The Satanic Panic
00:00And I'll finally give my Ted talk about Ted BundyThat's a very like Sarah Marshall Ted talkSoSatan wise yeah start me off. How did uh, how did all this begin? Well, can you describe it to me?What is the satanic panic so my understanding is that in the 80s?There was this thing where we thought that there were satanic cults that weremurdering children andIt was the parents that got together and they were worshiping Satan and they were sacrificing their kids and
00:47it was all verypagan andveryI want to say true detective, but of course it was before true detective, but it was this itSeemed like it was much bigger than what the actual I guess the act of right isolatedBut it kind of became this thing that the whole country was very concerned about you're you're right in theoverarching description of it and then wrong on twoInteresting points and what hadn't struck me until you said that is that as far I can't think of any allegations that I've read about
01:19So far about actual child murder. There were a lot of stories about animal sacrificeBut what the accusations were mainly about were child sexual abuseSo it was sexual abuse and thenOverwhelmingly it wasn't parents who were being accused of it, but it was teachers and daycare workers andespecially daycare employees the case that started this all off was the McMartinpreschool case where there was a preschool inManhattan Beach, California where the McMartin trial started in 1983 and went until 1990 and was the mostExpensive criminal trial in US history cost 15 million dollars. There was in the end essentially no result
02:04There was no actual evidence. Everyone got acquitted. What was the case? What was the crime?So what happened was that the mother of aFour-year-old boy who was enrolled there her son had had painful bowel movementstheir conflicting accounts that cameduring the trial and in one version of the story heAccused a teacher of molesting him and then later took it back and another version of the storyHe didn't take it back and one of the things he also said aboutWorker at the preschool was named Ray was that he flew through the air and so the mother
02:42Takes her concerns to the police the policewrite a letter and send it out toParents of about 200 other children at the preschool and I can read you some of itWhat's interesting about this is that there's from the beginning a lot of leadingWas this before we sort of knew about false confessions?the prevailing attitude at the time and the slogan that became attached to the McMartin trial and then to the otheraccusations and trials that followed wasbelieve the children and
03:15You can see how that is a form of backlash against the fact that previously childrenWe're not really believed about this kind of thing and we can take it as far back as FreudHaving his patients talk about their father's committing father daughter incest with them as it would be known forDecades still and just being unable to believeThat his patients were really being molested by male family members and we were coming off ofDecades and generations of being able to look abuse dynamic squarely in the eye andSimply not accepting them and not believing people who came forth about this kind of thing and I think that the the need toTo say no a child would never make this up a child can't lie was in to some degree
04:05Reparations for all that so the pendulum swung back, but then we didn't temper it with believe childrenBut don't ask the leading questionsYeah, the impetus to believe children folds in on itself and turns into an inability to believe children who say that they weren't abused ifthe adults involved in the situationbelieve that abuse had to have happened and so it happens inThe McMartin case is that the police send a form letter out to parents of about200 children and the letter saysPlease question your child to see if he or she has been a witness to any crime or if he or she has been a victim our
04:42Investigation indicates that possible criminal acts include oral sex fondling of genitals buttock or chest area and sodomyPossibly committed under the pretense of quote taking the child's temperature. Oh my godSo they just send out this letter this extremely inflammatory letter to a bunch of parentsYeah, and imagine if you're a parent and you have a four-year-old enrolled in preschool and you're told we have we have arrested aworker at this preschool and the accusations against him areThese horrific things that every parent isTerrified beyond almost anything else. How are you not going to assume that terrible things could very well have happened to your childSo what happens of course is that parents question children and the parents also become suspicious because their children are exhibiting
05:33signs of what these see what they see isOf them being disturbed following maybe some form of abuse and it's things like bedwetting and nightmares and suddenly not liking foodsThat they liked before and things that's like what every four-year-oldConstantly does what every four-year-old constantly does I was thinking also while I was researching this about I wasBaby sitting for a three-year-old a few weeks agowe wereLike in a messy like a garage area and she was in her socks and got down and got her socksDirty which I hadn't realized she wasn't supposed to do and then her grandmother came back in and was like
06:10Oh, you got your socks dirty and I said, oh, it wasn't I that was my dadI didn't know I'm sorry and the three-year-old goes. No, it wasn't her fault. It was someone elseWhich I would which I really loved becauseLike that's someone I want on my crew right like someday when I'm doing a heist someone who knows it's threeYeah, no, she's she gets itBut also I was thinking if you came in to that if you just heard a three-year-old say that and you had an ideaWell, children can't lie three-year-olds can't lie three-year-olds can't conceive of lyingWho was the someone else person and then if you are convinced as an adult and have some kind of confirmation
06:51Bias like you would if someone sent you a horrifying letterThen you can take, you know a three-year-old a four-year-old and sit them down and kind of poke them in Prada and say who was someone elsetell me about someone else andKids tend to not immediately recant and so if I had been you know for a three or four and someone had said who is someone elseI would make something up and come up with who this someone else person was and then I would do long-term thinking as aThree-year-old you're not thinking through. Hey if I tell a lie now, I'm gonna have to stick with that lieSo it's better to just rip the band-aid off and tell the truth now. You don't think in that way. You just keep telling liesYeah, just saying especially what somebody wants to hear too
07:31I mean so much of child behavior at that point is aboutImpressing your parents or telling people something that will make them happy or make them laughYeah, and so what we see in the the transcripts from some of these cases and from the questioning that these children are putThrough is adults saying things along the lines of we know that your teacher did something bad to youBecause you've got a confession or a description from one child and then you bring it to another child who corroborates itAnd then it becomes truth in the minds of the adults. So we havesocial workers and police officers saying things to kids likeWe know that your teacher is bad and
08:08Scary and she can't hurt you anymore and you have to help us put her in jailSo that she can't hurt any more kids. So just tell us we know that you know X thing happenedAnd if you're a kid and an adult is telling youThat you have to make them happy by saying that something happenedIt would take an incredibly strong will child to not do thatThe McMartin case goes to trial that becomesAttracts a lot of media attention because it's the kind of story that you know if it bleeds it leads and this isThe allegations are absolutely horrifying
08:48And then this is something that other parents across the country can look at and say if it could happen in this perfectly nice placein CaliforniaThen who's to say it can't happen at this perfectly nice place where I take my child every day soone of thePolice statements in the form letter is your child may have beenSodomized under the pretense of taking their temperature and so across the country in New Jerseya mother takes her four-year-old son to the doctor who takes his temperature temperature rectally andThe boy says oh my teacher does that to me at school and later clarifies that he means
09:24She takes his temperature and what the mother isExtremely ready to assume is that that means that he's being sexually abused and so that becomes the Kelly Michaels case in New JerseyWhere is the victim she's the alleged perpetratorAnd so the same thing happens in New Jersey has happened in California where one childMakes an innocuous statement to a parentthe parent interprets it as a description of abuse andThen talks to the other parents the other parents question their kidsThe police get involved and then we haven't even gotten into the satanic element of it too because in the McMartin case
10:08The mother who initially makes the accusations, you know, she gets the accusation that Ray flew through the air the allegedPerpetrator flew through the air and then that there are these tunnels underneath the preschool where they're taking children to do theirRituals the other interesting thing about kids is that they will say astoundingly bizarre shitIf we're we've created a dynamic where adults are ready to believeThe whatever they say if it's an accusation against a teacher or an authority figure in their life thenThese will become criminal accusations and kids also areObsessed with bodily functions and so a lot of the accusations of all they would be forced to eat shitOr they would pee on each other or they would all
10:58There was a case in AustinAbout a daycare center where a couple that ran at Fran and Dan Keller were also accused of satanic ritual abuse and one of the storiesThat a child told under questioning was that the killers and quoting from a Texas monthly article on this quoteKidnapped a baby gorilla from Zilker Park after which Fran cut a finger off the gorilla and drained the blood in a water bucketBut there's never been a zoo at Zilker Park much less a gorillaThere's something funny about these suburban parents coming up with these outlandishAccusations and then somehow convincing themselves that they're trueOf course, it's not funny at all because these people's lives are in the balance
11:41But it's hard not to laugh at this stuff. Yeah, it's absolutely absurdAnd I mean and the Kellers did hard time for this even if people were acquittedEven if they were never formally indicted then they were publicly accused. They lost their jobs. They lost their moneyIt's amazing to me that no one would check up on this because it would be so easyYou're like, okay, so they got a beat they kidnapped a baby gorillaThat's legit and then cut off the finger and drain the blood into a bucketLike there's not that much blood and a baby gorilla's finger. There's a finite number of baby gorillas in the United StatesOne of them went missing and its finger was cut off that in itself would be a story
12:22That could be tracked down by some enterprising reporterIt's interesting too that American parents are are hyper vigilant about this very real and this very unreal thingWe've recently discovered that child sex abuse existsLike this is also something that there was very little literature on until the 70s and so in 1983We're still reeling from this idea that there is such a thing as quote father daughter incestAnd are feeling hyper vigilant about it and the thinking at the time that received a lot ofsocietal support and federal funding in the form of group therapy programs primarily was thatIt's the integrity of the family that is at fault and there also emerges this idea of the family romance and that the problem
13:04Is that all of these women are going and working outside of the home and not being sexually available enough to their husbandsAnd at the same time their daughters are entering puberty and who could blame a man whose wife is giving him the cold shoulderFor just molesting his daughter a little and so that's the way that we conceive of child sexual abuse in the 70sWhat we see with that methodology is this this extreme hesitance aboutpathologizing the American patriarch and saying well, you know dads do this sometimes but they're it's it's not their faultWe were confronted with the fact that sexual abuse was occurring within the homeWhich is I think statistically where it's most likely to occur. We couldn't see the father asDangerous it was seen more as like a mistake
13:47Rather thanEvil is that what you mean? Yeah, and the solution to this was notQuestioning the nuclear American family where the father is in charge and where we have this power dynamicYou know the horror that we now feel for the figure of the child molester in AmericaWe couldn't quite do it and it reminds me of the way that in the 70sYou know Ted Bundy is arrested and there's a lot of very concrete evidence suggesting that he's killed a lot of women andThe police charged with guarding him just can't they look at him. They're like yeah, but but but you just seemLike such a regular guy. You seem like a regular middle-class guy
14:26How could you really be dangerous and so he escapes from police custody twice?We couldn't quite take it seriouslyAnd so I think that we put a lot of that on to Satan who's good for this kind of thing and witchesWho are also good for that kind of thing one of the allegations?Against the woman who ran the McMartin pre-school and who did serve a couple of years in custodyWhile this case was progressing police did a search and found a black robe among her belongingsWhich there had already been allegations about witchcraft andSatanism and people flying through the air and they were like yes
15:03This is evidence and the black robe turns out to be a graduation robeSo at the end of this long trial they go to prisonThey are acquitted because ultimately there's no actual evidence and it's funny because you can see us thinking through all of theseImportant questions about criminal and legal procedure or where we're struggling with how to deal for example with the question of a caseIn which the only evidence against the accused is testimony from a small childWhich is a serious thing to think about because there are cases where the onlyEvidence is testimony from a small child and something horrible has happened to themand so what happens too is that the children become mouthpieces for the parents and for the anxieties of the parents and the
15:47confirmation bias of theInvestigating police and the social workers where as a society it seems like during this time we had this lofty goalWe wanted to take our children seriously and protect them and understand the threats that were in their livesBut we also were quite sure we wanted the threat to be outside the homeI mean the previous estimates about sexual abuse andThe frequency of quote incest put it at about one per millionThat would mean in America there would be 300 people who had been molestedWhich is I think we can all be pretty confident saying there's more than 300 people in the United States that have been molested some of the
16:22For example the the Kinsey researchThere's a lot of verbiage in that when they talk about incest cases or cases where childrenWere experienced something sexually violent or coerciveThere's a lot of description of well, you know, but it it didn't negatively affect themThere's a quote in the the Kinsey paper is something to the effect ofYou know a child who has experienced for example someonean adult exposing themselves to themWill react only as negatively as they do if they see something like a spider like that's a normal response
16:59Yeah, to sexual predation and there's just section overwhelming need to believe that okay, it doesn'tHappen or it happens very very occasionally and when it does it's not traumaticThe tone that people took at the time because the argument then is if someone is a survivor of sexual abuse and isHaving you know a difficult adulthood then maybe that actually is a sign of the issues and problems that they hadBefore the abuse incident so almost the abuse is a symptom of all the other stuff that was going on in their lifeYeah, like you were already screwed up and that's why you got abused and the abuse didn't have any negative effect on youIt was yeah symptom of of your problems that pre it's pre-existing conditionIt's interesting that there's also this conception that the only people that could ever do any molestation are
17:48Evil to a profound extent, right? They're not justSexual predators, they're literal Satanists because there's no way that normal humans who weren't under the control of some darkSauron could ever do this. Yeah, the pre-existing fear of Satan which we had throughout the 70sAnd you know, there's the fear of heavy metal bands putting satanic secretbackward satanic messages and their songs and and this idea ofYou know America becoming a less Christian country andPaganism and the dark side of the hippie movement because now in AmericaWe have a similar inability to believe that the real danger is within the home within the system that we need to be worried about
18:32mass incarceration we need to be worried aboutMiddle what's happening within a middle-classAmerican family we need to be worried about people who are well integrated into our communities as humansWe exhibit the same behaviors that led us to need to believe, you know, the problem is not within the American homeThe problem is Satan. I think you can probably tell a lot about a society from what people don't need evidence to believeAnd I think it's very telling that people didn't need great evidence to believeSatanic abuse was going on which is fascinating to me because you would think it's such an extremeCase it's such extreme human behavior. Yeah, and one one of the things that Kelly Michaels
19:15I think responded to in terms of the allegations against her because one of the claims that emerged was that she had30 children in her care and she would strip all of them naked and they would have to you knowCorrals naked together basically and one of the things she said was do you know how long it takes to undress and then dressagain 30 children if you were the adult in the roomIt is impossible. I mean, I think it would take about four hoursSo this letter that the cops sent out to the parents is that remotely standard procedure?I don't know what police department's best practices are around this kind of allegation todayI think it would probably vary a lot state by state but department by department
19:57one of the things that I thinkAffected this as well is that when investigatingAllegations of these in the 70s when we really started having a national conversation about this and conceiving of it as something that happened and thereforeprosecuting it occasionallyWas that standard procedure in I think many departments at the time was to notAnd also the phrase that you see a lot and this is the girl child which just seems weird to meYou know, it's like that. Are you the key master? Are you the girl child?You know, it's the the terminology becomes weird and dated so quickly
20:31So the girl child who had madeAllegations of abuse against her father because that was the kind that we sort of started noticing firstwould not be questioned by the police and they would bring in a female social worker so that she would beUnintimidated and be able to open up and which is again, you know, these were decisions made withWith humanist intentions and with the desire to not further traumatize a traumatized childBut the other issue with that is that if you have a social worker who's an expert on speaking with childrenOr at least whose line of work that is then they areAt the time were not trained in police procedures
21:12They weren't trained in how to question a witness or a victim about a crime that they had witnessed or had been perpetrated against themAnd so the police were farming out part of their work to people who were not part of the legal systemSo what are some of the things that they weren't asking that they should have things like what was the date on which he molested you?You know one thing that as a social worker if you weren't trained as an operator within the legal systemIs that you really wouldn't you wouldn't know what kind of evidence would be admissible or not generally at trial?You wouldn't necessarily be trained in the kinds of behaviors that can lead someone toConfirm something that you're suggesting might have happened to them as opposed to having them introduce the information to begin withAnd then of course we had social workers still
22:00Doing a lot of questioning of kids and the McMartin case the the Kelly Michaels case the other cases that proliferated at this timeI think it would be so easy to have a sense and you know people whoWere involved in these cases have written about themselves in these termsThat you were a crusader and you were saving this kid from the forces of evilAnd if they were clamming up and refusing to talk and refusing to say anything bad about this person who you believedsincerely had done these terrible things thenYou would do anything that you had to to get them to saySomething because you would feel that you were helping them to overcome their fear of this monster in their lives
22:39If you especially if you think that sexual assaultAgainst children has been under reported so long and has been this sleeping giantUnderneath the culture for so long you're gonna say we're finally gonna get these peopleWe're finally gonna bring justice to this issueAnd so I can see how that would become a runawayCrusade for people. I think Satanism was less scary than the reality in a weird wayWhat we now know is that sexual abuse ofchildren and other
23:09Vulnerable members of society is something that can happenwithin an organized system like a churchand go onSometimes indefinitely with the soft collusion of many many responsible adults and community members and can be something thatWe just don't see and that's scarierThen the idea that it's yeah that we can recognizeThat anyone who would sexually abuse a child would be just as likely to kidnap a baby gorilla and use its blood in a ritualAnd these two things are equally unimaginable on the spectrum of human behavior and equally equally conspicuous
23:48And then when the tide starts to turn one of the things that causes that is that people startVery tentatively coming forward and saying is it really possible that there is thiscabal ofthousands of Satanists in the United States and they areInfiltrating preschools and daycare centers primarily in order to abuse children and use them in their rituals and convert them to SatanismYou know why children for a start they don't have any money like if you want to get someone involved in your evilcult thenIdeally you target someone who can help subsidize your stuff, you know rogues cost money
24:31By the end of the 80s so many of these cases have actually been brought to trialAnd there have been so many allegations that it becomes clear that for any of this to actually be happening or you know for 98%Of it to be happening then a significant percentage of adults in America areMembers of some sort of organized satanic cult that also manages to completely avoid detectionby adults andOnly children are the ones who are seeing any of this happening and this is and it's so ornate because it involves breaking into zoos andKidnapping animals and building tunnels underneath preschools and takingChildren away in planes and all of this all of these things that you would think would leave some trace of physical evidence and all these
25:16Logistics, yeah, I guess if there really wasn't a large organized group of any kind there'd be a magazineThere'd be a membership driveThere'd be at that point maybe not a website, but there would be catalogs that you could send away forthere would be all the accoutrements ofLike people that are really into golf have like an annual meeting and they haveThey have a newsletterYeah, if there was this big of a satanic subculture then you would not have to Jerry where your graduation roseUp into something you use for rituals. There would be something nice that you could buy
25:49From a catalog. I've always thought one thing that's really weird about Satanism is that just like racistNo one self identifies as a Satanist because Satan is a Christian deitySo to believe in Satan to worship Satan you sort of have to believe in the BibleBut if you believe in the Bible, why would you be rooting for the bad guy?My understanding is there are self-identified SatanistBut they're extremely small and there's the church of Satan which essentially only exists to bring free speech casesYeah, and I that always seemed weird to meI remember watching Rosemary's baby when I was way too young my impression was okay
26:28So if Satan literally exists and you're using him to impregnate someone then God existsSo that's kind of nice because if you know that Satan's there then God is there and soAnd why if you have that knowledge like what's the payoff?I've read the Satanic Bible and essentially Anton LeVe in the Satanic Bible is like lookWe do not really believe in Satan. That's not a thing what this is about isessentially this iron randy and objectivism andDo for yourself and don't worry about other people so much and there's a whole chapterHe's like here's some spells you can do they're silly, but they're fun
27:07Have a naked lady lie on a table and write shit on a scroll and then burn it and have some candlesAnd he's just saying none of this is real, but it's neat. That's a very secular viewpointI mean secular people can look at that and think it's jokey and funWhereas I think Christians would be totally horrified of that because if you actually believe in Satan then you wouldn't toy aroundWith his name you wouldn't throw his name around and sort of jokingly cast spells and so the entireviewpoint of theSatanist is that none of it's really real and so that's the only way in which you can be a SatanistThat's the thing. I mean, that's what I come back to just thinking about
27:46Criminology is this idea ofThe need to believe that there are people out there who say I'm evil and I love being evil and this is a sideI want to be on I don't think anyone really wants that I think there's probably you knowthere's some rogueteenagers and and disturb people out there who get somesense of control orOr satisfaction from the bravado of saying to themselves or other people. I'm I'm evilI'm in league with Satan. I'm in league with with human evil whatever
28:16But I don't think it's anything that any of us truly want and and yeahAnd Anton LeVe could be the godfather of Satanism because he didn't actually believe in any of it. What happened to the victimsDid the victims eventually recant?It's hard to know because a lot of them had their identities protectedand weren'tNamed publicly. I have not found anything on a case falling apart becauseVictims came forward and said no this actually didn't happenI mean victims did
28:47Alleged your victims did start to recantYou know or attempted to recant while these cases were going to trial and the line at the time was you knowYou say you're saying that because you're afraid of what this person will do to youwe can't believe you if you're saying this didn't happen and so the confirmation bias ofProsecutors during cases like this allowed them to see both silence and claims that abuse didn't happen asReinforcing their belief that there had been abuse which is wild in the in the absence of forensic evidenceIt's interesting that they that they kept on it for that longYeah, unless there's just none to find in the Kelly Michaels case one of the things that was taken as forensic evidence was a child had told the story about
29:32The about Kelly Michaels using peanut butter as a tool for sexual abuse that she would put it on her body and make the kids lick it offI think which is exactly the kind of thing that a child would say under pressureI think along with the gorilla finger and soOne of the investigators went into the kitchen of the day Karen found a jar of peanut butter and you knowThat was like the bloody glove moment and it's like the story checks out. There's peanut butterThere's peanut butter like why would you have peanut butter if you weren't gonna use it to abuse a child?This is like the argument that I've been having with my parents for like 50 years about whether or not the Bible is trueWhich is a completely pointless argument to have but they oftentimes will bring up that there's actually
30:16Very good evidence that there were floodsIn that part of the world at that time and I'm always like that is the least difficult to believePart of that story like the fact that there were floods is very easy to believeThe fact that somebody took two animals of every kind and put them on a boatThat's the hard part the fact that there were floods is not really evidence that the Noah's Ark story is trueThat's interesting too because I feel like so many of the aspects of the Bible that have alwaysGiven me trouble as someone who takes things fairly literally and you know made me as someone who grew up in a secular home never particularlyprone to believe Bible stories where that they very quickly get into you know
30:56If you're thinking about it logistically, you just think so is Noah out there catching two of every nat to get on the Ark andHow does this work and it's the same kind of logistical problems that you have with SatanismBut I guess if you're if your religion requires you to just acceptLiterally as gospel things that physically don't really make sense then Satanism works out well, tooDo you think that we're at a point now where this wouldn't happen?I don't know. I feel like I mean another really interesting aspect of this is that and I didn't really realize this until I wasresearching the OJ Simpson trial a few years ago and one of the things that happened there was thatJuries really didn't know what to do with DNA evidence. They didn't know what DNA was
31:42I think that as Americans we really didn'tHonestly in general start having a basic understanding of DNA until Jurassic Park came outAnd then we all kind of figured it out and we could use it in criminal trialsMarch at Clark at a certain point had to in a verypainstakingbasic way explain what DNA was and explain like look ourDefendant cut himself and got his blood all over the crime scene and the odds of that blood not belonging to OJSimpson are literally statistically impossible and the jury at that time was able to be like I
32:19Don't know but what another thing that's interesting thoughIs that there there was an alleged form of forensic evidence in the Kelly Michaels trial and in other trials where they would bring in?Physicians who would examine the child and say I don't know that the hymen of aGirl was in a strange what they took to be a strange shape or they had aDifferent different sized or shaped hymen or a hymen that suggestedPenetration or you know that doctors in these cases at the time believe suggestedSodomy which is if the the anus winked they called it winking. I don't I'm not sure exactly what thatLike if if you if you prodded it it would move I guess or contract or something and that sign that you've been molested somehow
33:08Or that you've stuck something up your butt or maybe nothing because what happens is you know aftersome of these people have been convicted thescience that allegedly supports it isdebunked andMore substantive studies are conducted on you know getting a decent sample size of what a child'sHymen or anus will do or look like which really had not been studied that much before apparently and they're like ohactually it turns out that there'sAll sorts of things that children's
33:41Anuses and genitals do and none of them actually correlate that directly to abuse and the you know we just didn't know this beforeYou know we are still vulnerable as juries to junk science and there are still trials in America where bite mark evidenceIs used by prosecutors and that's something that's notoriously unreliable. There isA lot of forensic you know non-dna forensic evidence that's brought in as evidence supporting someone's guilt that actually isNot particularly reliable or unreliable under certain circumstances, but is presented to a jury as you know ifthis is present thenthis 100 percent means that defendants guilt andCurries were not experts in this believe it. So
34:26I think we are still vulnerable. How did this allEnd did it just trail off? Did it just disappear slowly from the newspapers?I think it did. I think we just got scared of other stuff. There are echoes of it. I the the west Memphis 3Yeah, that was satanism, right? That was yeah, and that was satanismThey were satanists because damien eckles liked metallicaWhich is also great because metallica's music is about feelingsYeah, they're basically eighth gradersI was really into metallica when I was in eighth grade and that like music really spoke to me that in nine inch nails
35:02Were like my shit and then looking back like listening to them nowI'm like, oh wow these this is eighth grade. This is exactly how I felt in eighth gradeBut it's not particularly satanic. It's not particularlyIdeological, I think that is just the inability of old people to be interested in what young people are doingI think that is a that is a fundamentaland constant problem that whenever you look into anything it's likeMy parents parents being shocked that the Beatles hair touched their collarsevery generation has a version of that and
35:37In the 90s. It was metallica. Yeah, does this intersect with the whole recovered memories thing?Yeah, there was a book a canadian book that came out in 1980 called michelle remembers, which I've read and isfascinatingAnd is uses this repressed memory. I want to say technology, but that's not a repressed memory therapywhere basically thisAnd you know the circumstances around it are really interesting too a young woman named michellewasHappily married and just started
36:08I forget where precipitated this exactlyBut I think started exhibiting signs of psychological distress and didn't know why and felt like she'd had like a good childhoodAnd had a perfectly nice marriage and started seeing a psychiatrist who started doing repressed memory therapy on herShe starts recounting memories of her mother having been abusive and then that turns into memories of her mother having been in a covenandI thinkKilled a baby or they there was something involving them using a baby or an aborted fetus in a ritualAnd her having been forced as a young child to take part
36:45Uh in all of theseAgain these elaborate satanic rituals that they that she then remembered with the help of the psychiatrist who then married her and helpedWrite a book about it and theyWent on the the lecture tour and made I think probably you know a lot ofLiteral and cultural capital off of thisIt's a very it's a weird case. It's like a pigmalion a satan is pigmalion or somethingDid she eventually recant no, noI mean at least not publicly and that and she just sort of disappeared
37:16the sky disappeared and then andThere was nothing on the scale of these accusations and these trials that wasYou know a kind of a moment of public reckoning of us saying like oh fuckWe fucked up and I think probably that had to doWith the breadth of all this because there were relatively few people involved in investigating and prosecuting these casesbutPotentially a majority of americans were willing to believe this in some way or another and it's just it's hard to have apublic momenting of reckoning and essentially recanting
37:48With this kind of a thing and I mean repressed memory therapyhas been significantlydebunked since then butit also seems to meVery possible that someone could haveDisassociated memories of prior abuseandin order to
38:06to say myMy parent my family member someone in my communityAbused me and then if they're being guided through this by a professional who's willing to believe certain things and isGuided by a general belief in in that satanic cults for example that it's it's it's easier to sayin a way thatYour mother was like a satanic grand wizard and that's why she abused you than to say that she was a human being whoWasn't able to be the parent that you needed. So what do you think is the legacy of these cases?What did it leave us with?
38:43I mean it put a lot of people in prisonsomething thatI didn't initially think of until I had been researching this for a while is what did this do essentially tohundreds thousands of of america of children at this timewhoNot only were led to believe that they had been abused inAwful ways by members of their community and adults that they and their families trustedinevitably some of them
39:09If we're talking about hundredsMaybe a couple thousand of kids inevitably some of them stillBelieve that all of these things really did take placeand if theyCame to not believe it then that could leadTo some kind of rift with their family, you know, I wonder aboutwhat effect this had onYou know the relationship between children parents
39:33There was at least there was a mother in the kelly michaels case who published a bookAbout you know, this her crusade against her daughter's abuser and then of course laterKelly michaels turned out to be a perfectly nice aspiring actress who just wanted to get a job in new jerseyYou know, it's it's another horror story about manhattan real estate reallyWhat effect would it have on you if as a child your basic perception of realityWas screwed with this much and the adults in your life the authority figuresI mean, there's kind there's really a sick doubling of what allegedly took place in a way really was took plate reallyWas what happened because
40:10childrenwerePsychologically abused really in the end byThe adults in their lives and the authority figures the parents and the social workers and the police officers and the attorneys who they shouldHave been able to trustand who ultimatelyused them astools and created helps create these these memories and these
40:34traumas for them thatallowed them toCraft a narrative about their own anxieties and their own fears. I don't know what effect that would have on you as a human beingI think it would bepotentiallydeeply traumatic because now we believe in traumaWe don't think that being sexually abused is just like seeing a spider and we can evenConceive of a reality. We're having you know, your sense of what happened to or what didn't
40:59Altered in in sexual way could be traumatic as wellSo we finally found a good legacy of this that we finally believe the sexual trauma is realYeah, we probably believe kids a little bit more. So that's a good thing. I mean, maybeMaybe every episode of the show is going to end up being about the messy process of learning things as a societyThat learning that sexual trauma exists is goodBut it's this messy processwhere for a while we believe kids too muchOr we believe them when they say it happened
41:31But then we don't believe them when they say it didn't happen and it becomesThis thing where we want to redeem ourselves for the 50 years that we didn't believe them by over believing themand finding these new villains like satanism anddaycare centers when that really wasn't where the abuse was taking placethatfinallyabsorbing these things as a society is really hard and it kicks off all theseshitty unintended consequences like
42:02Thinking that there's a huge contingent of random satanists running daycare centersIt just seems like you're never going to get everybody all the way there, you knowA 51 percent of the country finally believes something that's true. That's a victory in a wayBut you still have 49 percent believing the wrong thing and also maybe that weWe have to be really wrong about something to be right about it eventuallyThe spotlight investigation happens in 2001and I feel as if that wasSuddenly being able to conceive of the fact of systemic
42:33Abuse within churches and within the catholic church right institutions are capable of thisYeah, and we mean and then you look back at the satanic panic and it's like you can see that that's thisBizarro version of the catholic church that we're really talking about or of you know churchSanctified abuse and systemic abuseWe were seeing things that did actually happen and significant abuse that went onWithout anyone noticing and and with children not being believed. It was because that you know, you were accusingpriests instead ofsatanic worshippers. So it all worked out in the end
43:12Not really butThat's our like fake happy ending to all of this. That's our fake happy endingYou
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