All the Lies They Did Not Tell

by Pablo Trincia

Crumbling and worn by time, it was far from everything and everyone. A red STOP sign was leaning against the building, signifying nothing. Windows were walled up or installed asymmetrically. It was as if the whole house had been designed by a child.

That strange and dazed little boy had only been with them for three months, but he left a gaping hole when he went away. The family still felt the loss more than twenty years later—Silvio especially. He looked like a big bear and oozed the type of wicked irony that is common in rural Emilia.

Soon after, Silvio, Oddina, and their daughters watched from a distance as Dario morphed into a different person. They looked on in horror as their acquaintances were handcuffed or splashed all over the papers or had their children ripped away from them.

Igor lived fifteen minutes outside Massa Finalese. He didn’t have a car. He didn’t have a house. He didn’t have anything. He lived in a squalid apartment in the projects. It was full of images of the Madonna. He lived off occasional work at a dump. A bachelor at forty, with a miserly stipend, he was accustomed to keeping his expectations low. The curse of being a Galliera.

The car windows were fogged up, and rain was tapping on the glass as Igor told his story to Alessia and me. He was direct and free of self-pity and spoke in a voice that was too wide and too deep for such a scrawny man. Igor’s face was thin and pale, hollowed out by years of depression.

He came off as someone who had started to wait for the end from a very early age.

The lawyer said, ‘I think you’re guilty.’ And I rightly continued to say, ‘But I didn’t rape anyone, I didn’t touch anyone.’ I said it over and over again. I was crying, I remember. At twenty-two years old, you’re still a kid. I didn’t know what prison was, I didn’t know what the years were, I didn’t understand anything at that age. So I pulled out the first dumb thing that popped into my head.”

Then Alessia asked him if he missed Dario. Maybe for the fiftieth time over the course of our conversation, Igor shrugged and curved his mouth into an expression of feigned indifference. “Sometimes.”

He looked a lot like his mother. And like Igor. When he saw them, he seemed calm, despite all that had happened. Until his phone rang. It was Mrs. Tonini. Someone had told her that Dario had been approached by strangers on his way home. He immediately became agitated. He had to go home, or she’d get angry.

In the picture, Dario is standing between Igor and Barbara, with his arm around each sibling, a hint of a smile on his lips. But his gaze is turned to an indistinct point in the distance. Beyond the camera lens. A thousand-yard stare.

“I miss him,” she said, the old pain resurfacing in her sobs. “I don’t know . . . To see him, to hug him, make him understand that I’m here if he needs me. I want to tell him that what he heard isn’t true. We never hurt him . . . Now that Mom and Dad are gone, I wish the three of us could be together again.”

Dario no longer lived in the town where they’d found him a few years before. He’d vanished completely. Again.

One of Oddina’s boxes contained a stack of letters the Gallieras had sent each other during their years of incarceration. I spent an entire night reading through them, in the living room of the little yellow house on Via Volta. There were dozens of them. The handwriting was sometimes hesitant and messy, sometimes rounded and crude. But between the lines was the emotional thread that tied four desperate people together.

don’t see any changes, and I’m losing patience,” Adriana wrote to Romano in a letter from Monza. “My love, I’m not mad at you but with those people that destroyed our family. It’s hard to be in this place without having done anything. I love you.”

When the trials began, her little yellow house became a meeting point for lawyers, local journalists, and psychologists consulting for the defense. They all sat around the kitchen table, and between a glass of Lambrusco and a serving of pumpkin turtlèin with ragú, they talked about what could be done or exchanged the phone numbers of experts Oddina had found. She often stayed up late writing notes or searching for similar cases in other parts of Italy. She then reached out to the lawyers and families of the children involved.

In November 1995, a teenage cousin of hers with psychiatric problems accused her whole family of abusing her, claiming that Angela had also been a victim. Just like that, without even investigating the matter in detail, a social worker and two carabinieri took her from school and brought her to a center for victims of child abuse. A psychologist asked Angela to draw a ghost. The psychologist thought the ghost looked like a phallus. Then a gynecologist—Dr. Maggioni again—speculated that Angela presented signs of sexual violence.

She was already seventeen by then. She’d been waiting for them since the day she was taken away. She wanted to know why they’d abandoned her. For more than ten years, social services had threatened her and tortured her psychologically. They would have said anything just to emotionally distance her from her parents. Including that her parents didn’t want her anymore. Or that they were dead.

There was an explanation for all of this. In those years, Italy was becoming increasingly aware that rape needed to be addressed with specialized tools. In 1996, just before the Pedophiles of the Bassa scandal exploded, the Senate approved Article 66 of the penal code. “Provisions against sexual violence,” transformed the crime from “a crime against public morals” to “a crime against the person.”

CISMAI is a network of antiviolence associations and centers around the country. Member organizations offer training courses that teach psychology interns, school staff, and health officials how to recognize and treat child victims of violence. They use very specific observational techniques and methods of listening and interacting that are based on the idea that children tell the truth and rarely lie.

CISMAI asked members to sign a consent form that required them to use an intervention protocol based on the premise that children’s behavior always displayed specific “psychological indicators” of abuse. “The more a child was damaged by abuse, the more his ability to remember and talk about it might be compromised,” reads point 5.1 of the association’s guidelines. In interviews with minors, psychologists must use an empathetic approach to help them talk about what they don’t have the strength or courage to say on their own.

The center’s president, Professor Paola Di Blasio from Università Cattolica, was also a consultant for the prosecution in Modena. Cristina Roccia and Sabrina Farci, expert witnesses for preliminary investigations, belonged to the Hansel and Gretel Research Center in Turin,

What all these experts seemed to overlook was that the children’s stories could have been contaminated in some way. Someone could have planted a seed in their memories. It then blossomed and grew over time until it devoured their real experiences, substituting them with something that was partially or completely artificial. This phenomenon has been studied for a long time in the rest of the world, but it remains underestimated, especially among psychologists who aren’t familiar with the research on the mnemonic functions of the brain.

In 1996, the American magazine Psychology Today published a long interview with Elizabeth Loftus, a university professor who’d declared, “Eyewitnesses who point their finger at innocent defendants are not liars, for they genuinely believe in the truth of their testimony . . . That’s the frightening part—the truly horrifying idea that what we think we know, what we believe with all our hearts, is not necessarily the truth.”

In the mid-1970s, Professor Loftus started conducting experimental studies on memory. She wanted to demonstrate that this psychic function was actually composed of extremely porous and delicate material. She showed volunteers videos of traffic accidents, then used a series of questions to test their ability to remember a scene they’d just witnessed.

To the question “How fast were the two cars going when they hit each other?” the volunteers generally gave a lower speed than if the question contained the phrase “when they smashed each other.” A simple verb was able to alter a volunteer’s perception of a memory, leading to a different answer.

Professor Loftus’s research focused on the credibility of court testimony and of repressed memories. Freud first covered the subject in the early 1900s. After Michelle Remembers came out in the 1980s, psychologists and the media took a renewed interest in it.

In those days, psychologists widely believed that when a person—especially a child—experiences trauma, such as sexual abuse, their subconscious instinctively expels the memories, freezing them and storing them inside the brain as though in a safe. The victim then forgets them, but only superficially, because in the meantime the trauma still has a deep effect on the person’s cognitive system.

This is exactly what happened in those preschools, when alleged recovered memory experts convinced thousands of children that they were hiding ugly memories somewhere in their heads, and that these needed to be pulled out at any cost and by any means. Psychologists used regressive hypnosis, anatomical dolls, drawings, and targeted questions to help children reconstruct a specific event or to confirm the stories of other children who had already been interviewed.

“New ‘information’ invades us, like a Trojan horse, precisely because we do not detect its influence,” wrote Professor Loftus in the results of her famous “Lost in the Mall” experiment.

Some of the interviewees initially said they didn’t remember the incident, but upon being questioned again, they corrected themselves. They then reconstructed an entire scene from nothing, enriching it with detail: they described the stores they saw while looking for their mom, the old lady who helped them, their fear, and the subsequent crying fit. After the participants repeated their story a few times, the false memory the psychologists had planted solidified in their minds, mixing with memories of real events.

Before Dario changed schools, he and Marco had been desk mates. Marco had even gone to play at Dario’s house a few times. But in just a few months, Dario had upended Marco’s entire childhood. He was gasping as he talked to me. That name had caused him to plunge back into a nightmare from long ago. He thought he’d been able to lock it away forever. Yet now, almost twenty years later, a stranger had come to rummage through his memories again.

Marco couldn’t remember exactly what he’d said, but he never forgot those stories. They’d affected him so strongly that they insinuated the same “memory” into his mind.

From what he was telling me and how he was saying it, I sensed that he’d probably never overcome the trauma from that period. I asked to talk to him again at a later date, but he never responded. Memory had played an ugly trick on him, too.

Professor Loftus had been impressed by a survey where 22 percent of therapists claimed they encouraged their patients to “let the imagination run wild” in order to recover memories of past trauma. If it was possible to trick adults, it was even easier to trick children.

Dr. Ceci believed that the simple repetition of the same question could destabilize a child, insinuating doubt in their mind and leading to a small mnemonic short circuit that activates the imagination, which attempts to compensate for the missing memory.

“We find nothing in a child’s memory is impervious to being tainted by an adult’s repeated suggestions,” Dr. Ceci told the New York Times in an interview.

The same happened with the McMartin case, where children were asked “closed” questions that already assumed the existence of facts the children hadn’t even mentioned yet.

One side urged caution, preferring the use of interview techniques that prevented the risk of creating false memories—questions that were open rather than suggestive. The other argued that this approach tended to

In 1996, as awareness of the threat of child sexual abuse was reaching its apex and the word pedophile was increasingly appearing in national headlines, a group of legal experts led by psychologist, professor, and lawyer Guglielmo Gulotta drafted the Carta di Noto, a document containing guidelines for examining minors in cases of suspected abuse. It later became a milestone of legal psychology. One of the document’s key points advised experts to “avoid, in particular, recourse to suggestive or implicative questions that assumed the existence of the very fact that was being investigated.”

“The expert must not be asked questions meant to ascertain the truth from a judicial point of view.” The job of the psychologist is to verify whether the minor is able to bear witness and can provide a version of events that hasn’t been contaminated. It is not the consultant’s job to establish whether the child was a victim of abuse. That is up to the court—and only the court.

This approach stands in sharp contrast with CISMAI tenets, which many legal psychology experts have criticized for promoting potentially dangerous listening methods that are based on antiscientific theories and that risk influencing children and contaminating their memory. The resulting trauma could even mimic that of an actual experience of abuse.

CISMAI’s new president—Gloria Soavi, a psychologist from Ferrara who was elected in 2014—made no secret of this viewpoint during a long interview over the phone. “Our approach focuses on the child as a presumed victim, on their psychological state and the nature of their trauma, with the understanding that there cannot be absolute neutrality in a relationship with a child.” The child “as a presumed victim.”

I pushed the tape into the mouth of the VCR. I rewound it. I pressed play at a random moment. Wavy lines appeared on the screen. Then the image became increasingly clear. A boy in a white sweater and a vest was sitting at a table in front of a piece of paper and a Bic pen. A microphone was hanging from the ceiling above his head. Behind him was a yellow radiator attached to a dark-gray wall.

I was sitting on the couch holding my head in my hands. My eyes were wide open, and my heart was racing. Incredible. There they were, the children. Months and months of reading their stories. And now I had them all here. With their eyes, their postures, their mannerisms, their facial expressions, their hesitations. Their voices.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I have time. Just tell me what format you want them in, and I’ll send them to you.” I didn’t know whether to be happy or surprised to have found a nearly seventy-year-old computer geek in the middle of the Emilian countryside.

He wasn’t listening anymore. His descriptions of the abuse at the Galliera home were limited to remnants of sentences repeated ad infinitum. He added no details. As if there hadn’t been a before or an after. Only sexual violence summed up in less than ten words.

And again, Dr. Cavallini: “You’re not listening. You’re not listening! And this does you no good. It does you no good. Otherwise, we’ll stay here a really long time, and you’ll leave much later!” Dario was drawing a ship on a piece of paper. “That’s a very pretty ship. Now, at this point we have to wait here for a while . . . You said that Ales took pictures . . . Who did he take pictures of?”

Something wasn’t right. I got the feeling that the adults weren’t there to listen to him with an open mind or to understand if something had happened to him, but to make him talk, to make him repeat the same things he’d said to his foster mother and to Dr. Donati in the previous months.

At the end of the interview, Dario formulated some extremely patchy accusations that if written down, wouldn’t have filled a single page. Most importantly, it didn’t contain a coherent narrative, or a beginning or an end.

If this was the method used in an official, filmed piece of evidence in the presence of a judge, what had happened when Dario had been alone with Dr. Donati? This video represented only the very first phases of the judicial process. Was this all it took to arrest all those people?