Elizabeth Loftus was enjoying her life researching the unreliability of memory in adults and children, and was often called as an expert witness in major trials such as that of OJ Simpson. By the mid-1980s those cases increasingly involved sexual abuse. But when her own work questioned the theory of repressed memory of sexual abuse, all hell broke loose. A woman hit her with a rolled-up newspaper. Worse, as she told Wendy M. Grossman, the controversy made her enemies - and propelled her out of her much-loved job