by Richard Beck
Q: Did she make you do anything to her boobies?
A: No.
Q: What did she make you do to her vagina?
A: Nothing.
Q: Nothing. Okay. I’m going to ask you a couple more questions. So, you know Kelly’s in jail, right? How do you feel that Kelly’s in jail? . . . Are you happy or not?
A: No.
Q: No.
A: I don’t like when Kelly’s in there.17
As the interview continued in this vein, Fonolleras assured the child that “all the other friends” he had talked to told him about Kelly’s abuse. “And now it’s your turn to tell me. You don’t want to be left out, do you?”
Q: Do you think that Kelly was—was not good when she was hurting you all?
A: [inaudible] wasn’t hurt, wasn’t hurting me. I like her.18
When the boy said, “No,” in response to a question about whether Kelly had made people take their clothes off, Fonolleras said, “Yes.” When Fonolleras asked the boy whether Kelly had ever kissed his penis, the boy replied, “No. Did Kelly kiss your pee-pee?” Fonolleras said that she hadn’t, “because I never met her yet.”19
By the time children involved in day care investigations spoke to an interviewer or therapist, many of them had already been questioned repeatedly by their parents, who described themselves to journalists and in books as being made physically ill by anxiety, anger, and fear. These undocumented conversations could, however, be dramatized, as in a 1989 made-for-TV movie in which a mother interrogates her son Teddy six times before he finally opens up. “They said you’d die if I ever told,” Teddy says.20 Professional interviewers often used these earlier conversations as the foundation for their own questioning, and in some interviews children referred back to their parents as a means of explaining, both to their interviewers and to themselves, the strange situation they now faced. In Miami a therapist named Laurie Braga asked a little girl how she felt about Frank Fuster being put in jail.
A: I’m glad.
Q: You’re glad. How come?
A: Because [inaudible] now I found out that he was bad. . . .
Q: No. What is it that makes you think that he is bad?
A: My mom told me.
Q: Did she tell you what he did that was bad? [pause] Don’t you wonder? No?
A: Do you know what he did?21
Interviews could last for hours, and the children being questioned were often five, four, or even three years old. When children failed to provide answers that corroborated allegations of abuse, interviewers repeated the questions. In Los Angeles one five-year-old boy who had attended the McMartin Preschool became frustrated with his interviewer, a woman named Kee MacFarlane:
Q: Where did Beth get touched?
A: She didn’t get touched.
Q: You can help tell her yucky secrets and she won’t have to tell. Wouldn’t that be nice?
A: She didn’t get touched.
Q: She never did? How about on the other side. Maybe she did.
A: She never even got touched.22
As these interviews pressed on, children who did not provide affirmative answers to questions about abuse found themselves being asked the same questions all over again. So the children began to provide different kinds of answers. Later in the same interview, Kee MacFarlane returned to the topic of the boy’s classmate.
Q: Here’s Beth.
A: She got touched nowhere.
Q: Oh, I don’t know if that’s the truth. We have to tell the [video recorder] the truth. Maybe she got touched in the back, too, like Otis.
A: Huh-uh [negative].
Q: Maybe she got touched in the mouth.
A: Huh-uh [negative].
Q: How about in the mouth?
A: Mouth?
Q: Yeah. Yes? In the mouth?
A: [No audible response.]
Q: I thought so.23
As the decade wore on, defense attorneys began to present expert researchers and therapists willing to explain what this kind of interviewing meant for the reliability of the accusations that eventually emerged. But expert knowledge doesn’t seem to be required to see what was happening in many of these cases. Around the country, therapists, social workers, and police officers unintentionally forced children to fabricate tales of brutal abuse. The children were then asked to repeat and reinforce these stories, both in courtrooms and in the years of therapy sessions that often followed. Children as young as three and almost never older than nine or ten, children who previously understood their time in day care as essentially normal, whether happy or not, had their lives reorganized around the idea that they were deeply and irrevocably traumatized. No amount of benevolence and well-intentioned concern on the therapists’ part can cover up the clearly coercive manner in which children were made to believe these things. “Are you goin’ to be stupid, or are you goin’ to be smart and help us here?” one interviewer asked a child who was failing to provide information.24
The coercive interviewing, the complete lack of physical evidence, and the incomprehensible strangeness of the allegations themselves began to make prosecutors’ jobs difficult, and as the decade entered its second half, a number of cases fell apart. In Minnesota, when the state abruptly dropped charges against twenty-one people after a jury acquitted the first two to have been tried, the prosecutor issued a statement claiming the charges were dismissed to prevent the release of documents pertaining to a related but secret investigation involving as many as six child homicides.25 In Miami members of the jury that acquitted a sixteen-year-old boy of ritual abuse in 1989 wrote a letter to Janet Reno in which they asked why her office had failed so spectacularly to present a convincing case. They did this in spite of what they described as their firm belief that “something did happen to the two children in question.”26 And in Los Angeles, where the McMartin trial would eventually drag on for seven years, becoming the longest criminal trial in American history, proceedings took on an atmosphere of surreal, geographically specific, black comedy. In 1985 a ten-year-old boy testified that a Los Angeles city attorney had slaughtered hundreds of animals alongside Ray Buckey, that he had been abused by priests and elderly nuns at a dozen separate satanic rituals, that he had been subjected to brutal beatings with a bullwhip, and that after all this the McMartin teachers had capped off their orgy of abuse by forcing the children to eat “peppers and other stuff that was raw” at a health food store.27
People who think they are being wrongly persecuted by the legal system will often compare themselves to the Puritans who were accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts. Those accused in the day care cases were no exception. In Manhattan Beach the defendants’ supporters ran newspaper ads reading, simply, “SALEM MASSACHUSETTS, 1692. MANHATTAN BEACH CALIFORNIA, 1985.”28 These ads were rhetorically powerful but also accurate in more ways than the defendants may have realized. The Salem witch trials were the first legal proceedings in American history to involve the testimony of child witnesses, and in both the seventeenth-century witch hunts and the day care investigations, the question of a child’s ability to distinguish fact from fiction was central.29 In each episode, children were thought to have been abused by a secretive group of conspirators, and each time it was the adults who first began to suspect that a conspiracy was at work. Initially the girls in Salem did not even report that anyone was harming them. Some scholars have hypothesized that their outlandish episodes and fits were primarily expressions of ecstatic religious fervor. Descriptions of the girls’ nonsensical outbursts strongly resemble modern accounts of speaking in tongues, and the girls described visions of angels, celestial light, and God’s glory just as frequently as they talked of terror and witchcraft.30 But the adult villagers ignored these expressions of religious ecstasy and joy, just as 1980s social workers would ignore those children who described benign experiences at day care. Again and again they asked their children, “Who is it t
hat afflicts you?”31
Salem and the day care cases were also investigated and tried in many of the same ways. In the 1980s, doctors examined the genitals of the alleged victims and often diagnosed abuse on the basis of nearly microscopic variations in skin folds and hymen measurements, variations that are now understood to be completely normal. In Salem, physicians and midwives also conducted painstaking examinations of the accused, on the lookout for something called a “witch’s tit.”32 This tit, which could be any odd protuberance or irregularity in a person’s flesh, was frequently “discovered” within close proximity to the genitals, and it was thought that succubi came to the tit at night to feed. Also attributed to the accused in Salem were terrible psychological and spiritual powers, such that victims risked further trauma if required to occupy the same room as their abusers. As one of the accused witches was led into a courtroom, her victims cried out in what one observer called “extreme agony,” and when she bit her lips, the girls said they could feel her teeth on their own skin.33 Similar concerns were used in the 1980s to justify laws that allowed children to testify via closed-circuit television.
After the panic died down in Salem, however, there were apologies and reparations. In 1697 Samuel Sewall, who had presided over the trials, asked that a formal apology be read before the congregation in Boston’s South Church, so that he could “take the Blame & Shame.”34 Twelve of the trial jurors asked for forgiveness, and although it was to take another fourteen years, the governor of Massachusetts authorized monetary compensation to twenty-two of the accused. No such apologies followed the day care ritual abuse trials, and there hasn’t been much in the way of reparations either. Of the many hundreds of people who were investigated in connection with day care and ritual abuse cases around the country, some 190 were formally charged with crimes, leading to at least 83 convictions. Undoing these convictions proved to be a slow, halting, and very painful process. In Massachusetts it took eight years for the state to overturn Violet Amirault and Cheryl Amirault LeFave’s convictions, and it would take nine more to release Gerald Amirault, Cheryl’s brother and Violet’s son, from prison. Kelly Michaels spent five years in prison after her 1988 conviction in a New Jersey courtroom. In El Paso, Gayle Dove was released from prison only to be tried and convicted again, and it would be another two years before she was freed for good. Fran and Dan Keller of Austin, Texas, were released in 2013, the same year in which a San Antonio prison freed Anna Vasquez, Elizabeth Ramirez, Kristie Mayhugh, and Cassandra Rivera. This is to say nothing of the challenges people convicted in these trials face after their term of incarceration. Jesse Friedman of Great Neck, New York, remains a registered “Level 3” sex offender despite his 2001 release and despite the mountain of evidence testifying to his innocence.
Even as convictions were overturned in some parts of the country during the 1990s, new investigations and trials occasionally popped up elsewhere. Some of these became famous miscarriages of justice. Three Arkansas teenagers who were falsely convicted of murdering young boys in the woods, in part because of their interest in heavy metal, became the subjects of a sympathetic HBO documentary that included a soundtrack by Metallica. The “West Memphis Three” were released in 2011 after eighteen years in prison. Other episodes, however, remain almost entirely forgotten, including the sex ring investigation in Wenatchee, Washington, in which forty-three adults were arrested on more than twenty-nine thousand charges of sex abuse involving sixty children. Eighteen of the defendants, nearly all of whom were poor and on welfare and some of whom were illiterate or mentally handicapped, were convicted in the mid-1990s. The last of them would not be released until 2000. The panic has also turned out, like much else in American popular culture, to have a powerful international appeal. Cases similar to those that characterized the American ritual abuse panic appeared in Norway, the Netherlands, and much of the Anglophone world, including the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Canada. As recently as 2010, a mentally handicapped man in Jerusalem was arrested on allegations of child sexual abuse. By 2011 many people in the tight-knit neighborhood of Nahalot were convinced that a sophisticated pedophile ring, governed by an elaborate secret hierarchy, had been operating in their midst for years, possibly generations. Children alleged ritual abuse at the hands of undercover Christians, and they described witches and magic doors.35
In order to cope with the implausibility of their allegations and the lack of physical evidence, supporters of the day care and ritual abuse prosecutions turned again and again to the importance of belief. In private homes, in court, and in the media, one’s belief in the children and the adults who spoke for them became the central issue around which the whole issue of child sexual abuse (and, to a certain extent, sexual violence in general) revolved. To an extent this development followed naturally from the long history of society’s inadequate response to abuse. Teenage girls alleging abuse at the hands of a relative or teacher were often dismissed as manipulative Lolitas, and adult women who went to the police with allegations of rape frequently watched as their credibility, rather than that of those they accused, became the crux of judicial proceedings. In the late 1960s, writers and activists began to point out that addressing the problem of sexual abuse in a just and constructive way would have to entail a new social willingness to take victims seriously when they spoke up. In the 1980s, however, the widespread emphasis on belief did not lead to children being taken more seriously. People associated with the day care and ritual abuse cases only believed children when they told stories that conformed to their adult advocates’ conspiracy theories and lurid fantasies.
These fantasies of imaginary abuse also influenced how society started to think about the abuse that really does happen every day. The hysteria cemented the child molester as society’s most feared and loathed criminal figure. When someone is convicted of a serious sex crime against a child, he—and in at least 95 percent of cases it is a “he”36—becomes the ward of a prison system in which pedophiles constitute a particularly reviled group and in which he will be vulnerable to sexual and physical assault himself. This vulnerability to beatings and rapes, which many people believe incarcerated pedophiles completely deserve, is the premise of many jokes about child abusers. When a sex offender finishes his sentence, laws in at least twenty states and hundreds of additional municipalities prevent him from living within a certain distance of places where children “congregate,” meaning not only schools and playgrounds but also parks, bus stops, and even homeless shelters. (In Miami these restrictions were so onerous that a group of offenders in Dade County briefly formed a tent city under a highway bridge, there being nowhere else to legally reside.)37 Politicians and their constituents enthusiastically support these laws in spite of a large body of research showing that child abusers almost never first encounter their victims in a “place where children congregate”; usually they encounter their victims, to whom they are often related, in private homes.38 These laws, in turn, both respond to and reinforce a set of widely shared beliefs about the psychology of the sex offender who victimizes children, who is understood to have an illness, to have no self-control whatsoever, to be utterly helpless in the face of his desires. Again, studies showing that child molesters actually have a rather low recidivism rate relative to those convicted of other violent crimes have done little to modify the public perception of the pedophile as a uniquely monstrous figure.39 This psychological caricature has shaped nearly three decades of thinking and policy about child sex abuse with destructive effects. Resources that might have been directed toward addressing the real causes of child abuse—simply put, these are poverty, the relative powerlessness of women and children within nuclear families, and the patriarchal organization of many workplaces, schools, and other social institutions—were instead used to fend off bogeymen. This misrecognition of the problem of child abuse and the misallocation of money and energy that resulted were, in a sense, part of the point. As disruptive and painful as the day care sex abuse cases were
to those involved, addressing the real causes of child abuse would have been a much more difficult and disruptive task. Proponents of the day care panic sensed this and looked for ways to avoid the issue head-on.
A simpler way of putting all this may just be to say that the witch hunt worked. The climate of fear that surrounded these cases influenced a whole series of arguments about women, children, and sex that had been intensifying in American politics and culture for some twenty years. In the 1960s and 1970s the sexual revolution and then, especially, the second wave of the feminist movement upended the long-standing assumption that the nuclear family, organized around the lifelong, monogamous marriage of a breadwinning husband to a wife who oversaw things at home, was the indispensible foundation of American society. Women demanded equal access to employment and pay, divorce lost its social stigma, and the cult of motherhood and domestic bliss began to lose its sheen. By the 1980s, however, with Ronald Reagan in office and evangelical Christianity at the height of its political influence, conservatives were mounting efforts to roll back these changes and shore up the old domestic order. These efforts gained so much momentum that even some feminists joined in, arguing that the liberalization of sex had gone too far and produced not freedom but anarchy, danger, pornography, victimization, and psychological trauma. Some cases also drew on long-standing anxieties about homosexuals’ supposed predisposition to pedophilia: four lesbian women in San Antonio and a gay nineteen-year-old teacher’s aide in Massachusetts were among those convicted. The day care trials were a powerful instrument of the decade’s resurgent sexual conservatism, serving as a warning to mothers who thought they could keep their very young children safe while simultaneously pursuing a life outside the home. As some of the country’s most basic social arrangements began to shift, the trials dramatized the consequences of that shift in the manner of a gothic play.