The Binge Crimes: Night Shift - Investigating the Satanic Panic on ‘Infamous’

Episode Date: December 7, 2023

Listen to Infamous HERE.  For Kelly Michaels, all of history is a Tolkien-like battle between a  small number of heroes and villains. Most of us are just hobbits — the  in-between folks, just trying to get by. Kelly, who’s getting by working  at Wee Care Nursery School in Maplewood, New Jersey, considers herself  an ordinary hobbit. That is, until she — like Frodo — gets swept up in a  battle, as panic sweeps nation over a surge in Satanism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey everyone, I'm Natalie Robomed, co-host of Infamous, a podcast about America's biggest scandals. Right now, Infamous is telling the story of Kelly Michaels and the Satanic Panic. It's a complicated, wild tale about memory, Satanism, and how one woman was sentenced to 47 years in prison for the worst crimes imaginable, only to be exonerated. Here's a sneak preview from my co-host, Vanessa Gregoriatis. This is a story about good and evil. It's about the spiritual battle that all of us may be engaged in every moment of every day to do the right thing or what we think is the right thing, to protect those who are good and innocent from those who are evil.

We are in a spiritual battle every second, but we decide every moment what kind of person we're going to be, what kind of choices we're going to make. Are we going to add to the misery of the world? Are we going to try to minimize it? Are we going to do what's right? We're making decisions all the time. I'm sitting with Kelly Michaels. We're in her kitchen nook near a photo of one of her seven children playing soccer. And she has thought a lot about good and evil, perhaps more than most people, for reasons that will become clear in a little bit. Actually, all human beings are kind of caught in it, which is a Tolkien. If you ever read any of his books, they're all hobbits, believe it or not. She's talking about J.R.R. Tolkien, the legendary author of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.

You see, Kelly believes that most of us are hobbits. If you haven't seen the movies or read the books, hobbits are the ruddy, homely, shyer folk who aren't looking for adventure or big ideas, but just want a regular, ordinary life. What about breakfast? I've already had it. We've had one, yes. What about second breakfast? Hobbits are more concerned with beer and finding someone to fall in love with and their next delicious meal than ideas of evil. In Lord of the Rings, this evil takes the form of Sauron, which is, this is how he's portrayed, an all-seeing eye of fire. This entity, this eye of fire, wants to take over Middle-earth, wants everything.

You did not seriously think that a hobbit could contend with the will of Sauron. Evil is the absence of good. Evil is the absence of truth, the absence of love, the absence of mercy, the absence of beauty. There's always been like the small elite few that like own and run everything and run the peasants which most of us are peasants. Just trying to survive, like have family, raise kids, try to have a good life. And then there's like some heroic people

who do battle against people that would reduce people to slaves, reduce people to ants that don't have any value. And then most of us are caught in the middle between these forces. History is mainly made by a small percentage of really bad people versus a handful of very heroic good people.

And the middle is like kind of get pushed around by both sides. Sometimes, Kelly thinks, the regular second breakfast eating folk, the hobbits, can get swayed by evil forces. They say you can get people to believe anything if you keep repeating it enough times. It's in, as Solzhenitsyn says, the line between good and evil runs between, not between cultures or sexes or political parties. It runs between every human heart. And it's a cliche, but there is a truth to that, you know. And which side of that line you're on can have very real consequences that have nothing to do with the fictional world of Lord of the Rings.

For Kelly Michaels, that would mean going to prison, and even more than that, becoming a pariah, being cast out of civil society. This woman in this breakfast nook became the definition of absolute evil. If you want to hear more, it's all on the podcast Infamous. Listen to Infamous wherever you get your podcasts.