At least half of the best professionals in the world believe she cheated.
This is why poker is a great game. People like you that presume to understand poker very well and are so confident in what they believe. Please keep playing.
And btw, I'm 50/50 on her cheating or not. It would be extremely simple to cheat in this environment.
Agree that these levels of bold, decisive claims are signals about what makes poker a great game.
Nobody has near enough evidence to be sure. I think the play is incredibly suspect, and I think I've met many players at the tables stupid enough to make it. It's not common, but they exist and keep playing.
What is exceptionally stupid are the guys saying "it would be a mistake to call here if you were cheating" while still believing "she called with J4 because she's really bad." Their logic requires her to make a (massive) mistake with J4, but assumes she wouldn't make a much more nuanced mistake doing an EV calculation.
I personally think if there was cheating involved, it was a binary signal ("you have the best hand") and she's too dumb to understand the implications of calling with J4 in the spot.
What bears repeating here is that this would not have helped in her situation. She at no point prior to making a seemingly outrageous call had the best hand. That's what makes it so unconvincing that she would be cheating to me. The odds were completely against her and cheating would have required knowing what card/cards were going to come up on the river.
The odds were not against her, they were in her favor.