Oct. 11, 2011

In 1989 Bob Kelly was charged with 100 counts of child molestation.

In 1992 he was convicted and sentenced to 12 consecutive life sentences.

In 1995 his conviction was overturned and he was released from Central Prison.

“It was the best six years of my life,” he says of his time behind bars, “because it set me up for the rest of my life.”

When he walked out, Kelly was a man who had determined “never to feel ashamed, because I had nothing to be ashamed of.”

Today, remarried and retired at 63, he lives in a tidy suburban house just outside Sanford.

Perhaps the anger he still feels toward those who conspired to imprison him has been compartmentalized.

His attention goes to gardening (“500 pounds of tomatoes this year”), writing and visiting inmates, carving walking sticks out of old Christmas tree trunks, playing Sudoku, hitting golf balls and reading only those Westerns in which “the good guy always wins in the end.”

And he still cooks and cans the spaghetti sauce he once served every Friday at the Little Rascals Day Care Center.

“Freedom don’t ever get old,” he says.

Jan. 16, 2012

Darkness to Light is a Charleston-based nonprofit with the goal “End Child Abuse.” Since its founding in 2000, D2L claims to have trained adults in 48 states and 10 foreign countries in how to prevent, recognize and react to child sexual abuse. Among its allies: YMCAs.

Unfortunately, D2L is less than meticulous in associating itself with other organizations. This is a letter I sent D2L officials on Dec. 5:

Darkness to Light does a disservice to the public and to your cause when you include on your list of resources the Survivorship website.

Survivorship’s board president is Neil Brick, who identifies himself as “the founder of S.M.A.R.T. (Stop Mind Control and Ritual Abuse Today) at http://ritualabuse.us. He is a survivor of ritual abuse and a survivor advocate. He works on developing supports for survivors and getting information out to the general public about ritual abuse. He runs yearly ritual abuse conferences on the east coast of the United States every year at http://ritualabuse.us/smart-conference. Links to his presentation transcripts and research papers are http://ritualabuse.us/smart/neil-brick.”

S.M.A.R.T. is perhaps the most prominent organization still insisting that numerous day-care providers in the 1980s and early 1990s subjected children to “satanic ritual abuse.” Although the day-care panic eventually waned and courts freed nearly all the unfortunate defendants, S.M.A.R.T. continues to see abuse in every one of these cases – from McMartin to Little Rascals to Fells Acres, etc.

Like Scientologists and Holocaust deniers, S.M.A.R.T. has been banned from editing Wikipedia entries. Neither should its disinformation campaign be given a platform by Darkness to Light.

Darkness to Light has yet to respond to that letter or to a Dec. 30 follow-up soliciting “a statement explaining why you continue to support this organization.”  I’d be happy to publish such an explanation, but even happier to learn that D2L has cut its ties to the ritual abuse movement.

Oct. 7, 2013

“Today (in 2001), few contend that the interview techniques used at the outset of the Fells Acres child abuse investigation, in 1984, were proper and reliable. Middlesex County (Mass.) prosecutors admitted to appellate judges in the 1990s that those techniques – characterized by repeated suggestive questioning about molestation despite initial avowals by the children that nothing of that kind occurred – would not be employed today.

“In 1998, Superior Court Judge Isaac Borenstein ruled that under current Massachusetts law, the manner in which the Fells Acres children were first interrogated would have constituted grounds to have the case dismissed.

“That questioning included hundreds of taped episodes such as this:

• Pediatric interviewer (Susan J. Kelley): “Did the clown touch you?”
• Child witness: “No. …”
• Interviewer: “You said the clown took your clothes off. …”
• Child: “Yeah. …”
• Interviewer: “What happened?”
• Child: “Well, nothing really.”
• Interviewer: “Did the clown touch … Will you show me if the clown touched any part of you?”
• Child: “No, he didn’t touch me.”

“The child interviewed in the above example testified against Gerald Amirault at his 1986 trial, and believes to this day that she was molested by an ‘evil clown.’ ”

– From “Memories questioned, but victim still certain of ‘evil’…. Studies say kids can be easily led” by Tom Mashberg in the Boston Herald (July 8, 2001)

So what happens to the professional prospects of a “pediatric interviewer” whose ludicrously biased questioning led to the conviction of not only Gerald Amirault, but also his mother and sister?  In the short term, Susan J. Kelley had to endure even her prosecutorial allies disavowing her “suggestive techniques.”

Soon, however, Kelley’s career was back on track,  unimpeded by the tragedy wrought by her blindered incompetence. She has never apologized…. although her lengthy current resume does omit mention of her role in the day-care ritual-abuse hoax, either as a prosecutorial interviewer or as an academic apologist.

Nov. 18, 2015

“Readers who want a deeper look at how young children’s accounts of CSA (child sexual abuse) were discredited in the same time frame of the (Roman Catholic) clergy CSA scandal should read Ross Cheit’s 2014 book ‘Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology and the Sexual Abuse of Children’….

– From “ ‘Spotlight’ Gets A Lot Right” by Colleen Friend in the Chronicle of Social Change (Nov. 15)

Whoa.

The clergy sex abuse scandal at the center of the just-released newsroom drama “Spotlight” had nothing to do with the “satanic ritual abuse” moral panic so earnestly if unpersuasively denied by Professor Cheit.

Clergy abuse was all too real, and the evidence proved undeniable; abuse in day cares was a fantasy produced by undertrained and overreaching therapists. Tragically, the children’s accounts that were “discredited” were their original denials that they had experienced abuse.

Worth noting: Dr. Friend is former director of Stuart House in Santa Monica, Calif., a child abuse treatment center opened to accommodate the tidal wave of (mostly imaginary) abuse cases spawned by McMartin.