However, he served on the Dewey Commission, which cleared Trotsky of the charges made against him by the Soviet government during the Moscow Trials.
All the defendants were sentenced to death and were subsequently shot in the cellars of Lubyanka prison in Moscow
The Moscow Trials series of show trials, some of which occurred in 1938.
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Trotskyist historian Pierre Broué noted that Trotsky had misinformed the Commission, claiming to have had no contacts with oppositionists inside the USSR to form a bloc (one of the charges of the Moscow Trials) despite being reminded during the Commission by his secretary, Jean van Heijenoort, of the opposite being the case.
This body initiated the celebrated 1937 Dewey Commission that inquired into the charges made against Trotsky in the Moscow show trials, and found the Moscow trials to have been a complete frame-up.
Her name was among those included on the letter denouncing the Dewey Commission's investigation of the Moscow trials, and she also endorsed the CP-initiated call for the Third American Writers' Congress in 1939.