Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Satanic Panic: America's First QAnon

Episode Date: October 27, 2020

Robert is joined by Jake Hanrahan to discuss Satanic Panic.FOOTNOTES: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDTFpof39-U&feature=emb_title https://delanirbartlette.medium.com/the-satanic-panic-and-the-west-memphis-three-e833532970b0w http://www.religioustolerance.org/ra_baker.htm https://theconversation.com/the-legacy-of-implanted-satanic-abuse-memories-is-still-causing-damage-today-43755 https://dangerousminds.net/comments/sex_lies_and_satanism_the_rise_and_fall_of_christian_comedian_mike_warnke https://www.vox.com/2016/10/30/13413864/satanic-panic-ritual-abuse-history-explained http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mcmartin/mcmartinaccount.html https://www.cbr.com/1980s-dungeons-dragons-satanic-panic/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHf0TIO0Axs https://io9.gizmodo.com/a-brief-history-of-satanic-panic-in-the-1980s-1679476373 https://greyfaction.org/resources/grey-faction-reports/satanic-panic-misogynist/ https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/31/us/proof-lacking-for-ritual-abuse-by-satanists.html https://archive.org/stream/a_cristian_response_to_dungeons_and_dragons/a_cristian_response_to_dungeons_and_dragons_djvu.txt https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079J6GXMS/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 https://www.amazon.com/We-Believe-Children-Moral-Panic-ebook/dp/B00X2ZW9H2/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=we+believe+the+children&qid=1603768283&s=digital-text&sr=1-1 Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's alleging networks of child abuse that don't really exist? My entire world now. Jesus Christ, that was a bad introduction. I liked it.

Thank you, Sophie. Thank you for your relentless positivity. This is Behind the Bastards. I'm Robert Evans, and my guest today is my friend and colleague, Jake Hanrahan. Jake, how are you doing, man? Good, thank you, man. Thank you for having me on again. Yeah, and you, Jake, you have a podcast now, another podcast. You've always had a podcast. Another one. Yeah, man. It's a new one we're doing, Q clearance. Sophie's been helping me with it. We have a podcast about QAnon and about, you know, the searching for the person or persons behind it, right? Yeah, trying to kind of lay it out for people that are not 100% familiar as well.

Like, I kind of realized that a lot of the QAnon media is very focused on either like four QAnon people, or it's kind of for the community that research, you know, I kind of wanted to bring everybody together to be like, let's make everyone understand it, you know what I'm saying? And so far, so good. You know, Jake, I admire what you're doing. I think it's important. And I wanted to help you out. And the way I wanted to help you out was by lending a bit of historical context, because what we have with QAnon, I think it's fair to say in brief, is like a massive, almost now international delusion about networks of satanic child murderers and traffickers, right? Have you figured it out yet, Jake? QAnon is not the first time this happened.

And today, Jake, we're going to talk about the satanic panic. Okay. I couldn't have guessed that one, man. No, it's interesting. It's interesting. It's perfect for me. Thank you so much. I just can't believe you haven't listened to episode two of QClear. It's where we talk about satanic panic. This is so much through it. It was enormous. I didn't know most of this stuff when I started reading about it. It's a fucking nightmare. And you're going to hate this episode. I hated writing it. It involved a lot of reading lurid, lengthy stories of child molestation that never happened,

but that children were convinced had happened to them, which is somehow, yeah, more disturbing almost than actual child molestation, like the idea that like a kid... People convincing them that it happened to them, right? Like, why would you make someone feel the worst thing ever if they didn't actually feel it, you know? It's completely fucked. I can't believe this is what you picked for Jake, except that I completely believe that this is what you picked. Yeah, we're going to talk about some fun shit. We're going to talk about Dungeons and Dragons. We're going to talk about the West Memphis Three. We're going to talk about the McMartin preschool scandal.

It's going to be fucking terrible. But first, we're going to go back in time a little bit, Jake, because the ideological soil that QAnon and the satanic panic grew in didn't start with either of those things. So let's talk about 177 AD or CE or whatever we're supposed to say, Europe. Let's talk about that. This is about, you know, 177 AD is about a century or so before Emperor Constantine was like, you know, brought Christianity to the Roman Empire and stuff. So things are still pretty pagan in Roman society, but Christianity exists and the pagans do not like it.

They've got these like weird people who are kind of on the fringes of society, and they start making up shit about them. So in the city of Lyon in modern day France, rumors started spreading that members of the Christian community there were secretly raping and cannibalizing their own children. Angry and probably drunken mobs of pagan Romans chased the Christian community out of their homes, beat them, stoned them and tortured their household slaves until the slaves admitted that their masters had been eating and molesting babies. With confessions in hand, the mob then massacred the entire Christian community of Lyon. Back when Europe was cool, basically.

Yeah, fucking rad as hell. So that massacre was an example of what anthropologists call demoniology. So not demonology, demon-o-i-o-g-y. And yeah, the authors of Satan's Silence, which is, have you read that book? It's fucking incredible. Satan's Silence, yeah. Yeah, it's really good, the defining work of the Satanic Panic era. And the authors of that book define demoniology as the narrative specific to every culture

that identifies the ultimate evil threatening the group during periods of social turmoil and moral crisis, societal preoccupation with its demoniology intensifies. So in pagan Rome, the ultimate evil was like the ultimate outsiders, the Christians at this point, like the people saying, no, there's only one God, right? So they get demonized and people start telling stories about the molesting and murdering children. Now, once Christianity became the dominant religion in Europe, its adherents found their own evil to oppress in the way that they'd once been oppressed. In the 12th century, a myth began to spread across the English countryside initially about Jewish rabbis murdering Christian babies.

This quickly spread all over Europe. And you start having this, like it's still around. Always Jews, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, they, of course, they're always, yeah. This kind of like was an early meme and it spread that way around Europe and like pamphlets and even like, you can still find churches in Europe that like in stained glass reliefs will have like images of what's called the blood libel. Rabbis murdering Christian babies to make mods. Yeah.

And it's the same kind of thing, right? Myths that this group of social outsiders is gathering up and murdering and probably molesting children. And Christians like killed so many Jews during this period as a result of the spread of this myth that later during the Reformation, there weren't like any Jewish people left in a lot of communities. So they had to find a new ultimate evil inside their community to go after. And this is where we get the witch hunts, right? Like everybody knows vaguely the story and they took different forms over the centuries, but the gist of the threat was always the same.

Satan is real and he's trying to destroy our community via some member on the fringe of our community who's working with the devil, right? Like that's the idea. And it happens a bunch of times. It happens in Europe. It happens obviously in the United States. You get the Salem witch trials and you have different groups of people targeted, right? Sometimes it's midwives. Sometimes it's just like members of the community like in Salem who start accusing each other of things.

And kind of one of the things that always marks witch hunts is that like there may be initially a specific group that's targeted, but once a real good witch hunt gets going, pretty much everyone winds up accusing everybody, right? Like that's what people do, yeah. Yeah, I remember reading a weird story where like a guy like pronounced something like differently to the rest of the town. And they were just like, yeah, he's a witch. Yeah, exactly. There was no escape, you know? People go fucking, it is one of those things.

You know, I'm a pretty staunch fan of the concept of democracy. But man, reading too much about witch hunts makes you like, oh shit. I don't know how we're going to get out of here. Fuck. They all voted to kill him. Yeah, they voted. Yeah. Drowning.

Go. Yeah, it's not good. Yeah, so once the United States became a thing, it showed a marked talent for witch hunts. And I have to say, like, y'all over in Europe and shit can do some pretty good witch hunts. But the USA, like, we are good at mass murdering each other over rumors of the devil. Witch hunts on steroids, right? Yeah, yeah, we're fucking great at it. And of course, like, you know, Jewish people got blamed for a variety of things, but also Catholics.

During the 1830s and 40s, Protestants in America were so frightened of Catholics that rumors started to spread about nuns consorting with the devil and molest murdering a bunch of little kids. I'm going to quote again from Satan's Silence here because this is some shit that sounds exactly like the shit happening now. Several books were written by women claiming to be ex-nuns who had escaped from convents where they witnessed orgies, torture, witchcraft, and the slaughter of infants. One account was so popular that in the years before the Civil War, its sales were surpassed only by Uncle Tom's cabin. During the same period, ex-nuns and priests, real or feigned, made a handsome living touring the country and testifying about the slaughter of innocents at the hands of mothers superior and bishops. It's the same fucking thing, like, they're going around and making money off it. You've got, like, fucking praying medic types in 1840. Like, it's fucking...

Yeah, literally, yeah. It's kind of funny though, it's like late the Catholics did do a lot of bad shit to the kids. Oh, absolutely, yeah. But not the devil stuff. Yeah, no, and, like, yeah, you have to assume that some of this started from, like, well, yeah, a bunch of fucking priests are molesting kids. Right, just, like, just throwing a devil as well, like, why not? Yeah, they're eating them as well, like, okay. Yeah, now they're eating them, yeah.

My people's, man. Yeah. So that's kind of the backstory of this really weirdly consistent thing that humans do, which is accuse groups on the margins of murdering and molesting children, right? Very consistent, that it's always like, if you're going to really demonize a group, you accuse them of going after little kids. And it goes back way more than a thousand years. I think it's like the ultimate evil, right? Yeah. Like, what's the worst thing you can do, like, harm a kid?

Exactly. So it's like, let's go with that. Yeah, let's fucking go with that. Now, we're going to have to cover a lot of other backstory in the United States before we actually get to the Satanic Panic, because the reason that the Satanic Panic was able to get so bad, and the reason that, like, one of the things you have with the Satanic Panic is you have all of these, like, lurid stories of devil worship and these kids testifying that they've been raped because they've had false memories implanted in them and stuff. And all of that was only possible because of a shitload of things that happened in the United States that made it the perfect soil for something like this. So we're going to explain kind of all of the different things that made it possible first. So one factor in the Satanic Panic being a thing that could happen was the fact that starting with our old buddy L. Ron Hubbard in the 1950s, cults started to get super mainstream in the United States in the 1960s and 70s.

And one of the ones that, like, got the most public perception was the Manson cult, which carried out a string of grisly murders in August of 1969. The most famous Manson killing was the murder of Sharon Tate, Abigail Folger, and several other less famous people. I think they killed five people at once in this, like, big compound that was, like, Roman Polanski's house, but he was out at the time. And these murders were incredibly grisly, and they had elements that police at the time described as ritualistic. I don't know that they actually were ritualistic murders, but it was described as ritualistic murder. So you have these cults. There's that great book, Right Chaos, by Tom O'Neill, and it just dispels all of that. Like, it was just, again, it's part of the Satanic Panic.

They just rolled with it, even though they were saying the stuff was bullshit. Yeah, yeah, and it is bullshit, but people at the time believe it. So you've got suddenly, number one, cults are all over the place. And then you've got this cult murdering people. And then in the 1970s, you get the Zodiac killer and the son of Sam and the alphabet killer. And all of these were mass murderers whose slayings had, like, weird, ritualistic and a cult seeming overtones to them. So people start to, like, get, like, really convinced that this is a thing that actually happens, right? That, like, and they have some, you know, if you are a person who reads the news in this period,

you've got what you think is solid evidence that this is a problem, that there's ritualistic cults out there murdering people for a cult, you know, purposes. Now, the 1970s also happened to be the decade where Satanism went, I don't know, mainstream is probably saying too much. But it became, like, it became, like, an organized thing, right? Anton Leves publishes the Satanic Bible in 1969, which became the central text for the Church of Satan. Which probably had its heyday in the 1970s. Now, the reality is that the Satanic Bible was both largely plagiarized and more or less just a self-help book with an edgy rapping to it. This did not stop people who hadn't read it from flipping the fuck out.

So the Church of Satan, again, fundamentally pretty peaceful thing, has maybe 5,000 members in the U.S. at its height during this period. But all of this shit happening, like, you know, with the Mansons and with these ritual murders and then all the shit that's happening in Hollywood in terms of, like, the movies that are coming up, kind of cooks it into the center of a conspiracy. So in 1973, you have the best-selling novel, The Exorcist, adapted into a film. We all know about The Exorcist, big part of it is demonic possession. And in order to improve ticket sales, its producers claim that it was based on a true story, which was a lie.

They were, like, some elements were taken out of a story of an actual priest who had an exorcism, but, like, it had bore no resemblance to anything that happened in the book. A priest once existed, true story. Yeah, a priest once existed, and he was a little off, yeah. Demonic possession hadn't been a massive topic in American culture in this period, but after The Exorcist, it becomes, like, a huge topic of discussion. For one thing, there's hundreds of, like, movies that come out that are based on, like, similar premises, right? The thing that, like, little bitty, shitty B-movie producers always do, like, they rip off the big popular movie.

And for most Americans, obviously, this just meant that we got a bunch of fun horror movies that involved demonic possession. But among the nascent Christian rite, which in this period was starting to form into a political block for the first time in the United States, The Exorcist was seen as a deadly warning. This was helped along by a new species of evangelical Christian grifter, themselves inspired by the Church of Satan, the fake former Satanist. So you start having former Satanists, kind of like these former Catholic nuns, popping up in this period and lecturing about things they had supposedly done. Now, the most prominent of these guys was Mike Warnke, who published his book, Satan's Cellar, in 1972.

Satan's Cellar recounted a childhood and young adulthood that Warnke claimed had been spent, like, as a hardcore devil worshiper. He claimed that he'd been a Satanic high priest and that he'd been involved in ritualistic sex orgies. He went into detail about ritual murders, child murder, and mass rape, claiming that he'd participated in a variety of capital offenses, until Jesus saved him by sending him to Vietnam. He saved him by doing that. What a horrible guy. A bit grim in it. Yeah, there were a lot of Satanists back in the 60s and 70s. We had to get them all off the nom to clear that shit out.

It seems so. Yeah, it's pretty wild because all of these guys, like Warnke, they would all claim to have taken part in, like, serious crimes that never got investigated. So you'd think people would be like, you said you murdered a bunch of babies. Right, no one was like, oh, yeah, he's just admitted it in writing. It just all feeds into itself, right? Absolutely, it does. And Mike Warnke is kind of the biggest person who starts this avalanche. And he's within the bubble of Christian media, which was a lot smaller back then, he was a huge celebrity. And he actually cracked over into the mainstream to an extent.

He showed up on Oprah, on Larry King, and on 2020, telling lurid stories about his supposed past as a devil worshiper. He also used his past as a Satanist to launch a career as a Christian stand-up comedian. Well, that's so American, I love it. Yeah, it's incredibly American. You couldn't come up with a better, like, hot story. Yeah, it's very funny. Now, for reasons I will never be able to explain, Warnke saw massive success hybridizing his stand-up routine with his claims about child, like, sex abuse and Satanism, which led to some really baffling recordings like the one I'm about to play you from his 1989 stand-up routine.

Do you hear me? In it, he starts with incredibly lame jokes. And I'm going to play you a selection of his jokes, just so you can get an idea of what the tenor of his stand-up act is like. You told me this was going to be a Christian thing, and I can tell you right now that boy up there on stage, he is not a Christian, because he's got that long hair. Why do people drive on parkways and park on driveways? What is daylight savings time? And if we're saving so much of it, who's got it all? How do you know when yogurt's gone bad? How do you get Teflon to stick to a skillet when nothing sticks to Teflon? I'm not hearing you laugh, Jake. Do you not enjoy his comedy?

I mean, you know when you're at Christmas, you get like a joke and a cracker. It's that level of like, you just turn cracker jokes into like stand-up. Oh, that's bad. He looks like, I don't know man, he looks actually kind of like the devil worshipper from like pre-detectives. He does look like a Satanist, right? Like a movie Satanist, no offense to the actual Satanist in the audience. You would cast him as one, right? Yeah, like this guy looks evil. Yeah, and he definitely is. So like, you've got those jokes, which are like the most milk toast nonsense that you could possibly put in a stand-up routine. And then in the middle of them, he starts talking about deadly serious anecdotes about ritual genital mutilation and sacrifice. And again, this is in the middle of a stand-up set to a bunch of kids.

Christian kids. Yeah, Christian kids and their families. I met a little girl who was murdered last year in 1987 in the state of Louisiana by having her sexual organs cut out while she was still alive. Oh. A lot of you think that when a Satanist kills, they do so because they want to spill blood. You've seen enough late night movies to think that. But if a Satanist or any other kind of occultist kills an animal or a human sacrifice, it's not to spill blood. It's to release the life force.

Because when the life force is released and you've done the right incantations and rituals, you can absorb that force, they say. And it makes you a stronger wizard warlock. Or whatever. Wizard warlock. And the longer the death, the more prolonged the death. And the more agonizing the death, the more force is released. So they took this little girl and they killed her by cutting her sexual organs out while she was still alive. Yeah.

Okay. Great comedy set. Really? Yeah. Way to lighten the mood. You know, I've done some stand up by a friends who did it. That's a definite choice in terms of how to end your set. Yeah.

Oh, by the way, the killer got cut up and it was me. Let me lie about it. So he's saying he's a part of all this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's fucking enough. It's complete nonsense. Right? Obviously.

Why isn't he being investigated? No, I mean, you listen to that though and like the audience is deadly quiet. You have to assume they're all buying this shit. Like there seemed to be taking him very, and he was taken very seriously, which is a problem because he was a preposterous liar. Actual journalists sat down with Warnkees family and friends to ask them about his claims, which included the fact that he'd lived in a witch's coven with 1,500 other people. And that he'd been a horrible drug addict and all of his family,

everyone who knew him laughed at all of this. Of course, we fucking grew up with him. He was just a nerd. He's just a nerd, exactly. And there were a bunch of obvious holes in his story. For example, he claimed that Charles Manson had attended one of his deadly ritual sacrifice parties in 1966. Unfortunately, the exact time that he claimed the party happened occurred at the same time as one of Manson's stints in federal prison from a parole violation.

So he could not have been there. There's actually a whole book that was published proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Warnkees was a liar. And in fairness, the journalists in it were two Christian journalists who worked for an evangelical news site who were like, this guy is fucking full of shit, clearly. Right, right. There's nothing wrong with Christians. It's like these guys literally even take advantage of evangelicals. Exactly.

He's grifting these people by scaring them. It's very horrible what he's doing. Not only is his comedy bad, but he's frightening people. It's bad to frighten people for no reason, I would say. Yeah, so. Unless it's funny. Unless it's funny. Yeah, I mean, yeah, absolutely.

It's funny that yes. But he's absolutely not. Yeah. But yeah, the fact that Warnkees was like, he had a private jet at one point. He was, or at least he claimed he had a private jet. I don't know, but he was very popular. Like he was a huge deal for a while. Now, right around the same time, Warnkees was starting to preach about ritual satanic murder,

which is again, in the midst of all these cults and Zodiac killers and shit, something else was happening in American society. People were starting to accept that child sexual abuse was a thing and was a major problem, which is a good thing, right? Obviously. And for a long time, like people, you know, it is one of those things when you go back in time, like it was kind of, people really didn't give as much of a shit about kids as you might expect back in the day. It was the same in the UK.

Yeah, absolutely. People were like, oh, we used to just let our kids out and play anytime you could do that back then, like as if Papyrus didn't exist. Yeah, it wasn't a great thing to like ignore your kids. It's not good. Yeah. Back then either. But yeah, people start to accept that it's a thing and there starts to be like,

an industry starts to build up of people who are child protection advocates, which again is a good thing, but aspects of it go terribly wrong. Save the children, am I right? Yeah, it's really messed up because getting people to accept that child sexual abuse was a problem was one of the first victories, major victories of the modern feminist movement, right? Not talking about like the Suffragettes, but like people like Gloria Steinem and stuff. And this is like a really big victory that they're getting people to take this seriously. And initially, their understanding and the understanding of most people was that most abuse victims were young girls,

primarily daughters who were violated by incestuous fathers. And it is absolutely true that most kids who are molested are molested by a close family member or a friend of the family. Now, as a result, the problem of child sexual abuse was generally referred to as a problem with incest during this period. So you see a lot of people talking about incest and they're not talking like when we talk about incest today, it generally means something different. They're talking about child sexual abuse as a rule when they talk about incest in this period. So feminists argued that the solution to this was greater gender equality, which would enable girls to more effectively say no to the demands of their abusive male relatives

and it would allow wives to stand up to their husbands. And they also argued that part, I don't think is accurate, but they also argued that it would give mothers the option of taking their kids out of the house because they'd be able to have a job at a checking account. And that part actually does seem like a realistic remedy. So again, yeah. Yeah, right. Like there's nothing wrong with that. Like that makes no.

Yeah. It does make sense. It's a good thing to do. But like every thing that people do, there were problematic and faulty aspects of it, including the fact how people began to sort of look at the problem of the men who were doing the molesting. And I'm going to quote again from Satan's Silence here. These feminist visions were obscured, however, by an intransigent society-wide insistence that the problem lay merely in the minds of a few troubled men. Accordingly, the cure for sex abuse was psychotherapy coupled with family counseling.

And if treatment was all that was necessary, sex abuse was not so much a crime as an illness. Hence, rather than calling for careful impartial investigation by the police, accusations demanded intervention by psychotherapists prepared to take the side of the aggrieved daughter and to heal the perpetrator, even if he insisted the charges were false. So again, we'll talk about some of the problems that this causes. Obviously, good that it's being taken seriously, but also, yeah, we'll cover the aspects of this that are problematic. So the first comprehensive legal remedy to the problem of child sex abuse was Walter Mondale's 1973 Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, or CAPTA. And CAPTA set aside money to research child abuse for the first time, which is great.

Definitely a good thing. Researching like the causes of it, it also gave money to states so they could set up treatment programs, which was more of a mixed bag. Because in order to get the act through congressional Republicans and get it approved by President Nixon, Mondale had to water down some things. See, the data suggested that the most significant driving factor behind child abuse of any kind was poverty. But Republicans didn't want to hear that, so out the door it went. Corporal punishment was also understood to be a major part of child abuse, but talking about that was seen as undermining the authority of parents. So instead, the act focused on physical abuse and the idea that abusive parents were suffering from a psychological illness, one that could strike any parent and one that could be cured. Quote,

By the time Senate hearings for CAPTA convened, this medicalized interpretation of child abuse was so firmly established that experts like Brandeis University Professor of Social Policy David Gill found it impossible to promote a different analysis to the politicians. After doing a groundbreaking national survey of child abuse in the 1960s, Gill had concluded that neglect and battering were intimately tied to poverty, and that the federal government's reluctance to correct social and economic inequality made Uncle Sam the country's worst child mistreater. But Mondale interrupted Gill and reminded the audience during the hearing that this is not a poverty problem, it is a national problem. So again, the biggest part of child abuse is not child molestation, it's neglect and physical abuse, which is primarily driven by poverty, but nobody wanted to hear that in Congress. So instead, they just focused on child sexual abuse.

Sorry, as I said, do you know what that kind of reminds me of? So I've done research on all this kind of child abuse stuff, and it is true that there have been communal child abuse situations. Absolutely, for sure. But then when they bring the devil into it, it's like, oh, get the priest to sort it out. And it just completely flies out the window and it isn't taken seriously anymore. It's so annoying. Yeah, it's very frustrating. Yeah.

And one of the things that you see here, too, is people who have no experience in investigating cases, being assigned to these cases, because they stop being seen as a criminal problem. Jesus. Yeah. So Congress didn't like Professor Gill's testimony, but they really enjoyed the testimony of a woman named Maureen Litvin, a Southern California mom who went by the pseudonym Jolly Kay. Now, Jolly told a heartbreaking story about how she'd been abused as a child and how this abuse had led her to abuse her own kids. She testified that she'd once tried to strangle her daughter and had thrown a knife at her daughter on another occasion.

Now, Jolly Kay described her long process of seeking treatment until finally her therapist advisor to start a self-help group, which she eventually called Parents Anonymous. Now, a group like this being sort of touted as a cure for child abuse was a dream come true for Congress, because Parents Anonymous, number one, put the responsibility on abusive parents themselves for fixing the problem, and it cost basically nothing to support as opposed to alleviating poverty, right? Right. Get the oxygenists to put out the fire. Yeah, that's exactly right.

Yeah, peonon. So Congress did give federal support to Parents Anonymous, but it was a hell of a lot cheaper than like fixing the broken social safety net or raising the minimum wage or any of the other things that might have actually done a real, like, significant help. Not that it's a bad idea to have support groups for parents like this, but I would say that that shouldn't be your first priority when parents are throwing knives at kids, you know? Right, right, yeah. Yeah, so CAPTA was enacted in 1974,

and among other things it made therapists, teachers, and school administrators mandatory reporters. I don't know what you have if you have this in the UK, but basically if you're a mandatory reporter and someone discloses child abuse to you, you have to report it to the authorities. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we have. A thing that makes sense on paper and sometimes is a good thing, but also is sometimes a bad thing because the police often do a very bad job of handling these cases, and it makes the kid not trust whatever authority figure they confided in about the abuse in the first place.

Like, it's a very mixed bag, you could say. But the first thing that happened when they, you know, CAPTA gets passed is it leads to a massive search in reported child abuse. Suddenly it goes from something that like very rarely got reported to something that fucking all over the place, which is because child abuse was all over the place, right? Like it's not a bad thing that suddenly people are like, oh shit, a ton of people are abusing and molesting their kids. But this led to a massive problem for federal and state governments because an awful lot of working men were revealed to be abusive to their children. Locking these guys up would force the state to pay for their care,

and it would remove like tax money from the state, and it would force them to like pay in welfare to support the family. This was unacceptable. Thankfully, the self-help therapy group model solved this problem because instead of going to jail, abuse of fathers were sentenced to therapy, which their families were often mandated to attend with them, including the children they'd been fucking or hitting. What a great solution! Like the way to like destroy the victim even more, right?

Like you couldn't come up with a better way of doing it. It's so fucked up. This is not to say that the situation for abused children was better prior to this because like for girls, and it was nearly always girls who reported abuse back in the early 1970s, the standard procedure before CAPTA would be to make a report to the police who would then force you to undergo an invasive genital exam, and then the cops would usually do a follow-up interview, which they would like show up at your school to interrogate you and shit.

And you'd be sent to a foster home or a juvenile home while your abusive dad stayed with the rest of your family. So that he could threaten them into getting their story straight. And the charges against him would inevitably hit the local news, which meant he would lose his job, which meant the family would fall in the bottom. It was just a whole fucking, it's always been bad, right? Like when I'm criticizing CAPTA, I don't want to pretend that like it was good before. But it's like putting salt in the wound a little bit, you know what I mean? It's like trying to bail out the shit with the thimble.

Exactly, exactly. So the self-help therapy group option allowed police to keep these kind of cases quiet, which saved on embarrassment for everybody. It also allowed the fathers to stay employed and it avoided breaking up the family, which religious right-wingers considered to be as much of a priority as treating battered kids. Jake, do you like weddings? Yeah, I love weddings. Have you ever been at a wedding and been like,

boy, I wish I could find a way to get several dozen grams of hexagene explosives delivered to this wedding, but I just don't have a missile guidance. Yeah. Yeah, some, yeah. Well, the good people at Raytheon can help you out with that, Jake, because the missile guidance chips they make are guaranteed to hit weddings, school buses, mostly those two targets. So, yeah.

We're not in Yemen, so. No, no, it does help if you're in Yemen. Raytheon, big presence, and all right, here's the actual ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson,

and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, you're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns.

He's a shark, and not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev,

is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science

you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match

and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Alright, we're back. We're back. We're talking about better kids. Kind of deflated a little there. So the self-help therapy group option was considered great by everybody

but the actual kids who were being abused. And oddly enough, one of the things that's weird about it in this period is that both kind of like a lot of left-wing folks and feminists and the religious right kind of all get on board this idea for very different reasons, right? The religious right likes keeping the family together and they want to avoid divorces and whatnot at all costs. Feminists like it because all of these groups do involve

these men talking about the horrible things that they've done, like their horrible sexual fantasies and stuff, which was seen as like a useful thing at the time, right? So it is this weird kind of situation. And there's also, you can find some writings from some people who are like advocate, like child defense advocates and very left-wing at the time who also like that kind of the confessional nature of these things, mirrors like what you see in certain left-wing political movements,

the self-criticism sessions. So it's weird. You get all these different, like all these groups who should, who normally are at each other's throats all get on board of a very bad idea for wildly different reasons. Yeah, a very different tech mill, you know what I mean? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, a very different one.

It's bizarre. It's a really strange period to study. So if you're starting to say, boy, it seems like all these new programs prioritize the feelings and security of male abusers over their female child victims, you would be right. And the growing field of child protection was rife with misogyny. The best example would be Dr. Roland's summit,

who is a massive piece of shit. He went on to be a major satanic ritual abuse expert. And obviously everything he ever said about satanic ritual abuse was nonsense. But before that, he was an incest expert. And in his expert opinion, child sexual abuse by fathers was largely the fault of their wives. So this guy, who is again one of the most prominent doctors in the field in this time, describes the behavior of child molesters as family romance.

I'm sorry. Did he have any siblings by any chance? Yeah, he had some daughters. You have to worry for them. He believed that fathers who molested their daughters would never molest a stranger's daughter, which obviously is wildly untrue. That's all right then.

Jesus Christ. And his argument was that the attraction of these fathers was purely to, in his words, the delicious little creatures that the father had helped to create. Whoa. Red alert. Red fucking flag. Yeah.

So Summit felt that basically all men considered their daughters to be delicious and that the impulse to commit incest was nearly universal for middle-aged men who were anxious about the end of their own youth. Men and healthy men like projecting a little bit dude. Oh dear, yeah. So since all men clearly want to fuck their daughters, the only reason that most men don't is because they have healthy marriages that let them deal with their horniness by fucking their wives.

So when incest happens, it's the fault of the abuser's wife who was, quote, absorbing herself in a job rather than fucking her husband hard enough to stop him from raping their daughter. Jesus Christ. It's the ultimate right wing, like the fence. It's like outrageously fucked up. And he said this like officially, like... Yeah, yeah.

He was very open about this. And no one went, hang on. Like this guy's up to something. I would argue the right response when someone tells you that is to just start hitting them and not stop. Like just immediately start punching. But no one did. Instead he was taken seriously.

So his beliefs were unfortunately quite common. And one of the most popular abuse treatment programs at the time was called Child Sex Abuse Treatment Program, or CSATEP? CSATEP? CSATEP. CSATP. I don't know how to acronym it.

You did great. CSATEP. You did not do great. CSATEP first launched in the Bay Area and it was geared towards preserving nuclear families that... Because basically what happened is in the Bay Area because of a number of things, including affluence, it's one of the first areas that starts getting like really good reporting

about child sexual abuse and it turns out that a bunch of fucking dudes in the Bay Area were raping their kids. Right. Which created a problem because these guys were pretty high income. So again, the state doesn't want to lose tax money, doesn't want their parents to go on the dole, or their families to go on the dole. So CSATEP was geared towards preserving nuclear families

and it taught that the root of sexual abuse of children was a dysfunctional marriage. One of the repair work mandated by the therapy involved the mother apologizing to her daughter for her husband's sexual abuse and saying, you are not to blame, daddy and I did not have a good marriage. That is why daddy turned to you. Wow.

That is just unbelievable, isn't it? It's fucking shocking. That is just unbelievable. That's like... I can't believe that. When was this in the eighties? Yeah, this is the fucking like... Not even long ago.

The late seventies, yeah, I think. Yeah, not even long ago. You know what I mean? Like, Jesus Christ. No, really fucking pretty recently. We'll probably get at least one person who as a kid went through CSATEP and stuff with their family in the comments. Yeah.

This episode drops and I wouldn't be surprised. Too bad for them, man. It's so fucked. It's so fucking wild. So starting in San Jose, CSATEP was increasingly mandated for fathers accused of sexual abuse. Courts often made fathers what became known as the Godfather offer because it was an offer they couldn't refuse.

So you get caught, you go to therapy, take probation and avoid jail. Almost overnight, the confession rate among accused child molesters went from very low to 90%. And again, I don't want to... This is a really flawed system. So we're going to cover all the shit that's bad. It's also...

Aspects of it were good because most of these guys at this point, very few sexual abuse allegations made by children against parents were false, right? So the vast majority of these guys, you have to assume some innocent people took basically the equivalent of a plea bargain just because they didn't want to go to trial. But the vast majority of these guys were guilty, and at least something happened. But CSATEP led to a number of very unsettling changes

in the way these problems were dealt with. For one thing, police shifted away from interviewing the child in these cases and instead started talking to their teachers, their mother and other adults who knew the kid. And these second-hand accounts of people who knew the child were considered to have the same legal weight as if they'd come directly from the child. This is problematic for a number of reasons.

I think that as a journalist we understand, right? Yeah. A little bit. Yeah. And it feeds into the satanic panic stuff we're going to talk about later. When the child was eventually questioned, the work was done by a social worker rather than a detective. And this may not sound like a problem because, like,

if you have a social worker who's specifically trained for this shit, that sounds good because cops are not great at talking to kids all the time, right? Right. But there was a crime committed, right? Yes. So it's like you need more than the social worker, right? Like, jeez. One would say, and also the social workers were not well-trained to do this.

They weren't well-trained on how to interrogate someone without asking leading questions, right? Police are at least, in theory, taught not to do that. Like, obviously, that's a problematic. That's all how to do that. Yeah. But theoretically, a detective who's questioning a child is, number one, not supposed to assume the allegations are true.

They're not supposed to ask for leading questions. They're just supposed to try to have the kid talk about what happened. And the accused enjoys the presumption of innocence. And the social workers questioning these kids weren't trained that way. They were trained to believe that it's always the case that, like, this person is guilty, which is a problem for the person interrogating the kid in this situation, because they tended to push the child to talk about things

that the child might not otherwise have talked about. Now, again, not a huge problem at the time, because virtually all of these allegations of child sexual abuse were true. But when the satanic panic came about, the allegations were false, and the social workers still did the same thing. They pushed kids. Right. Yeah.

You're seeing all of this infrastructure get built up. They're trying to do their own thing against themselves and push this satanic thing forward, right? Exactly. Like, so you're seeing all this kind of infrastructure that created that allows this to happen later. So by 1975, C-SATUP had become so popular that the entire state of California adopted it as the standard.

Our friend Dr. Summit attended C-SATUP training and was so taken by it that he wrote a manifesto titled The Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome. In it, among other things, he pushed the idea that children never fabricate as explicit sexual manipulations they divulge in complaints or interrogations. As a result, they should always be believed, even if their story included fantastic wild details that seemed impossible. Again, like you're seeing the groundwork get laid here.

Yeah. Yeah. It's on its way. Yeah. By 1980, child sexual abuse was no longer a dark national secret. It was a topic widely discussed by Americans and featured in the media. And I'm going to quote again from Satan's Silence. Thanks to an alliance among feminists, therapists, and law enforcement officials,

it was becoming possible for daughters to disclose their victimization and for fathers to admit their guilt. In national media, from the New York Times to Playboy, the Anlanders Encyclopedia and Donahue, testimonials abounded from repentant fathers, newly asserted wives, and girls regaining their dignity. Yet later research would reveal that many incest offenders also rebelled as children outside their families,

and they raped grown women as well. Further, there is evidence that regardless of what kind of treatment sex abusers get, as many as one in seven goes on to offend again. Ironically, then, politicians and child protectionists fervor to keep fathers in families left many youngsters and women at risk of further abuse. And by pushing Godfather off her confessions, the therapy model of sex abuse intervention replaced skilled forensics personnel with social workers and others who knew nothing about how to test

the validity of criminal sex abuse charges and who unstintingly believed them all. So by 1980, all of the infrastructure we're going to need to let a satanic panic happen and to have the legal system in, like, further it is in place. Right, then just come out of nowhere. It's built on without, I guess, without trying to do that. But, like, I can see what you're saying. Like, it just became the perfect ground for it, right?

Yeah, and obviously, like, fuck Dr. Summit. But the vast majority of the people involved in setting this system up are people whose motivations are the purest it could possibly be. They want to protect kids, right? And it's a new thing at the time. It's not a new problem, but it's a new way to tackle it. Yeah, yeah. And again, probably up to this point, the system still does more harm than good

because it replaced basically nothing, right? Right. But it's about to stop being a system that does more good than harm, right? Like, that's about to change. So there's some more background we have to lay. In 1979, Jerry Falwell and some other assholes founded the Moral Majority, which was the first large-scale Christian right-wing political organization. This is the first time that the Christian right is like a block in politics,

and it has been ever since. The Moral Majority was initially formed due to an opposition to Roe v. Wade and an opposition to forced integration of Christian schools. They didn't want black people to be able to go to Christian colleges. That was a big part of it. How Christian of them? Very Christian of them, extremely so. Love their neighbor, right?

Wow. And it was Jerry Falwell of all people, I was sure. Yeah, very surprising stuff. And like, yeah, there were a lot of other people, obviously. But yeah, the Moral Majority was fueled also by a sense of deep anxiety because women are starting to work at this point, like full-time, like it's becoming a very major thing. One of the things I didn't realize until I was doing this research, actually,

is that during this period from like the 70s to the 80s, women, it becomes the norm for women to work, but the average income of households doesn't really raise. Because like, this is also at the time that workers' protections and rights are collapsing and like, Reaganomics starts to take over in the 80s. So like, more people, like you would think that having two incomes in a household would increase the amount of disposable income people have, but it really didn't.

And again, yeah. Jesus. Yeah. Great country. So in 1980, a psychologist named Lawrence Pasder published a book about his wife and former patient, Michelle Smith, which, you know, if your wife is a former patient as a therapist, you might not be a great therapist.

Creepy alarmist. So her memoir, Michelle remembers, detailed a childhood of horrific occult sex abuse. Pasder claimed to have used hypnotic regression therapy to help his wife uncover buried memories of abuse at the hands of the Church of Satan. Pasder also claimed with no evidence that Anton Levese Church wasn't the real Church of Satan,

and the one that molested his patient wife that existed for centuries. So. Okay. And Michelle remembers is basically, so the claim she's making is that she became the victim of a satanic cult for several months during 1955 when she was a five-year-old. She was imprisoned by them. She had all these recollections of being tortured in houses

and mausoleums and cemeteries, of being raped and sodomized with candles, of being forced to shit on a Bible, and on a crucifix of seeing babies and adults murdered. Sorry. Yeah, it's awesome. You know that to Christians of the day, like her being like, I watched babies get murdered,

was the same as like I and I pooped on a Bible, like both equally bad devil things. Like the guy like with their memories like a little bit more, a little bit more offensive. Yeah. Shut in the Bible. We've got it. Yeah.

She also had memories of having a devil's tail and horns surgically attached to her. Yeah. She had memories of a cult attempt to kill a child and make it look like an accident by placing her in a car with a corpse, and then crashing the vehicle. And this is said to have gone on for like close to a year until her faith, the fact that she was so Christian, the Satanists give up because they just couldn't turn her.

And then she claimed that she forgot the experience for 20 years until she entered therapy with Dr. Pazder, who then became her husband. Now, this was all lies, Jake. I feel like part of the therapy, he was like, we can sell a book. Yeah. Yeah.

If you remember, we can sell a book. And I don't know. There's been a lot of writing on this too. I've done enough research to know how in on the con Michelle was, but I'm almost certain her husband was in on the con or it was a con on his behalf. And credible people debunked the book immediately. For one thing, there's a picture of Michelle

in her grade school yearbook that was taken during one of the months when she was supposed to be hidden, like locked in a house by Satanists, which, you know, all of her family members who knew her during this period basically say like nothing out of the ordinary happened during her childhood. Certainly nothing satanic ritual molesty. The only abuse that Michelle endured for certain was at the hands of her therapist husband. The whole idea of repressed memories, which now we got, we're laying a lot of groundwork here.

So let's talk about the fucking idea of repressed memories comes from. It goes back to the 1800s when early psychologists decided that hysteria, which is what they called women having emotions in those days, came from someone suffering a childhood trauma that was so terrible that they developed amnesia to dissociate from the event. And this is a mix of, because like Freud is involved in this and it's not all bullshit, dissociation is a thing that happens when you're dealing with PTSD, right?

Like we've all dealt with it like it's a fucking thing, but it doesn't involve forgetting the horrible thing that happened, right? Right. Just memories become blurry. Yeah. I mean, I don't know, but it doesn't sound very real. Yeah. Yeah. Like I definitely have had memories like periods I don't remember during the dealing with PTSD itself, but the actual trauma that caused it, I remember pretty darn well.

Right. Yeah. And the fact that I don't remember other things was probably because I was like drinking and abusing drugs massively during that period, you know? That's called a blackout rubber. Yeah. Yeah. So there, yeah. And, you know, you have to assume everyone was drunk in the 1800s too. And they were definitely on cocaine because that's how Freud did all of his psychotherapy.

So yeah, that may have influenced things. Fucking Freud, man. Yeah. So Freud decided that hysteria was inevitably caused by childhood sexual violation. And he pressured his female patients to tell him detailed stories of their abuse. And again, a lot of these were probably true, but also a lot of them weren't. And he convinced himself that these stories were hidden memories, at least for a while. He did eventually realize that a lot of the abuse stories his patients told him

were like physically impossible because they were just like the outlandish fantasies. And he kind of dropped this idea that like emotional issues, like mental illness as an adult was inevitably caused by like some sort of sexual trauma as a child. He did kind of drop that idea. But in the late 1970s, therapists started reviving his old theories. And among an influential subset of the field, repressed memory therapy became the go-to explanation for things like eating disorders and depression, right? Like you go to the psychotherapist because you've got anorexia or whatever,

and he starts trying to recover memories of you being raped as a kid because you must have if you have anorexia, right? It couldn't be caused by anything else. And yeah, this was basically nonsense. And the problem about trying to recover implanted memories is that generally what actually happens is the therapist creates memories of things that never happened. And I'm going to quote from a write-up in the conversation now. Experimental psychologists have repeatedly demonstrated with ease

which false memories can be implanted in a sizable proportion of the population under well-controlled laboratory conditions. But it is undoubtedly the case that such false memories can arise spontaneously as well in the context of psychotherapy. One of the techniques that has been shown to result in false memories is asking people to imagine events that never actually took place. It appears that, eventually, and especially in people with good imaginations, the memory of the imagined event is misinterpreted as a memory for a real event.

The use of hypnotic regression is a particularly powerful means to implant false memories. So this becomes... I've heard that before, though. As a kid, there were things that I was certain was like it happened. And then I get older and I think, hang on, that must have been a dream because there's no way it would have happened that way. And especially as a child, there's all sorts you could get confused about. Absolutely.

And a lot of this is part of the problem. This is part of why, also, if you look at eyewitness testimony, generally sucks, actually. People are very bad at being eyewitnesses because our fucking brains, you all starts a wild shit. Especially when there's a traumatic experience, where notes are so important. Exactly. That's why reporters take notes, and it's why you should never listen to anything anyone ever says.

Just fucking put on headphones to block out all noise, fucking put on a blinder so you can't see and just stumble through the world, and you will not believe anything untrue. You will probably bump into things a lot, though. You're more fun, though. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Here's an ad for a product. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI

had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man

who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev,

is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. The 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI

isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match

and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, we're back. So, yeah, hypnotic regression and repressed memories, mostly nonsense, basically all nonsense,

but it was considered to be pretty settled science at the time, not by like an overwhelming number of scientists, but by cops and judges and TV hosts and the kinds of psychologists who are good at talking to cops and judges and TV hosts, right? Like that's the group of people to whom this is settled science for. Well, actually, credible research is like, there seem to be problems with this. So Michelle remembers was a hugely influential book.

It was treated as gospel by a terrible number of people and it actually became a standard textbook for social workers in the United States. Jesus, really? Yeah, a lot of people remember. Yeah, it's not fucking good, man. Oh, dear God. So Lawrence Pasder became a recognized legal expert in satanic ritual abuse, which exploded into the mainstream

as a real problem thanks to his book. So what we have in 1980 is a situation where evangelical Christian paranoia over the devil and the black arts leaps over and starts to infect mainstream society. This would come to have a terrible impact first on two families in Bakersfield, California. And now we're finally into the satanic panic. Ready? You excited?

Ready. Yeah. Yeah, I'm so excited. It's fucking awesome. So these two families are the McCuins and the Nifons. And I'm going to quote from a write up in religioustolerance.org that kind of goes over the basics of the case. The triggering incident occurred in 1980 when Becky McCuinn disclosed that her grandfather,

Rod Phelps, had touched her inappropriately. The family doctor confirmed the abuse. No charges were laid. Becky's mother, Debbie McCuinn, arranged for her daughter to obtain counseling. But Debbie's stepmother, Mary Ann Barber, who is believed to have had a history of mental illness, felt that her step-granddaughters were not being sufficiently protected.

She obtained the assistance of the Mothers of Bakersfield, a group concerned about child abuse. Jill Haddad took particular interest in the case. She was the spokesperson for the group and had many relatives working for local police forces. Ms. Barber claimed that Alvin and Debbie McCuinn were not good parents, and that Debbie's daycare license should be revoked.

She asked the social services department to make a surprise inspection. The social worker, Betty Palco, found no major infractions and took no action to revoke the license. So again, no actual evidence of serious child abuse here. Although I will say the McCuins weren't exactly ace parents because later that year they did take their two daughters on a supervised visit to see their allegedly abusive grandfather.

And this caused Marianne to have a psychotic episode, which sent her to the psychiatric ward at a local hospital. She eventually succeeded in getting custody of the kids and convincing county officials to file child endangerment charges against the McCuins. But because she was not at all well, Marianne took things a step further, and she had begun believing that the McCuins

were part of a massive, insidious satanic sex ring in Kern County. As she told social workers, there is a group of people involved in molesting the girls. They're all in on it. So you have, one, in a case of actual abuse, two, some parents who probably are not being as careful as they need to be around a guy who's dangerous, and a woman who's maybe schizophrenic, definitely is mentally ill

and is hospitalized as a result of it, who becomes convinced that as opposed to a single act of child molestation by one guy, there's a massive conspiracy to molest all of the kids in town. And unfortunately for a shitload of people, the social workers in Bakersfield had been trained using the textbook Michelle remembers. So when this very ill woman starts claiming

that there's a massive network of satanic sex abusers in town, they believe her. And by the time the social workers sat down with the kids, Becky and Dawn, both kids had spent months listening to their very, very sick step-grandmother tell them they had been the victims of a ring of ritual abusers. So these kids get repeatedly questioned and they confirm what their, they basically parrot

what their step-grandmother had told them to say. And over the months, their disclosures become like weirder and weirder. They claim that they had been hung from ceiling hooks, beaten with belts, rented to strangers in motels, and had been forced to act in kiddie porn movies. They claim that they were abused by a sex ring, which involved their grandparents, their parents,

their fathers, brothers, friends of their parents, and the social worker who did the inspection, a co-worker of their father and two one named welfare workers. And all of these fucking people start catching charges and getting arrested and shit. And their life just dynamites these people's lives, right? Just based on this one testimony. Yeah, yeah, based on this woman and these kids

who had been in her care listening to her talk about, yeah. Oh, right, yeah. But it's like, you know, the thing I always think about things like this, it's like racism, right? No one is born of racists. Kids become racists from hearing what they hear from racist parents, usually. So it's the same kind of concept, right?

They'll just repeat that shit. Exactly, they're kids. Like if you tell them, if you tell your, if you tell your like three-year-old over and over, you were raped by the devil. Like they will eventually believe it. Yeah, you're just gonna be like, all right. I guess I was, yeah.

So the social worker and their father's co-worker eventually had their charges dropped after their lawyer introduced Marianne's medical records into the trial and was like, this woman has psychotic episodes and is paranoid and probably schizophrenic. Perhaps we need more than just her testimony, right? Not that those people can't testify when they're the victims of abuse,

but if you have them making lurid, wild allegations and there's no physical evidence for any of it, perhaps you should not trust those allegations. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. So this convinced the DA to drop those two people's charges, but then the medical records were sealed and forbidden from being used by the defense

for the McCuins and the Niffens, which is something else, because again, all of the cops have bought into this too. So I'm gonna quote again from that write-up in religioustolerance.org, quote, the Niffen's sons, Brian and Brandon, were repeatedly and suggestively interrogated, though interviewers would describe a sex act

and then asked the child to confirm or deny that it happened. When questioned separately, each was told falsely that their brother had disclosed abuse by both the parents and the rest of the sex ring. Brian and Brandon claimed that they were yelled at and terrorized by the interrogators. They were told that they could go home again if they testified about the abuse.

These manipulative and coercive interrogation methods are now known to generate false allegations. No fucking doubt, right? Wow, yeah, you don't say. Questioning in Bakersfield went far beyond the definition of leading and was in fact coercive threatening and brainwashing of young children.

This is like a legal finding later. Unfortunately, in early 1983, basic research into child interview techniques was in its early stages. Direct questioning and manipulation of children was common practice. The Niffen boys finally caved in under the pressure and said that abuse had occurred.

So, yeah, during a supervised visit, Brandon Niffen was asked by his grandmother if the charges were true. He answered, no, none of those things ever happened. The grandmother was arrested for discussing the case with her grandchild when she brought this up when she said, hey, he told me that he was lying because the interviewers terrorized him.

So, like, he tells his grandmother, they made me give a false confession. She goes to the judge and she gets arrested and is banned from testifying at trial and has her right to having custody visits like terminated for years. Because again, all of the people in the legal system believe all this shit and have to assume,

like, oh, she's got to be part of it because she's trying to, like... It's unbelievably fucked up. They just all created a brand conspiracy with each other, right? It's fucking amazing, yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating, actually. Yeah, it's incredibly...

Like, there is a lot that is and should be studied about this period of time because it says so much that's very frightening about human psychology. It's that crowd mentality, right? Like, it's very scary, yeah. Yeah, yep, exactly. Like, it's a lot of the same stuff

that makes fascism work, right? It's just like the way people are and the way people act in groups and the way people act when they are in a group and all get scared of the same thing. Right, exactly, yeah. So, both Niffen boys later recanted entirely and stated that they'd been coerced to testify

and they testified again in 1996 after the end of the satanic panic and were able to convince a judge to overturn both sets of convictions. The Niffens, like, their parents had spent like a decade plus in prison along with the McCuins. Like, four people in prison for years and years. You're joking.

No, it's like, it's unbearably fucked up. Yeah, yeah. There's a partial happy ending here because the Niffens, like, once the kids, like, realized what had happened to them, been done to them and testified, like, they got to be a family with their parents again,

the McCuins never did because both Becky and Dawn continued to maintain their testimony was true. And it's almost certain that both children had false memories forced on them as a result of improper interrogation methods, but the family never fucking healed. It's deeply

bad. That's the side of the satanic panic, right, that you don't really hear a lot about. It's kind of funny, the whole thing's like, oh, yeah, it's so stupid, but then, like, I was doing research for this podcast episode the other day and it's like, wow, like, I mean, one woman in the Italian case

and it was just like, you just couldn't handle it, right? It was like, all based on literally nothing. Nothing at all. It ruins people. Yeah. I mean, in the same thing, in a different way, it's happening with QAnon, right? Like, you have hundreds of families at least that have been torn apart by this sort of stuff.

It's fucked. It's super fucked. And it kind of, if you kind of look at what happens with the book Michelle remembers and how it helps both spark the satanic panic and how it infests, you know, this system for dealing with child abuse and stuff like that, it's almost like an infection that comes into it and deal

all these problems in it suddenly become actively toxic. And yeah, it did not stay limited to Kern County out near Bakersfield. The case of the McCoon and the Niffen families was just the beginning. In 1983, not long after their initial conviction, events in another part of Southern California

were about to take the nation by storm. In next episode, we're going to talk about the McMartin preschool trial, which is the longest, most expensive trial in US history and one of the most fucked up things I've ever read about in my entire life. You happy, Jake? You ready?

You psyched up, man? Let's fucking do it. I can't wait for this. You want to plug some shit? Yeah, man. It's just the podcast, right? Q clearance is out now, obviously with you guys. Popular front is always around. Popularfront.co.

One thing I do want to say, though, is like, especially considering this topic, you know, I've done a lot of research into like various kind of child abuse scandals and the thing is, like, they do exist and even some of the more lurid, insane stories have happened for real,

but on a way that where it's like, it's nowhere near as ritualistic or movie-like, you know, so there's a great example that people should look into, like the monster of Belgium, a guy called Marc Detro, and like, he would just have this horrific kind of child abuse scandal thing

where he was kidnapping children for hire and it involved, like, some of the most yeah, it involved some of the most high-level politicians. This isn't a conspiracy, like, but it's one of the least known ones because stupid stuff like this gets the hearing, right?

The more sensational, the more easy to understand satanic stuff is what people like QAnon often put out. Meanwhile, people are doing very dark things and it kind of goes by the wayside because obviously real life is a little bit more and confusing, you know, and it's a real shame.

It's this fucking thing that happens in the satanic panic, too, where like, no, like, we could all, there is a conspiracy to traffic people who are legally children for the rich and powerful, like, it absolutely happened, it probably still is. But, like, focus on that.

Not Michelle's memory or whatever, the hell it's called. Well, it's weird, it's interesting to me that, like, the things that go viral are always, like, which are very, it's very uncommon for, like, two and three and four-year-olds to be molested. It's like 15-year-olds, like, yeah, it's

men fucking teenagers, right? And that's bad! It's terrible and it doesn't make it any better, but again, it's like, this is the issue, right? When you have people like QAnon specifically, one of my biggest problems with them is that they make people just go, oh, that's just QAnon stuff.

And a lot of it is just nonsense QAnon stuff, but in between that, there's things that really need to be looked at for the sake of the victims, you know? And it's like, oh, thanks, you've completely destroyed any relevance here because you're making things up all the time. It's sad.

Yeah, I mean, I get why, like, it just came out that Virginia Jufri, I think her name is pronounced, was one of the Epstein victims. And she's QAnon now. And, like, she's the one I can't blame for it, because it's like, yeah, you were part of a giant sex abuse, like, conspiracy. Right, but even that now

it makes you think it's like, not to say you wouldn't believe it, but now some people will just go, oh, it's D and I've heard it's due with Q and they won't look any deep. It's fucked. It's all, everything's horrible. Thanks for listening to the podcast, people. We'll be back on Thursday with

some of the worst stories you've ever heard in your life. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protest. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver

hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know. Because I'm Lance Bass.

And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313

days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for watching.