Sept. 8, 2015

“Jennifer (a pseudonym) reached out to me after seeing an interview I gave about the McMartin Preschool trial…. She said she had been involved in a similar case as a child and that her experiences with the police, the judicial system, and a series of therapists mirrored those of the McMartin children. Now an adult with a career and family of her own, she agreed to speak with me about her experiences during the trial and in the decades since….

“Jennifer’s experiences illustrate the consequences of the misguided ‘belief’ in children that so many therapists, parents, and cops professed during the 1980s….”

– From “Moral Panic and the Myth of Recovered Memory” by Richard Beck at Literary Hub (Aug. 18) 

Although Beck presents more as a historian than a journalist, his interview with Jennifer is a significant addition to the sparse roster of recanting (or not) child-witnesses. Not surprisingly, her account offers numerous parallels not only to McMartin but also to Little Rascals:

• “lots of phone conversations and meetings” among parents
• an interviewer with “anatomically correct dolls”
• her initial insistence that “nothing had happened”
• “a tour of the jail” arranged by the therapist to assure her that the supposed molester was safely behind bars
• her capitulation in the face of endless therapy sessions, leading her to “finally just start… making stuff up.”
• the eventual overturning of her day-care teacher’s conviction

Might Jennifer’s coming forward, however tentatively, lead the way to more recantations by child-witnesses?

Dec. 31, 2014

“Dear Mr. Powell:

“At their meeting on December 16, the members of the North Carolina Highway Historical Marker Advisory Committee… voted unanimously not to approve a marker (in Edenton recognizing the Little Rascals Day Care case).

“Your nomination was among 17 on the agenda (only five met with approval)…. In short, the committee felt that the case was too recent – with too many people affected by it living in the area. They felt that much more time needed to pass before the subject could be judged by history and considered for a marker. One suggestion was that it might be considered 25 years after the deaths of those convicted…..”

– From a letter rejecting my application for a “history on a stick” marker for the Little Rascals case

I respect the committee’s reasoning, even though I doubt I’ll be around when it’s ready to reconsider – in what, 2075?

Dec. 15, 2016

You probably haven’t been asking Google to provide you with daily news alerts about “satanic ritual abuse,” but if you had , the popularity of fake news would come as no surprise.

Decades of debunking may have squelched the wrongful prosecutions of day-care providers, but beneath the surface… well, these headlines sprang from just one day’s news feed:

• Ritual Abuse is Real: Cover-up of Child Sexual and Ritual Abuse

• Cover-up of the Century: Satanic Ritual Abuse and World Conspiracy

• Ritual Abuse: What It Is, Why It Happens, And How To Help

• Breaking the Circle of Satanic Ritual Abuse

• Child Trafficking/Illuminati-Freemason Ritual Abuse

March 9, 2012

“This (Breezy Point Day School) case sounds like the Windshield Pitting Epidemic….

“In the early 1950s, people in the Tacoma-Seattle area began to notice little pits in the windshields of their cars. Rumors started – Martians were landing, it was from nuclear fallout.

“Well, it turns out those pits were always there – they are in every windshield – but no one noticed them until there was anxiety about nuclear testing. For the first time, they were looking at their windshields instead of through them….

“Anxiety makes things take on a different meaning.”

– Mass hysteria specialist Gary Small, psychiatrist at UCLA School of
Medicine, quoted in Philadelphia magazine (April 1991)