My Experience with a Pathological Liar

She denied what was obvious to everyone, even in the face of photos

Anyone who practices family law as long as I did will probably have run across some pathological personalities. One memorable incident from my practice keeps coming to mind in connection with recent COVID-related events and the behaviour of people such as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Tony Fauci.

 

My client G was a thirty-something man who had the opposite problem of what often occurs in family law. Frequently, a man comes into the lawyer’s office proclaiming that he could not possibly have fathered a particular baby, that the woman was a slut who had slept with many other guys too, and that some doctor had told him he had a low sperm count anyhow. Blood tests are then done, and child support either is or isn’t ordered depending on the outcome. 

This client was different. He claimed that the baby his former live-in girlfriend had just given birth to was his child, not her husband’s, and he wanted visiting rights. We started a court application for a declaration of paternity and access to the child.

The woman, who by that time had returned to her husband and two older kids, swore up and down that she had never had sex with G, had never been his girlfriend, and had never lived with him in the basement apartment in his parents’ home. 

But G had photographs. There she was, posing happily with him in the apartment, their arms around each other. There she was with his family, very much an accepted member of the clan. There she was, kissing my client affectionately. G’s parents confirmed his story. They were distressed that the woman had left their son, and wanted access to their grandchild. Blood tests were done. They showed that paternity “could not be excluded” (that’s the language those tests use) with a certainty of something like 99.9 percent. In other words, he was clearly the dad.

When I got the opportunity to cross-examine the woman under oath, she nevertheless put forward all her denials without a moment’s hesitation. She genuinely seemed to believe what she was saying. Then I brought out the photos and showed them to her. I expected some kind of reaction of embarrassment or guilt at having been caught lying. Nope.  

All she said was “His family always did take a lot of photos.” What??  

Clearly, there was something wrong with this woman’s brain, that she could look at those photos, and remember what his family had been like, yet continue to deny what was obvious to everyone else. I thought perhaps she was so fearful of her husband’s rejection of the new baby that she somehow managed to make herself completely forget the several months she had spent living with G. But there was never any psychiatric diagnosis made, at least not when I was involved. 

Her lawyer broke the news to the husband, they eventually agreed to allow G access to the child, and G voluntarily began paying child support. The whole incident occurred at least twenty years ago. The child must be an adult now. I sometimes wonder about the hell that woman must have put her entire family through, with a brain that functioned like that. I think G was actually lucky that she left him. I just hoped the kid hadn’t inherited her brain defect, whatever it was.  

This incident came to mind when I watched Episode 282 of Del Bigtree’s show The Highwire. There’s a clip starting at 15:43 in which Dr. Tony Fauci, in a recent Fox News interview, denies with a straight face having “shut down” anything in response to the pandemic. This is followed by six other video clips of Fauci on earlier occasions advocating shutting down the country or the economy, and in one case, regretting that he hadn’t recommended it earlier. 

I have always marvelled at the exchanges I’ve witnessed between Fauci and Senator Rand Paul, among others, in which Fauci—unembarrassed and apparently believing his own words—denies having done things (such as funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab) that Paul has just provided him with solid evidence of his having done. 

I’m convinced that there is something wrong with that man’s brain, and it’s similar to what was wrong with my client’s ex-girlfriend’s brain. What makes people like this tick? How did they fail to absorb the moral lesson (i.e. don’t lie) that most of us learn before the age of about seven? Is this what is meant by “psychopathy”?

Recently, I stumbled upon a pre-pandemic book called “Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend”, by Barbara Oakley. She compares what we would call Machiavellian behaviour in a politician (such as lying to attain a political goal), to what psychologists would define as “antisocial personality disorder”, or psychopathy. 

Oakley says, “The puzzle for everyone is how there could be people who can do bad—even horrendous—things to others without feeling guilt.” Exactly. For two and a half years now, that has been the recurring question among freedom advocates around the world.

Each time the book describes a common behavioural trait of psychopaths, I’ve found myself thinking, “That’s exactly what Justin Trudeau did back when ….”, or “That describes Fauci to a T.”  

Oakley says functional MRI scans now reveal which areas of the human brain are activated by which types of emotions—fear, aggression, empathy, etc. People who seem to be deficient in the empathy department appear to have actual physical deficits in activity in specific locations in their brains. The book explores the old nature versus nurture debate: whether these deficits might be genetic, or might have developed due to environmental factors, or a bit of both. 

I know that my two dogs—a poodle, and a Tibetan spaniel—behave very differently from each other, and each one conforms recognizably to the behaviour that’s considered their breed standard. Obviously, their behaviour has a genetic component. So I consider it quite plausible that genes play an important part in human behaviour too. 

However, I also can’t help wondering whether the explosion of chronic neurological illnesses such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s that we are seeing in the world these days—which I suspect are due at least in part to toxic pesticides and herbicides, electromagnetic radiation exposure, and frequent injections with metallic adjuvants in “quackcines”—is damaging so many brains that our future will be filled with ever-increasing proportions of the population who are Machiavellian if in politics, or just generally psychopathic. 

Comments—even speculative ones—are welcome.