoined from prosecuting and/or commencing any causes of action or claims against Dr. Salter in any and all federal courts or in the court of any state, including but not limited to Maryland, Virginia, Indiana, and Texas.”

***In recent years, for example, those claiming that global warming doesn’t exist, that some ethnic groups are intellectually inferior, or who support “Intelligent Design Theory” find difficulty publishing their work in peer-reviewed journals; not because of political correctness, or because participating researchers are offended, but because each of these cases had serious methodological errors, and overwhelming flaws in their conclusions.  In other words, in the world of ideas, they didn’t make the cut. 

****Both Crook and Hoult had successfully sued parents after their delayed explicit memory recall was corroborated independently.  Dr. Loftus ended her membership in the APA before the Association could review the complaints, and was therefore outside of their jurisdiction.  The APA, consequently, did not act upon them.