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Case 1:20-cr-00330-PAE Document507-1 Filed 11/24/21 Page5of15 Comey, Moe, Pomerantz and Rohrbach November 1, 2021 Page 4 Moreover, grooming has no consistent definition, and concerns have been raised that “there is no valid method to assess whether grooming has occurred or is occurring.” Natalie Bennett & William O’ Donohue, The Construct of Grooming in Child Sexual Abuse, 23 J. Child Sexual Abuse 957, 974 (2014). In any particular population of alleged victims, patients, or plaintiffs—including those whom Dr. Rocchio has treated or evaluated—the determination of whether grooming has occurred is a subjective judgment hinging largely on the credibility of the individuals. Such judgments have no known error rate and cannot be tested, verified, or reproduced. Although the Government’s Expert Notice regarding Dr. Rocchio’s proposed testimony is silent as to whether she is expected to impute a theory of “grooming-by-proxy” to the Defendant, it is important to note that there is no generally accepted theory of grooming by third parties or empirical evidence regarding the prevalence, characteristics, or mechanisms of such a phenomenon. Ms. Maxwell is not accused of soliciting or enticing sexualized massages for herself. Instead, the claim appears to be that Ms. Maxwell recruited and groomed minors to provide sexualized massages for Mr. Epstein, which would amount to grooming-by-proxy. Dr. Dietz is aware of no authority—no journal articles, no studies, no tests, nothing—to support a theory of grooming-by-proxy. Such a theory has not gained any acceptance (let alone general acceptance) in the relevant community; it has not been peer-reviewed; it has not and cannot be tested; and there is no known or potential rate of error. Dr. Rocchio’s opinion that “[i]ndividuals with particular vulnerabilities are often targeted by perpetrators of sexual abuse” is a commonly accepted bit of clinical lore derived from the frequent observation of highly vulnerable children among those children who allege sexual abuse, but it is not based on empirical data regarding the likelihood of abuse among children with varying degrees of vulnerability. To the extent that less vulnerable children, such as those with intact families, attentive parents, good social support, little psychopathology, less prior trauma, no substance use, and higher resilience are less likely to allege abuse than the more vulnerable, the generalization could be proved weak or false, if only there were such empirical data. And even if there were such data, it would be important to devise a means of verifying that abuse did occur to those who allege it, which is a difficult task at best because of the pains so many abusers take to avoid confession, witnesses, or physical evidence. The clinical, criminal justice, and forensic populations from which the observation of prevalent vulnerabilities is derived—including those clients whom Dr. Rocchio has treated or evaluated—trarely represent groups in which all allegations of abuse have been verified by confession, witnesses, physical evidence, or other means. Other opinions put forth in the disclosure of Dr. Rocchio’s proposed testimony also rest on assertions that are untestable, cannot be reproduced, and have no known error rate. b. Opinions About Hindsight Bias Hindsight bias must be considered when evaluating sex abuse allegations and or “grooming behavior.” Many claims of sexual abuse of minors involve behaviors that are, in DOJ-OGR-00008074