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….
Gun lobby knows that public outrage will subside
Dec. 18, 2012
The hands-off-my-guns community is hunkering down, as it did after Columbine, after Tucson, after Aurora, confidently waiting for the storm of outrage to pass.
Just curious: If 20 dead children aren’t enough to start the change process, how many would it take? 100? 500?
But those questions assume that SOME number, however outrageous, would at last open a tiny crack in the massive resistance of the gun lobby.
In reality, no such number exists.
– Lew Powell
If anyone deserves pardon, why not Edenton Seven?
May 30, 2012
Is the case for pardoning the Wilmington 10 any more compelling than that for pardoning the Edenton Seven?
As the N&O’s Bruce Siceloff points out, “Somebody firebombed Mike’s Grocery, a white-owned store in a black Wilmington neighborhood, during three days of racial violence in February 1971. When firefighters and police came to put out the blaze, somebody fired shots at them.”
In Edenton, by contrast, no crime was committed, making exoneration all the more challenging: There’s no alternative “somebody” to point to.
We believe them, we believe them not….
Oct. 26, 2012
“As in the McMartin case, the North Carolina ‘experts’ dismissed absurd elements of the children’s stories and fixated on the guilt of the caretakers.
“When a child put two dolls together, it counted as evidence; when he claimed that Miss Dawn cooked him in the microwave, he was taken to be speaking figuratively.”
– From “Day Care, Satanism and ‘Therapy’” by Alexander Cockburn in the Los Angeles Times (Sept. 5, 1991)
What is so sad as a debunker with no bunk?
June 12, 2014
“He thinks the continued treatment of these cases as a modern-day episode of mass hysteria does disservice to children and even puts them in danger.
“ ‘We have, over the last 20 years, discounted the word of children who might testify about sexual abuse,’ he writes. ‘We have become more worried about overreacting to child sexual abuse than we are about underreacting to it.’
“If that were the legacy of the day-care cases, it would be a damning one. But when I spoke to psychologists in the field – those Professor Cheit cites respectfully, as well as those he attacks – they gave a different account of the science at the heart of this history….”
– From “Abuse Cases, and a Legacy of Skepticism” by Emily Bazelon in the New York Times (June 9)
Thank you, Ms. Bazelon. In the category of “fat books in desperate search of a reason to exist,” Cheit’s “The Witch-Hunt Narrative” belongs right up there with William D. Cohan’s contemporaneous “The Price of Silence,” an account of the Duke lacrosse case that sympathizes not with the railroaded (and later exonerated!) defendants but with District Attorney Mike Nifong, who was disbarred and briefly jailed for conspiring to rig the case against them.
At the core of each book is the unsubstantiated contention that something surely must have happened, either at a Durham party house and at countless day cares. Fortunately, Cohan and Cheit can only gratuitously smear the reputations of innocent defendants, not put them in prison – unlike Little Rascals expert witness Mark “where there’s smoke there’s fire” Everson.