up with new information by cuddling him, praising him and "telling him how brave he was after he revealed more and more details of his abuse". Michael Lamb, a leading authority on the interviewing of child abuse victims, was asked to review the interviewing process the children endured. In addition to the problems caused by multiple interviews, he noted that there were substantial delays between the alleged events and the formal interviews which were conducted up to 18 months later. Lamb wrote that during this time, the children were exposed to conversations with their parents, social workers and other children and "were likely to have adopted recently acquired information about the events in question". Stephen J. Ceci, a psychologist at of Cornell University and an expert in children's suggestibility and children's courtroom testimony, also studied transcripts of many of the children's evidential interviews. In July 1995 he said the interviews "were not conducted in accordance with currently understood interviewing principles." According to Ceci, it is impossible to distinguish between accurate and inaccurate allegations when children are suggestively and repeatedly interviewed over a long period. Ellis' sexuality A number of people who were involved in the case believed Ellis was convicted because he was homosexual and was the only male worker at the creche.At the trial, he was portrayed as sexually deviant and perverted, which was held to be somehow consistent with the makeup of a child molester. Accident Compensation Corporation involvement One parent, Malcolm Cox, who had three children at the creche suggested that some parents may have been motivated to make claims that their child had been sexually abused because the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) automatically awarded $10,000 to anyone claiming to have been abused. He said that he and his wife were visited by a council social worker with ACC claim forms and told "we had to get in quick to claim the money because lump sums were being abolished". In the end, ACC paid more than $500,000 to about 40 parents of Civic Creche children. Generally parents received a standard $10,000, "but in cases where Ellis faced multiple charges relating to a single child, some parents claimed for each alleged incident of abuse" (McLoughlin, 1996). One child's parents allegedly claimed five payments, while another claimed four. According to North and South Magazine, "ACC didn't require a conviction before paying out. It paid up without so much as