Sept. 17, 2012

I don’t doubt that prosecutors asked themselves many questions during the course of the Little Rascals case. “Think it’s gonna rain tomorrow, Nancy?” Or maybe “You want anchovies on yours, Bill?”

On more relevant issues, however, they seem to have been remarkably incurious. For instance….

■ Why did none of the defendants in the state’s biggest sex-abuse case have any history of sex crimes?

■ When sex-abusers of children are almost always men, why were five of the Edenton Seven women?

■ Why was there a complete absence of physical evidence?

■ Why did none of the frequently cited child-porn photographs ever turn up?

■ At a day care where parents came and went often and unpredictably, why did not one adult ever report anything suspicious?

■ Why was every child seen by prosecution therapists determined to have been abused, but none of those seen by out-of-town therapists?

■ When criminal conspiracies almost always collapse at the first offer of a plea deal, why did none of these defendants agree to point a finger at the others?

■ Could it really be just coincidence that these allegations surfaced so soon after a day-care ritual-abuse seminar attended by the Edenton police officer who would lead the investigation?

For prosecutors to have raised such questions, of course, would risk recognizing their career-making case as a colossal sham. Better to stay blindered and to forge ahead….

Dec. 21, 2011

“Is it not plain that the people had frightened their children with so many tales that they could not sleep without dreaming of the devil, and then made the poor women of the town confess what the children said of them?”

– From Francis Hutchinson’s “Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft” (1718) describing the 1669 “seduction” of 300 children in Mora, Sweden, which resulted in the burning of 85 “witnesses” (cited in “Victims of Memory” by Mark Pendergrast)

May 17, 2013

From Betsy Kelly’s comments at the ceremony awarding Ofra Bikel the 2007 John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism:

“I stand before you tonight because of Ofra Bikel. She spent many hours with my family and with some of the most hurtful and hateful people. She turned many (viewers) around to believe in the truth. The day she walked into my life I had somebody to hold onto… and she opened the door and she led me out…..”

From Nancy Smith Barrow’s comments:

“I thought: She comes from another planet, she doesn’t speak Southern, what can she do?

“I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to climb into that hole we were in…

“Ofra took us where we were, where hell was raining down, where people who have known us since we were born would cross the street not to meet us….

“Ofra, I owe you for the most precious thing in my life (my sister), you brought her back…..”

From Ofra Bikel’s comments:

“I was this close to not doing (‘Innocence Lost’). I said (to assistant Rachel Dretzin), ‘Are you crazy? What are we going to do in a little town with a little hotel that doesn’t take American Express?’…. Anyway, we went, and the first day I realized we were staying….

“The whole country was awash in sexual abuse stories, but there was nothing less likely than for Edenton, North Carolina, to be involved in this satanic conspiracy… The town was calm on outside but seething on the inside with these rumors of terrible sexual abuse, started by one kid, then three kids, then 10 kids, then 80 and then close to a hundred… until they decided to close the list….

“(After the last Little Rascals charges were dropped) I was left with two very strong feelings: how many things can go wrong in the justice system…. and what a powerful tool we had in our hands with the television documentary….”

Nov. 28, 2011

“The Little Rascals case offers a trove of testimony illustrating how immersion into the popular psychology of sexual abuse gave parent-experts the terms and concepts to retrospectively interpret their children’s behaviors and emotions, and to do so with the ring of authority….

“One mother testified that once she had learned the psychology of sexual abuse, she realized her child’s denial that anything untoward had happened at the day care center actually was a sign that he had been sexually abused.”

– From “The Day Care Ritual Abuse Moral Panic” by Mary De Young (2004)