By Mark Pendergrast
The Keepers, a wildly popular seven-part documentary series aired by Netflix in May 2017, promotes the theory of repressed memories by resurrecting and validating a previously dismissed Baltimore case from the early 1990s.
The show relies heavily on recovered memories of abuse to convince viewers that a now-deceased Catholic priest, Joseph Maskell, or another priest known only as “Brother Bob,” murdered a young nun named Cathy Cesnik in 1969, in order to prevent the nun, an English teacher, from reporting sexual abuse of high school students at Keough High School in Baltimore, Maryland.
The series is dramatic, artfully constructed, and based on real events, but it is extremely misleading, especially in accepting without question the validity of repressed memories.
The Keepers purveys all the old stereotypes, including a psychologist who explains confidently: "Some things we experience are so unbearable and so painful that we shut them out.” This popular series could undo years of good memory science in the public arena.
The star of The Keeper series is Jean Hargadon Wehner, known as “Jane Doe” in the dismissed lawsuit, who was a student at Keough High School, a private Catholic school, from 1967 to 1971. She had no abuse memories until she reach adulthood, but beginning in 1981, the year after the publication of Michelle Remembers (the first blockbuster book about repressed memories and satanic ritual abuse), Wehner began to see a series of counselors and therapists, including massage and movement therapists.
She also learned to put herself into a prayerful trance, which she called “dialoguing with the inner child,” a kind of pseudo-multiple-personality state in which she identified various internal child personalities named Jeannie, Beth, Gloria, Ethel, and Martha, each of whom apparently held different abuse memories.
During the 1980s, she recovered memories of how her uncle and an array of strangers abused her from age three to twelve – typical of false “massive repression” memories with a ritual abuse flavor. She also recalled that this uncle abused her ten siblings, though none of them remember it.
During the 1990s, Wehner read an array of popular books about repressed memories, no doubt including The Courage to Heal. In 1992, Wehner began therapy with Ph.D. psychologist Norman Bradford (currently in practice and a professor at Goucher College in Baltimore), who had her keep a dream journal.
Shortly afterwards, she began to retrieve her first memories of priest abuse, starting with Father Neil Magnus, whom she envisioned masturbating while he took her confession. When she discovered that Magnus was dead, Wehner switched to retrieving memories of abuse by another priest, Joseph Maskell, who had been her high school counselor. She eventually recalled vaginal and anal rape (sometimes with a vibrator), oral sex, enemas, him putting a gun in her mouth, and forced prostitution.
But Wehner’s sex abuse memories expanded dramatically beyond Maskell to include two policemen, three high school teachers, a local politician who practiced a political speech while she performed oral sex on him, three more priests (Father Schmidt, Father John, and Father Daniels), four religious brothers (Brother Tim, Brother Bob, Brother Frank, and Brother Ed), two religious sisters (Nancy and Russell), and another religious brother known only as Mr. Teeth, who read from the Book of Psalms as he had sex with her. Wehner also remembered that she herself killed an unidentified nun at her school.
Yet the millions of people who have viewed The Keepers did not learn many of these background facts. (Netflix is notorious for keeping viewer numbers secret, but Newsweek revealed that it had the top two streaming shows in 2016, both with over 20 million viewers.) What viewers see is that Jean Hargadon Wehner seems to be an attractive, sensitive, self-assured woman with a supportive, wholesome family, and that she claims to have recovered memories of abuse by Father Maskell and a few others.
And director Ryan White – whose aunt was Wehner’s high school classmate -- goes out of his way to portray her memories as real. After listening to her tell her story for hours, White told his producer, “This woman is telling the truth and we need to be part of this.”
It is true that Sister Cathy Cesnik, 26, an attractive, popular English teacher, was murdered and probably raped on November 7, 1969. Only three days later, another young woman, 20, was killed two miles away in a very similar fashion. It is quite likely that the same unknown person killed both of them, but the murderer probably didn’t know that Cesnik was a nun, because she had just begun working at a public high school and had permission not to wear her habit.
As part of her prayerful memory process, Wehner visualized how Father Maskell had taken her to see Cathy Cesnik’s body, and that her face had been crawling with maggots. Maskell must have known that she would immediately repress the memory, just as she allegedly forgot her rapes every time the door clicked shut as she was leaving his office. When Maskell’s body was exhumed in 2017 (he died in 2001), his DNA did not match the DNA at the murder scene.
As background, readers should know that the late 1980s and 1990s featured the height of an epidemic of false memories of childhood sexual abuse, fomented by this misguided, pseudoscientific form of psychotherapy. The theory behind this fad stemmed from Sigmund Freud’s work a century beforehand, in the 1890s.
It is true that Sister Cathy Cesnik, 26, an attractive, popular English teacher, was murdered and probably raped on November 7, 1969. Only three days later, another young woman, 20, was killed two miles away in a very similar fashion. It is quite likely that the same unknown person killed both of them, but the murderer probably didn’t know that Cesnik was a nun, because she had just begun working at a public high school and had permission not to wear her habit.
As part of her prayerful memory process, Wehner visualized how Father Maskell had taken her to see Cathy Cesnik’s body, and that her face had been crawling with maggots. Maskell must have known that she would immediately repress the memory, just as she allegedly forgot her rapes every time the door clicked shut as she was leaving his office. When Maskell’s body was exhumed in 2017 (he died in 2001), his DNA did not match the DNA at the murder scene.
As background, readers should know that the late 1980s and 1990s featured the height of an epidemic of false memories of childhood sexual abuse, fomented by this misguided, pseudoscientific form of psychotherapy. The theory behind this fad stemmed from Sigmund Freud’s work a century beforehand, in the 1890s.
Freud called it his “seduction theory,” which he himself soon abandoned. But the idea – that people can “repress” or “dissociate” years of traumatic childhood memories and then recall them as adults -- refused to die, in part because it provides an appealing plot device for novels, movies, and sensational media coverage, and because many psychologists have imbibed the theory somewhat like mother’s milk.
It has become an underlying professional assumption that people really can and do banish traumatic memories from their consciousness. And Freud himself promulgated his modified theory as “the return of the repressed” – the pseudoscientific notion that buried desires or fears return in symbolic dreams or actions.
Freud’s theory was resurrected in the 1980s by a group of therapists who were concerned about sexual abuse and who believed that women in particular (but men, too) with “symptoms” such as depression, eating disorders, or sexual issues must have been molested as children and repressed the memories so that they had no current knowledge of a horrific childhood.
Only by remembering the abuse would they be healed. These therapists believed that they could help their clients unearth these repressed memories through methods such as hypnosis, dream analysis, interpretation of bodily pangs, induced panic attacks, or group experiences.
In 1988, with the publication of The Courage to Heal, by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, this movement exploded into a full-fledged epidemic in which women in therapy became convinced that they should accuse their fathers or other family members or caregivers of having raped them for years during their childhood and, with the encouragement of their therapists, they cut off all contact with their families.
Many hundreds of lawsuits were filed by therapy patients with brand new abuse “memories.” Thousands of stunned parents and other relatives became the first innocent people targeted by the repressed memory epidemic. In the 1990s, over 500 reported cases were filed in which the only evidence stemmed from recovered memories – 15 percent were criminal, 85 percent civil cases. Hundreds of additional cases were quietly settled without formal filings, as many parents or other accused relatives or caretakers were embarrassed, devastated, and terrified.
As Harvard psychology professor Richard McNally observed in 2005, “The notion that traumatic events can be repressed and later recovered is the most pernicious bit of folklore ever to infect psychology and psychiatry. It has provided the theoretical basis for ‘recovered memory therapy’ — the worst catastrophe to befall the mental health field since the lobotomy era.”
McNally came to similar conclusions in his book, Remembering Trauma, and most reputable memory scientists agree with that assessment. “There is no good scientific evidence that these unconscious forces exist,” wrote psychologist Charles Fernybough in Pieces of Light, his 2012 book on memory. “Traumas are remembered, and they are remembered only too painfully. They may not be thought about for a long time…but they are not forgotten.”
Nonetheless, despite the furor over false memories produced by pseudoscientific theories, those who believed in recovered-memory therapy did not give up their dogma or belief system. Thus, repressed memories did not disappear. Indeed, the idea that people could completely forget years of childhood sexual abuse and then remember the abuse later has become enshrined in the popular imagination, despite its widespread scientific debunking. Unfortunately, the repressed memory epidemic has not really subsided. While it was slowed by scientific analysis and retractor lawsuits, the epidemic continues to this day.
Since the height of the repressed memory epidemic, media coverage has swung wildly between solid scientific reports on the malleability of memory to uncritical regurgitation of recovered memory claims. Most young journalists don’t know what happened during the “Memory Wars” decade that followed the 1988 publication of The Courage to Heal and similar books.
Add to that the impact of the Internet and acceptance of fake news (really fake, such as the 2016 “news” that a pizza parlor harbored a pedophile ring) and conspiracy theory as reality, and you have a recipe for disaster, which is why I have written Memory Warp: How the Myth of Repressed Memory Arose and Refuses to Die, to be published by Upper Access Books in October 2017, and The Repressed Memory Epidemic: How It Happened and What We Need to Learn from It, to be published in September 2017 by Springer.
Once an idea enters the cultural mainstream, it has a way of resurfacing like a bloated corpse every few years. The corpse has risen again, if it ever truly sank, and The Keepers is one of the most pernicious examples.
The second star of The Keepers is Teresa Lancaster, “Jane Roe” in the 1994 lawsuit, who was a year behind Wehner at Keough High School. She claimed to have always remembered that Father Maskell forced her to disrobe, sit on his lap, endure his fondling, andtake enemas and douches while he watched, and that he was present during a gynecological exam. But it was only after she learned about “Jane Doe’s” claims and met repeatedly with Wehner’s lawyer (who also represented her) that she recovered memories of rape by Maskell, the gynecologist, and a policeman. Those recovered memories were confused and inconsistent.
Lancaster has recently changed her story (and memory), alleging that she always remembered the rapes, but that is not what she said when she made the allegations in the early 1990s.
In 1993, Wehner and her siblings sent letters to other former Keough High School students, asking about possible abuse, and they received many responses. The Keepers makes it appear that a hundred or more people claimed that Maskell sexually abused them, but since none of them appeared as plaintiffs in the lawsuit, it is unlikely that any recalled severe abuse.
It is more likely that Maskell was inappropriate in many ways, and he may have been a voyeur who hugged and fondled girls and watched as they took douches. He may have also acted badly with boys. In The Keepers final, seventh episode, Charles Franz, now a dentist, alleges that Maskell abused him in some unspecified way prior to his counseling position at Keough High School.
In a 1995 article, in which he was called “Bill,” Franz revealed that there was no severe molestation, but he claimed that Maskell, then an associate pastor at St. Clement in Landsdowne, PA, had grabbed his crotch and said “Hold onto your balls” as he drove over a bump in a car, when Franz was 13.
Other former Keough students also recovered memories or tried to. One classmate thought Maskell must have drugged her Coca-Cola. “I've never been certain of what happened. There's so many gaps in my memory of being with him, and I only have fragments,” she said in The Keepers. In a recent interview, Teresa Lancaster said that she was “focusing on victims that are coming forward. There are a lot of people who can’t remember a lot.”
Donna Vondenbosch is another alleged victim of Father Maskell. In The Keepers, she says, “He would hypnotize me sometimes; sometimes it was with a pocket watch he had. There are blocks of time when I have no idea what happened.” In a long article on the Maskell case by Paul Mandelbaum, published in Baltimore Magazine in 1995, a woman identified in the article as “Eva Nelson Cruz” makes very similar claims; it is likely that “Cruz” is in fact Vondenbosch.
In the article, Cruz admitted that she had recovered memories of the abuse with the help of therapist Kenneth Ellis. As a child, the journalist wrote, “She was certain that God didn’t love her, and sometimes, at random moments, she would hear a little voice in her head, her own voice, imploring Jesus to have sex with her.” In incrementally recovered memories, she eventually came to believe that Father Maskell had raped her aboard a boat, in the presence of another man whom she had kicked, and that Maskell had also stuck a wooden crucifix into her vagina.
“It’s not unreasonable to interpret Eva’s dreams as tapping into repressed memories of her experiences with Maskell,” Ellis told Mandelbaum, the reporter. (Ellis is still practicing in Maryland, and he still promotes dream interpretation, writing: “Dreams can be viewed as the dreamer’s attempt to ‘work through’ or resolve some conflict that they are experiencing in reality.”)
Some Keough alums may have reinterpreted always-remembered incidents to make them more sinister in retrospect. As one of them says in the series, “Something that may have seemed insignificant at the time has relevance now.”
Unforgivably, The Keepers puts two true believers in repressed memories on screen as “experts.” Psychologist L. M. Lothstein asserts: "Some things we experience are so unbearable and so painful that we shut them out. The major systems for protection of the self, the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal, fight-flight response, the vagal response to play dead, to dissociate, to be unaware of something, they'll come right into play in order to protect the self from harm."
This is pseudoscientific claptrap. He goes on to say, “We now know so much more about memory. It's scientifically accepted that memories can be compartmentalized and not known to the conscious ego."
This is absolutely untrue. Reputable memory scientists know that repeated traumatic events tend to be recalled all too well. As Lothstein pontificates in The Keepers, the filmmakers flash sensational headlines about a 2004 study,claiming: “Psychologists Offer Proof of Brain’s Ability to Suppress Memories,”and “A Freudian Theory Proven,” even though this was a study of word pairs that demonstrated nothing whatsoever about repressed trauma memories.
The documentary also features psychiatrist Richard Sipe of Johns Hopkins, who served as a witness for Wehner and believed her recovered memories. “There are things that have the ring of truth, even if they are hard to believe,” he explains in The Keepers. Sipe diagnosed Wehner with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which he compares to that of war veterans.
“Naturally we know so much more about this because of men and women coming home from war and being traumatized. We have all sorts of knowledge now about how the brain handles those.” But the brain does not handle war experiences by repressing them, but by being unable to forget them. That is what causes PTSD.
Sipe criticizes his colleague Paul McHugh, the head of the Department of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, as having a “blind spot” about repressed memories because McHugh testified that they had no scientific validity. McHugh, the author of the book Try to Remember, a critique of repressed memory therapy, apparently convinced the Baltimore judge in the case, who dismissed it before trial, a decision upheld on appeal.
In The Keepers, Jean Wehner tells viewers, “There’s an awful lot I still don’t remember,” so stay tuned for more horrific abuse memories yet to come. In the series, she demonstrates how she recalls her memories, lighting a candle and lying down to go into her prayerful state. As she does so, the camera zooms in on an angel figure beside her, which says “Believe Believe Believe Believe Believe.”
Critical response to The Keepers has been overwhelmingly positive and credulous. In a review, a Baltimore Sun reporter asked rhetorically why Wehner had not come forward earlier. “Because that’s how ritualized long-term abuse works in children,” she wrote. “The abuser is able to control the victim through threats and intimidation…. Jean says that to survive the horror, she in effect dissociated herself — severed herself from the experience, put the entire ordeal into a box, sealed it up, and buried it. It would stay buried for over 20 years.”
New York Times reviewer Mike Hale called The Keepers “a fascinating and devastating experience” and identified Jean Wehner as “a steely heroine.” He wrote that “trying to obtain justice based on recovered memories has the outlines of a classic tragedy,” without expressing any skepticism about the validity of such memories. The Guardian called the series“a breathtakingly brave true crime documentary."
Prompted by The Keepers series, Vice magazine’s Kaleigh Rogers published an article reviewing the alleged scientific validity of repressed memories, asserting that since the 1990s “we've built a much stronger understanding of how and why childhood trauma could lead to repressed memories.”
On the contrary, reputable memory scientistshave found that years of traumatic events are impossible to forget and that false memories of abuse are frequently produced through suggestion and influence. Rogers erroneously concluded: “The science is firm that traumatic events can cause memory loss, and that these memories may resurface years or decades later.” I am sure that she sincerely meant well, but from her photo, Rogers is a young Millennial who was swayed by the series and accepted the myth of repressed memory hook, line, and sinker. I fear that she is representative of a new generation who will be vulnerable to these dangerous theories.
--Mark Pendergrast is a science writer and independent scholar and the author of many books (www.markpendergrast.com.) He discusses The Keepers in his forthcoming book, Memory Warp: How the Myth of Repressed Memory Arose and Refuses to Die (October 2017).
On the contrary, reputable memory scientistshave found that years of traumatic events are impossible to forget and that false memories of abuse are frequently produced through suggestion and influence. Rogers erroneously concluded: “The science is firm that traumatic events can cause memory loss, and that these memories may resurface years or decades later.” I am sure that she sincerely meant well, but from her photo, Rogers is a young Millennial who was swayed by the series and accepted the myth of repressed memory hook, line, and sinker. I fear that she is representative of a new generation who will be vulnerable to these dangerous theories.
--Mark Pendergrast is a science writer and independent scholar and the author of many books (www.markpendergrast.com.) He discusses The Keepers in his forthcoming book, Memory Warp: How the Myth of Repressed Memory Arose and Refuses to Die (October 2017).
The author notes that he submitted a shorter version of this investigative expose of the popular Netflix series to Slate, Vice, Discover, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Psychology Today, and other publications, to no avail.
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” he said, “that the mainstream media have no interest in debunking sex abuse allegations, even if they are based on psychological myths.”