Dec. 7, 2016

“If you do a Google search right now for ‘McMartin preschool tunnels,’ you will be inundated with ‘studies’ and ‘reports’ that ‘prove’ the tunnels did exist, and that the lurid fictions prompted out of the children by ambitious social workers were therefore true. Nothing dies on the Internet, not even the most arrant lunacy….

“One of [Donald Trump’s] primary surrogates, Scottie Nell Hughes, told an NPR panel that ‘There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts.’ But we have not ‘entered’ an age of post-truth politics. We’ve been living in it for years. The Executive Branch of the government just has been slow to catch up. Now, it’s right there with the rest of us, god help the country. We’re all just the children of McMartin now. We’ll say anything we’re told until we come to believe it ourselves.”

– From “America Was Always a Nation of Conspiracy Theorists. Now, They’re Simply More Dangerous: Lessons from Pizzagate” by Charles P. Pierce in Esquire (Dec. 5)

Nov. 27, 2014

“Of the dozen or so historical markers clustered in the town of Edenton, only one – recognizing novelist Inglis Fletcher – postdates the 1800s.

“The North Carolina Highway Historical Marker Committee now has the opportunity, 25 years after the first arrest in the Little Rascals case, to add to that number a 20th Century event inarguably significant in the legal and social history of not just North Carolina but also the nation.”

– From my application proposing “history on a stick” recognition for the Little Rascals Day Care case

The marker committee, composed of historians from four-year colleges across the state, will meet in December to decide which pending applications meet its criteria.

July 11, 2012

“And what did Doctor (Mark) Everson say what to look for? A coherent package that’s consistent. You look at the behavior and what the child says…. He talked about sexual acting out, coaxing sexual behavior, masturbation, fears, and anxieties. New fears that come up that aren’t developmentally appropriate for a child that age, such as a fear of men or a particular man, changes in their personality caused by stress like regressive behavior, bed wetting, clinginess, thumb sucking.

“And as I name these, I hope that you are sitting there remembering how many of these children so far have had these kinds of behaviors.”

– From prosecutor Nancy Lamb’s closing argument in the trial of Bob Kelly

“… What could be expected for ritually abused children? That vexing question prompted everyone involved in the McMartin Preschool case to look for symptoms, and in their urgency, to mistake normal developmentally-based behaviors, quirky idiosyncrasies and even the iatrogenic effects of intimidating interviews for sequelae of ritual abuse. In this nascent moral panic, the widely circulated ‘symptom lists‘ transformed messy subjectivity into embodied and interpretable texts….”

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

To day-care ritual-abuse prosecutors, what Nancy Lamb called “these kinds of behaviors” embraced everything from bed-wetting to hyperactivity to eating disorders. No dot went unconnected.

Contrary to such handy lists, however, numerous studies have found no “coherent package” of symptoms of child sexual abuse.

March 31, 2015

“…The watershed event marking the shift in public opinion on these (“satanic ritual abuse” day care) cases was the HBO airing of ‘Indictment: The McMartin Trial’ (watchable here on YouTube) in May 1995, wherein Ray Buckey, the child-molesting villain of the McMartin trial, was recast as the victim of a hysterical conspiracy theory.

“Five years earlier, no major television network would have dared question the infallibility of the testimony of ravished, innocent babes. A network like HBO is closely attuned to shifts in the public mood.

“Such TV dramas and feature films are generally more likely to respond to existing trends in public opinion on controversial issues than to break new ground, and so this docudrama marked a sort of closure on the issue in the public imagination, though the judicial system cannot shift direction so quickly.”

– From “The Metanarrative of Suspicion in Late Twentieth-Century America” by Sandra Baringer (2004)

Eighteen days before HBO broadcast “Indictment,” the North Carolina Court of Appeals had overturned the convictions of Bob Kelly and Dawn Wilson, but Kelly’s torture at the hands of the state was far from over: A year later he would be charged with raping a young girl outside the day care in 1987. Was prosecutor Nancy Lamb unable to “shift direction so quickly” – or simply unwilling?