We Believe the Children

by Richard Beck

  An important part of a trial attorney’s job is to model, for the benefit of the jury, belief in either the defendant’s innocence or guilt. Danny Davis occasionally joked around with Ray Buckey on the witness stand because of course you would only joke around with someone who hadn’t sexually molested a bunch of children. By the same token, a prosecutor has to perform distaste for the defendant and demonstrate solidarity with the victims and their families. As Nathan documented at length, Debra Kanof put a lot of work into these performances. At one point during the trial the defense tried to address a child’s claim that Michelle Noble had kept a decorated Christmas tree in her house when she brought children over for abuse. As the abuse was thought to have occurred during the summer, this was a strange allegation, but defense attorney Charlie Roberts then called one of Noble’s former coworkers to the stand, and she explained that it was her house the children had seen, that she lived very close to the Y, and that they had come by one day in December and eaten cookies in front of her decorated tree. Kanof responded by speculating that Noble had deliberately set up a Christmas tree in her living room out of season so as to frustrate any future attempts by the children to describe their experiences.38 Kanof also told reporters, on the basis of no evidence presented in any courtroom, that Noble had filmed the children in order to profit from her involvement in a “national porn ring out of Kansas.”39 She waited until Noble’s husband, William, was seated in the witness box to inform him that, as he was now a suspect, he might want to retain legal counsel of his own. She saved her pet theories for moments that maximized their dramatic impact. In her closing arguments Kanof wondered aloud about the children’s accounts of having plastic syringes inserted into their anuses. She pointed out that some children had also mentioned being made to defecate before a camera, and she said the syringes were likely the plastic tips of enemas. A reporter heard one parent sitting in the gallery exclaim, “Oh, God.”40

  Nathan’s piece wasn’t the only skeptical coverage Dove and Noble’s trials received. Although the local news media had more than its fair share of lapses, it also noted Kanof’s aggressiveness, the major implausibilities in the children’s allegations, and Gallardo’s leading interviewing techniques. But these reports didn’t cover the material that Nathan explored in a second article she wrote that appeared in the same issue of the Voice. In “Sex, the Devil, and Daycare,” Nathan called the day care sex abuse cases a panic and tried to explain why they were happening. She outlined a history of the country’s waxing and waning interest in child abuse, tracing a line through the Victorians’ sensational cases of violent battery, the Progressive era’s fight against neglect, and physicians’ attempts to detect traces of physical trauma in the 1960s. She pointed out the vanishing rarity of day care abuse as a proportion of child abuse as a whole, the vast majority of which is committed in private homes by relatives or close family friends. “A mere 1.7 percent of all reported child abuse—including beatings and neglect—is committed by teachers or other paid caretakers not related to the child,” Nathan wrote. “And of that miniscule proportion, only one-tenth is thought to involve sexual abuse.”41 The implications of that last statistic are worth lingering over: for all the anxious news reports describing sexual abuse in day care as an “epidemic” in American life, it actually constituted less than two-tenths of 1 percent of the problem.

  Nathan also tried to explain the origins of this strange obsession with abuse in day care. Her editor, Ellen Willis, had for years offered radical feminist critiques of antipornography feminists, arguing that activists like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin promoted narratives of helplessness and victimization that denied women’s sexual curiosity and played into reactionary hands. Nathan’s politics were similar—she believed the imaginary horrors of day care distracted people from the real issue:

  The people who have stared most unflinchingly at the glaring connection between sexual abuse and the patriarchal nuclear family have been feminists. They have examined power arrangements inside the family, then shown how child battering, wife battering, and incest are linked to extramural violence like rape. But in the Reaganite 1980s feminist consciousness raising about sexual violence hadn’t led to a critique of the family; rather, it had encouraged moralism against evil people and narrowly legalistic remedies.42

  Family life was in the midst of a transformation, Nathan wrote, evolving and rearranging in response to consumerism, reproductive technology, and women’s migration into the workplace. “But it seems that the weaker the family gets, the holier its image.” Day care made a perfect scapegoat: “If the private family is sacred, the public child-care center is profane. If stay-at-home mothers are holy, then the people they pay to take care of their kids when they escape from the house are witches.”43

  It would be hard to say that Nathan’s article directly helped Noble and Dove. There are whole sets of courtroom procedures devoted specifically to preventing journalists from influencing a trial’s outcome, and in any case, both defendants had been convicted by the time the Voice published Nathan’s article. These convictions were not the end of the story, however. In November 1987 an appeals court overturned Noble’s conviction by ruling that the use of children’s videotaped testimony violated her constitutional right to confront her accusers in court. The district attorney’s office prepared to try her again. Dove’s case was also thrown into chaos just six weeks after her conviction when a juror came forward to reveal that the jury had seen documents never admitted into evidence during the trial. They weren’t incidental documents either—in an affidavit, juror Dorothy Gentleman said the notes, which were written by one of the children’s mothers, played a decisive role in changing her verdict from not guilty to guilty. Also playing a role in Gentleman’s reversal was the fact that, although she believed “there was no evidence except what the parents had said their child said,” peer pressure from the other jurors turned out to be intense. “I was made to feel guilty for voting not guilty because I felt I would be branded as one who condones child abuse.”44 Noble was retried later that month, convicted a second time, and sentenced to twenty years in prison.

  Nathan’s reporting and analysis, commissioned by a radical feminist intellectual and published by the country’s preeminent alternative weekly newspaper, came from the far-left wing of the political spectrum. But just as feminists and evangelicals had found common ground in their victim-centered opposition to pornography and abuse, ritual abuse skepticism attracted a politically diverse group of supporters as well. One of the earliest examples is Victims of Child Abuse Laws (VOCAL), a group that formed in Minneapolis in the wake of the Scott County sex ring investigations. The group was founded by a Lutheran minister and psychologist named Ralph Underwager, who, along with his wife, Hollida Wakefield, had been retained by attorneys for two of the Scott County defendants to analyze the child interviews. On Thanksgiving Day 1984, VOCAL held a service on the steps of the state capitol at which Underwager appeared in robes and led a group of parents and protesters in song and prayer. “Parents are being subjected to laws designed to place children’s rights in an adversarial role against parents’ rights,” read VOCAL’s press release. “The damage done by Child Protection people is often irreparable.”45 Underwager went on in the coming years to provide skeptical testimony in many child abuse trials, and he and Wakefield also began to publish their own journal, Issues in Child Abuse Accusations. Where Nathan saw the day care cases as proof of society’s inability to come to terms with the family’s complicity in child abuse, VOCAL saw the investigations as a hostile government attack on family life.

  Two books soon followed in VOCAL’s wake. Paul and Shirley Eberle, the married couple who attended much of the McMartin trial, published The Politics of Child Abuse in 1986. With the words, “What has America become if police and social workers can forcibly enter your home and take your children away without due process, without even probable cause, supported by nothing more than an anonymous phone
call?” printed on the cover, the Eberles’ book also saw the day care trials as government-sponsored attacks on the family. Shocking anecdotes from various trials alternated with long, seemingly unedited transcripts of interviews with people like Roland Summit and Peggy Ann Buckey. In one of these interviews, defense attorney Forrest Latiner pointed out that the Buckeys were themselves Republicans. “They voted for all those conservative, law-and-order initiatives,” he said, “and they never in their wildest dreams suspected it would ever come back to haunt them.”46

  The Eberles themselves took conservatism a bit less ironically. In an interview with Lee Coleman, a psychiatrist who testified for the defense at many child abuse trials in the 1980s and 1990s, they brought up what they saw as the problem of anti-male bias among child protectionists. “There have been a number of books published in the past three years,” they said, “written by radical feminists on child abuse—mostly incestuous—that are long, strident diatribes of hatred of the male.”47

  1986 also saw the publication of The Child Abuse Industry: Outrageous Facts About Child Abuse & Everyday Rebellions Against a System That Threatens Every North American Family, a book written by a home­schooling advocate named Mary Pride. “Was there anything in the current anti-family climate that could stop a social worker from lying in order to yank a child away from his natural parents?”48 she asked in the book’s introduction. According to Pride, the family was an institution that lacked any civil rights whatsoever, and the recent uproar about child abuse was simply a ploy by “those who dislike the traditional family” to further their own professional interests.49 She wasn’t entirely wrong about the dangers social workers posed to working-class and minority families. In the 1980s, as in the Victorian era, the specter of child abuse allowed upper-middle-class professionals to keep a wary eye on marginalized communities, and child protection workers were much more likely to remove children from poor or nonwhite homes than from their wealthier counterparts.50 Pride’s defense of minority communities was complemented, however, by a paranoid fear of government as well as a sexual politics that would have made James Dobson smile. She thought the “real roots of child abuse” were abortion, pornography, sexual infidelity, and no-fault divorce.51 She also thought the government had instituted “compulsory ‘death education’ classes”52 in public schools to promote teenage suicide, and she worried that state-mandated abortions were soon to come.53

  Ritual abuse and mass molestation skepticism retained this political heterogeneity as it slowly proliferated in the late 1980s. A year after the publication of her El Paso report, Debbie Nathan returned to the Voice with an in-depth investigation of Kelly Michaels, a New Jersey day care teacher convicted in 1988 of abusing twenty small children at the Wee Care Day Nursery in Maplewood. Michaels had experimented sexually with women in college, a fact that compounded the difficulties she faced in court. Believing that jurors pulled from a community with such “small town attitudes” would be eager to associate homosexuality with other kinds of sexual deviance, Michaels’s attorney decided he could not call character witnesses to testify for his defendant; the risks of exposing them to cross-examination that would reveal Michaels’s sexual history were too great.54 This was, to an extent, the focus of Nathan’s piece: the way a community’s mistaken ideas about pedophilia and child abusers could intersect with other sexual fears and anxieties. Two years later, however, when Harper’s published its own article on the Michaels case by conservative pundit Dorothy Rabinowitz, these sexual dynamics were nowhere to be found. Rabinowitz didn’t even mention Michaels’s homosexual experiences, much less examine the crucial role they played in the case. Perhaps Rabinowitz worried, as Michaels’s defense attorney had, about what people would think of an accused child molester who also turned out to be gay or at least not consistently, uniformly straight.

  This political muddle notwithstanding, ritual abuse skepticism was on its way to mainstream respectability by the end of 1987. In Los Angeles the district attorney’s office dropped six of its seven jailhouse informants from the witness list as a result of Kevin Cody’s Easy Reader story, and George Freeman, the one who remained, did not reassure courtroom spectators about the reliability of jailhouse informants. Soon after he testified in the preliminary hearing, Freeman was arrested and charged with a number of crimes, including selling drugs, burglarizing his employer’s property, driving under the influence, illegally possessing a gun, violating his parole, and stealing sheep. Then, before he was even allowed to say anything at trial about Ray Buckey’s alleged confession, Freeman had to offer testimony about perjuries he had previously committed while testifying in other cases, in exchange for which Lael Rubin offered him immunity.55 (He also admitted to having previously perjured himself about those perjuries.)56 Freeman repeated his story about Ray Buckey on direct examination, but the following day’s newspapers paid more attention to his exchanges with Danny Davis. “Tell us,” Davis asked Freeman, “did you do something with some sheep?”

  A: Yes, I did.

  Q: And please tell us what did you do.

  A: A friend of mine and I took four sheep from a guy I worked for, and I took them over to a friend of mine’s house and sold to him, sold two of them. We was going to barbecue the other two.

  Q: Did your boss, your employer, give you permission to take the sheep?

  A: No, he didn’t.

  Q: And when you went—took the sheep, did you intend to borrow them, originally?

  A: No, because he always talked about how nasty they were, and he was going to get rid of them and stuff.

  Q: So you were doing him a favor?

  A: Yeah, I figured I was. . . .

  Q: When you took these sheep, I guess it was in the dark of night?

  A: No. As a matter of fact, it was in the daytime in the fog. I had a hard time getting them.

  Q: Running them down?

  A: Excuse me, yes.

  Judge Pounders momentarily broke off Davis’s line of questioning. “If this gets any funnier,” he said, “we’re going to have to take a break”—Freeman’s testimony was hard to hear over the laughter. Davis asked Freeman what he did with the sheep once he managed to run them down.

  A: Put them in the back of my boss’s truck.

  Q: Again, without his permission or knowledge?

  A: Yeah. He was at the lake.

  Q: Fishing?

  A: No. He was recuperating from an automobile wreck where him and his two kids almost got killed.

  It was at this point that Lael Rubin asked whether she might interrupt the proceedings and approach the bench for a sidebar.57

  Every aspect of George Freeman’s involvement in the case—every aspect of the DA’s efforts to use jailhouse informants at all, in fact—was a disaster for the prosecution. And yet Freeman was seen even at the time as a relatively small episode in a case that had already run for four years and that was expected to continue for another year at the very least. Judge Pounders worried about the jury’s ability to endure such a lengthy proceeding. Jurors continued to fall asleep, two had to be admonished for passing notes back and forth, and one was excused from further service after suffering a stroke. In 1988 Pounders conferred with the attorneys on how to answer a juror’s question about the trial’s estimated length. “If we tell the jury 12 more months,” he said, “they will get up en masse and attack us.”58 Lael Rubin suggested he fudge and say eight months, and everyone agreed. Kee MacFarlane testified. For the first time jurors watched videos of the interviews at CII. The Supreme Court ruled that testimony delivered via closed-circuit television violated a defendant’s constitutional rights, parents pulled three children off the prosecution’s witness list, and twenty-seven charges were subsequently dropped. Preparations for the future remained very much on everybody’s mind. In the fall of 1987 Virginia McMartin spent a day testifying out of the jury’s presence, in front of a video camera. She was eighty years old; the tape was stor
ed away in case she died before being called to the stand.59

  Sensing, perhaps, some new and really significant vulnerabilities in the prosecution’s public opinion campaign, former defendants began to give interviews. In the summer of 1988 the Los Angeles Times published simultaneous profiles of Babette Spitler, Mary Ann Jackson, and Betty Raidor, McMartin teachers whose charges had not made it past the preliminary hearing. Raidor talked nostalgically about puttering around the garden and putting on dinners for friends at her house, which she and her husband had sold for $225,000 to help cover her legal expenses. She said she missed her two cats and two dogs, which weren’t allowed in her new apartment complex. Mary Ann Jackson was the only defendant who didn’t lose her home, but she said it was just recently that people stopped giving her suspicious looks and making remarks on the street when she went out with her grandchildren. To sustain herself after the arrest, she said, she read books by concentration camp survivors and turned to her religious faith.60

  Babette Spitler had a harder time. After her arrest she and her husband tried to send their two children to live with relatives in San Diego under assumed names, but it only took the Manhattan Beach police a few weeks to learn where they had gone and bring them back to the South Bay. There the children were interviewed for six hours at the Children’s Institute International and then sent to the county facility for neglected and “wayward” youth. They eventually returned to their relatives in San Diego, but Spitler later learned her children had felt guilty for months, terrified they said something at CII to make matters worse for their mother and the other teachers. After the charges were dropped and after Babette and her husband passed a battery of psychological tests, their children were finally returned—the family had been separated for two years. The Spitlers’ house and savings were gone, and they tried hard to prevent their new neighbors from discovering their involvement in McMartin. Unlike Jackson and Raidor, Spitler was bitter. “I wanted a trial,” she said. “When they dropped the charges, they said they didn’t have enough evidence to convict me. They never said that Babs Spitler is innocent.”61