'Try it yourself: try to recall an event 40 years ago, and watch the layers of the onion peel off. especially it you tell the story to a third party.'
Hold on a minute, according to the memoir, this was not a singular event forty years ago, but a regular event, over a ten year period, from the age of three to the age of 13, and not just any event, but a truly shocking event, which nonetheless, Bettina forgot about for 47 years. That tests credulity.
Jesse objects to my citing the many cases where courts and welfare agencies have presumed parents guilty of abuse before eventually finding them innocent, saying this is not comparable. It is not comparable. I was seeking to make the point that far from being the case that child abuse was a hidden crime, we have for the last twenty years been in the grip of a child abuse panic, which has led to many innocent people being jailed. If you want a comparison with lynching, that is a better one.
What bearing does this have on the Aptheker allegations? Only that we live in a society peculiarly sensitive to the danger of child abuse, not one that is seeking to cover it up.
Jesse seems to be unaware that abuse memoirs are an established literary genre today, with contributions from Kathy O'Beirne. Constance Briscoe, Dave Pelzer. In the case of the first two, siblings and parents strongly object to the representation of their families, apparently refuting central facts in O'Beirne's story. People tell all kinds of stories about themselves, many true, some not so. Binjamin Wilkomirski compelling holocaust memoir turned out to be a fiction, as did James Frey's addiction and self-harm memoir, A Million Little Pieces. These authors dramatised their lives by presenting themselves as victims of terrible abuse.
On one thing, I can agree with Jesse that we cannot have 'absolute certainty that every testimony along these lines is totally 100% true', which is why I think it is fair to assume that Herbert Aptheker's reputation is intact unless and until such time as there is corroborating evidence for Bettina Aptheker's accusations.
Forgive me if I definitely do sign off now, got to pack.