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….
How to get attention: Why, ‘It’s getting worse every year’
Nov. 21, 2012
“The child abuse field has always been one that felt like there was not enough public policy attention, so the narrative reflected that: It’s at crisis proportions; it’s getting worse every year; it’s an epidemic….”
– Mark Chaffin, professor in the department of pediatrics at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center
Dr. Chaffin’s observation wasn’t specific to the ritual sex abuse era, but he sure captures its ever-more-breathless conjuring of villains and victims.
Edenton Seven could’ve used a Johnny Depp
Sept. 10, 2012
“You saw those initial documentaries, you make a choice: Am I going to watch the thing and go ‘Wow, that’s really horrible,’ and go out and get a milkshake?”
– Johnny Depp, tracing the roots of his advocacy for the West Memphis Three
That could be me talking – except that the eye-opening documentaries for me were “Innocence Lost” rather than “Paradise Lost,” that I’m a retired newspaperman rather than a Hollywood actor and – most crucial – that I went out for a figurative two-decade milkshake run rather than responding immediately to the outrage I was seeing on screen. Hats off to WM3 advocates such as Depp, who moved quickly to challenge prosecutors every bit as recalcitrant as those in North Carolina.
Perhaps N.Y. Times needs some new experts
Aug. 6, 2016
It’s appalling to see the New York Times, in its Aug. 5 obituary on Chris Costner Sizemore, “the real patient behind ‘The Three Faces of Eve’, quote as experts Dr. Colin A. Ross and Dr. Richard Kluft, psychiatrists who validated and promoted the “satanic ritual abuse” moral panic of the 1980s and early ’90s.
For decades Dr. Ross has spun out cockamamie ideas from supernatural “eye beams” to CIA conspiracies. And as recently as a 2009 interview on CBS “Sunday Morning,” Dr. Kluft confidently posited a nationwide epidemic of undiagnosed cases of “multiple personality disorder”:
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.
Do Ross and Kluft really provide the kind of authority the Times needed for this story?
The full obituary on Chris Costner Sizemore is here, cached here.
Why evangelicals fall prey to ritual abuse tales
Dec. 22, 2014
““We evangelical Christians by definition live by our own narrative of creation, fall, and redemption. We believe in good and evil. That is why, as a group, we might be vulnerable to other meta-narratives – after all, if you believe in one, it’s easier to accept a second and a third.
“One example: in the 1980s and 1990s too many of us accepted the story of widespread Satanic Ritual Abuse, despite the fact that the evidence could not be found, nor could anyone name the thousands of missing children who supposedly had been sacrificed to the devil.”
– From “ ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’ has its 50th Anniversary” by Gary Shogren at Open Our Eyes, Lord!
Although “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” by Richard Hofstadter was first published in response to Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign, it continues to offer insights into the attraction of a wide range of conspiracy theories.