You're Wrong About - The Satanic Panic

Episode Date: May 3, 2018

The 1980s were real but the Satanists weren't. Sarah tells Mike about why America spent a decade worried about witches running daycare centers. Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseSupport the show

And I'll finally give my Ted talk about Ted Bundy That's a very like Sarah Marshall Ted talk So Satan 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 were murdering children and It was the parents that got together and they were worshiping Satan and they were sacrificing their kids and

it was all very pagan and very I want to say true detective, but of course it was before true detective, but it was this it Seemed like it was much bigger than what the actual I guess the act of right isolated But it kind of became this thing that the whole country was very concerned about you're you're right in the overarching description of it and then wrong on two Interesting 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

So far about actual child murder. There were a lot of stories about animal sacrifice But what the accusations were mainly about were child sexual abuse So it was sexual abuse and then Overwhelmingly it wasn't parents who were being accused of it, but it was teachers and daycare workers and especially daycare employees the case that started this all off was the McMartin preschool case where there was a preschool in Manhattan Beach, California where the McMartin trial started in 1983 and went until 1990 and was the most Expensive criminal trial in US history cost 15 million dollars. There was in the end essentially no result

There was no actual evidence. Everyone got acquitted. What was the case? What was the crime? So what happened was that the mother of a Four-year-old boy who was enrolled there her son had had painful bowel movements their conflicting accounts that came during the trial and in one version of the story he Accused a teacher of molesting him and then later took it back and another version of the story He didn't take it back and one of the things he also said about Worker at the preschool was named Ray was that he flew through the air and so the mother

Takes her concerns to the police the police write a letter and send it out to Parents of about 200 other children at the preschool and I can read you some of it What's interesting about this is that there's from the beginning a lot of leading Was 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 other accusations and trials that followed was believe the children and

You can see how that is a form of backlash against the fact that previously children We're not really believed about this kind of thing and we can take it as far back as Freud Having his patients talk about their father's committing father daughter incest with them as it would be known for Decades still and just being unable to believe That his patients were really being molested by male family members and we were coming off of Decades and generations of being able to look abuse dynamic squarely in the eye and Simply not accepting them and not believing people who came forth about this kind of thing and I think that the the need to To say no a child would never make this up a child can't lie was in to some degree

Reparations for all that so the pendulum swung back, but then we didn't temper it with believe children But don't ask the leading questions Yeah, the impetus to believe children folds in on itself and turns into an inability to believe children who say that they weren't abused if the adults involved in the situation believe that abuse had to have happened and so it happens in The McMartin case is that the police send a form letter out to parents of about 200 children and the letter says Please 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

Investigation indicates that possible criminal acts include oral sex fondling of genitals buttock or chest area and sodomy Possibly committed under the pretense of quote taking the child's temperature. Oh my god So they just send out this letter this extremely inflammatory letter to a bunch of parents Yeah, 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 a worker at this preschool and the accusations against him are These horrific things that every parent is Terrified beyond almost anything else. How are you not going to assume that terrible things could very well have happened to your child So what happens of course is that parents question children and the parents also become suspicious because their children are exhibiting

signs of what these see what they see is Of them being disturbed following maybe some form of abuse and it's things like bedwetting and nightmares and suddenly not liking foods That they liked before and things that's like what every four-year-old Constantly does what every four-year-old constantly does I was thinking also while I was researching this about I was Baby sitting for a three-year-old a few weeks ago we were Like in a messy like a garage area and she was in her socks and got down and got her socks Dirty which I hadn't realized she wasn't supposed to do and then her grandmother came back in and was like

Oh, you got your socks dirty and I said, oh, it wasn't I that was my dad I didn't know I'm sorry and the three-year-old goes. No, it wasn't her fault. It was someone else Which I would which I really loved because Like that's someone I want on my crew right like someday when I'm doing a heist someone who knows it's three Yeah, no, she's she gets it But also I was thinking if you came in to that if you just heard a three-year-old say that and you had an idea Well, children can't lie three-year-olds can't lie three-year-olds can't conceive of lying Who was the someone else person and then if you are convinced as an adult and have some kind of confirmation

Bias like you would if someone sent you a horrifying letter Then 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 else tell me about someone else and Kids 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 else I would make something up and come up with who this someone else person was and then I would do long-term thinking as a Three-year-old you're not thinking through. Hey if I tell a lie now, I'm gonna have to stick with that lie So 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 lies Yeah, just saying especially what somebody wants to hear too

I mean so much of child behavior at that point is about Impressing your parents or telling people something that will make them happy or make them laugh Yeah, and so what we see in the the transcripts from some of these cases and from the questioning that these children are put Through is adults saying things along the lines of we know that your teacher did something bad to you Because you've got a confession or a description from one child and then you bring it to another child who corroborates it And then it becomes truth in the minds of the adults. So we have social workers and police officers saying things to kids like We know that your teacher is bad and

Scary and she can't hurt you anymore and you have to help us put her in jail So that she can't hurt any more kids. So just tell us we know that you know X thing happened And if you're a kid and an adult is telling you That you have to make them happy by saying that something happened It would take an incredibly strong will child to not do that The McMartin case goes to trial that becomes Attracts a lot of media attention because it's the kind of story that you know if it bleeds it leads and this is The allegations are absolutely horrifying

And then this is something that other parents across the country can look at and say if it could happen in this perfectly nice place in California Then who's to say it can't happen at this perfectly nice place where I take my child every day so one of the Police statements in the form letter is your child may have been Sodomized under the pretense of taking their temperature and so across the country in New Jersey a mother takes her four-year-old son to the doctor who takes his temperature temperature rectally and The boy says oh my teacher does that to me at school and later clarifies that he means

She takes his temperature and what the mother is Extremely ready to assume is that that means that he's being sexually abused and so that becomes the Kelly Michaels case in New Jersey Where is the victim she's the alleged perpetrator And so the same thing happens in New Jersey has happened in California where one child Makes an innocuous statement to a parent the parent interprets it as a description of abuse and Then talks to the other parents the other parents question their kids The police get involved and then we haven't even gotten into the satanic element of it too because in the McMartin case

The mother who initially makes the accusations, you know, she gets the accusation that Ray flew through the air the alleged Perpetrator flew through the air and then that there are these tunnels underneath the preschool where they're taking children to do their Rituals the other interesting thing about kids is that they will say astoundingly bizarre shit If we're we've created a dynamic where adults are ready to believe The whatever they say if it's an accusation against a teacher or an authority figure in their life then These will become criminal accusations and kids also are Obsessed with bodily functions and so a lot of the accusations of all they would be forced to eat shit Or they would pee on each other or they would all

There was a case in Austin About a daycare center where a couple that ran at Fran and Dan Keller were also accused of satanic ritual abuse and one of the stories That a child told under questioning was that the killers and quoting from a Texas monthly article on this quote Kidnapped a baby gorilla from Zilker Park after which Fran cut a finger off the gorilla and drained the blood in a water bucket But there's never been a zoo at Zilker Park much less a gorilla There's something funny about these suburban parents coming up with these outlandish Accusations and then somehow convincing themselves that they're true Of course, it's not funny at all because these people's lives are in the balance

But it's hard not to laugh at this stuff. Yeah, it's absolutely absurd And I mean and the Kellers did hard time for this even if people were acquitted Even if they were never formally indicted then they were publicly accused. They lost their jobs. They lost their money It's amazing to me that no one would check up on this because it would be so easy You're like, okay, so they got a beat they kidnapped a baby gorilla That's legit and then cut off the finger and drain the blood into a bucket Like there's not that much blood and a baby gorilla's finger. There's a finite number of baby gorillas in the United States One of them went missing and its finger was cut off that in itself would be a story

That could be tracked down by some enterprising reporter It's interesting too that American parents are are hyper vigilant about this very real and this very unreal thing We've recently discovered that child sex abuse exists Like this is also something that there was very little literature on until the 70s and so in 1983 We're still reeling from this idea that there is such a thing as quote father daughter incest And are feeling hyper vigilant about it and the thinking at the time that received a lot of societal support and federal funding in the form of group therapy programs primarily was that It's the integrity of the family that is at fault and there also emerges this idea of the family romance and that the problem

Is that all of these women are going and working outside of the home and not being sexually available enough to their husbands And at the same time their daughters are entering puberty and who could blame a man whose wife is giving him the cold shoulder For just molesting his daughter a little and so that's the way that we conceive of child sexual abuse in the 70s What we see with that methodology is this this extreme hesitance about pathologizing the American patriarch and saying well, you know dads do this sometimes but they're it's it's not their fault We were confronted with the fact that sexual abuse was occurring within the home Which is I think statistically where it's most likely to occur. We couldn't see the father as Dangerous it was seen more as like a mistake

Rather than Evil is that what you mean? Yeah, and the solution to this was not Questioning the nuclear American family where the father is in charge and where we have this power dynamic You know the horror that we now feel for the figure of the child molester in America We couldn't quite do it and it reminds me of the way that in the 70s You know Ted Bundy is arrested and there's a lot of very concrete evidence suggesting that he's killed a lot of women and The police charged with guarding him just can't they look at him. They're like yeah, but but but you just seem Like such a regular guy. You seem like a regular middle-class guy

How could you really be dangerous and so he escapes from police custody twice? We couldn't quite take it seriously And so I think that we put a lot of that on to Satan who's good for this kind of thing and witches Who 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 custody While this case was progressing police did a search and found a black robe among her belongings Which there had already been allegations about witchcraft and Satanism and people flying through the air and they were like yes

This is evidence and the black robe turns out to be a graduation robe So at the end of this long trial they go to prison They are acquitted because ultimately there's no actual evidence and it's funny because you can see us thinking through all of these Important questions about criminal and legal procedure or where we're struggling with how to deal for example with the question of a case In which the only evidence against the accused is testimony from a small child Which is a serious thing to think about because there are cases where the only Evidence is testimony from a small child and something horrible has happened to them and so what happens too is that the children become mouthpieces for the parents and for the anxieties of the parents and the

confirmation bias of the Investigating police and the social workers where as a society it seems like during this time we had this lofty goal We wanted to take our children seriously and protect them and understand the threats that were in their lives But we also were quite sure we wanted the threat to be outside the home I mean the previous estimates about sexual abuse and The frequency of quote incest put it at about one per million That would mean in America there would be 300 people who had been molested Which 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

For example the the Kinsey research There's a lot of verbiage in that when they talk about incest cases or cases where children Were experienced something sexually violent or coercive There's a lot of description of well, you know, but it it didn't negatively affect them There's a quote in the the Kinsey paper is something to the effect of You know a child who has experienced for example someone an adult exposing themselves to them Will react only as negatively as they do if they see something like a spider like that's a normal response

Yeah, to sexual predation and there's just section overwhelming need to believe that okay, it doesn't Happen or it happens very very occasionally and when it does it's not traumatic The tone that people took at the time because the argument then is if someone is a survivor of sexual abuse and is Having you know a difficult adulthood then maybe that actually is a sign of the issues and problems that they had Before the abuse incident so almost the abuse is a symptom of all the other stuff that was going on in their life Yeah, like you were already screwed up and that's why you got abused and the abuse didn't have any negative effect on you It was yeah symptom of of your problems that pre it's pre-existing condition It's interesting that there's also this conception that the only people that could ever do any molestation are

Evil to a profound extent, right? They're not just Sexual predators, they're literal Satanists because there's no way that normal humans who weren't under the control of some dark Sauron could ever do this. Yeah, the pre-existing fear of Satan which we had throughout the 70s And you know, there's the fear of heavy metal bands putting satanic secret backward satanic messages and their songs and and this idea of You know America becoming a less Christian country and Paganism and the dark side of the hippie movement because now in America We have a similar inability to believe that the real danger is within the home within the system that we need to be worried about

mass incarceration we need to be worried about Middle what's happening within a middle-class American family we need to be worried about people who are well integrated into our communities as humans We exhibit the same behaviors that led us to need to believe, you know, the problem is not within the American home The problem is Satan. I think you can probably tell a lot about a society from what people don't need evidence to believe And I think it's very telling that people didn't need great evidence to believe Satanic abuse was going on which is fascinating to me because you would think it's such an extreme Case it's such extreme human behavior. Yeah, and one one of the things that Kelly Michaels

I think responded to in terms of the allegations against her because one of the claims that emerged was that she had 30 children in her care and she would strip all of them naked and they would have to you know Corrals naked together basically and one of the things she said was do you know how long it takes to undress and then dress again 30 children if you were the adult in the room It is impossible. I mean, I think it would take about four hours So 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 today I think it would probably vary a lot state by state but department by department

one of the things that I think Affected this as well is that when investigating Allegations of these in the 70s when we really started having a national conversation about this and conceiving of it as something that happened and therefore prosecuting it occasionally Was that standard procedure in I think many departments at the time was to not And also the phrase that you see a lot and this is the girl child which just seems weird to me You 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

So the girl child who had made Allegations of abuse against her father because that was the kind that we sort of started noticing first would not be questioned by the police and they would bring in a female social worker so that she would be Unintimidated and be able to open up and which is again, you know, these were decisions made with With humanist intentions and with the desire to not further traumatize a traumatized child But the other issue with that is that if you have a social worker who's an expert on speaking with children Or at least whose line of work that is then they are At the time were not trained in police procedures

They weren't trained in how to question a witness or a victim about a crime that they had witnessed or had been perpetrated against them And so the police were farming out part of their work to people who were not part of the legal system So 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 system Is 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 to Confirm something that you're suggesting might have happened to them as opposed to having them introduce the information to begin with And then of course we had social workers still

Doing a lot of questioning of kids and the McMartin case the the Kelly Michaels case the other cases that proliferated at this time I think it would be so easy to have a sense and you know people who Were involved in these cases have written about themselves in these terms That you were a crusader and you were saving this kid from the forces of evil And if they were clamming up and refusing to talk and refusing to say anything bad about this person who you believed sincerely had done these terrible things then You would do anything that you had to to get them to say Something because you would feel that you were helping them to overcome their fear of this monster in their lives

If you especially if you think that sexual assault Against children has been under reported so long and has been this sleeping giant Underneath the culture for so long you're gonna say we're finally gonna get these people We're finally gonna bring justice to this issue And so I can see how that would become a runaway Crusade for people. I think Satanism was less scary than the reality in a weird way What we now know is that sexual abuse of children and other

Vulnerable members of society is something that can happen within an organized system like a church and go on Sometimes indefinitely with the soft collusion of many many responsible adults and community members and can be something that We just don't see and that's scarier Then the idea that it's yeah that we can recognize That anyone who would sexually abuse a child would be just as likely to kidnap a baby gorilla and use its blood in a ritual And these two things are equally unimaginable on the spectrum of human behavior and equally equally conspicuous

And then when the tide starts to turn one of the things that causes that is that people start Very tentatively coming forward and saying is it really possible that there is this cabal of thousands of Satanists in the United States and they are Infiltrating preschools and daycare centers primarily in order to abuse children and use them in their rituals and convert them to Satanism You know why children for a start they don't have any money like if you want to get someone involved in your evil cult then Ideally you target someone who can help subsidize your stuff, you know rogues cost money

By the end of the 80s so many of these cases have actually been brought to trial And 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 are Members of some sort of organized satanic cult that also manages to completely avoid detection by adults and Only 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 and Kidnapping animals and building tunnels underneath preschools and taking Children 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

Logistics, yeah, I guess if there really wasn't a large organized group of any kind there'd be a magazine There'd be a membership drive There'd be at that point maybe not a website, but there would be catalogs that you could send away for there would be all the accoutrements of Like people that are really into golf have like an annual meeting and they have They have a newsletter Yeah, if there was this big of a satanic subculture then you would not have to Jerry where your graduation rose Up into something you use for rituals. There would be something nice that you could buy

From a catalog. I've always thought one thing that's really weird about Satanism is that just like racist No one self identifies as a Satanist because Satan is a Christian deity So to believe in Satan to worship Satan you sort of have to believe in the Bible But if you believe in the Bible, why would you be rooting for the bad guy? My understanding is there are self-identified Satanist But they're extremely small and there's the church of Satan which essentially only exists to bring free speech cases Yeah, and I that always seemed weird to me I remember watching Rosemary's baby when I was way too young my impression was okay

So if Satan literally exists and you're using him to impregnate someone then God exists So that's kind of nice because if you know that Satan's there then God is there and so And 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 look We do not really believe in Satan. That's not a thing what this is about is essentially this iron randy and objectivism and Do for yourself and don't worry about other people so much and there's a whole chapter He's like here's some spells you can do they're silly, but they're fun

Have a naked lady lie on a table and write shit on a scroll and then burn it and have some candles And he's just saying none of this is real, but it's neat. That's a very secular viewpoint I mean secular people can look at that and think it's jokey and fun Whereas I think Christians would be totally horrified of that because if you actually believe in Satan then you wouldn't toy around With his name you wouldn't throw his name around and sort of jokingly cast spells and so the entire viewpoint of the Satanist is that none of it's really real and so that's the only way in which you can be a Satanist That's the thing. I mean, that's what I come back to just thinking about

Criminology is this idea of The need to believe that there are people out there who say I'm evil and I love being evil and this is a side I want to be on I don't think anyone really wants that I think there's probably you know there's some rogue teenagers and and disturb people out there who get some sense of control or Or satisfaction from the bravado of saying to themselves or other people. I'm I'm evil I'm in league with Satan. I'm in league with with human evil whatever

But I don't think it's anything that any of us truly want and and yeah And Anton LeVe could be the godfather of Satanism because he didn't actually believe in any of it. What happened to the victims Did the victims eventually recant? It's hard to know because a lot of them had their identities protected and weren't Named publicly. I have not found anything on a case falling apart because Victims came forward and said no this actually didn't happen I mean victims did

Alleged your victims did start to recant You know or attempted to recant while these cases were going to trial and the line at the time was you know You say you're saying that because you're afraid of what this person will do to you we can't believe you if you're saying this didn't happen and so the confirmation bias of Prosecutors during cases like this allowed them to see both silence and claims that abuse didn't happen as Reinforcing their belief that there had been abuse which is wild in the in the absence of forensic evidence It's interesting that they that they kept on it for that long Yeah, 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

The 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 off I think which is exactly the kind of thing that a child would say under pressure I think along with the gorilla finger and so One of the investigators went into the kitchen of the day Karen found a jar of peanut butter and you know That was like the bloody glove moment and it's like the story checks out. There's peanut butter There'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 true Which is a completely pointless argument to have but they oftentimes will bring up that there's actually

Very good evidence that there were floods In that part of the world at that time and I'm always like that is the least difficult to believe Part of that story like the fact that there were floods is very easy to believe The fact that somebody took two animals of every kind and put them on a boat That's the hard part the fact that there were floods is not really evidence that the Noah's Ark story is true That's interesting too because I feel like so many of the aspects of the Bible that have always Given me trouble as someone who takes things fairly literally and you know made me as someone who grew up in a secular home never particularly prone to believe Bible stories where that they very quickly get into you know

If you're thinking about it logistically, you just think so is Noah out there catching two of every nat to get on the Ark and How does this work and it's the same kind of logistical problems that you have with Satanism But I guess if you're if your religion requires you to just accept Literally as gospel things that physically don't really make sense then Satanism works out well, too Do 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 was researching the OJ Simpson trial a few years ago and one of the things that happened there was that Juries really didn't know what to do with DNA evidence. They didn't know what DNA was

I think that as Americans we really didn't Honestly in general start having a basic understanding of DNA until Jurassic Park came out And then we all kind of figured it out and we could use it in criminal trials March at Clark at a certain point had to in a very painstaking basic way explain what DNA was and explain like look our Defendant cut himself and got his blood all over the crime scene and the odds of that blood not belonging to OJ Simpson are literally statistically impossible and the jury at that time was able to be like I

Don't know but what another thing that's interesting though Is 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 a Girl was in a strange what they took to be a strange shape or they had a Different different sized or shaped hymen or a hymen that suggested Penetration or you know that doctors in these cases at the time believe suggested Sodomy which is if the the anus winked they called it winking. I don't I'm not sure exactly what that Like 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

Or that you've stuck something up your butt or maybe nothing because what happens is you know after some of these people have been convicted the science that allegedly supports it is debunked and More substantive studies are conducted on you know getting a decent sample size of what a child's Hymen or anus will do or look like which really had not been studied that much before apparently and they're like oh actually it turns out that there's All sorts of things that children's

Anuses and genitals do and none of them actually correlate that directly to abuse and the you know we just didn't know this before You know we are still vulnerable as juries to junk science and there are still trials in America where bite mark evidence Is used by prosecutors and that's something that's notoriously unreliable. There is A lot of forensic you know non-dna forensic evidence that's brought in as evidence supporting someone's guilt that actually is Not particularly reliable or unreliable under certain circumstances, but is presented to a jury as you know if this is present then this 100 percent means that defendants guilt and Curries were not experts in this believe it. So

I think we are still vulnerable. How did this all End 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 3 Yeah, that was satanism, right? That was yeah, and that was satanism They were satanists because damien eckles liked metallica Which is also great because metallica's music is about feelings Yeah, they're basically eighth graders I was really into metallica when I was in eighth grade and that like music really spoke to me that in nine inch nails

Were like my shit and then looking back like listening to them now I'm like, oh wow these this is eighth grade. This is exactly how I felt in eighth grade But it's not particularly satanic. It's not particularly Ideological, I think that is just the inability of old people to be interested in what young people are doing I think that is a that is a fundamental and constant problem that whenever you look into anything it's like My parents parents being shocked that the Beatles hair touched their collars every generation has a version of that and

In 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 is fascinating And is uses this repressed memory. I want to say technology, but that's not a repressed memory therapy where basically this And you know the circumstances around it are really interesting too a young woman named michelle was Happily married and just started

I forget where precipitated this exactly But I think started exhibiting signs of psychological distress and didn't know why and felt like she'd had like a good childhood And had a perfectly nice marriage and started seeing a psychiatrist who started doing repressed memory therapy on her She starts recounting memories of her mother having been abusive and then that turns into memories of her mother having been in a coven and I think Killed a baby or they there was something involving them using a baby or an aborted fetus in a ritual And her having been forced as a young child to take part

Uh in all of these Again these elaborate satanic rituals that they that she then remembered with the help of the psychiatrist who then married her and helped Write a book about it and they Went on the the lecture tour and made I think probably you know a lot of Literal and cultural capital off of this It's a very it's a weird case. It's like a pigmalion a satan is pigmalion or something Did she eventually recant no, no I mean at least not publicly and that and she just sort of disappeared

the sky disappeared and then and There was nothing on the scale of these accusations and these trials that was You know a kind of a moment of public reckoning of us saying like oh fuck We fucked up and I think probably that had to do With the breadth of all this because there were relatively few people involved in investigating and prosecuting these cases but Potentially a majority of americans were willing to believe this in some way or another and it's just it's hard to have a public momenting of reckoning and essentially recanting

With this kind of a thing and I mean repressed memory therapy has been significantly debunked since then but it also seems to me Very possible that someone could have Disassociated memories of prior abuse and in order to

to say my My parent my family member someone in my community Abused me and then if they're being guided through this by a professional who's willing to believe certain things and is Guided by a general belief in in that satanic cults for example that it's it's it's easier to say in a way that Your mother was like a satanic grand wizard and that's why she abused you than to say that she was a human being who Wasn'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?

I mean it put a lot of people in prison something that I didn't initially think of until I had been researching this for a while is what did this do essentially to hundreds thousands of of america of children at this time who Not only were led to believe that they had been abused in Awful ways by members of their community and adults that they and their families trusted inevitably some of them

If we're talking about hundreds Maybe a couple thousand of kids inevitably some of them still Believe that all of these things really did take place and if they Came to not believe it then that could lead To some kind of rift with their family, you know, I wonder about what effect this had on You know the relationship between children parents

There was at least there was a mother in the kelly michaels case who published a book About you know, this her crusade against her daughter's abuser and then of course later Kelly michaels turned out to be a perfectly nice aspiring actress who just wanted to get a job in new jersey You know, it's it's another horror story about manhattan real estate really What effect would it have on you if as a child your basic perception of reality Was screwed with this much and the adults in your life the authority figures I mean, there's kind there's really a sick doubling of what allegedly took place in a way really was took plate really Was what happened because

children were Psychologically abused really in the end by The adults in their lives and the authority figures the parents and the social workers and the police officers and the attorneys who they should Have been able to trust and who ultimately used them as tools and created helps create these these memories and these

traumas for them that allowed them to Craft a narrative about their own anxieties and their own fears. I don't know what effect that would have on you as a human being I think it would be potentially deeply traumatic because now we believe in trauma We don't think that being sexually abused is just like seeing a spider and we can even Conceive of a reality. We're having you know, your sense of what happened to or what didn't

Altered in in sexual way could be traumatic as well So we finally found a good legacy of this that we finally believe the sexual trauma is real Yeah, we probably believe kids a little bit more. So that's a good thing. I mean, maybe Maybe every episode of the show is going to end up being about the messy process of learning things as a society That learning that sexual trauma exists is good But it's this messy process where for a while we believe kids too much Or we believe them when they say it happened

But then we don't believe them when they say it didn't happen and it becomes This thing where we want to redeem ourselves for the 50 years that we didn't believe them by over believing them and finding these new villains like satanism and daycare centers when that really wasn't where the abuse was taking place that finally absorbing these things as a society is really hard and it kicks off all these shitty unintended consequences like

Thinking that there's a huge contingent of random satanists running daycare centers It just seems like you're never going to get everybody all the way there, you know A 51 percent of the country finally believes something that's true. That's a victory in a way But you still have 49 percent believing the wrong thing and also maybe that we We have to be really wrong about something to be right about it eventually The spotlight investigation happens in 2001 and I feel as if that was Suddenly being able to conceive of the fact of systemic

Abuse within churches and within the catholic church right institutions are capable of this Yeah, and we mean and then you look back at the satanic panic and it's like you can see that that's this Bizarro version of the catholic church that we're really talking about or of you know church Sanctified abuse and systemic abuse We were seeing things that did actually happen and significant abuse that went on Without anyone noticing and and with children not being believed. It was because that you know, you were accusing priests instead of satanic worshippers. So it all worked out in the end

Not really but That's our like fake happy ending to all of this. That's our fake happy ending You