Aug. 17, 2014

“I’m not comfortable commenting on any of them at this point in time.”

– Lael Rubin, formerly the lead prosecutor in the McMartin Preschool case, declining to say whether she still thinks the defendants were guilty

 That’s not the only eyebrow-raiser in this recent 30-years-after piece by a Los Angeles TV station.

Rubin contends that “The strongest evidence, the physical evidence, the medical evidence, I think was very significant.” But Kevin Cody, who logged more hours in the courtroom than any other journalist, confirms my impression that the prosecution actually produced “zero medical evidence of abuse.”

Finally, Rubin credits the McMartin case with improvements in the interviewing of children: “The criminal justice system, interviewers and police, law enforcement are much more concerned about eliciting information from children, as opposed to giving them clues.”

This is disingenuous. Like John E. B. Myers, Kee MacFarlane  and Sylvia Gillotte – Rubin tips her hat to progress but refuses to take the logical next step: admitting the injustices issuing from those McMartin-style interrogations.

theguardian.com

Carole Myers/Felstead

March 21, 2016

“Once again advocates of the much discredited Satanic Abuse Panic are making claims of widespread child abuse across Britain.

“Scotland appears to have become caught up in a nationwide frenzy of superstitious irrationality. This moral panic exhibits typical clichés of sensationalist psychology. In England, the case of Carole Myers/Felstead – whose family were falsely accused of an endless variety of insane criminal acts – has comprehensively demonstrated that the existence of Satanic Cults preying on vulnerable children is a myth created on the therapist’s couch…. Real victims of abuse are being let down by focusing on this nonsense.”

– From “Recent Satanic Abuse Claims in Scotland” by the British False Memory Society (March 10)

For whatever reason, the UK seems especially resistant to having its fingers pried from the myth of “satanic ritual abuse,” which migrated from the States in the late ’80s.

Feb. 13, 2015

“Psychologists terminated a study (of 70 students at a Canadian university) that showed the ease of implanting false memories of committing terrible, violent crimes in the recent past – because some subjects couldn’t be convinced that they hadn’t committed the crime after they were told the truth.”

– From “Police interrogation techniques generate false memories of committing crimes” by Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing (Feb. 9)

More on this recent study from Sarah Barmak at the Toronto Star:

“If subjects said they couldn’t remember the false event, questioners reassured them they would be able to retrieve their ‘lost memories’ if they tried hard enough. If they began to ‘remember,’ experimenters asked for more detail. Do you recall any images? How did you feel? Visualize what it might have been like, they said, and the memory will come back to you….”

“Lost memories,” of course, were the fool’s gold mined so relentlessly by the prosecution therapists in the Little Rascals Day Care case. Remarkably, it took only three 40-minute sessions for the Canadian researchers to corrupt the memories of fully 70 percent of their college-age subjects – the Little Rascals children required months of implantation!

May 10, 2014

“The failure to obtain convictions (in the McMartin Preschool case) combined with massive press coverage during and after, which ‘taught’ the American public various ‘lessons’ about child sex abuse, from child suggestibility to the notion that one must guard against ‘hysteria’ on such issues.

“The Witch-Hunt Narrative (by Ross Cheit) examines the evidence in the McMartin case as well as other widely reported cases, and gathers other sources on the phenomenon, to conclude that the McMartin case and reporting led to a paradigm of treating charges of abuse as a witch hunt rather than legitimate. This book goes a long way to debunk the paradigm, because there was compelling evidence for conviction….”

– From “Book of the Week” by Marci Hamilton at Hamilton and Griffin on Rights

Are we now witnessing the beginning of a belated backlash to the backlash over the “satanic ritual abuse” prosecutions? Contrary to Professor Hamilton’s enthusiastic review, Ross Cheit’s 544-page tome is riddled with inaccuracies, distortions and a shocking number of crucial omissions. Fortunately Debbie Nathan and the National Center for Reason and Justice have responded with a devastating point-by-point refutation – about which more later….

Update: I asked Hamilton, who teaches at Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School, Yeshiva University, to read Nathan’s piece and reconsider. Her response: “We will have to agree to disagree.”