Expert Witness

Ann Wolbert Burgess, a forensic psychiatric nurse and court-recognized expert on trauma, sexual violence, and criminal profiling, opens by describing her role as an expert witness. She traces the history of expert testimony from ancient Athens and Rome through landmark cases, including the 1782 English case Folkes v. Chadd, which established that qualified experts could offer scientific opinion for juries to weigh. In the United States, the 1923 Frye v. United States case introduced the "general acceptance" standard for admitting scientific evidence. The 1993 Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals decision replaced that rigid standard with a flexible, judge-driven framework, and the Supreme Court later extended it to all expert testimony in Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael. Burgess connects this legal evolution to her career advocating for survivors of sexual violence, insisting that her methods must be grounded in fact to withstand courtroom scrutiny.

Burgess recounts her first encounter with the legal system in the early 1970s. As a recent PhD graduate researching the traumatic effects of rape, she discovered that sexual violence was one of the four major crimes in the United States yet had the lowest conviction rate. She began crisis counseling with a woman she calls Jane, who was raped by three men in her apartment in fall 1973. At a probable cause hearing in January 1974, Jane was forced to sit beside her attackers' families, who berated her. No one asked Burgess to provide expert testimony, an oversight she attributes to the male-dominated culture of the era. The next morning, Burgess brought her entire class to stand behind Jane in the courtroom, an experience that crystallized her resolve to become an expert witness who could contextualize victims' experiences for juries.

The book's longest case study concerns the Menendez brothers. On August 20, 1989, 18-year-old Erik Menendez and his 21-year-old brother Lyle called 911 from their family's Beverly Hills mansion to report that their parents, José and Mary Louise "Kitty" Menendez, had been shot. Police found José shot five times and Kitty nine times with a 12-gauge shotgun; the crime scene showed no forced entry, no robbery, and no shell casings. José, a Cuban immigrant who had risen through corporate America to become a top entertainment executive, imposed a rigid regime on his sons. After the murders, the brothers spent lavishly, and circumstantial evidence mounted. In March 1990, the ex-mistress of the brothers' therapist tipped off police about recorded confessions. Lyle was arrested, and Erik turned himself in three days later.

In April 1990, Burgess received a call from Jon Conte, an academic and pioneer in sexual violence research who was testifying for Lyle's defense. Conte recommended Burgess to assess Erik and connected her with defense attorney Leslie Abramson, a polarizing trial lawyer twice named trial lawyer of the year. Abramson explained that Erik had disclosed years of sexual abuse by his father and wanted Burgess for her combined expertise in FBI criminal profiling, forensic nursing, and victim psychology. At the Los Angeles County jail, Burgess interviewed Erik, who, through a series of drawings, depicted escalating abuse: his father raping him, his parents' complicity, the brothers' terror, and the night of the shootings. Erik drew himself progressively smaller and filled backgrounds with black lines conveying entrapment. Burgess concluded that the jury needed this context to understand the killings.

The defense centered on imperfect self-defense, arguing the brothers killed out of genuine fear rooted in years of abuse. On October 19, 1993, Burgess took the stand and testified that the crime scene was a domestic killing with disorganized features: The excessive number of shots indicated fear-driven overkill rather than calculated rage. She explained how long-term trauma rewires the adolescent brain and discussed her coinage of the term rape trauma syndrome, a pattern of psychological responses commonly observed after rape. During cross-examination, prosecutor Pamela Bozanich dismissed Burgess's testimony as pseudoscientific and claimed men cannot be raped. The first trial ended in a hung jury split along gender lines. The retrial proceeded under significant restrictions, including a bar on the imperfect self-defense theory, and the brothers were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole.

The book also examines the case of Charlie Scott, a confidence-style rapist, a type of offender who exploits established trust with victims to commit assaults. Scott, an Army enlistee who concealed his criminal record under a false identity, targeted women through charm before using coercion and threats. In December 1995, Burgess testified at his military presentencing hearing that Scott was at high risk for re-offense. In 2023, DNA from a victim's sexual assault kit linked Scott to an earlier crime, and he pleaded guilty.

In fall 2006, attorney Jim Cooney recruited Burgess as a defense expert in the Duke University lacrosse case, in which three players were accused of gang-raping an exotic dancer named Crystal Mangum at a house party. Burgess reconstructed the events using time-stamped digital evidence, which showed the accused could only have been in the same room for approximately two minutes. Mangum's account shifted across interviews. Burgess investigated Mangum's psychiatric history and developed a theory of confabulation, a neuropsychiatric condition involving the unintentional creation of false memories. She concluded that Mangum was blurring memories of a rape she reported experiencing at age 14 with a false memory of being assaulted at the lacrosse house. Meanwhile, district attorney Mike Nifong politicized the case, declaring the players guilty in media interviews without disclosing that no DNA evidence linked any player to Mangum. In April 2007, North Carolina attorney general Roy Cooper dropped all charges and declared the players innocent.

Burgess describes her role as a consulting expert for Andrea Constand in the sexual assault case against Bill Cosby. In January 2004, Constand, a 31-year-old director of women's basketball operations at Temple University, visited Cosby to discuss career opportunities. He gave her pills, she lost consciousness, and she woke with fragmented memories of being sexually assaulted. Too overwhelmed to report, she eventually resigned from Temple, where Cosby sat on the board of trustees, and moved to her parents' home in Toronto. When Constand filed a police complaint in January 2005, the district attorney declined to prosecute. A civil suit followed, during which Cosby testified about drugging women with quaaludes; the suit was settled with a nondisclosure agreement. In 2014, comedian Hannibal Buress publicly called Cosby a rapist during a live show, prompting dozens more women to come forward. Cosby's sealed deposition was unsealed, and in December 2015, Constand filed criminal charges.

In June 2016, Constand's lawyers contacted Burgess to conduct a psychiatric examination. Burgess administered the Beck Depression Index and the Impact of Event Scale, identifying chronic posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Her report concluded that Constand had chronic PTSD as a permanent neurobiological response to the assault. The first trial ended in a hung jury in June 2017. Shortly after, the New York Times published sexual abuse allegations against Harvey Weinstein, catalyzing a broader cultural shift toward supporting survivors. At the retrial, Cosby was found guilty of three felony counts of aggravated indecent assault and sentenced to 3 to 10 years in state prison. Burgess reflects that Constand became an early emblem of the #MeToo movement.

Through filmmaker Gregory Horoupian, Burgess reconnects with serial killer Edmund Kemper's case. Horoupian's commitment to accuracy gained him unprecedented access to Kemper in prison. Though Burgess hoped to gain insights about offenders' experience of the trial process, the interactions reinforced the importance of building trust and holding offenders accountable through facts.

In the book's final major case, Burgess addresses Larry Nassar, a doctor for Michigan State University (MSU) and the U.S. national gymnastics team who sexually abused more than 500 victims between 1994 and 2016. Burgess assesses a victim she calls M., a former MSU scholarship athlete, and concludes M. has a delayed post-traumatic stress response. Court records revealed that MSU's purportedly independent review of Nassar was a private internal review designed to shield the university from liability, a failure Burgess characterizes as institutional betrayal. At trial, Judge Rosemarie Aquilina allowed 156 women to deliver victim impact statements over seven televised days, an exercise Burgess views as essential to giving survivors control over their stories.

In her epilogue, Burgess reflects on the tension between empathy and objectivity and the erosion of public trust in expert witnesses. She describes her work using natural language processing to analyze lone offenders' manifestos and envisions AI tools for risk assessment and courtroom simulations, positioning the expert witness as a steward of truth and justice.