Uncover - S6 "Satanic Panic" E6: ‘I remember telling them nothing happened to me’

Episode Date: February 6, 2020

How does it come to be that hundreds of children across North America and beyond report such similar crimes? How has a phenomenon that’s never seen a proven case become so real in the minds of so many? And what does it mean for the children at the centre of it all? For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/uncover/uncover-season-6-satanic-panic-transcripts-listen-1.5437487

The next thing I know is I wake up and I just remember like something bad happened to me last night, somebody hurt me. This is Carrie Lowe's story. Carrie did everything quote-unquote right. She reported right away. Her legal team says police systematically mishandled her case. Meanwhile, her attackers remain at large. I'm Maggie Rahr and this is Carrie Lowe vs. Available now on CBC Listen and everywhere you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast.

In the 80s, as a little kid, we were outdoors all the time. We'd like to breakdance and roller skate, and we were always on boats and swimming and sunburned. My brother and I have a ridiculous amount of freckles. Kristen Galvin was born and raised in a small beach town called Stewart, Florida. Unlike some of the other kind of tourist sprawling towns on the Atlantic. It stayed small and quaint. Sounds nice. Yeah, it's a beautiful place.

Kristen is not one of the children from the Martinsville case, but replaced the ocean with prairie plains, and she could be. The satanic panic descended on Kristen's quiet little town in 1988, homing in on her preschool, Glendale Montessori. I loved school. Everyone thought it was a great experience for me. I was able to tie my shoes at the age of two, which everyone was impressed by. My mother to this this day, still tells everyone. She had nothing but fond memories of her time at the preschool. But that would change.

Basically, the town had organized a kind of community meeting for all the parents who had ever sent a child to this preschool. who had ever sent a child to this preschool. Because earlier that year, they had arrested the owner of the preschool and also the secretary and were continuing to investigate some other people who had worked there. And what started out as being, they thought there was like maybe some isolated boys

who had been sexually abused, started to turn into actually the school has been open for however long 15 years 20 years so we need to go back and start looking into everyone who ever attended this school to find out how far this spread. Kristen is about 10 years old at the time, and her parents take her to a psychologist. I do have generalized anxiety disorder. I have panic attacks. So I think some of my sensitivities made it seem as though I was a likely candidate to having had something happen to me. it seem as though I was a likely candidate to having had something happen to me. But all of these things can also just happen without having gone to satanic preschool.

Kristen found the psychologist formidable and a bit intimidating. They asked me and asked me and asked me to remember things and I couldn't remember things. And then he suggested to my mother that they have a technique that will help me remember, and it's hypnotism. And one of his assistants in the office had been to an SRA convention to learn the techniques of recovering memories from SRA, which stands for satanic ritual abuse.

Kristen describes the technique as something akin to guided meditation. He just kind of talked peacefully. There might have been some reverse counting. And I think there was like some imagine some clouds floating by and just kind of calming the mind and let your brain flow freely. And also kind of encouraging a free association or like encouraging your brain to run wild and it was like a clear your mind and let the thoughts come to you

kind of approach. Under hypnosis images begin to surface. A snake being held up and sliced from its head down to its tail and the blood being collected in a cup and then kids drinking blood and... Yeah, I remembered a cold metal table and being naked and maybe some objects, metal objects.

And being on the table, some kind of inspection situation. The images are disturbing. But Kristen is also disturbed by the feeling that something's not quite right. I understood the difference between lying and telling the truth. And after I was hypnotized, I told my mother that I didn't feel like they were real memories. And she came back with me to the doctor and the doctor said that that's what recovered memories feel like. They don't feel like real memories, but they really did happen. What people don't want to believe is that mothers and fathers abuse their children.

They want to believe in evil monsters. But a study has shown that of those who attend these seminars, half will diagnose patients as victims of ritual abuse. If you lived with some of these children, you'd know that their trauma is real. When some of these children hit their adult years, they would sort of reopen this and speak their piece. The children told nothing. The American dream is not hiring strangers to take care of your children.

I'm Lisa Bryn Rundle, and this is Uncover, Satanic Panic, Episode 6. I remember telling them nothing happened to me. From the moment I started digging into the Martensville case, I've been thinking about the children. It's impossible not to. Questions about them hover in every corner of this story. What must the whole thing have been like for them? And how do they make sense of it now? I'm not the only one

who wonders about them. My side of it is, it's just one side and it's not really that important, but really the people that really need a voice are the kids. Former Martinsville police officer, Claudia Bryden. for a lot of other different reasons, though. Probably a lot of sad reasons. And yet, my belief is that some of them will never be able to talk about this. Will never want to. Maybe one day, maybe, somebody will come. They need to know that they're not alone. They need to know that there are people who believe, 30 years later, if they're still claiming the same things, if they haven't recanted, if they haven't, then I feel they have the right.

They have the right to speak out. But the question is, would any of them want to? Let's see, it's all, it's like layers of it. And I have guilt about it also, like guilt about... For Kristen, it's been a long, sometimes agonizing journey to sort out what really happened to her. You're going to need therapy after this conversation. I've got it lined up. It's good. therapy after this conversation. I've got it lined up. It's good. Back in 1989, Kristen's psychologist ended up persuading her that she did drink the snake's blood and that she was

assaulted on the cold metal table. And in doing so, he rewrote her history. She was now a survivor of satanic ritual abuse. I think for my parents, like I was, I'm kind of a weird person. I'm a sensitive person. And I think it made sense to them. It's like, oh, that's why she's like this. Even for Kristen, there was an element of relief. there was an element of relief. It seemed to explain her anxiety and panic attacks in a way that wasn't her fault. Part of me liked the attention as a child would. That's the part I feel guilty about,

is that I kind of was like, oh, everyone's paying attention to me and they're all worried about me. Kristen joined nearly 20 other children in Stuart, Florida, believed to be victims. In the end, there were dozens of reports of ritual abuse. Children said they were forced to drink blood and eat feces. They were raped with knives or crucifixes, and that the abuse was photographed. No evidence of satanic ritual abuse, no images, no relevant injuries to the children,

no knives or crucifixes with the victim's DNA was ever found. Even Kristen's description of her town at the time sounds familiar. Since it was such a small town, all the ways it was spreading was like, oh, the dentist's kids were also there, and oh, my friend at school, his little sister is currently there. And there was more public meetings. I think there was multiple meetings where they brought all the parents together to have these kind of professionals come and talk to them about what they recommend people do. So the information was organized distribution, and the police who had investigated the case were, yeah, it was just everywhere. The town was going a little bit crazy.

Ultimately, two people are convicted of sexual crimes against multiple children. two people are convicted of sexual crimes against multiple children. The school's director is sentenced to 27 years in prison. And then Kristen grows up. She moves away, studies music, starts a career. But then two things happen that change Kristen's life again. The first takes place in a sensory deprivation tank, one of those soundproof capsules where you float in salt water and kind of see what happens when you turn off all outside input.

And so it allows your brain to kind of explore other altered realities. And I thought I was going to have a kind of positive experience. Kristen gets into the tank thinking it's going to be fun. And instead, I just dove deep into this like horrid preschool. And there was just like these neon arrows pointing at it saying like, a lot of your current problems you're working on have to do with this situation. Because it affected your relationships with your families and your friends and with sex and with everything. So you need to kind of, if you want to heal, you need to figure this out.

She's about 27 years old at the time. And she's not sure she wants to follow the neon arrows pointing at her past. I was scared to go back into this world and open up this thing I had so nicely packaged and put away. The second thing that happens is that she watches a film, a 2003 documentary called Capturing the Freedmen. The Freedmen case began in 1987. A prominent middle-aged teacher in a prosperous Long Island town is charged with sodomizing young boys who were his students.

Soon, allegations were made against his son and another man as well. The setting was the Freedmen home, where the elder Freedman taught after-school computer classes. The children's accounts didn't involve Satanism, but in many ways, this story fits the pattern. Public panic, snowballing accusations, repeated interviewing of children, and charges of large-scale recurring abuse that left no conclusive physical evidence and no witnesses beyond the children. All three men charged were convicted of sexual abuse.

I don't think that they're sitting around with any kind of diabolical or conspiratorial agenda to go out and falsely accuse Arnold Friedman or Railroad Jesse Friedman. But nobody's critiquing them. Nobody's saying that we've got a problem in this culture with hysteria around this issue. And so they're really free to let their fantasies fly. The filmmaker reaches out to journalist Debbie Nathan. I was one of the first writers for the mass media to look at those cases critically and question them.

In the Friedman case, the basic charges were completely implausible. First of all, you'd have to believe that blood is coming out of these children's orifices, that they're screaming, that they're crying, that their clothes are soiled from semen and from blood. And yet their parents show up. Sometimes they show up unannounced. Everything looks fine. Beginning in the late 80s, she had been sounding the alarm about cases like this one.

We now welcome, also in Los Angeles, Debbie Nathan. Debbie is an investigative freelance journalist who has been covering the McMartin and other abuse trials around the country. All these parents are bizarro, huh? They're all whacked. Well, it's not really fair, I don't think, to deal simply with these parents or with this particular case. You have to understand that all over the country there's a hysteria. And I don't think that it's a question with most of these kids of lying. I think that they have been brainwashed, if you will. By the time she was done watching the documentary, Kristen knew she had to figure out if her town had been caught up in the hysteria that Debbie is referring to. had been caught up in the hysteria that Debbie is referring to.

She goes looking for a book that Debbie wrote along with a defense attorney. It's called Satan's Silence, Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt. And on the first page, she has a list of cases that happened in the 80s that need to be re-examined because of social hysteria around satanic ritual abuse. And my principals, the teacher from my school, his name was right there and the name of my town was right there in the book. The book came out in 1995, more than a decade before it landed in Kristen's hands. Suddenly, it seemed possible that Kristen's first memories, the ones where she loved preschool, were the real ones. Which meant she'd spent more than half her life believing she was subjected to horrors that had never happened.

It also meant that the man who was still in prison might be innocent. It was a really weird feeling. So many people went to jail. Kristen ends up contacting Debbie Nathan, who offers to help her dig into the evidence. The whole thing just started to unravel. What they find convinces Kristen that the Stuart, Florida case,

her case, was in fact part of the ritual abuse panic. This big part of your own history, a way that you understood yourself, a way that your family understood you, was suddenly crumbling. I mean, what was that like? It was bizarre. It was layers and layers and layers. I cried a lot that year. And then also I would try to talk to my parents. I needed support. My father, it was interesting. So my father was like, I always thought that might not have happened. And then my mother was like, let's not reopen this. I do not want to think about this. Please do not, do not go there. And I was like, mom, it's too late. I'm there.

Kristen understands those images that came up under hypnosis differently now. They were asking about animals. And I had mentioned that a real memory that I had from preschool was that we did do a camping trip in the yard of the preschool when I was about four years old. What I remembered is that in the middle of the night, we found out that the principal of the school had killed a snake, a rattlesnake. And if you go camping in certain areas, I'm guessing that's not an uncommon thing to have happen, that you kill a rattlesnake. But once under hypnosis, this story of killing a snake became, I reinterpreted it through a kind of ceremonial, satanic framework where we drank the blood after he killed the snake. And she now believes the satanic elements of her disclosures were borrowed from movies and stories she'd heard.

But when you've believed something for that long, when it's woven into your understanding of yourself, it's not easy to shake. Even now, Kristen's certainty can sometimes slip away. And the fear takes over. Like when she first had to leave her own young child at daycare. It's a Montessori school. Oh my gosh. And I went there the first day and I looked around and they're so nice and so sweet. And I was like, I wanted to just make, I'm like, are you a child molester? Are you? Hey, do you like, I just want to make sure nobody hears a child molester. Is that okay?

You know, my husband's like, you don't need to ask them that. I'm pretty sure they're not. I mean, you had to adapt to something maybe happening. Then you had to adapt to something maybe not happening. Where are you at now? How sure are you that that's the real story as opposed to the narrative that came out in therapy? I'm pretty sure. Today, I'm pretty sure.

I think the story is resolved, but the effects of the story are still, they still hang out a little bit. And in some ways, it defined parts of my personality. And it's a kind of a good story. Like, you can really kind of be like, people can, you know, they tell their stories. Like, hey, I had this crazy thing happen to me. And I'm like, yeah, check this out. I think the whole experience, like for me, I feel like I've been traumatized,

but it wasn't by my preschool. It was by the psychologist and the social hysteria. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is.

I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. If you opened up a copy of the LA Times on October 30th, 2005, you would have found a remarkable story. The headline was simply, I'm sorry. The apology was from a man named Kyle Zerpolo. Two decades earlier, he was one of the hundreds of children who reported being ritually abused by the owners and staff

of the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California. It started out here in Manhattan Beach looking like an isolated incident. One mother noticed that her young son was having nightmares and difficulty sitting down. Teachers at this prominent Southern California preschool were accused of sexually molesting their young students. Authorities now believe that at least 60 young children were victimized and that the ultimate number could well be much greater. McMartin was one of the first and one of the biggest daycare panic cases.

Those children, some of them as young as two years old, were photographed by the suspects. Kiddie porn was the primary purpose for the alleged sexual abuse of children. Some children alleged that a living creature was sacrificed on the church's altar. the suspects. Kiddie porn was the primary purpose for the alleged sexual abuse of children. Some children alleged that a living creature was sacrificed on the church's altar. The truth about Satanism is they truly do use blood and they mix it with urine and then they also use the real meat, the real flesh. And this is what 1,200 molested kids in the city of Manhattan Beach have told the sheriff's department. After seven years in court, the McMartin trials ended without a single conviction. Kyle had been carrying the guilt and shame of his role in the case since he was eight years old.

But he too saw the capturing the freedman'sck and decided to reach out to Debbie Nathan. He told her his story and that became the I'm Sorry article in the LA Times. Here's some of what he said. I remember telling them nothing happened to me. I remember them almost giggling and laughing and saying, oh, we know these things happened to you. Why don't you just go ahead and tell us? Anytime I would give them an answer that they didn't like,

they would ask again and encourage me to give them the answer they were looking for. Kyle said he felt ashamed that he was being dishonest. But, he explained, whatever my parents wanted me to do, I would do. And I thought they wanted me to help protect my little brother and sister, who went to McMartin. My parents were very encouraging when I said that things happened. It was almost like saying things happened was

going to help get these people in jail and stop them from what they were trying to do to kids. Also, there were so many kids saying all these things had happened that you didn't want to be the one who said nothing did. You wouldn't be believed if you said that. We believe the children because once upon a time, we were the children and nobody believed us. Believe the children was more than a slogan. It was an organization formed by the parents in the McMartin preschool case.

One of the greatest difficulties in reporting a story like this one is that so much of it sounds so outrageous, too dreadful, too bizarre to be true. Concerned citizens have gotten together to defeat that disbelief. This organization is called Believe the Children. Its guiding principle, that the stories these young victims are telling are too widespread, too consistent not to be true. If we were lying, I don't think we'd come up with such good lies. Are you telling us the truth? If this isn't true, I mean, you can do anything you want with me, but it's true. Very few of the children at the

center of these cases have spoken out publicly as adults. And it's easy to imagine a whole lot of reasons why. Many of the children were so young, they might not even know that they were involved. For those who, like Kyle, were aware they weren't telling the truth, it might just be too difficult to come out and say it. In part because being honest now also implicates people, including the parents who so fervently believed. Despite the repercussions, other children have come forward over the years. I mean, I just called my parents everything from sexual abusers to murderers.

I mean, it wasn't real. It was like being in a movie. It wasn't real. It wasn't real at all. Andy Myers told his story to the CBC in 1994. Eleven years earlier, he was one of the children thought to be a victim of satanic ritual abuse in Jordan, Minnesota. They insisted that I was abused and they questioned me for like two hours that night. What did they say? They just said that my dad was abusing kids

and that they suspected he was abusing me. And I denied it, I mean, because he never did. So they were insistent? Very insistent. I mean, I was in tears for the whole time. I mean, I had no idea what was going on. So I just sat there and said, I want to go home. They said, you can go home then, but I never.

A year and a half later. You didn't go home for a year and a half? Yeah. Andy had been placed in a foster home and wasn't allowed to see his parents. He was questioned almost daily for three months. I was the only one that didn't think I was abused. I mean, everybody else told me I was an abused child. You start to believe that almost. Finally just said, fine, yeah, that happened. Why did you say yes that day?

I have no idea. Probably because I was just sick of being badgered. I didn't think, I mean, I was ever going home. I mean, I had, I figured, if this is going to be the way life is, I might as well make it a little more tolerable for myself. Almost immediately, Andy recanted his allegations. But this time, he wasn't believed. It caused Andy such profound mental and emotional distress that he suffered a breakdown that led him to be hospitalized for weeks.

He was 12 years old at the time. No one wants to be the person saying we shouldn't always believe the children. But what many of the adults who held so tightly to that edict don't seem to realize is that they didn't believe the children. At least, not the ones who told them over and over that nothing had happened. Here's Kristen. And it's interesting because it's at odds with things like the Me Too movement. Like, we want to believe accusers of sexual assault. What's interesting, what I found most revealing is when I actually got the actual court documents. They have these interviews with these kids written on pieces of paper, and I held them in my hand and I read them. And when you read them, it was so clear that these interviews were coerced. I mean, it's like no question.

Videotapes of the interviews in the majority of these cases have been sealed by the courts. But there are transcripts. This is part of an interview with a young boy in the McMartin case. Question. Where did Beth get touched? Answer. She didn't get touched. You can help her tell her yucky secrets and she won't have to tell.

Wouldn't that be nice? She didn't get touched. Oh, I don't know if that's the truth. Question. Other kids remember things, and they told me you were there. So don't you remember seeing some of that? Shake's head no. You're just afraid.

No, I'm not. You're just a scaredy cat. How come you won't tell me? It takes time to look behind information. and so it's lazy not to. And so if someone has an argument like, why would children do that? I would just say they sound uninformed. Kyle Zerpolo made efforts to apologize directly to the surviving defendants in the McMartin case. They declined, saying it wasn't the kids who needed to be apologizing.

It was the adults. But that apology hasn't happened. In the U.S. alone, more than a thousand years in combined prison sentences were handed out before these cases slowly began to recede. In many cases, it took years before convictions were overturned. Some never were. never were. Ultimately, there would be acquittals and exonerations, articles and books that called out the panic, and even an apology by Geraldo Rivera for having been duped.

But none of that reached as deeply into our collective psyches as the panic itself. There has never been any sort of large-scale reckoning with the satanic ritual abuse panic. No definitive rolling back of the mistaken beliefs that fueled it. And that has left the thousands of people like Kristen to cope with the fallout on their own. like Kristen to cope with the fallout on their own. There's one more painful twist in Kristen's story. James Toward, owner and director of the Glendale Montessori Preschool in Stewart, Florida,

was still in prison as Kristen began to re-examine her past. Right around the same time that I was doing this, the local newspaper in my hometown released a 20-year anniversary article damning him again 20 years later and celebrating the police officers that did the case. The timing of everything was just bizarre. And I used to have nightmares. When I was like 13, I'd have a hard time at school, and I'd be like, I'm going to go tell this man that he's ruined my life. And now I'm like, I'm going to go tell this man that I think he might be innocent. Kristen ends up talking to him by phone from prison, and to his wife, who had stood by him.

She even starts a free James Tower website. But when she finally accesses the police files, Kristen concludes there was reason to believe he was guilty of real sex crimes. Just not satanic abuse. Do you feel that he was guilty of something? It sounded like the cops and the investigators kind of muddled the two. Like, wait a second, he has a, I don't know, I don't want to defend him either. Because that's totally not a cool thing to do. She was no longer sure she wanted to advocate for his release.

And Kristen had to recalibrate her feelings about it all again. It's hard to say how many cases included a kernel of truth amid the false allegations. According to former FBI agent Ken Lanning, we'll never know. According to former FBI agent Ken Lanning, we'll never know. Once these cases are contaminated, it's almost impossible to know with any degree of certainty what actually happened. By the mid-90s, researchers were starting to show why. I saw him out in the yard. Here's a demonstration by developmental psychologist Stephen Cece from a 1994 CBC documentary.

Cece sent a stranger to visit a local daycare. The man, Sam Stone, stayed only two minutes, said hello and goodbye to the children, and left. Once a week for 12 weeks, the kids were given interviews, and during these interviews, some of the kids were given interviews, and during these interviews, some of the kids were given highly erroneous suggestions. They might be told, for example, do you remember that time Sam Stone came to your classroom and ripped the book? Did he do it on purpose or was it an accident? Then there was another interview. The kids were

asked what happened when the man visited the daycare. Remember, he was only there two minutes, said hello and goodbye, and left. Well, he was reading this book, but he didn't tear it at all. Oh, he didn't? No. Oh, really? Yeah. Well, what else did he do when he was in the classroom? He was doing it so fast that he ripped one of the pages.

None of the things that you just heard this little boy say happened. And this is what we find that the kids frequently will do. They'll go beyond the script that was given through the erroneous questions. Over 70% of the kids were influenced by the questions and made things up. In a later study, Professor Cece found that given certain conditions, children can also invent stories about physical harm. The facts are, as we best understand them scientifically, is that you can get children and adults to them for a prolonged period of time have repeatedly provided the children with erroneous information. The question should never have been, do you believe the children?

Do you believe the children? It should have been. Did panicked parents and police and child advocates, supported by a credulous media, pressure children into false accusations? And did they convince happy children with healthy childhoods that they'd been subjected to devastating abuse. Out of all this pain, something good did emerge. It shined a spotlight on the interviewing techniques that had produced so many false allegations. It forced the development of investigative protocols. Protocols that, when followed, help everyone. During the hysteria, it was the worst of both worlds.

Real crimes against children continued to go unpunished, while innocent people were persecuted in the name of child protection. Now, we're much better at making sure neither of those things happen. Today, we know that false allegations of child abuse are rare, unless they are obtained through suggestive or coercive interviews. That, with the exception of very young kids, children's reports are just as reliable as adults. That the first interview with a child is the most accurate.

And that children may believe that they actually experienced false suggested events long after the interviews have ended. And so the question we need to ask now is this. How many of those children still believe? This case has stuck with me because it has always bothered me that probably nothing was done to help those kids, to help these children get over a trauma that had been inflicted on them.

That, to me, is a huge tragedy. Heather Leonoff, the lawyer who handled Travis Sterling's appeal. I'm sure that they are hugely psychologically damaged because they would see themselves now as victims of horrific torture and abuse. And it takes a lot to get over that. And that's what they would understand had happened to them. So many of the people I spoke with about the Martensville case

expressed concern for the children's well-being. But Heather makes a case I haven't heard before. But Heather makes a case I haven't heard before. The Saskatchewan government, in my opinion, had a duty to fix some of the harm that they had caused. And one of the groups that I thought that they really owed a duty to were the children who had been manipulated by the adults to say things that fit the adult's agenda, and they had caused serious, serious harm to children. And I was very concerned about, never mind my clients and his parents and his family and the police officers who had been caught up in this fit of hysteria, but the children who had been made physically and emotionally ill

by the brainwashing that they had gone through to get them to believe that this had all happened to them. believe that this had all happened to them. That's why the Saskatchewan government at the time, not 25 years later, but at the time, needed to go public and make sure that that community understood that this had never occurred, that this was complete fiction. They needed to stand up and say, all of the adults involved in this were wrong, and they didn't do that. And now the community, 25 years later, still thinks some of it happened.

But most importantly, the parents of these children think it happened, and these children think it happened. And they should have gotten them therapy and help 25 years ago. It's too late now. I truly hope Heather's wrong about that last bit. About it being too late. The children are adults now, of course. And their identities were protected in the courts and the media. I wasn't sure if I'd be able to find them.

Or if they'd want to be found. But I felt they deserved to know that this podcast was happening, and I wanted them to have a chance to speak, if that's something they wanted to do. In the end, I was able to reach out to many of them. Only a few replied, and none wanted to speak on the record. At least, not yet. Whatever their views are now about what did or did not happen to them, I know this much. They were traumatized.

And I don't think they owe the public anything. But they are owed something. At minimum, clarity. They deserve to know what really happened to them. Next, on the final episode of Satanic Panic. What gives what you're doing today, it's relevant. If you take away the lurid components, that's an investigation you could have today. The exact same challenges are all there. You know, in doing your best, sometimes you don't get it right.

You can't, you can't know. But there's no doubt in my mind that a lot of things happened at that daycare. Nobody remembers what happened there. This is crazy. We should all be reminded of it. That's why a public inquiry really was necessary. Uncover, Satanic Panic is written and produced by me, Lisa Rundle, and Alina Ghosh. Mixing and sound design by Evan Kelly. Chris Oak is our story editor.

Emily Connell is our digital producer. Original music by Olivia Pasquarelli. Evan Agard is our video producer. Tanya Springer is the senior producer of CBC Podcasts. Arif Noorani is our executive producer. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, all at CBC Podcasts, or by email, uncover at cbc.ca.

Special thanks for this episode goes to HBO and Andrew Jarecki, The New York Times, CBC's The Fifth Estate, and Richard Beck, whose book, We Believe the Children, has been an invaluable resource. For more CBC Podcasts,

go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.