Aug. 20, 2015

“In the mid-1980s, a friend of mine testified on behalf of an elementary-school teacher who had been accused of being a pedophile.

“A child had told his mother that the teacher had taught them about ‘boobies and dicks’ and had drawn a picture on the blackboard that sounded suspiciously to the mother like an image of an ejaculating penis.

“The police had raced to the classroom and confiscated the damning evidence: several copies of ‘Moby-Dick.’ What the teacher had drawn was a whale and its spout.

“Looking back, we can see that the only boobies involved in this case were the adults. But whenever we are in the midst of a moral panic, as we were in the 1980s, we feel that our alarm is reasonable and that punitive solutions are appropriate.

“Dicks? That child knew the word ‘dicks’? Cancel sex ed! Run that teacher out of town!…”

– From “A Very Model Moral Panic” by Carol Tavris in the Wall Street Journal (Aug. 7)

Feb. 16, 2018

“Eighteen years ago this month, Peter Ellis left prison. He ought never to have been there in the first place.

“[In 1993] Ellis was convicted of child abuse at the Christchurch Civic Crèche. It remains one of New Zealand’s most controversial cases, and one [New Zealand’s] proposed Criminal Cases Review Commission would do well to address.

“If all the allegations were to be believed, Ellis was involved in making children dance naked while some were placed in an oven or suspended in a cage. Others were buried alive, and one child was forced to kill another. One unfortunate lad was turned into a frog and a cat. Needless to say the evidence for these events was not strong…”

– From “Peter Ellis martyr to deranged prejudice” by Jarrod Gilbert in the New Zealand Herald (Feb. 8)

The first allegations against Peter Ellis occurred shortly after a nearby Ritual Abuse Workshop. What a coincidence – the first allegations against Bob Kelly occurred shortly after a
nearby day-care sex abuse seminar….

Oct. 21, 2011

How would you handle six years behind bars after being wrongfully convicted? Here’s how Bob Kelly did it:

“In jail (in Chowan County before being found guilty) there was nothing but sitting and waiting. Central Prison was easier – I could work.

“A warden told me, ‘Whoever kills Bob Kelly will have a trophy. I can put you in lockup, where you’ll be safe.’ But that would’ve meant spending 23 hours a day in a cell. I said, ‘Put me in the general population. I’ve got 12 life sentences, and I’m not going to do my time hiding.’

“But I tried to be smart. It was two years before I went outside in the yard. All I could think of was, if I got in a fight, how would that affect the appellate court?… Only one time did a jailhouse gangster lay his hands on me, and I realized I had to stand up to him to keep it from happening again….

“My first job was janitor in G block. I waxed the floor, emptied the trash, kept it like my home. They don’t allow bleach, because it would get thrown in the guards’ eyes, but I managed to talk a guy in the laundry room out of a bottle. It was great for spraying down the showers. My block was the only one in the whole prison that smelled like Clorox….

“My next job was running the canteen for lockup. The guys who had been there before me had watered down the Cokes and coffee and pocketed the difference. I wanted to run the best canteen I could, so I started giving full measure….

“You know what the other prisoners said? ‘You’re stupid – don’t you know you could be making money?”

Nov. 2, 2012

“The (McMartin) episode and its conclusion were ravaged by the mass media and produced a tremendous repercussion throughout the nation – but not the one of caution, as one might have expected…. (Time magazine reported that) ‘Nationally, the attention generated by the case set off an explosion of reports claiming sexual abuse of children, increasing such reports from 6,000 in in 1976 to an estimated 350,000 in 1988.’”

– From “Witch-Children: From Salem Witch-Hunts to Modern Courtrooms” by Hans Sebald (1995)