According to Ms Loftus, who has published 24 books and more than 600 papers, memories are reconstructed, not replayed. “Our representation of the past takes on a living, shifting reality,” she has written.

During the Weinstein trial last year, Ms Loftus cited her most well-known study, “Lost in the Shopping Mall,” which showed that, through a series of interviews, people could be induced to remember that they had once gotten lost in a shopping mall as children and were rescued by a stranger, even though the event never happened.

Her research has been used to discredit abuse survivors’ testimony in court, and it also has led to stricter requirements for the use of recovered memories in trials. 

Therapists and academics who believe memory repression is a natural survival technique continue to contest her stance on the phenomenon.

False memory syndrome has not been ratified by the American Psychological Association and is labelled “controversial” and is “not [an] accepted diagnostic term.”

Ms Loftus, who charges up to $600 an hour for her time, failed to convince the jury that Annabella Sciorra’s memory was defective at Weinstein’s trial. Ms Sciorra accused him of rape in the early 1990s.

With the exception of one case, she has exclusively testified for the defence since the 1970s. 

There are risks for the defence team, some lawyers said, particularly since the #MeToo movement in which women accused powerful men of sexual harassment and abuse.

“Victim shaming … doesn’t work especially now in 2021, and it usually hurts you,” said Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma, a New York defence attorney who specialises in sex crimes cases. “You have to show the utmost empathy in my opinion to people who have been victimised.”

Ms Loftus said in a 2020 interview with the Los Angeles Times: “The world is full of people who support accusers. I think people who are accused deserve some modicum of support as well.”

Following her testimony in the Weinstein trial, Ms Loftus had a speech cancelled and her students wrote a letter to the dean asking her to be removed from faculty.

“If the MeToo movement had an office, Beth’s picture would be on the 10 most wanted list,” Ms Loftus’ brother Robert told the New Yorker magazine for a profile.