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.
On Facebook
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.
Click for earlier Facebook posts archived on this site
Click to go to
Today’s random selection from the Little Rascals Day Care archives….
Donald Trump has Harvey. Nancy Lamb had Floyd.

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.”
![]()
Prosecutors turned on by nonexistent porn tape
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?”
Richard Kluft, ‘advocate of moderation’?
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.
When did Little Rascals myth become lie?
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.





