Rascals case in brief
In the beginning, in 1989, more than 90 children at the Little Rascals Day Care Center in Edenton, North Carolina, accused a total of 20 adults with 429 instances of sexual abuse over a three-year period. It may have all begun with one parent’s complaint about punishment given her child.
Among the alleged perpetrators: the sheriff and mayor. But prosecutors would charge only Robin Byrum, Darlene Harris, Elizabeth “Betsy” Kelly, Robert “Bob” Kelly, Willard Scott Privott, Shelley Stone and Dawn Wilson – the Edenton 7.
Along with sodomy and beatings, allegations included a baby killed with a handgun, a child being hung upside down from a tree and being set on fire and countless other fantastic incidents involving spaceships, hot air balloons, pirate ships and trained sharks.
By the time prosecutors dropped the last charges in 1997, Little Rascals had become North Carolina’s longest and most costly criminal trial. Prosecutors kept defendants jailed in hopes at least one would turn against their supposed co-conspirators. Remarkably, none did. Another shameful record: Five defendants had to wait longer to face their accusers in court than anyone else in North Carolina history.
Between 1991 and 1997, Ofra Bikel produced three extraordinary episodes on the Little Rascals case for the PBS series “Frontline.” Although “Innocence Lost” did not deter prosecutors, it exposed their tactics and fostered nationwide skepticism and dismay.
With each passing year, the absurdity of the Little Rascals charges has become more obvious. But no admission of error has ever come from prosecutors, police, interviewers or parents. This site is devoted to the issues raised by this case.
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Little Rascals Day Care Case
This Facebook page is an offshoot of littlerascalsdaycarecase.org, which addresses the wrongful prosecution of the Edenton Seven and other such victims.
Meanwhile in Edenton....
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Allies for our cause!
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The courts have a long history of capriciously pulling the rug out from under Junior's appeals, but maybe this time....
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Today’s random selection from the Little Rascals Day Care archives….
C’mon, Dr. Kluft, aren’t you proud of your role?
Feb. 24, 2014
Why would Dr. Richard Kluft “take exception to” and “(raise) the issue of legal liability” over “When Psychiatry Battled the Devil”?
It’s not as if the record of Kluft’s involvement in promoting “satanic ritual abuse” and “multiple personality disorder” could be any longer or better-documented.
And it’s certainly not as if he has ever acknowledged the error of his ways.
In this exchange from a 2009 interview on CBS “Sunday Morning” he confidently posits a nationwide epidemic of undiagnosed cases of MPD:
Tracy Smith: So do you think that there are, what, thousands of people walking around out there with MPD who don`t even know it?
Kluft: Oh, easily.
Smith: Tens of thousands?
Kluft: Easily.
Smith: Hundreds of thousands?
Kluft: Easily.
Smith: Millions?
Kluft: We might be at that level.
Passing off such fantasy as expertise would be knee-slappingly funny, of course, had it not typified the thinking that fostered scores of wrongful prosecutions and ruined thousands of lives….
I remain baffled – what exactly has Richard Kluft done to deserve such obeisance from Psychiatric Times?
Holocaust denial shows vulnerability of real memory
Oct. 11, 2013
“Holocaust deniers have managed to receive, in recent years, a respectful hearing on college campuses and elsewhere, despite the existence of mountains of firsthand and corroborated traumatic memories of the Holocaust provided by many thousands of survivors – memories that don’t have to be recovered because they are all too vividly, and all too persistently, remembered.
“Holocaust deniers began to achieve their victory over memory even before efforts were made to establish the new category of ‘recovered memory.’ If recovered memory remains unchallenged as a new form of memory, then one can only guess how much more vulnerable to doubt and manipulation legitimate memory will become.”
– From “The Monster In the Mists” by Walter Reich in the New York Times (May 15, 1994)
Faller, Everson resist trend toward skepticism
Sept. 24, 2012
The February 2012 special issue of the Journal of Child Sexual Abuse is devoted entirely to “Contested Issues in the Evaluation of Child Sexual Abuse Allegations.”
Ritual-abuse holdouts Kathleen Coulborn Faller and Mark D. Everson use the issue to vigorously push back against calls for greater diagnostic skepticism.
The object of their displeasure is “The Evaluation of Child Sexual Abuse Allegations: A Comprehensive Guide to Assessment and Testimony” (2009), edited by the late Kathryn Kuehnle and Mary Connell. Contributors to the Kuehnle-Connell volume advocate more reliance on forensic science and less on “unverified methods or conjecture” of the kind that enabled prosecution of the Edenton Seven. By contrast, Everson and Faller can be counted on to stretch the bounds of prosecution-worthy evidence, from finding “clinical usefulness” in anatomical dolls to granting universal credibility to child-witnesses.
From Everson’s response in the journal:
“Many critics of current forensic practice (emphasize) specificity over sensitivity…. Specificity (minimizing inclusion of false cases) and sensitivity (maximizing inclusion of true cases) are counterbalancing indices of decision accuracy. Favoring specificity over sensitivity means that overdiagnosing (child sexual abuse) is considered a more serious concern than failing to substantiate true cases of abuse….”
Yes, I’ll admit it: I consider the perils of overdiagnosis – putting innocent people in prison – much worse than those of underdiagnosis – letting a possible abuser go free, at least temporarily. However much Everson and Faller might wish otherwise, our system of justice does stipulate “reasonable doubt.”
‘Moral panics: they may begin with a legitimate societal concern….’
Jan. 4, 2018
“Sexual harassment or assault, by contrast [with the Communism scare in Hollywood], obviously warrants discipline at the very least and criminal prosecution wherever appropriate. But then and now, what’s lacking is any shared obligation to respect constitutional rights, ensure due process or maintain a sense of proportion…. And that’s the thing about moral panics: they may begin with a legitimate societal concern – drug and alcohol abuse, teen pregnancy, child abuse, human trafficking – but they can devolve into Prohibition, movie and broadcast censorship, banning comic books and rock ‘n’ roll, and general crusades against anything in popular culture challenging the official conformist line. And if you’re not careful, you’ll soon find yourself succumbing to irrational fears of ‘satanic ritual abuse,’ ‘backward masking’ in rock lyrics and secret pedophilia rings run out of suburban pizzerias….
“It’s not witches, but the witch-hunters, that we should really fear, for they lead us to abdicate our responsibilities to be fair, thoughtful, measured, and rational….”
– From “Season of the witch” by Joel Bellman at LA Observed (Dec. 10)
