March 17, 2016

The award-winning documentary “The Trials of Darryl Hunt” was released in 2006, but of course Hunt’s world-famous exoneration only freed him to face new trials on the outside – most recently divorce and cancer.

Winston-Salem police Wednesday attributed his death to suicide by gunshot.

Amazingly, Darryl Hunt overcame the unspeakable damage done by 19 years of wrongful imprisonment to build a life of righteous achievement. I’m choosing to remember his journey, not its end.

Jan. 16, 2013

“Therapists diagnosing Satanic Ritual Abuse as the cause of their patients’ troubles… often belonged to a subculture within the therapeutic community, where focus on dissociation and multiple personalities were more important than among other clinicians.

“This small minority were involved in the vast majority of ritual abuse allegations with a therapy background. Nevertheless, many elements of the ideas, and some of the practices that seem to have been important in creating SRA-narratives were common among therapists of all kinds: belief in the concept of repression, a view of memory as analogous to a video-tape or computer and (confidence) that hypnosis could be an important tool in unearthing forgotten abuse. This view of memory and memory recovery has been largely dismissed among the community of cognitive psychologists.”

– From “Psychology and the Satanic Ritual Abuse Controversy. A Brief Research Review” by Asbjørn Dyrendal in Skepsis (March 2, 2007)

Aug. 12, 2013

“To maintain their belief in networks of satanic ritual abuse, the people involved in (the 16th Annual Ritual Abuse, Secretive Organizations and Mind Control Conference, to be held in Windsor Locks, Conn.) have built up a labyrinth of contorted mental passageways….

“According to the organizers…  when people recant their belief that they were the victims of satanic ritual abuse, the recanting is itself evidence of satanic ritual abuse. They assert that satanic cults insert neurological programs into the minds of their victims. Among these programs, they say, is one that makes therapists who push their patients to talk about ‘repressed memories’ of satanic ritual abuse look stupid….

“Standard academic conferences are open to anyone interested, so that ideas can be challenged. That’s not how things work at the Ritual Abuse, Secretive Organizations and Mind Control Conference, which excludes members of “unsympathetic organizations” or “secret organizations.”

“How exactly would a conference exclude members of secret organizations?… The instant a member of a secret organization was revealed as a member of a secret organization, the secret organization wouldn’t be a secret any longer, and the person accused of being a member would then become eligible to attend.

“Are there any members of secret organizations that would be willing to attend the Ritual Abuse, Secretive Organizations and Mind Control Conference, and report back to me what happens there?

“Wait… don’t tell me. That would just ruin the plan. Do it in secret.”

– Adapted from “How Can A Conference Exclude Member Of Secret Organizations?” by F.G. Fitzer at Irregular Times (July 2, 2013)

Not surprisingly, the weekend conference was a project of S.M.A.R.T., and the top-billed speaker was Judy “Twenty-two Faces” Byington.

April 29, 2016

The damage was minimal compared with that caused by HB2, but the N.C. General Assembly in 1992 produced its own ludicrous overresponse to a nonexistent problem. It fell hard for the “satanic ritual abuse” allegations in the Little Rascals Day Care case.

Requiring SBI notification within 24 hours of any report of sexual abuse in a day-care setting was reasonable enough. But that was only the beginning.

According to the Associated Press:

“Law enforcement officials are teaming up with social services experts to investigate and more effectively prosecute child sexual abuse in North Carolina day-care facilities….

“State Bureau of Investigation Director Charles Dunn said… the goal is to train up to 300 individuals in the state’s largest cities.

“Under the protocol, agencies in counties would establish guidelines for interagency task forces. Each task force would include an investigative unit and a resource unit.

“The typical investigative unit would include a child protective services social worker, law enforcement officer, consultant from the state day-care licensing agency and an SBI agent.

“The resource unit might include medical personnel, SBI lab experts, mental health workers and representatives of the attorney general’s and local district attorney’s offices….”

Maybe this sprawling bureaucratic troop movement, frustrated in its original mission, could be reactivated to enforce HB2 in the state’s bathrooms…..

— My response to a post on HB2 at the North Carolina Criminal law blog (April 29)