Jan. 13, 2012

For months I have been fruitlessly searching the record for a public apology from even one prominent perpetrator of the ritual-abuse day-care hoax. At last I have happened upon such a statement:

“I want to announce publicly that as a firm believer of the ‘Believe The Children’ movement of the 1980s, that started with the McMartin trials in California…. I am now convinced that I was terribly wrong… and many innocent people were convicted and went to prison as a result….”

So who was this lone heroic figure who stepped forward, confessed his mistake and acknowledged the pain it had caused? Was it a repentant prosecutor or judge? A psychologist, perhaps?

Well, no. It was Geraldo Rivera.

Of all the talk-show hosts who grabbed giddily, repeatedly and unquestioningly onto the latest claim of ritual abuse, it was Geraldo, starting in 1987, who went furthest over the top.

“Estimates are that there are over 1 million Satanists in this country…” he told viewers. “The majority of them are linked in a highly organized, very secretive network. From small towns to large cities, they have attracted police and FBI attention to their Satanic ritual child abuse, child pornography and grisly Satanic murders. The odds are that this is happening in your town.”

By Dec. 12, 1995, however, Geraldo had experienced a change of heart. That’s the night he hosted the CNBC special “Wrongly Accused and Convicted of Child Molestation.”

“He is to be commended for stating his new belief in public,” observed the invaluable religioustolerance.org.

“Unfortunately, a one-minute apology and recantation is hardly sufficient to reverse the damage done by many hours of sensational programming, grounded on misinformation.”

May 27, 2015

“Here’s an observation from the (“satanic ritual abuse” day-care) panic that I don’t think has been fully explored: These kids didn’t make up these stories.

“In this case (of Fran and Dan Keller) and dozens of others, the kids were telling tales with details about geography, history and current events about which kids of their age couldn’t have known. That’s likely what made their stories seem somewhat credible. But the fact that it all was fictitious reveals a particularly unsettling truth:

“These sick, lurid, unimaginable abuses could only have been a product of the imaginations of the therapists, social workers, cops and/or prosecutors who interviewed the children. If the memories were implanted, those are the only people who could have implanted them.

“That means that the same people entrusted to protect these kids, and in whom these communities trusted to police the streets, prosecute crimes and administer therapy, were ultimately the ones capable of dreaming up detailed sexual fantasies that put children in bizarre rituals involving violence, animals, corpses and so on.

“There’s a lot to be learned from these cases. For one, there are lessons about professional accountability:

“Not only were the vast majority of the prosecutors who put these innocent people in prison in these cases never sanctioned, but also most went on to great professional success, sometimes because of their role in these high-profile cases, and sometimes even after it was widely known that the people they prosecuted were innocent.

“There are other lessons here about how we screen ‘expert’ witnesses, and how bad science gets into the courtroom. There are lessons about the power of suggestion that could be applied to eyewitness testimony and how we conduct police lineups.

“But the drawing of lessons is something we typically do once a crisis is over. This one still isn’t. There are “still people in prison awaiting exoneration.”

– From “The ongoing legacy of the great satanic sex abuse panic” by Radley Balko in the Washington Post (May 26)

Is there something about “satanic ritual abuse” cases that knocks courts off their game? Although the Texas Court of Appeals manages to overturn (at last!) the child sexual abuse charges against day-care operators Fran and Dan Keller, it can’t bring itself to acknowledge their actual innocence. Thanks to Judge Cheryl Johnson for her clear-eyed concurring opinion noting that “This was a witch hunt from the beginning.”

Sept. 12, 2014

Edenton has been the scene of many historic events – the Edenton Tea Party, the escape of Harriet Jacobs, etc. – but surely nothing happened there in the entire 20th Century more significant than the Little Rascals Day Care case.

So why is the case not even mentioned on Edenton’s Wikipedia page?

On Sept. 28, 2013, a rogue editor abruptly removed a passage similar to this one:

“Edenton achieved international notoriety for the Little Rascals Day Care sexual abuse trial, the subject of journalist Ofra Bikel’s award-winning trilogy of documentaries….”

Wikipedia entries are intentionally easy to edit, but the process leaves fingerprints.
The person whose name is attached to the Little Rascals deletion turns out to be an innkeeper in Edenton. He ended our exchange with “I did not remove anything or post anything on that site…. must have been my competitor from across the street.”

I have restored the deleted passage – let’s hope it proves innkeeper-proof.

March 18, 2013

“When I look back, I think my greatest mistake (was) my failure as editor of the News & Observer to make sure we had a top-notch investigative reporter on the Little Rascals case in Edenton.

“Our regional person was adequate as a regional correspondent, a full-time staffer, but he was not the person to see what was wrong with this case and to do the necessary digging to root it out.

“That prosecutor had gone wild, eaten up by ambition, I suppose, to hang these people, these people who operated the Little Rascals Day Care Center, no matter how.

“…All the kids talked about being borne through the air this way and that way and flying all over, and it was crazy stuff.

“As it turned out, (the Edenton Seven were eventually released), but it wrecked their lives forever. And I still feel sorry about that, still feel sorry about it.

“I think had we sent someone like Pat Stith down there, that would have been it.

“But see, at that time, Edenton already was a pretty far reach for the News & Observer…. (Our) pulling out of eastern North Carolina (to cut expenses) might have affected my thinking (about) whether we were really responsible for doing something about that miscarriage of justice.”

– From an interview with Claude Sitton, editor of the Raleigh News & Observer from 1968 to 1990 (Southern Oral History Program, Southern Historical Collection, UNC Chapel Hill, July 12, 2007)