Child molestation is one of the most heinous things a person can be accused of. I always tell the client I am fully aware this is the modern day scarlet letter. If you are branded as a child molester and you have to register, your life is over. So there’s not one piece of advice I can give to somebody charged, but I can tell you this. There is one way to win these cases. You need to figure out why the accuser is lying. We all know theoretically it’s innocent until proven guilty, but that is not how it works in reality. That is definitely not how it works if you’re accused of child molestation. When you get into that court room, the jury thinks you did it, and you have to be able to explain why your client didn’t, even though that’s not the burden of proof in the United States. So with a molestation case, the key thing – why is he or she lying? And there can be a lot of answers.

For example, I have a case ongoing, but this is very common, where there’s a vicious custody and divorce battle, and it’s pretty obvious what’s going on, because mom has a lot to say to the child against dad, so that can be an obvious point of cross-examination or to explain why the child might be lying. Sometimes it’s way more complicated, though. There can be a minor – ‘cause we’re usually talking about a minor – who truly believes something bad happened to them, he or she was molested when he was younger, but it’s not true. And I’ve had to work with memory experts and false memory experts to explain how can that happen, ‘cause a lot of juries don’t believe that’s even a thing, but it is. You can hold a false belief, but it doesn’t make it true. And then also of course there can just be children that want attention, who are naturally storytellers. They don’t tell the truth about things. Or they have been abused by somebody. Truly they’ve been a victim, but it’s not your client. And so it doesn’t matter, obviously, which one of those things is the reason, or maybe it’s a combination, but if you can’t express or explain to the jury why such heinous accusations are coming up, you can’t win the case.