Who is Jane?

About

Nicole Kluemper’s parents separated when she was a little girl. Her father won the custody case, and Nicole thus completely lost any contact with her mother. When she was a teenager, her father fell ill and she was sent to live at different places, from family friends through foster homes and even a children’s home. She also contacted her mother for the first time in years, but the mother was reluctant to talk about the past. That is why seventeen-year-old Nicole agreed to meet David Corwin, a child psychiatrist who had interviewed her as a forensic expert in the custody case. She asked him if she could see the videotaped interviews as she was eager to learn what she had actually told Corwin about her parents at that time. The psychiatrist, in turn, asked her if she remembered her childhood allegations against her mother...

In 1997, child psychiatrists David Corwin and Erna Olafson published a case study known as “The Case of Jane Doe”, which has become an important and frequently cited source in criminal cases and in related civil disputes concerning childhood sexual abuse and repressed memory. After publication of the case, psychologists Melvin J. Guyer and Elizabeth Loftus, an expert on false memory, investigated the background of the case. Did the girl really repress the traumatic experiences associated with her mother and then, many years later, recover the memory through therapy and hypnosis? Or were the memories suggested and coerced by her father and stepmother? Nicole, the main subject of the case, is now herself a child psychologist. She has chosen this career to help other children with a similar personal history.