I don’t know how much national attention this case is getting, but we are all over it here in Boston. There has, of course, already been alot of litigation arising from the Church sexual abuse scandal, but this one is a criminal trial, and I am of two minds about it. While sexual abusers should be held responsible and punished for their actions, the prosecution here is basing their case on an unreliable and suspect accuser, several other of Shanley’s alleged victims having withdrawn from the case in the weeks before the trial. While victims of abuse become chronically psychiatrically troubled, so too do suggestible psychiatrically troubled individuals sometimes ‘become’ victims of abuse in their minds and the minds of caregivers, prosecutors and others who have zealous investments in the reality of abuse. While traumatic memories are stored in a dissociated way, protectively inaccessible to the victim until recovered, it is also demonstrable that ‘recovered memories’ can be fictitious after-the-fact creations. Human memory is malleable and, in some instances, how convincing it is is matched by how unreliable it is. I wonder if we are going to see a monumental battle of expert witnesses around the recovered memory issue in the current case. The proponents of the view that these recovered memories are false and the adherents to the trauma model are often zealots who clash as cataclysmically — and unproductively — as any do when they argue about matters of faith. Shanley and his accuser will likely become damaged icons for polemical positions in a prodigious battle played out in the Cambridge courtroom.