Aug. 27, 2017

In 1999, when the last charges against Bob Kelly were dismissed, here’s how Joseph Neff of the News & Observer described the scene:

“The prosecutors in the longest, most expensive criminal case in North Carolina history picked a day when all attention was focused elsewhere to quietly throw in the towel.

“It was Sept. 15, as Hurricane Floyd churned northward toward landfall the next day, that Assistant District Attorney Nancy Lamb filed a two-page document with the Clerk of Superior Court in Edenton, dismissing eight counts of sexual abuse against Robert Kelly.”

April 30, 2012

“Prosecutors are reviewing pornographic videotapes seized in Montana…. A man identified as Willard Scott Privott appears wearing a pirate costume in a boat full of children, according to affidavits….

“Several children have testified (during Bob Kelly’s trial) that they were taken on boat trips. One 6-year-old boy testified that the boat was driven by a pirate….

“Bill Hart, an assistant attorney general prosecuting the case, said State Bureau of Investigation agents and Edenton Police Officer Brenda Toppin are reviewing the confiscated material….”

– From an Associated Press dispatch, Nov. 30, 1991

Needless to say, the Montana tape seizure was quickly revealed as a fool’s errand.

But how excited the prosecutors must have been by the prospect of finally finding actual evidence to support their multiplicity of charges!

I e-mailed the Montana stories to Scott Privott, who said that until now he had only heard word-of-mouth accounts.

He remembered Dorene Anna Stearns and David Lee Etheridge as no more than acquaintances in Edenton. “As far as her tales of seeing me in a movie, I wonder how even the state could believe that…. If a movie did exist and she saw it in ’87, why didn’t she report it to authorities back then?”

Feb. 28, 2014

As noted by Gary Greenberg, Richard Noll’s disappeared history of psychiatry and satanic ritual abuse “singles out two psychiatrists – Bennett Braun and Richard Kluft – who were instrumental in giving legitimacy to the SRA accounts. They helped change the DSM to make Multiple Personality Disorder (thought to be caused by the abuse) seem more common, they started the International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality and Dissociation, and they founded a journal called Dissociation….”

If the SRA era was psychiatry’s Wild West, then Braun and Kluft were… who? Butch and Sundance? Or Frank and Jesse?

In “Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory” (1995) philosopher Ian Hacking pointed out an editorial in Dissociation in which Kluft “pleaded for moderation, but…  acknowledged that powerful emotions were at work. He also raised the stakes by printing a comparison that I find rather odious. He noted that one party refers to Nazis and the Holocaust, asking, ‘Should he or she be silent, emulating the “good Germans” who did not speak out about the atrocities in their midst, and by his or her silence become a facilitator?’”

Despite such overheated comparisons, and his ludicrous estimates of an epidemic of  “multiples,” Kluft at least claimed “moderation”  – not so Braun, whose excesses in patient treatment led to suspension of his Illinois medical license, closure of his hospital MPD unit and at least four out-of-court settlements, one for $10.6 million.

Today he practices in obscurity, while Kluft concentrates on stifling publication of incriminating journal articles.

Nov. 23, 2012

“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.”

– John F. Kennedy

Viewed most generously, Little Rascals therapists and prosecutors fell for and promulgated the myth. But when they obstinately refused to consider ever-growing evidence to the contrary, they ended up defending the lie.