by Richard Beck
The Meese Commission organized public hearings in various major cities during 1985 and early 1986, including Los Angeles, Miami, Houston, New York, and Washington, DC. Meese appointed three commissioners whose views on pornography and censorship could be described as liberal, but the commission’s other nine members were largely conservative, including a prosecutor with a special focus on obscenity cases, a priest, and a former Nixon speechwriter who thought the commission should go after slasher films as well. These politics were reflected in the testimony presented at the commission’s hearings.
WAP helped to organize a few dozen witnesses to testify about the harm they had suffered, including a cheerleader whose photographs had been published in Playboy without her permission and a woman who claimed that her husband’s pornography consumption had caused him to turn violent. An overwhelming majority of the testimony presented was vehemently and emotionally critical of pornography’s place in society, and although this could have been read as a signal that porn really did need to be subjected to tighter controls, a few commissioners pointed out that such simple conclusions made no sense in light of pornography’s immense commercial success. “Such material is selling to millions of apparently satisfied customers,” two commissioners wrote in a jointly signed statement. The problem was that none of those people were willing to talk about their satisfaction in front of a federal panel. “To find people willing to acknowledge their personal consumption of erotic and pornographic materials and comment favorably in public about their use has been nearly impossible. . . . It seems obvious that the data gathered is not well balanced.”47
Some of the most powerful and widely publicized testimony came from Andrea Dworkin. She spoke at the commission’s New York City hearing, and the transcript of her remarks does not do justice to her performance. She spoke in a deep voice with a rhythmic cadence, and her writing, which conveyed a similar sense of momentum and power, earned her a reputation as American feminism’s Old Testament prophet. “I’m a citizen of the United States,” she told the commission,
And in this country where I live, every year millions and millions of pictures are made of women with our legs spread. We’re called “beaver,” we’re called “pussy,” our genitals are tied up. They’re pasted, makeup is put on them to make them pop out of the page at a male viewer. Millions and millions of pictures are made of us in postures of submission and sexual access so that our vaginas are exposed for penetration, our anuses are exposed for penetration, our throats are used as if they’re genitals for penetration. Uh, in this country where I live as a citizen, real rapes are on film and are being sold on the marketplace, and the major motif of pornography as a form of entertainment is that women are raped and violated and humiliated until we discover that we like it, and at that point we ask for more.48
She called pornography “a form of political persecution,” she asked the government to enforce RICO statutes against studios and distributors, and she said that porn should be removed from federal prisons entirely: “It’s like sending dynamite to terrorists.”
When antipornography activists talked ominously about the porn industry’s explosive growth, they weren’t making it up. The number of published magazines had increased tremendously following the runaway success of the 1972 film Deep Throat. Although magazines featuring bondage and sexual violence remained on the margins of the pornographic mainstream (defined largely by Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler), their numbers increased as well. The Meese Commission hearings, however, sometimes took on a paranoid tone that closely resembled that of the ritual abuse and multiple personality conferences that were taking place around the country at the same time. “We see the centrality of pornography in serial murders,” Dworkin said during her testimony. “There are snuff films.”49 She was referring to an urban myth that held that in the darkest corners of the pornography world there existed a secret network of producers and directors who made sex films culminating in the actual, unsimulated murders of the women who performed in them. No evidence of such a commercial enterprise has ever been found, but Dworkin, MacKinnon, and others publicly referred to snuff films as the logical end point of pornography’s misogynist hatred.50 When police investigating day care and sex ring trials mentioned their belief that teachers and parents had produced and sold pornographic evidence of their crimes, it was this imaginary network of deviants that was thought to be taking care of distribution.
This was a bizarre and volatile political atmosphere. In the personal statement he composed for the commission’s final report, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson wrote that he “passionately” supported the control of obscene materials, and then he specifically thanked Dworkin for her “moving testimony” and asked how anyone “could turn a deaf ear to her protest.” He also repeated the slogan that had been invented by people who considered him a political opponent in every way, except for this one: “Pornography is the theory; rape is the practice.”
It was in this environment that all the different professional threads of the child care sex abuse panic came together as well. Roland Summit testified in the Meese Commission’s Miami hearing, and so did Kenneth Lanning, who appeared to discuss his behavioral profiles of pedophiles and child porn collectors.51 The commission cited his work many times in the Final Report. Miami also heard from a woman who said pornography had been part of her three-year-old daughter’s abuse at a preschool. Because the commission concealed her identity, there is no way to determine whether she was a McMartin parent, but her account matches the stories that came out of Manhattan Beach in every detail: “My daughter attended [a] Pre-School in California. She was three years old when she began attending. During the six months she attended before the school closed, she was sexually molested on multiple occasions by teachers on the school grounds and was also taken off school property to unknown locations to be molested by persons unknown to me. Photographs were taken on many (if not all) of these occasions. She was threatened with physical violence with a knife and a gun and was forced to watch animals being killed.”52
Finally, multiple personality made an appearance. The Final Report contained a section devoted specifically to “Amnesia and Denial and Repression of Abuse,” and the commission heard from at least one woman who had been diagnosed with MPD.53 “Like an internal sore,” a witness at the Washington, DC, hearing said, “the repressed memories began erupting, baring all of my symptoms and anxiety.”
It has been extremely difficult for me to write my testimony. I am only now, because of the request that I testify today, beginning to remember the pornography to which I was subjected. The memories that I have relived completely have been of a physical nature, the extreme traumas which were responsible for my splitting. I feel that I have been so desensitized that the memories of having been shown pornographic pictures have seemed harmless and therefore, until now, there has been no need to remember them. . . . Each time I have reread what I have written I am so re-appalled, re-horrified, and re-traumatized myself that I decided it was more important to just tell you that I knew pornographic magazines played a large part in my stepfather’s life.54
The commission was not thought to be a great success. Attorney General Meese made the mistake of announcing his findings while standing in front of a statue of Lady Justice, and many of the following morning’s front pages featured a photograph of Meese denouncing sexual imagery while a marble pair of bare breasts loomed above him. The Final Report was also somewhat muddled by the liberal commissioners’ refusal to sign on to some of the more ominous and unsubstantiated findings regarding the connection between pornography and violent sex crimes. Instead of one collaboratively written essay summarizing their shared conclusions, the commissioners wrote many individual pieces, each arguing with the others.
Still, the list of “Recommendations for the Justice System and Law Enforcement Agencies” that appeared at the beginning of the Final Report made it clear that Reagan had achieved at least some of his goal
s. Recommendation 11: “The Attorney General should direct the United States Attorneys to examine the obscenity problem in their respective districts, identify offenders, initiate investigations, and commence prosecution without further delay.”55 Recommendation 24, designed to give government officials an easy way of shutting down strip clubs: “State and Local prosecutors should enforce the alcoholic beverage control laws that prohibit obscenity on licensed premises.” Recommendation 89, getting down into the fine details of adult entertainment: “Holes enabling inter-booth sexual contact between patrons should be prohibited at peep show booths.” In the broadest sense, the commission recommended that the government shut down whichever parts of the adult industry it could.
The political alliances that made both the antipornography movement and the Meese Commission possible could not have come into being but for the shared belief that the country’s children were in danger. Child protectionism has a long history in American politics, and Democrats and Republicans have each been eager to list the ways in which children would be harmed by their opponents’ proposals and policies. In the decades following the 1960s and the sexual revolution, however, with the structure of America’s social arrangements and sex roles in an unprecedented state of flux, conservatives came into full ownership of “family values.” They described a country in which porn, gays, and women had run amok, and they argued that the confines of traditional family life, with its breadwinning husband and housewife mother, provided a shelter from social madness. So even as some of the country’s most prominent feminist voices could be heard decrying porn and its effects on women and children alongside movement conservatives like James Dobson, the political benefits of their efforts were not so evenly divided.
This uneven distribution of political gains was part of what made antipornography so controversial within feminism itself. Although the media had always represented the women’s movement as a unified campaign organized around a single set of goals, there were enormous disagreements between mainstream liberals like Gloria Steinem and feminism’s more radical wing. As early as 1982, these disagreements over the role of sex and sexual expression in society had caused a feminist conference held at Barnard College to devolve into a series of angry denunciations. And if the antipornography position seemed to be consolidating its gains by the middle of the 1980s, that should not be taken as a sign that intrafeminist conflict over the issue had eased. As some of antipornography’s harshest feminist critics pointed out, the 1980s were a decade during which the country experienced its most significant conservative retrenchment since World War II. When feminists contributed to the national mood of anxiety and fear about child endangerment, they were playing directly into their opponents’ hands.
The child care and sex ring trials were the purest expressions of these fears, but by the mid-1980s they were humming along with a quality that looked less like panic than efficient professionalism. One of the basic reasons the McMartin case took so long is that the people investigating and prosecuting it had to work out interviewing techniques and courtroom tactics all by themselves. Kee MacFarlane, Astrid Heger, Roland Summit, and Lael Rubin were pioneers, and like anybody breaking new ground in a new field, their work was plagued by its share of sloppy mistakes.
In Miami, however, State Attorney Janet Reno did not make the same errors as she organized the prosecution of Frank and Ileana Fuster, a married couple who lived in a suburban development called Country Walk. Frank was a thirty-five-year-old Cuban immigrant with a young son, Noel, from a prior marriage. Ileana was seventeen, an undocumented immigrant from Honduras, and she had been married to Frank for less than a year when the couple decided to run a neighborhood babysitting service out of their home. Frank handed out business cards: “Country Walk Babysitting Service—We don’t say we’re the best, but people do talk.”
Children from around the neighborhood, most of them younger than six, spent time at the Fusters’. A little less than half a year in, one of these children was taken home at the end of the day and then asked his mother whether she would “kiss” his “body,” meaning his penis. “Ileana kisses my body,” he said. “Ileana kisses all the babies’ bodies.” Although the mother’s alarm at these statements is understandable, it may well have been due to a simple cultural misunderstanding. Ileana had grown up in rural Honduras, a place where it is common for women to touch or kiss the genitals of young children to reassure them or to show casual, nonsexual affection.56 A few months later a mother picking up her eighteen-month-old from his first day of out-of-home child care became convinced that her son had been drugged. The boy seemed tired, and at home he hit himself in the head with a block until she took it away. Word spread in the Country Walk development that something was not right with Ileana’s babysitting, and a police detective was asked to interview five children. One of them had a speech impediment, and the others had very little to say.
There was one exception, a five-year-old boy who told the police investigator that Frank had taken photographs of naked children. He said the same thing over the following weeks to Joseph and Laurie Braga, a pair of child development specialists brought in by State Attorney Reno. The Bragas were significantly more responsible with their interviewing technique than the therapists at CII. They videotaped all of their interviews, they generally did not see individual children more than twice, and, with one glaring exception, they avoided the kind of openly confrontational tone that would cause the McMartin prosecution so much trouble at trial. Still, for each of the boy’s incriminating statements—he said that Frank sodomized one of the children and also encouraged “caca” games, where kids were made to throw and smear feces around the house—the Bragas elicited a bizarre or implausible claim as well. The boy said a thirteen-year-old called “Ms. Booby” had stopped by one day and that he had been the only child who didn’t laugh at her.57 The boy said that the Fusters had drugged the children with homemade pills that looked like candy corn. He also vacillated nervously between describing himself as a participant in the games, as an observer, or as someone who had only heard things from other children:
Q: You told me once, during one of our visits you told me that you saw Noel’s daddy put his penis in his mouth.
A: Right.
Q: You did see that?
A: Right.
Q: So you just said that you never saw any of the games? Now what you’re saying is different.
A: I saw some games.
Q: Oh, okay well can you—
A: The games that they played with Noel. I saw.
Q: Can you tell me what games with Noel that you did see? Can you tell me what they did? What you want to show me with the dolls what they did?
A: Hum . . . I just . . . I just . . . um . . . watched for a little while and then . . . hum . . . I had to leave then.
Q: So when you watch for a little while, can you tell me what you saw in that little while.
A: Um . . . they were uh . . . sticking, uh . . . penises in Noel’s mouth.
Q: Who were?
A: Hum . . . Frank.
Q: Frank.
A: Yeah.
Q: And what was Ileana doing?
A: She was sending me home because my dad picks me up and she gets everything ready to leave.58
In a different interview he said the Fusters had played the sex game outside while he watched TV in the house. Other children who saw the Bragas failed to make any incriminating statements during their first interview, but then, weeks later, they would return for a second session, almost always at their parents’ insistence. The neighborhood parents had been meeting every night to exchange information, and therapists aren’t the only ones who can pressure children to disclose abuse. The Bragas ultimately conducted forty-six interviews with thirty-one children. For all their flaws, these interviews looked pretty good in comparison to Kee MacFarlane’s more blatantly suggestive interrogations.
Frank’s son, Noel, who w
as six years old when his father was arrested, also told the Bragas that nothing had happened to him, but then doctors took a sample from his throat and tested it for gonorrhea. It came back positive. With police unable to find any weapons, pornography, or feces smeared across the walls of the Fuster home, and with doctors unable to find any evidence of sexual trauma in their examinations of the children, Noel’s positive gonorrhea test represented the first hard evidence of sexual abuse in the Country Walk case—or in any of the decade’s child care and sex ring cases.
In later years this test would become the object of controversy among journalists and other observers. In 1988 researchers at the Centers for Disease Control reported that gonorrhea testing among low-prevalence populations like children produced a high rate of false-positive results—as much as one-third—and they specifically warned that the “RapID NH” test doctors had used on Noel might not be able to distinguish between gonorrhea and other bacteria that naturally inhabit the respiratory system.59 A later study confirmed the finding that the test was inaccurate 36 percent of the time.60 In 1984, however, doctors were very happy with their new test, which reduced the time needed to obtain results from two days to just four hours. One study called it “accurate, reliable, and useful.”61 This may be why the Bragas decided to treat the boy very differently from how they had treated any other child during their final interview with him. They questioned Noel for seven hours: “Do you think it was your father?” Joe asked, and Laurie followed up with, “Maybe it was your dad?” All morning Noel insisted that he could remember nothing about being abused, at one point driving Joe to say to him, “I know you are not telling the truth because you said no one put their penis in your mouth.” They asked him to think it over after lunch, and when Noel returned he admitted that Frank had abused him. Then he was allowed to leave the interview room, and he reversed himself again.62