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[00:00:29.430]
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[00:00:34.290]
There are curse words that are unbeaten today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version,
you can find that at our website.

[00:00:41.280]
This American Life, Dawg. Gary did not want to become a football player, no interest in the game at
all. He was a timid kid, kind of kid who in baseball would cause his eyes when he was up at bat. He
was so scared of getting hit by the ball.

[00:00:57.040]
But when you're high school, you know, your personality is still up for grabs.

[00:01:00.520]
And Gary's high school, there's not one person, but two people with a very different vision of who he
was. They were assistant high school football coaches and very noticeable big personalities. And they
were twins. And I didn't really know their name.

[00:01:14.950]
I'd seen them around. They were super handsome and in great shape. I mean, they were ripped and
they would wear Gold's Gym tank tops and jams, these shorts, these Hawaiian shorts, they would buy
those. And they had really long hair. And they they were very charming, charismatic, funny.

[00:01:33.490]
And they were known as The Jetsons, which was this the self proclaimed nickname.

[00:01:40.210]
I think they called themselves The Jetsons. Yeah. Referred to themselves. Yeah. Because The
Jetsons was and people from the future and they felt that they were like that. They were definitely the
first people I ever noticed who referred to themselves. And that is that the third person, the Jetsons
are coming to get you the Jetsons.

[00:01:57.740]
We'll see you the Jetsons. That's what they were.

[00:02:00.160]
Sometimes they would they would say Johnny Jetson will be with you today. Joe Jetson will be with
you tomorrow.

[00:02:07.000]
They're like magical figures.

[00:02:10.810]
And these magical figures, these assistant football coaches, they gave Gary his own nickname in the
fall of junior year. It was not a glittery name like the Jetsons, kind of the opposite actually waste.

[00:02:21.970]
They called him as a waste of talent to like Goldman to playing football.

[00:02:27.640]
They told him that football would get him a college scholarship, get him girls. They said the
newspaper would write about him. They wanted him on the team so badly because Gary was a giant
compared to most of the kids playing football back then.

[00:02:39.670]
This is the Peabody, Massachusetts, Boston suburb near Salem in the late 80s.

[00:02:44.020]
Most high school players back then were five, nine, five, ten.

[00:02:47.290]
Gary was six, six, two hundred pounds and he was athletic.

[00:02:51.700]
But basketball in his high school team, those coaches scolded him for his complete lack of
aggression and for crying.

[00:02:59.720]
What he really loved doing was art projects going to the arts and crafts store reading. He kept an
enormous stuffed animal collection in his room, even in high school. He's also pretty depressed at the
time, Gary's a comedian today, Gary Coleman, and on stage when he tries to describe what he was
like as a kid, I talk about being Charlie Brown.

[00:03:20.850]
I say picture of my childhood, Charlie Brown. If Snoopy had died, that was that was my that was my
childhood. I felt so sorry for him.

[00:03:30.120]
I felt like the whole point of his character is that he's sad and lonely. And even that wasn't lonely
enough.

[00:03:36.720]
You have to kill off his dog. Yes.

[00:03:39.450]
So in the debt, instead of telling them that they were going to make him into a star, he laughed it off.
He like the attention from the Jetsons.

[00:03:45.330]
Sure. But he did not consider this seriously at all. Football seemed brutal, just nonstop violent physical
contact. He did not think he could cut it, guys. He knew he played football. They were so tough. Gary,
on the other hand, he got picked on. He got bullied. He was bullied out of Little League. So football, no
way. And then his junior year ended and just a couple of days into summer break, it was June six.

[00:04:13.390]
Thirty in the morning, he got a phone call, woke him up. It's the twins.

[00:04:18.820]
They said, Gulman, this is the Jetsons. Meet us at the Universe Gym at seven thirty. We are going to
train the Golman this summer and get the government a scholarship and make the gunman into a
star. By the end of the summer, you will be two hundred and forty five pounds and ripped like Arnold.

[00:04:43.330]
It was so weird and bold and on the spur of the moment he figures what the hell?
[00:04:48.610]
And he has this thought that you have sometimes as a kid, he thinks these adults say, I can do this.

[00:04:52.840]
Maybe they're right. They were so convincing. They were so convincing. And then there was a part of
you that thought like, yes, magical man.

[00:05:02.710]
It was it was intoxicating.

[00:05:05.200]
It was because they were so cool.

[00:05:09.160]
And my entire life, my my family was more of a don't get your hopes up type of attitude, a philosophy
of things don't don't always work out the way you want them to. And so it was a very negative house.

[00:05:23.380]
And I remember asking them if I said, you really think I'm going to I'm going to play on the school
football team, I, I don't have that much experience. And their answer, if I should, I swear or just say
what really happened every single time, I would ask them in any kind of question, they say, fuck, yeah.
And not everybody was using that expression back then.

[00:05:42.760]
That was the first instance of somebody saying that to me instead of don't get your hopes up and
we'll say it was fake. Yeah. And I just I was like, oh, my gosh, these guys are so, so exciting.

[00:05:55.840]
And they believe in me that summer. Every morning he works out with Jetson's from seven thirty to
nine thirty. Then they take taken to a diner. They buy him a big breakfast with eggs and other proteins
at night. Sometimes they teach him running routes.

[00:06:12.880]
Remember, Gary had never played football and it was just like the Jets and said it was incredible.

[00:06:20.050]
It was like a rocky montage. I was getting stronger and bigger and they would say things.

[00:06:26.470]
They they had this thing. The government is getting huge. The government is getting huge. And so by
the end of the summer.

[00:06:33.760]
How did you look? I looked fantastic, man. I had I I'd grown my hair long like them, and clothes started
to look really cool on me.

[00:06:42.880]
They were as I was filling out and they were they were right. I weighed 240 pounds. I could bench
press two hundred twenty five pounds. I ran a forty eight forty, which was was very impressive to
everybody.

[00:06:55.600]
Everything about me had had changed physically. I had built this really great costume.

[00:07:01.420]
Why do you say costume.
[00:07:02.680]
Because it covered up who I really was. I was still the same, the same Gary who cried at movies.

[00:07:09.340]
So. So you have this man costume. Yeah. That you're wearing, which is your new body. Yes, I feel
terrific. And it's it came time to start practices.

[00:07:18.520]
You would think that he would be psyched to use this new body that he created for the purpose it had
been made for, like, OK, he's Captain America, it's World War to bring on the Nazis.

[00:07:27.820]
But in fact, he was terrified of just getting hit of the physical contact that's built into football. And a
week before practice, he talks to a friend and he says to the friend he doesn't think he can do it.

[00:07:39.430]
He doesn't think he can go through with it. Should he call the Jetsons and tell him he started over? It's
not for him.

[00:07:44.650]
I'll never forget what he said. He said, Gary, they will kill you. They spent their entire summer training
you and and feeding you. You can't you have to go through with this.

[00:08:00.010]
So he did. He went through with it.

[00:08:02.410]
But the problem was, as John Jetson put it, he was a daisy in a field of weeds alarm among
conquerors.

[00:08:10.120]
You can put it into a tough guy costume, but doesn't always make him into a tough guy.

[00:08:15.430]
And of course, adults are always trying to convince kids and inspire kids about who they can be.
That's what good parents do. That's what good teachers do.

[00:08:23.740]
But some kids like Gary just have trouble going along with the plan.

[00:08:29.560]
They want to please the adults. They want to do what they're asked.

[00:08:33.880]
But all the while, they genuinely wonder, can they actually become the person the adults are telling
them to become?

[00:08:39.820]
Is that them? Is that who they should be? And it's totally confusing for them. The adults in their lives
seem to know what they're talking about.

[00:08:49.150]
They're adults, for God's sake. They're supposed to know better, but the kids end up wandering in a
really primal way.

[00:08:55.780]
Who am I? Well, from Chicago, it's this American Life.

[00:09:00.280]
I'm IRA Glass. I show today in two acts and the second act adults make it to a woman can't even
decide. What is true about some of the most basic facts about her own history, but we're going to
start with this story at one Gary story, which we're calling Jersey Shore.

[00:09:21.070]
Gary went to his first football practice and it was just as bad as he had imagined it would be.

[00:09:25.390]
Guys rush at him and smash into him on every play. It's totally painful. He's completely miserable,
bruised. He was in this one play.

[00:09:33.590]
This guy hit me helmet to helmet and it was so loud, like a gunshot. And everybody noticed it and they
called it a business. And the way it got its name was they said The Jetsons told me this. They said,
the biz is the sound that it makes when you get hit in the head during a game, which is businesses.

[00:09:55.600]
And each week the guy who had the best hit on somebody else would get this T-shirt called The Biz of
the Week t shirt. And now we know that that these things, these biz's, they were concussions.

[00:10:09.160]
But at the time, in nineteen eighty eight, the concussion protocol was pretty much you.

[00:10:13.900]
Could you go in and that first time that I got busy to the Jetsons were so proud of me, they, they high
fives me and they patted my, my head. The goal man got business first because I was laughing along
with them but I was like I hope that never happens again.

[00:10:33.340]
Every day Gary would show up at practice and hated it until finally they started to play real games.
And these are just preseason scrimmages, but they're against other high schools. There's a crowd in
the stands that change everything from the very first time they put them in on offense, they set up a
play for me.

[00:10:52.330]
It's this pass where they just throw it over the middle, they throw it up high and nobody can reach as
high as I can jump. I catch it.

[00:11:00.070]
It takes a couple of guys to to bring me down just because I'm I'm big and I want to run away from
contact like there were fans and they were cheering.

[00:11:09.130]
I will say that was exhilarating.

[00:11:12.310]
Coaches try man on defense. He barely knows what he's doing and he sacks the other side's
quarterback.

[00:11:17.980]
I had no technique.

[00:11:19.330]
Yeah, but I was just so much bigger than this kid that that he couldn't outrun me because he wasn't as
fast as me and he wasn't as strong as me. So I was able to wrestle him to the ground. Anyhow, we go
into the to the locker room and the coach is berating the other players on the team for for not being
aggressive. And he says the only person out there sticking anybody, which I don't know if they still use
that expression, but I like that expression.

[00:11:45.370]
Sticking anybody is Gary Coleman, a kid who never played football until this summer. And I wish I had
goosebumps. And it was it was like a movie. So it's all happening just like it just happening. Just like
The Jetsons had said. It was uncanny. Opening game of the real season, the coaches start him, this
newbie player, he sacks the opposing quarterback right away and on offense, they throw me the ball
three times. I caught every single one.

[00:12:19.410]
I mean that that night I go to my first high school party. I never go to a high school party.

[00:12:25.820]
And it was such a letdown because you see parties in movies, they're so exciting and there's sad. And
I just sat down on a couch. I didn't drink and and it was an incredible letdown.

[00:12:36.380]
But I was and I was invited. But you were. I was very excited. Yes. It's important. You were there. You
were there at the bad, but yeah, you made it.

[00:12:43.760]
And then Sunday night, the night before school, a local newspaper reporter called me and interviewed
me about this game.

[00:12:51.800]
He said that that I was the talk of the town and then talked about how everybody knew the ball was
coming to me and they couldn't stop me.

[00:13:00.530]
And just like the Jetsons had said, they're going to be newspaper articles. There was a newspaper
article in the Salem Evening News the next day that called me Mr. Raw Potential. Wow. Yeah. And it
did not last the season opener.

[00:13:14.570]
His first great game was also his last great game.

[00:13:18.020]
I had one more decent game or I caught a pass and I made a really, really good tackle. But the teams
started to do this thing where they would send guys to block me and my legs and they would send a
couple of guys and they would just roll into my my legs. I think it's called a cut block, if I remember
properly.

[00:13:38.000]
But that that was how they would sort of neutralize me.

[00:13:42.680]
And didn't the Jetsons have some technique you can use to, like, get around that now?

[00:13:47.840]
Either either they they didn't suggest one or I wasn't able to employ it.

[00:13:54.950]
Opposing quarterbacks wanted to stay away from the side of the line. The Gary was on so he wasn't
sacking anyone anymore.
[00:14:00.860]
And after this one time when Gary fumbled the ball on a big play at the goal line, suddenly he says
they stopped sending him out for passes. So no more who catches it wasn't making big plays, he was
not living up to all that bright potential. And some dark part of his personality kicked in like maybe he
was a waste after all the man costume had for them for a while, but he was still the same person had
always been to dread practices and games I would throw up before every game on the sideline.

[00:14:35.040]
I would throw up because I was overcome by nervous and anxiety. I started to feel really lousy about
myself and my grades suffered. And I just knew that I was starting to to disappoint these these guys.
And they never said anything to their credit. They never said, wow, we were really had high hopes for
you. It just I it sounds crazy.

[00:14:56.670]
I still have nightmares about it. It's playing back then was make it through the season one game a
week, never play again.

[00:15:10.860]
And in the middle of this, a college football coach came into our locker room and and introduced
himself to me at my locker.

[00:15:20.130]
And that was sort of a what the hell is going on here.

[00:15:23.430]
Introduced himself to me and said what? He said, you had a great game, which I hadn't. And I am an
assistant at Dartmouth College, and we'd love for you to take a visit to Dartmouth. OK, here's the thing
that Gary didn't know or understand at the time, as disheartened as he was, his coaches did not think
he was having a bad season. Sure, they weren't sending him out for passes. But the main reason for
that, John Jetson told me on the phone, wasn't the fumble that Gary had made.

[00:15:57.230]
Like Gary obsessed over it was that the quarterback couldn't throw reliable passes. The team wasn't
that good that year.

[00:16:04.610]
And sure, yes, Gary didn't know how to stay on his feet when players threw themselves at his ankles.
But John says he'd only been playing football a few months. Of course, he hadn't mastered that.

[00:16:13.220]
There wasn't time to teach him everything. The Jetsons still saw Gary as a diamond in the rough, Gary
was doing everything they asked Ranna's plays well, it was more reliable than most of the team.

[00:16:24.650]
And so the coaches did what they did with any player with a ton of potential. They took video of Gary's
best game. That great first game made a bunch of copies and send it around to colleges. And after
seeing that video, a parade of recruiters showed up at Gary School.

[00:16:42.420]
You get called out of class to meet them.

[00:16:44.750]
He was approached by Harvard Holy Cross, UMass University of New Hampshire, University of Maine
and some top division one A schools, Syracuse and Boston College. His favorite recently won the
Cotton Bowl.
[00:16:56.870]
And also they were players on the team who are all Americans. I mean, this was a big time program
that played a big time schedule against Penn State and Notre Dame and Ohio State and USC. I mean,
they were they were big time football and they had Heisman Trophy winner Doug Flutie. He was the
hero to everybody in my neighborhood. And what do you remember of, like, them recruiting you?

[00:17:16.940]
I remember this man who I had seen on TV because he had recruited Doug Flutie and he was a New
England celebrity and his name was Jack Buck.

[00:17:25.550]
Now, I'll never forget it because he had an office at Boston College and it overlooked the stadium and
he had a Heisman Trophy. And he said, son, I always I always loved being called son. And I would just
mouth it's like an arm around the shoulder. I don't know what it is about that word he said, son, I'm
going to go ahead and offer you, which meant a scholarship. I'm going to I'm going to offer you.

[00:17:53.810]
And he said something to the effect of you're 17 years old or maybe I was eighteen. He said, you have
an NFL body. And then I remember thinking, wow, I've really fooled another one, and that part of me
was saying I was afraid this was going to happen because I have to take the scholarship and I know
I'm going to be in over my head. And then the other side of it was, this is so exciting and somebody
believes in me.

[00:18:22.330]
And and did part of you feel like, oh, my God, I'm going to be playing for this incredible coach?
Whatever problems I had in high school, this guy is the guy. He's a genius.

[00:18:29.950]
He's going to fix whatever problem I had. I'm going to be a star.

[00:18:32.500]
Yeah. So he takes scholarship. He says he has no idea how he would have paid for college without a
football scholarship. He works out all summer, and by the time he gets to training camp, he was
bigger than ever, 260 pounds his speed and strength. One of the best on the team. But it's clear right
away. I just felt so small. I mean, these guys really were supermen, their aggressiveness, their
strength.

[00:18:58.200]
It wasn't the same sport. And it was quite clear early on to the other players that I wasn't like them. I
didn't I was like, yeah, and I can be pushed around and I could be bullied. There were guys who were
going to go on to the NFL. There was one player who played for the Vikings. And I remember one time
I was lollygagging on a play and he he hit me and beside me and he said to me afterwards, and he
was he was his nickname on the team was the Maniac.

[00:19:29.490]
What you really have to do something impressive to get a nickname like that amongst these lunatics?
He said to me, he said, you can't just stand there like that. I could have killed you.

[00:19:39.300]
And in the nicest way possible, he said that he had let up, even though he had hit me harder than I had
ever been hit in my in my life.

[00:19:54.690]
Gary went into a full-blown depressive crisis, not eating when he should have been eating like a horse,
sleeping all the time, crying. The prevailing thing going on in my head is I want to kill myself.

[00:20:08.550]
I'm worthless, I'm useless.

[00:20:10.650]
Everybody hates me. And did you have this did you have this feeling of like, oh, I'm actually like as
strong as any of these guys. Like, you're stronger than most of them.

[00:20:18.030]
You're faster than most of them. Like, I should be as good. Did you ever think if I go if I just psych
myself up in the right way, I'm going to be able to do this?

[00:20:26.910]
Well, I just knew.

[00:20:31.700]
I knew who I was, and the problem is I know who I am and I hate him, I hate him so we can be
disappointed and he lets down and I just wanted to go back to the room and sleep and and and cry.

[00:20:48.500]
Yeah. Did you have your stuffed animals with you? No, but I.

[00:20:52.190]
I had brought my blanky. Like I, I grew up with a blanket that was in my crib and I could never sleep
without it, but it was like this thing that I was so ashamed of and never spoke about really to anybody,
because I I thought that if anybody ever found that out, they would just be like, this guy is insane and
also a woman.

[00:21:15.710]
Did you have a roommate? I had a roommate. Yeah. That you had to hide the binky from. Yeah. Yeah.
You would call it the blanky, not the blanket.

[00:21:24.290]
No, I always I, I mean, I refer to him. I referred to him, I called him blank and whatever happened to it.

[00:21:33.350]
Oh I still have it. It's on my pillow right now in Harlem. Yeah. Wait, wait. Seriously. Yeah. Wait. How old
are you.

[00:21:40.220]
I'm forty eight. Do you need it? No, but I. I love it. It's there with the pillow, I put it in my my computer
bag so I can carry it on planes when I travel. And is it a comfort? Yeah, it's a comfort. It helps me. It
helps me sleep. I, I don't know how common it is.

[00:22:02.490]
And the fact that you keep asking me questions about it makes me think it's really odd. But you'll
have, like people who you're sleeping with will like will come over and they'll sleep in your bed and
they'll be the blank.

[00:22:16.300]
Yeah, my partner Chadash is a woman. Um, she's been aware of it since we've been dating. Yeah.

[00:22:24.300]
Not a problem. Not a problem. Not until today. Sorry.

[00:22:30.090]
Not trying to blanky shame. I'm not.

[00:22:34.590]
Anyway, back in college, first time Gary goes home for the weekend, he stays in his room, cries and
sleeps and won't talk to anybody.

[00:22:43.410]
And his brother suggests he finds a therapist for what time actually has counseling services set up
for anybody who needs it. And when he gets back to school, Gary meets with a therapist who has a lot
of questions. And he said point blank, he said, why don't why don't you just quit the football team?
And I and I like that was ludicrous to me. And the way I would explain it now is you have to
understand my entire identity is wrapped up in this.

[00:23:08.370]
And if I quit, I will be proving the voice in my head that keeps telling me I'm weak and soft and
worthless. Right.

[00:23:17.220]
So I made it through the season, the doctor prescribed him antidepressants and the sadness and
ruminations lifted. And in the spring, Gary's therapists asked, what are you going to do about football
for next year? And Gary was like, I'll continue till I graduate.

[00:23:33.270]
And he said, Listen, I never give advice. It's not my place to give advice, but I'm going to give you some
advice. You need to quit the football team.

[00:23:45.440]
I said, if I quit. The football team. I'm I don't get to wear the uniform, I don't get to wear that jacket that
gets me special treatment in the cafeteria and and makes me interesting to the other the other
students and the professors.

[00:24:06.380]
I said, if I'm not a football player, then, well, who am I?

[00:24:13.830]
And he said, and I'll never forget it. The best answer, he said, you'll be a man. But he didn't mean you'll
be masculine, you'll be macho, he meant you'll be an adult. Gary quit the team. He did keep the
scholarship. I went to bat for him and convince the school we're going to keep it for four years. And
that same year, the year you quit football, Gary took the first real steps towards a different vision of
who he'd be as an adult.

[00:24:41.250]
A vision that was not handed to him by any of the grown ups in his life, not his coaches or his parents
or his teachers, was something he invented for himself. That's the year he started writing jokes.

[00:25:01.200]
Do you know that I listen to your show and I've heard people reveal things about themselves that I
wouldn't reveal?

[00:25:07.280]
Yeah, and I would never thought that the blanky would be one of those things that there could be
somebody in my heart never tell anybody about a blank.

[00:25:16.900]
I don't know. I could care less that everybody knows now. So you feel no. You feel no self-
consciousness about it at all?

[00:25:22.350]
Not anymore. I did for 47 years, though I only mentioned it on stage this this year.
[00:25:28.620]
People laughed and it redeemed everything.

[00:25:31.380]
No, no, no. And now I do say that I feel like I am like I don't want to make you feel weird about it.

[00:25:36.180]
No, no. I think it's healthy.

[00:25:38.280]
But but you love Charlie Brown, who was the wisest character on the Peanuts cartoons?

[00:25:45.930]
Linus Yeah. And he had a black guy.

[00:25:48.930]
He was five. He wasn't five or eight or whatever is.

[00:25:58.050]
No, you're right. He was old enough to have.

[00:26:01.170]
He's a child now. He is a child.

[00:26:03.240]
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:26:11.010]
He has an HBO special called The Great Depression. It's on HBO. Max, if you're curious about his
work, you can find it at Garry Golman dot com.

[00:26:28.430]
Coming up, a 17 year old tries to understand the moment that shaped her whole life. Fortunately for
her, there's video.

[00:26:35.480]
Unfortunately for her, it's more complicated than that. That's in a minute.

[00:26:40.640]
Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. Support for this American life comes from
Spotify, President Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen have a new podcast. And right now you can
listen to renegades born in the USA exclusively on Spotify. In the podcast, longtime friends President
Obama and Springsteen sit down to discuss the country that's given them both so much, chronicled
the stories of its people and connect their own search for meaning, truth and community. With the
larger story of America.

[00:27:13.500]
Listen free only on Spotify. This American Life from IRA Glass. Today's program, here's looking at you,
kid, stories of adults telling kids what they should think of themselves and kids trying to make sense
of what they're told. Today Show is a rerun. We've arrived at Act two of our program, Act two grown
ups know things that an actor is actually a line from Lord of the Flies. Piggy says it. They're grown
ups, have a cup of tea and talk things through and then everything is all right.

[00:27:42.930]
That's how grownups do it.

[00:27:44.300]
It's hopeful.

[00:27:45.620]
And of course, you know Wrong-headed, so often things don't work out that well here in the adult
world.

[00:27:51.980]
But in the story, it's this moment where a bunch of the boys chime in with their desire that they could
turn to adults. And in this next act, a girl turns to an adult with that same kind of hope that the adult
will set things right. But over time, the adults that she turns to simply do not agree about some very
fundamental things about her. Eleana Gordon Smith reported this story for a book she wrote, I got
interested in uncertainty years ago.

[00:28:19.040]
There's a kind of uncertainty that we all live with where you don't know the answer. It's not a big deal
like what time the bus is coming, who left the front door open where that pen went? But I wanted to
know about the opposite high stakes uncertainty where the facts aren't decisive and it hurts to not
know what to think, where there are big consequences, it affects your whole life.

[00:28:42.010]
I wanted to know, is it possible to just sit in that kind of foundational doubt or do you just have to flip
a coin and pick something, anything to believe?

[00:28:51.850]
Which is how I got interested in Nicole Gompa. She's 40 now, but this starts when she was 16 and she
just couldn't catch a break.

[00:29:00.580]
She was in foster care after her dad, who had sole custody of her for most of her life, had a stroke and
died. She'd bounced around between friends houses but wound up in a group home.

[00:29:11.290]
I just felt very adrift in the world and unanchored, having lost my father and my best friend. I was so
alone and I, I just I was reaching out for something to feel connected to. She started really wanting to
know about her mom. She lived nearby just a couple hours drive, but they hadn't seen each other in
more than 10 years. The custody court hadn't even allowed visits and Nicole didn't know why. A quick
warning, what I'm about to go into mentions different kinds of abuse.

[00:29:46.970]
Nicole had a foggy thought that her mom might have done something bad to her as a kid, she
remembered saying something to someone when she was young about her mom burning her feet on
a stove and remembered something about a sexual abuse allegation. But could that be right? Surely
she'd remember those things actually happening. But she didn't. What if her dad had just made her
say those things about her mom, it had been a really ugly custody battle. Each parents had all kinds of
things about the other.

[00:30:15.720]
What if her dad wanted custody so bad he invented all these awful stories? There was so much about
her mom that Nicole didn't know. So she arranged to meet her mom in person.

[00:30:26.340]
They did. They started seeing each other more regularly, but it always fell off. Once she remembers
sitting next to her mom at dinner and putting her head down on the table in front of her. She grabbed
my back and it was very, very uncomfortable and I had a pretty strong reaction to it.

[00:30:45.690]
Nicole says they didn't talk about any abuse. And then in the middle of that doubt, a piece of evidence
seemed to fall from the sky and with it the promise of knowing what had happened in the custody
dispute.

[00:31:01.610]
Dr. Dave Corwin phoned Nicole, he was the child psychiatrist in the custody battle that had split
Nicole off from her mom and he had videotapes of interviews he'd done with her when she was a very
young girl. It had been his job to investigate the abuse allegations. He'd had a question, he was
speaking at a conference. Would it be OK if he showed those people the tapes? Nicole remembered
calling, she remembered that he'd been nice to her as a kid.

[00:31:27.570]
She said, yeah, he could use them, but could she see those tapes to. He agreed and recorded that
meeting, I don't know the effect because it's never been done, to my knowledge, this will have on you.

[00:31:40.650]
OK, so I'm sitting across from Dr. Horn and there's a video camera. I'm getting ready to watch the
tapes of myself at five years old. And he went through a very lengthy, informed consent.

[00:31:56.400]
At this stage, you're 17 years old. What I'm doing is I'm I'm doing this informed consent directly with
you, saying here's the issues as I understand them, and that's up to you.

[00:32:06.750]
OK, finally, we got to the point where he was going to shut off the video camera so that I could watch
my five year old self and he asked me to be here. You know, what do you recall?

[00:32:24.000]
Why don't we start with if you could just tell me what you can recall of that time frame?

[00:32:29.260]
I think I described one of the offices that he did, one of the interviews in striped sweatshirt that I was
wearing at the time, sweatshirt that was striped this way, OK?

[00:32:39.480]
That's why when I think of these injuries, that sort of thing, they got 17 year old Nicole says she can't
remember whether her mom really did hurt her.

[00:32:47.130]
I told you, I guess I told the court that my mom burned my feet on the stove and they still don't
remember if that's, in fact, how I was burned. Really, that's the most serious accusation against her
that I remember. That's what I have a problem remembering. I've come here trying not to determine
already that she's done it or that she's guilty. And I try not to say, well, she's did she didn't do anything.
I refuse to believe she's anything in here that I really want to know.

[00:33:23.550]
And then Kulwin brings up the allegation of sex abuse.

[00:33:26.790]
David Cohen literally asks me, do you remember any allegations of sexual abuse, concerns about
possible sexual abuse?

[00:33:37.020]
And my initial reaction is actually no. I mean, I remember that was that was Friday. And then he starts
to speak and I say, wait, hold on a second.

[00:33:46.570]
Remember, I do 17 year old Nicole's whole demeanor changes at this moment. It's instant and kind of
strange to watch. She becomes completely still and she's staring into middle distance.

[00:33:59.790]
What do you mean? Oh, gosh, that's where.

[00:34:09.440]
I kissed her when she was bathing me or whatever, hurting me, and that's when I started to recount
some details of a memory that came back to me, as you were saying that to me, that you remember
having said those things, that you remember having experiences, that I remember it happening, that
you're hurting.

[00:34:40.750]
She hurt me. She just went through. I don't know if it was intentional, hurt, choose between me and I
only remember one instance and she. She hurt me. She put her fingers too far where she shouldn't
and she hurt me. That's the first time I remembered that since saying that when I was six years old.
But I remember. Remember being young. Yeah, I remember it happening. OK.

[00:35:18.580]
It was like. Like a movie set where the walls because, no, there's no roof. Like I was sitting up on the
walls looking down into a bathroom and my biological mother bathing, you know, younger me, and
she touched me inappropriately. And that's where the memory stops.

[00:35:50.600]
So it's like you're watching it from outside of yourself. From above. Yes.

[00:35:56.630]
But I could feel the pain, though. And I remember saying that I it's like I took a snapshot of the
painting is a picture of the pain and what was inflicting the pain.

[00:36:07.970]
It was my biological mother.

[00:36:15.530]
Even before she saw the tapes, Nicole, at 17, felt she'd got the certainty she wanted. She remembered
her mother actually hurting her. She watched the videos of herself as a small girl anyway and shut off
the recorder while she did. And this remarkable thing happened. Nicole saw herself as a young girl
describing the very same abuse, almost verbatim. I've seen the videos, it's the 80s, a very small Nicole
is in pigtails and white stockings, colwin's and a big plaid shirt and shaggy hair, and he asks right
away about Nicole's mom.

[00:36:49.710]
What she like me? Why? Why is she mean to hurt me? How does she hurt you?

[00:37:02.490]
Like sticks your finger at my vagina.

[00:37:05.880]
But after there on my finger, when did she do that? All the time. Which gives him a bath.

[00:37:18.140]
What what did you say to her when she did that to you said don't do that. I said, oh.

[00:37:28.980]
She says her mom burned her feet over a hot stove. Cohen tries to figure out if Nicole knows the
difference between what's real and what's make believe. He asks her to separate things like President
Reagan real well. She knows from things like Superman make believe, which she also knows. He gets
her to swear on her oath as a brownie that what she said about her mother is real. She does. She
holds three little fingers up in the brownie salute on my honor.

[00:37:55.110]
I will try to serve in my country.

[00:37:58.830]
There are other concerning details about Nicole's mom.

[00:38:02.220]
Once she had dropped Nicole off to see Dr. Colwin for one of their recorded sessions, and Nicole had
seemed happy to be recorded and speak clearly into the microphone when a dad dropped her off is
suddenly concerned that the microphone will broadcast what she's saying into the waiting room
where her mom sits.

[00:38:18.060]
Cohen asks her about the abuse she described the week before. Does she remember talking about
that a little bit? Nicole says quietly. Go with tell me, what do you think? Is that pop out of the way?
Does they can't hear us say they can't hear us out there. And you're saying, OK, I'm I'm not going. And
after we get done talking, I'm happy. Can tell them to come me. It's just between you and I think, OK.

[00:38:54.180]
She whispers before going on to talk about being burned untouched in the bath.

[00:38:59.430]
In another interview, Nicole says her mothers told her to lie to God, that I don't know who is in court. I
guess what's in court about my mother? What about your mother? Did you know that to me that you
were threatening me, right, and she has threatened me that if I didn't like this, she said that she would
do something bad to me.

[00:39:34.270]
She's talking about CPS, Child Protective Services. If you didn't do what little CPS man did, she would
do something bad to me. Well, when did she say that?

[00:39:50.500]
So that's the video of six year old Nicole. Cohen then asks 17 year old Nicole how she's feeling about
what she just saw. She says there are some questions that might never be answered. But her biggest
question about why she didn't grow up with her mom that had an answer. She was sure her mom had
abused her back.

[00:40:09.220]
But I do have an explanation in my mind, and I can now realize it's not my fault, you know, and I could
put that chapter behind me and I could go on. Yeah, I do think I think it's a very healthy thing to not.
Rex. For Nicole, the tapes and her memory proved what had happened to her as a kid. It was a relief.
She'd been worried that she was going to learn that her dad really did coach her to lie about her mom.

[00:40:40.870]
Now, she could put that aside. She could remember him the way she always had as her best friend
and a good dad. But then Cohen published a case study about Nicole, he didn't use her name, he
called her Jane Doe. But Corwin's case study became part of a huge dispute that was fracturing
psychology in the 90s.

[00:41:00.640]
It was called the memory wars. And the argument was about whether repressed memories, adults
suddenly remembering trauma were real. Some scientists believe repressed memories were possible.
Others said no way. Nicole's videotapes and Cohen's article were co-opted by the side that thought
repressed memories were real. They thought Nicole's case proved it. Cohen hadn't seen this coming.
I've spoken to him. He says he wasn't on either side.
[00:41:35.100]
Dr. Elizabeth Loftus read Cohen's article with one eyebrow firmly raised. She was a psychology
professor at the University of Washington and a big deal. It was her experiments that proved
memories of malleable. And she was a star witness in high profile court cases where she argued that
eyewitness recollections aren't reliable. So when the memory was began, she knew which side she
was on. She thought repressed memories were almost never real. She wrote a doorstop of a book
called The Myth of Repressed Memory.

[00:42:03.970]
And when she read the Jane Doe case, she was alarmed.

[00:42:06.930]
I knew that people were using this case as the new proof of repressed memory. It was being
discussed academically. It was being introduced into court cases to prove that repressed memory is
real and has been proven. It was being used against people whom I thought were innocent because
they were on trial in their cases. And so we had to get to the bottom of it.

[00:42:36.510]
Part of her suspicion was the message and part was the messenger. She'd seen Corwin testify in
court. On another case, a patient accused the therapist of abuse and she didn't find him persuasive
there either.

[00:42:47.610]
I already had a suspicion about Corwin and his judgment, I think going into this situation because of
the work I had seen him do on this other case and how he had pretty much, you know, helped to ruin
the life of this poor female psychiatrist who was the accused person.

[00:43:08.070]
In this other case, you're saying that the female psychiatrist was accused of abuse? Spy by, I think, a
former patient. And Cohen was saying that that had happened in so many words.

[00:43:20.280]
Yes, he was he was an expert for the accuser.

[00:43:23.910]
Loftus decided to investigate the Jane Doe case. She wanted to know whether the abuse had really
happened. But to do that, she needed to know the real name of that little girl.

[00:43:34.340]
Rather than ask Cohen, which would be normal for a researcher looking into someone else's study,
she decided to dig around on her own. Loftus knew where to start clues in the tapes.

[00:43:45.830]
At some point in the tape, he called her Nicole. And I just made a little mental note. Her name is
Nicole.

[00:43:54.980]
He said something like and when you were living in Fresno and I thought, hmm, it has something to do
with Fresno, that kind of thing. She contacted a private investigator to run down some tips. She
searched death records for Nicole's father. She found dozens of matches and she started narrowing
them down, closing in on the real Jane Doe.

[00:44:19.980]
Nicole, meanwhile, was thinking very little about her time as Jane Doe. She left foster care and was
making her own life as an adult. She joined the Navy. She was learning to fly military helicopters and
she decided to become a psychologist. She says because she wanted to be like Corwin, she felt safe
when she was talking to him as a kid, like she was being listened to. She wanted to make other people
feel that way. She started chasing her psychology classes at night while she trained as a pilot during
the day.

[00:44:48.230]
A couple of years into her military service stationed in Hawaii, she got an odd phone call from a close
family friend, said, hey, there's something going on.

[00:44:57.600]
There's a private investigator looking for you. What did you think, oh, my gosh, why on Earth, what on
earth, what is happening now? And I knew within moments of hearing the words private investigator
that this had something to do with Dave's Journal article. It was the only thing she'd ever been part of
that might be interesting to an investigator. She called Korwin Cullen Loftus was behind it. Loftus
interviewed Nichol's foster mom, former stepmom, family, friends who knew her growing up.

[00:45:36.730]
She'd even interviewed Nicole's biological mom and said she might have been wrongly accused.

[00:45:41.760]
Nicole hearing about Loftus was like, absolutely not. Why did you want her to stop?

[00:45:49.800]
I felt intruded upon. I felt violated. Very vulnerable, very exposed. And I understand that that probably
sounds weird, given that I had already given Dave my consent to publish a story about intimate details
of my life. But there's a very, very big difference between someone asking you to investigate parts of
your life and someone doing so without your knowledge or permission. I did exchange emails with her
and I asked her to stop what she was doing.

[00:46:23.940]
And what did she say in so many words? No. Did she ask you any direct questions while she was
looking into the case? No. Did that strike you as kind of odd, that struck me as kind of infuriating.
Nicole complained to Loftus University, who told her to stop investigating the Jane Doe case. I just
got the call from some administrator on my campus saying, you know, are you looking into this case?
I said, yes, I'm looking into this case.

[00:46:59.190]
And they came and seized my files.

[00:47:02.620]
I mean, I couldn't believe this was happening. When can one can the administrators come to your
office and just take your files?

[00:47:11.140]
Loftus was eventually cleared and she published her findings on Jane Doe. She argued that the abuse
might never have happened. Of course, this was the opposite of what Nicole had believed and clung
to since she was 17.

[00:47:24.100]
Loftus printed eight pages worth of doubts in a magazine and called the article Who Abused Jane
Doe when Nicole heard the article was on stand.

[00:47:32.800]
She took a friend from her military base and drove 50 miles to Barnes and Noble, where they stood
side by side reading it.

[00:47:39.430]
It was so. Hurtful. It was so ridiculous to me that someone basically interviewed everyone in my life
who had known me when I was a child except me, and then went ahead and patchwork together, the
story that just so happened to completely support her hypothesis. How dare she? She just had no
right. She just had no right to do what she did. Whose story is this? This isn't just her story, this is this
is the falsely accused mother's story.

[00:48:24.980]
This is a whole other people are part of the story. I don't think one person gets to just decide. I'm
going to only tell the story one way and only let people tell it who believe me uncritically. What about
the other people in the story? I thought I was investigating an accusation against a possibly innocent
person. I don't think the claim is that you should have just believed her uncritically. I think I think
Nicole says that the way that you went around this research was sort of traumatizing and
demoralizing to her, like it made her feel like she didn't have any control over her own records and her
own confidential information from her childhood.

[00:49:08.740]
Can you put yourself in her shoes at all? Can you understand why she feels like this was a trespass?
Well, yes, I mean, I think she. She had her way of telling her story. And. And she didn't want there to be
another way and then that might be upsetting for her. I don't I it doesn't seem to me like what she was
upset by was that there was another way of telling the story. I think what she found upsetting was
that you found out who she was and looked into her life without asking her, without thinking about
her.

[00:49:53.150]
Well, don't you think that that that that's what journalists do all the time? Usually when you write a
story about someone, you contact them or you ask them what they think of the things that you found
out. Actually, I you know, I I there were times when I would have liked to have talked to her, I think I
even wrote up some questions that I might want to ask her.

[00:50:22.680]
But in the end, we decided that it was just too risky.

[00:50:27.270]
Risky how? I just remember there were going to be conditions and and it just made us nervous and so
we decided we would just publish what we had found out. Through many, many other sources. And.
And leave it at that, and that's that's what we did. Nicole sued with the help of a lawyer who took her
case for free. They went after Loftus and everyone who'd helped write the article for 21 complaints
from defamation to invasion of privacy.

[00:51:07.030]
But even though she was angry with Loftus, Nicole read her article over and over again until
something happened that she wasn't expecting. She found herself agreeing with Loftus a little, it
planted a seed of doubt it did, yes. What was that like to feel like there's this thing that you've been so
certain of for so long that you felt like you had resolution of with Dr. Cohen and seeing those tapes
and then to have it be the subject of doubt again?

[00:51:38.740]
What did that do to you? It made me feel very small. It made me feel very insignificant, as though my
opinion on my own, the events of my own life were the least important. Nicole started changing her
mind back and forth over and over. Some days she thought she'd been abused. Other days she
thought she'd lied about it. I have to say, as someone who spent months looking into laughters article,
it is really hard to work out the responsible thing to think.

[00:52:24.620]
When I first read it, I remember thinking, Gameover, there's no way Nicole's mom abused her. But as I
looked into each claim, Loftus made what it seemed like a nine on the convincing the scale turned out
to be more like a fool. Like Lofthus found a report from another psychologist who interviewed young
Nicole, who said she sounded mechanical and rehearsed when she talked about abuse. Loftus told
me that was the evidence that impressed her most. But I don't know.

[00:52:52.070]
He says, quote, Nicole has told her story numerous times to a number of different people and she
now sounds mechanical. He could mean Nicole's lying or he could just mean she's been asked to tell
it too many times. And Loftus interviewed Nicole's stepmom, a woman who'd been there for the
custody battle. She told Loftus that she and Nicole's dad had tried to win custody with what she
called the sexual angle. Loftus heard that is sinister, but did she accidentally reveal that she'd had an
agenda or did she just use sexual angle as an unfortunate shorthand like saying we won custody with
the abuse thing and take the bundes?

[00:53:30.170]
Loftus found out that Nicole has a fungal condition that makes skin peel like a healing burn. But there
are photos of young Nicole's feet with big blisters. Could they be explained by a fungus? It genuinely
torments me. I still don't know what to think. Every piece of evidence seems to go back and forth like
this. I went mad trying to find out the answer. I thought if I read enough court documents, I finally find
the one thing that no one else had, the thing that would give me certainty either way, of course I didn't.

[00:54:00.020]
And Nicole didn't either. She sat every day in the suspended animation of not knowing, caught
between two really distressing ways of seeing her past. In one, her mother abused her. In the other,
her father manipulated her into lying. And because she lied, her innocent mother was cut out of her
life and wrongly accused of abusing her child.

[00:54:22.520]
It just created this back and forth that I continue to live with today. It did happen. It didn't happen.
Some days I fall somewhere in between.

[00:54:35.000]
How disorienting was it to feel like you had the truth and then you lost it?

[00:54:41.930]
Disorienting is a good word, and I don't think it fully captures. It goes to my identity. It really goes to
the heart of who I am and who I thought I was and who I think I am. The most important, the key
memory on which I rebuilt and then rebuilt again. My identity has now been called into question. It's
just. Frustrating, multiplied by a million. It's just so, so frustrating.

[00:55:26.480]
There is an intangible to be gained from the process of transition from being a victim to becoming a
survivor.

[00:55:39.630]
And in my case, now, all of a sudden, I am I neither I don't know am I either I I don't know.

[00:55:49.280]
Nicole's lawsuit against Elizabeth Loftus dragged on and on over five years all the way out to the
California Supreme Court. In the end, Nicole lost the First Amendment, protected Loftus, his journalist,
and Nicole had to pay the legal fees nearly a quarter of a million dollars, which she could not afford
the court garnished to a military wages. She quit. The Navy lost two houses and her car was
repossessed. Over all this, she filed for bankruptcy. These days, instead of being stuck between
believing she was abused and believing that she wasn't, Nichole's found a third option.

[00:56:32.340]
She tries to care a little less. She can't dial down the uncertainty, so she tries to dial down the stakes.

[00:56:39.000]
I'm never going to know. I'm never going to know, and even after all these years.
[00:56:47.270]
I think I still thought that at some point I would come to a solid decision, yes or no, and really, really
I'm never going to know and that just has to be OK.

[00:57:04.250]
There's so much that Nicole can't be certain of, so she hammered out a certainty about herself, she
found a way forward and she became a pilot. She got two master's degrees and a Ph.D. in
psychology. She's now a therapist like she's wanted since she was six. And she's never called her
mom out of her life, Nicole's mom has always said that she never abused Nicole. She maintains that
today and she says she didn't tell Nicole to lie to Child Protective Services.

[00:57:31.210]
Her mom's in her 70s. They live in the same state. It's not an easy relationship.

[00:57:37.400]
There's a possibility that I ruined my biological mother's life. There's a tremendous amount of guilt
associated with that.

[00:57:45.310]
We're close for we're relatively close for a period of time. And then things sort of fall apart again, just
as they have. When was the last time you spoke? Five months ago and what was that like, it's still it's
still awkward, it's still very pressured, if you will. She still wants very much for me to believe that she
never did anything to me. And and I still don't know. So it's. It's really, really hard to move past that
major sort of elephant in the room.

[00:58:28.560]
Do you ever talk about it? No. Is she able to accept that you might just not know. No, I think she really
wants you to believe that she didn't. Do you think you could do you think there's anything that could
change your mind? No, the waters are so muddy now, there's no I'll never know why my or the other
Nicole is no more certain about what happened today than she was when she was 16.

[00:59:02.020]
She never flipped a coin and picked something to believe, but she landed on a certainty about what to
do.

[00:59:08.470]
Doesn't rest on what to believe. It doesn't matter what the evidence says. She wants her mom.

[00:59:22.390]
Eleanor Gordon Smith, a president of the stories in her book Stop Being Reasonable How We Really
Change Our Minds a little Bit can go a long, long way.

[00:59:41.260]
So what's the thinking to maybe start today, start today? Start today. Well, program was produced
today by Neil Drumming and Emmanuel Barry, the people who put a show together includes Whitney
Dangerfield of the Cornfeld, Hilary Elkins, Damien Grave, Miki Meek, Don Nelson, Katherine Reymundo,
Nadia Raymond, Robin Semino Listenership, Lilly Sullivan, Christopher Satava, Matt Tierney, Julie
Whitaker and Diane Wu, a managing editor for today's program. Was David Kestenbaum. Additional
production help on today's rerun from Ari Sapperstein.

[01:00:14.980]
Special thanks.

[01:00:15.520]
Today to John and Joe TESHA, a.k.a. The Jetsons, Amy Brattain, Michelle Johnson and Keith Woods,
our website, This American Life Dog, This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by
PUREX, the Public Radio Exchange.

[01:00:30.250]
Thanks as always to our shows co-founder Mr. Formality. You know, he is so excited about the
superhero he created.

[01:00:36.760]
This guy, who gets bit by a radioactive seagull, patrols the beaches, saving lives. Tori swears it's super
popular.

[01:00:44.740]
The government is getting huge. The gal man is getting huge. AmeriGas back next week with more
stories of this American life.

[01:00:59.270]
You've got. That. Next week on the podcast of This American Life, Derek joined the military to be a
soldier. And by the way, that's what he got jumping out of airplanes.

[01:01:23.950]
He was digging foxholes, you know, army stuff. And one day down, a new assignment, they told him.
You wouldn't have to do any field duty, but you would have to sing and dance amateurs, people doing
things they are not trained to do. Next week on the podcast on your local public radio station.