Aug. 17, 2012

“I’ve wondered how the prosecutors (in ritual-abuse day-care cases) could live with themselves.

“Says Debbie Nathan (coauthor of “Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt”): ‘There was a time – and it lasted eight or nine years – when there was an entire body of expert opinion that these things could happen.’ It was a time, she says, when pseudoscience had raced ahead of science, when best-selling books that had yet to be contradicted asserted that the inability to remember a trauma was the strongest proof of it, when doctors trying to be helpful established as a baseline a model virginal hymen so perfectly smooth and shaped that it allowed any actual hymen to be construed as traumatized.

“ ‘Our culture is still really atavistic,’ says Nathan, ‘but there’s an overlay of science on it. Mix the totally primeval stuff with science and you’ve got this mix that can’t be beat.’ Prosecutors, she says, ‘are just as naive as anyone else, but they also know how to sway people. They have all the techniques down pat. “Suffer the little children.” “Innocence defiled.” “Worse than murder.” ‘

“But why, as science and truth become clearer, is it so hard for so many prosecutors to recant?…  ‘Maybe it’s because the whole process of constructing one of these innocent people as a really demonically evil sexual pervert who sadistically violates lots of kids – the whole process of constructing this character on a real person is torture. You have to be very invasive. It’s a very sadistic enterprise. You become like a torturer.’ ”

– From “Why Can’t They Admit They Were Wrong?” by John Conroy
in the Chicago Reader (Aug. 1, 2003)

April 16, 2016

“To many in the criminal justice system, it is now a source of embarrassment that there was ever a time when police and prosecutors were convinced that bands of Satanists had infiltrated the nation’s day care centers in order to abuse young children. Yet in the (Fran and Dan Keller case), which I investigated for the Austin Chronicle back in 2009, I was startled to hear both a veteran cop and a prosecutor say they still believed in even the most absurd of the children’s allegations….

– From “Convicted of a Crime That Never Happened: Why Won’t Texas Exonerate Fran and Dan Keller?” by Jordan Smith at the Intercept (April 8)

Nov. 8, 2013

While we await Gov. McCrory’s decision on whether to promote Nancy Lamb to district attorney, another key figure in the Little Rascals prosecution is stepping aside.

From the Elizabeth City Daily Advance:

EDENTON – Judge Chris Bean, chief district court judge in the 1st Judicial District, does not plan to seek re-election to another term.

Bean, who has been a judge for more than two decades, said recently he plans to step down when his current term ends in December 2014.

“I have been doing this for 20-some years,” Bean said. “It has been a fascinating career.”

Unmentioned by Judge Bean (or by the Advance, which seems to have purged Little Rascals from its memory)  is his deeply prejudicial testimony against former client Bob Kelly.

Bean and Lamb have continued to share an immunity to just consequences. (Compare the enormity of the Little Rascals prosecution with the penny-ante misconduct that typically brings about disbarment in North Carolina.)

Only their innocent victims – the Edenton Seven, the child witnesses – paid a price, and it was a high one indeed.

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.