676: Here’s Looking at You, Kid

Ira Glass

Gary did not want to become a football player, no interest in the game at all. He was a timid kid, the kind of kid who in baseball would close his eyes when he was up at bat, he was so scared of getting hit by the ball. But when you're in high school, your personality is still up for grabs. And at Gary's high school, there was 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.

Ira Glass

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 Jetsyns, kind of the opposite, actually. Waste, they called him.

Ira Glass

They told him that football would get him a college scholarship. It'll 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.

This was in Peabody, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb near Salem in the late '80s. Most high school players back then were 5' 9", 5' 10". Gary was 6' 6", 200 pounds. And he was athletic, played basketball on his high school team. Those coaches scolded him for his complete lack of aggression and for crying.

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 was also pretty depressed at the time. Gary is a comedian today, Gary Gulman. And on stage, when he tries to describe what he was like as a kid--

Ira Glass

So when the Jetsyns started telling him that they were going to make him into a star, he laughed it off. He liked the attention from the Jetsyns, 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 who 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, 6:30 in the morning-- he got a phone call, woke him up. It's the twins.

Ira Glass

It was so weird and bold. And on the spur of the moment, he figures, what the hell? And he has this thought that you have sometimes as a kid. He thinks, these adults say I can do this. Maybe they're right.

Ira Glass

So that summer, every morning he works out with the Jetsyns from 7:30 to 9:30. Then they take him to a diner, and they buy him a big breakfast with eggs and other proteins. At night, sometimes they'd teach him running routes. Remember, Gary had never played football. And it was just like the Jetsyns said.

Ira Glass

And as it came time to start practices, you would think that he would be psyched to use this new body that he had created for the purpose it had been made for. Like, OK, he's Captain America. It's World War II. Bring on the Nazis. But in fact, he was terrified of just getting hit, of the physical contact that's just 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. He doesn't think he can go through with it. Should he call the Jetsyns and tell them he's thought it over? It's not for him.

Ira Glass

So he did. He went through with it. But the problem was, as John Jetsyn put it, he was a daisy in a field of wheat, a lamb among conquerors. You can put a kid into a tough guy costume, but it doesn't always make him into a tough guy.

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.

But some kids, like Gary, just have trouble going along with the plan. They want to please the adults. They want to do what they're asked. But all the while, they genuinely wonder, can they actually become the person the adults are telling them to become? 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. They're adults, for God's sake. They're supposed to know better. But the kids end up wondering in a really primal way, who am I?

Well, from WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Our show today in two acts. In the second act, adults make it so 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, act one, Gary's story, which we're calling "Jersey? Sure."

Ira Glass

Gary went to his first football practice, and it was just as bad as he'd imagined it would be. 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.

Ira Glass

So 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 changed everything from the very first time they put him in on offense.

Ira Glass

Coaches try him out on defense. He barely knows what he's doing. And he sacks the other side's quarterback.

Ira Glass

Opening game of the real season, the coaches start him. This newbie player, he sacks the opposing quarterback right away. And on offense--

Ira Glass

And it did not last. The season opener, his first great game, was also his last great game.

Ira Glass

Opposing quarterbacks learned to stay away from the side of the line that Gary was on. So he wasn't sacking anyone anymore. 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 heroic catches. He 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 fooled them for a while, but he was still the same person he had always been. He started to dread practices and games.

Ira Glass

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 Jetsyn told me on the phone, wasn't the fumble that Gary had made-- like Gary obsessed over-- it was that the quarterback couldn't throw reliable passes. Their team wasn't that good that year.

And sure, yes, Gary didn't know how to stay on his feet when players threw themselves at his ankles, but John Jetsyn says he'd only been playing football a few months. Of course he hadn't mastered that. There wasn't time to teach him everything.

The Jetsyns still saw Gary as a diamond in the rough. Gary was doing everything they asked, ran his plays well. He was more reliable than most of the team. 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 sent it around to colleges.

And after seeing that video, a parade of recruiters showed up at Gary's school. He'd get called out of class to meet them. He was approached by Harvard, Holy Cross, UMass, University of New Hampshire, University of Maine, and some top Division 1A schools, Syracuse and Boston College, his favorite, who'd recently won the Cotton Bowl.

Ira Glass

So he takes the 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.

Ira Glass

Gary went into a full-blown depressive crisis-- not eating when he should've been eating like a horse, sleeping all the time, crying.

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. And his brother suggests he find a therapist. The football team actually has counseling services set up for anybody who needs it. And when he gets back to school, Gary meets with the therapist, who asked him a lot of questions.

Ira Glass

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

Ira Glass

Gary quit the team. He did keep the scholarship. The counselor went to bat for him and convinced the school to let him keep it for four years. And that same year, the year he quit football, Gary took the first real steps towards a different vision of who he'd be as an adult, a vision that was not handed to him by any of the grownups in his life, not his coaches, or his parents, or his teachers, but something he invented for himself. That's the year he started writing jokes.

Ira Glass

Gary has an HBO special coming out later this year called, Gary Gulman: The Great Depresh. If you're curious about his work, you can find it at garygulman.com.

Coming up, a 17-year-old tries to understand a moment that shaped her whole life. Fortunately for her, there's video. Unfortunately for her, it's more complicated than that. That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm 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.

We've arrived at act two of our program, act two, "Grownups Know Things." That act title was actually a line from Lord of the Flies. Piggy says it, that grownups have a cup of tea and talk things through. And then everything is all right. That's how grownups do it. It's hopeful, and of course, wrongheaded. So often things don't work out that well here in the adult world.

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. Eleanor Gordon-Smith reported this story for a book she wrote.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

I got interested in uncertainty years ago. There's a kind of uncertainty that we all live with where you don't know the answer, and 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. 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?

Which is how I got interested in Nicole Kleumper. She's 40 now, but this starts when she was 16. And she just couldn't catch a break. 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.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

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.

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 parent said all kinds of things about the other. 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. They did. They started seeing each other more regularly, but it always felt off. Once, she remembers sitting next to her mom at dinner and putting her head down on the table in front of her.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

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.

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 Corwin. She remembered that he'd been nice to her as a kid. She said, yeah, he could use them, but could she see those tapes too? He agreed and recorded their meeting.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

17-year-old Nicole says she can't remember whether her mom really did hurt her.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

And then Corwin brings up the allegation of sex abuse.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

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.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

So it's like you're watching it from outside of yourself, from above?

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

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. Corwin 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. Corwin's in a big plaid shirt and shaggy hair. And he asks right away about Nicole's mom.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

She says her mom burned her feet over a hot stove. Corwin 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, which 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.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

There are other concerning details about Nicole's mom. Once, she had dropped Nicole off to see Dr. Corwin for one of their recorded sessions. And Nicole, who'd seemed happy to be recorded and speak clearly into the microphone when her dad dropped her off, is suddenly concerned that the microphone would broadcast what she's saying into the waiting room where her mom sits.

Corwin asks her about the abuse she described the week before. Did she remember talking about that? A little bit, Nicole says quietly.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

OK, she whispers, before going on to talk about being burned and touched in the bath. In another interview, Nicole says her mother's told her to lie.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

She's talking about CPS, Child Protective Services.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

So that's the video of six-year-old Nicole. Corwin 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.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

For Nicole, the tapes end 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. 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 Corwin 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.

It was called the memory wars. And the argument was about whether repressed memories, adults suddenly remembering trauma, were real. Some scientists believed repressed memories were possible, others said no way.

Nicole's videotapes and Corwin's article were co-opted by the side that thought repressed memories were real. They thought Nicole's case proved it. Corwin hadn't seen this coming. I've spoken to him. He says he wasn't on either side.

Dr. Elizabeth Loftus read Corwin'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 are 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 wars 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. And when she read the Jane Doe case, she was alarmed.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

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 their therapist of abuse, and she didn't find him persuasive there either.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

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. Rather than ask Corwin, 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.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

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.

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, when she was being listened to. She wanted to make other people feel that way. She started acing her psychology classes at night while she trained as a pilot during the day. A couple of years into her military service, stationed in Hawaii, she got an odd phone call from a close family friend.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

It was the only thing she'd ever been part of that might be interesting to an investigator. She called Corwin, who learned Loftus was behind it. Loftus interviewed Nicole's foster mom, former step-mom, family friends who knew her growing up. She'd even interviewed Nicole's biological mom and said she might have been wrongly accused. Nicole, hearing about Loftus, was like, absolutely not.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

Nicole complained to Loftus's university, who told her to stop investigating the Jane Doe case.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

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.

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, she took a friend from her military base and drove 50 miles to Barnes & Noble where they stood side by side reading it.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

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. 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.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

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 Loftus's article, it is really hard to work out the responsible thing to think. When I first read it, I remember thinking, game over. There's no way Nicole's mom abused her. But as I looked into each claim Loftus made, what had seemed like a nine on the convincingness scale turned out to be more like a four. Like Loftus found a report from another psychologist who'd 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. 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 step-mom, 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 as 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 burns. 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 pinball back and forth like this. I went mad trying to find out the answer. I thought if I read enough court documents, I'd finally find the one thing that no one else had, the thing that would give me certainty either way. Of course, I didn't.

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.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

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 as a journalist. And Nicole had to pay Loftus's legal fees, nearly a quarter of a million dollars, which she could not afford.

The court garnished her 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, Nicole's found a third option. She tries to care a little less. She can't dial down the uncertainty, so she tries to dial down the stakes.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

There's so much that Nicole can't be certain of, so she hammered out a certainty about herself. She found a way forward. She became a pilot. She got two master's degrees and a PhD in psychology. She's now a therapist, like she's wanted since she was six.

And she's never cut 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.

Her mom's in her 70s. They live in the same state. It's not an easy relationship.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

Nicole is no more certain about what happened today than she was when she was 16. She never flipped a coin and picked something to believe, but she landed on a certainty about what to do, that doesn't rest on what to believe. It doesn't matter what the evidence says, she wants her mom.

Ira Glass

Eleanor Gordon-Smith. A version of this story is in her new book, Stop Being Reasonable: How We Really Change Our Minds.

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Neil Drumming and Emanuele Berry. The people who put our show together includes Whitney Dangerfield, Aviva DeKornfeld, Hillary Elkins, Damien Graef, Miki Meek, Stowe Nelson, Katherine Rae Mondo, Nadia Reiman, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, Lilly Sullivan, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, Julie Whitaker, and Diane Wu. Our managing editor is David Kestenbaum.

Special thanks today to John and Joe Teche, a.k.a. The Jetsyns, Amy Burtain, Michelle Johnson, and Keith Woods. Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

Thanks as always to our show's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. He is so excited about the superhero he created, this guy who gets bit by a radioactive seagull, patrols the beaches, saving lives. Torey swears it's super popular.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

[MUSIC - BRENDA RUSSELL, "A LITTLE BIT OF LOVE"]

(SINGING) A little bit of love can go a long, long way. So what you're thinking of.