“Are they using confabulation?”
Judge Jeanine Pirro toyed with the idea Monday that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s accusers might have been hypnotized to think that he had tried to sexually assault them.
Talking on Fox News’ “The Five,” Pirro went full-conspiracy theory in trying to explain why women were, to quote the president, coming out of the woodwork to accuse Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct of varying degrees.
“I’ve never seen anything like this in my career of three decades. I’ve never seen so many repressed memory cases in my life, especially against one guy,” said Pirro. “So, the question is, if there’s something awry going on, was there hypnosis? Are they using confabulation?”
“Confabulation” is a psychological term referring to a person holding fabricated, distorted, or misinterpreted memories without the conscious intention to deceive.
In other words, Pirro is saying that even if the accusers are acting in good faith (an assumption not shared by many political commentators on the right), they may be recalling completely false (or falsified) memories.
And as a former district attorney, Pirro would certainly never make baseless accusations, right?