Sept. 26, 2012

“The (Little Rascals) kids stories have unerringly followed the ritual abuse plot, progressing lately to tales of witnessing babies slaughtered. Perhaps not coincidentally, their most bizarre allegations began surfacing around the time that 27 million viewers watched ‘Do You Know the Muffin Man?’ a (Lifetime TV) movie that rehashed details from several ritual abuse cases, but included the wholly fictional climax of parents discovering day-care teachers worshipping the devil amidst piles of kiddie porn.”

– From “The Ritual Sex Abuse Hoax” by Debbie Nathan (Village Voice, January 12, 1990)

“Muffin Man” aired October 22, 1989 – simultaneous with not only the ongoing arrests of Little Rascals defendants but also the satanic-baby-kidnap rumor sweeping East North Carolina.

“These stories keep cropping up all over the country,” observes the “Muffin Man” prosecutor. “With this many Satan ritual abuse cases, there has got to be something out there.” (In the Little Rascals case, this “Where there’s smoke…” rationale was most notoriously put forth by UNC Chapel Hill psychologist Mark Everson.)

In Bucks County, Pa., however, District Attorney Alan Rubenstein couldn’t help noticing that complaints about ritual abuse at Breezy Point Day School went from a trickle to a torrent the day after “Muffin Man” aired. Unlike so many other prosecutors in Edenton and elsewhere, Rubenstein saw through the claims and crushingly debunked them.

Nov. 27, 2019

Betsy Kelly is paroled from the Correctional Institution for Women in Raleigh.

In January she accepted a plea of “no contest” and a sentence of seven years in prison. Since she had already served two years and two weeks in jail, she became eligible for parole almost immediately. But Assistant Attorney General Bill Hart, fuming over her unwavering insistence that she was innocent, reneged on an agreement not to challenge her release, and the Parole Commission kept her imprisoned another 10 months.

Betsy Kelly’s no contest plea disqualifies her from the National Registry of Exonerations, but she is surely as innocent as the rest of the Edenton Seven – that is, completely innocent, Bill Hart be damned.

July 13, 2012

“It is painful to admit this, but when the McMartin story first hit the news, the two of us, independently, were inclined to believe that the preschool teachers were guilty. Not knowing the details of the allegations, we mindlessly accepted the ‘where there’s smoke, there’s fire’ cliché; as scientists, we should have known better.

“When, months after the trial ended, the full story came out – about the emotionally disturbed mother who made the first accusation and whose charges became crazier and crazier until even the prosecution stopped paying attention to her; about how the children had been coerced over many months to ‘tell’ by zealous social workers on a moral crusade; about how the children’s stories became increasingly outlandish – we felt foolish and embarrassed that we had sacrificed our scientific skepticism on the altar of outrage.

“But our dissonance is nothing compared with that of the people who were personally involved in or who took a public stand, including the many psychotherapists, psychiatrists and social workers who consider themselves skilled clinicians and advocates for children’s rights.

– From “Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)” by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson (2007)

Of course, not everyone who “mindlessly accepted the ‘where there’s smoke, there’s fire’ cliché’ ” has recovered his misplaced scientific skepticism.

July 15, 2014

“I realize I’m a little flip when I say 80 percent of the evidence is trash, but it is.

“I thought sooner or later some editorialist was going to write, ‘That sorry judge should have done something.’ And yet if I stopped it, it would have been a problem in an appeal….”

– Judge Marsh McLelland, in an interview published April 1, 1992, in the Greensboro News & Record, shortly after the jury began deliberations in the trial of Bob Kelly

Given that McLelland had been overseeing the Kelly case for more than 17 months – and still had Dawn Wilson’s trial ahead of him – I suppose he deserved to grumble a bit about the tedium.

But what an odd comment about wanting to avoid “a problem in an appeal” – did he believe only the defense was responsible for producing “trash” evidence?