We Believe the Children

by Richard Beck

  Even more public than these profiles with their sympathetic photo illustrations was Peggy Ann Buckey’s decision to try to win back her teaching credentials. Immediately after her arrest, the state’s Commission on Teacher Credentialing had revoked Buckey’s certification to teach communication-handicapped children and then waged a two-and-a-half-year battle to keep her out of the classroom for good. Buckey filed suit in superior court, and over the spring, summer, and fall of 1988 the commission held a hearing that resembled nothing so much as the McMartin trial in miniature. Two years after District Attorney Reiner dropped all charges against her, Buckey heard four children testify that she had molested them. Where criminal proceedings operate under a formal presumption of innocence, the credential hearing required that Buckey essentially prove she wasn’t guilty. Abuse experts and alibi witnesses appeared on her behalf, and children rehashed their courtroom testimony about trips to a farm and a chopped-up pony.62 The night before the commission announced its decision, Buckey drove through a snowstorm up Interstate 5 and through Kern County, breaking off to the west just before Bakersfield and arriving in Sacramento at three in the morning. She won her appeal and began teaching in the Anaheim Union High School District in February 1989.63 She refused to go back to Manhattan Beach—she said she wouldn’t even drive through town unless forced to by traffic.64

  The everyday sense of panic around child abusers in day care centers was dissipating in greater Los Angeles. Newspapers began to discuss the panic’s height as though the events of 1984 and 1985 lay in the more distant past. “Four years after the McMartin child molestation case burst over the South Bay’s preschools, owners say that their nursery schools are filled to capacity and that time has eased most of the pressures generated by widespread sexual-abuse allegations,” the Los Angeles Times reported in the spring of 1988.65 Enrollment had plummeted in the months following Wayne Satz’s first KABC report, but teachers believed that parents had regained their confidence in day care’s safety. Allegations targeting other centers had failed to produce a single conviction, and when, in December of 1988, a sixteen-month-old was found strangled in a Lomita day care home, investigators were very vocal about wanting to avoid “sensational,” McMartin-style speculation.66 “The McMartin thing,” said a spokeswoman for the state’s preschool licensing agency, “is pretty much behind us.”67

  The effects of a panic, however, are not undone just because panicked people begin to calm down. Of the seven preschools closed by abuse allegations in 1984 and 1985, five never reopened, and in 1987 allegations of abuse emerged at the South Bay Center for Counseling, which had been established in 1984 specifically to care for children allegedly molested at other day care centers in Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, and Torrance. (Colleen Mooney, the center’s executive director and a witness for the McMartin prosecution, said of the allegations that “the important thing to remember is that the child was believed. [Child sexual abuse] can happen anywhere, any time.”)68

  Day care became more expensive as well, with schools that had reputations similar to McMartin’s in 1983 charging $325 per month for daily service (adjusted for inflation today, that would be more than $750). One preschool instituted policies forbidding teachers from cleaning off children after bowel movements, and two teachers had to be present to deal with any child who complained about an “owie” on his or her genitals. These policies, like day care workers’ increased reluctance to show physical affection to the children they cared for, sprang not from a belief that they protected children from abuse but from a desire to protect workers from false allegations. A similar desire was behind many preschools’ decision to stop hiring men. Day care owners believed the sight of men caring for small kids was likely to make parents nervous.69 Child care, then, was exclusively women’s work, even when the women got paid for it.

  A month after Peggy Ann Buckey learned her teaching credentials would be reinstated, Ray was released from the Los Angeles County Men’s Central Jail on $1.5 million bail. He was thirty years old and had been incarcerated for nearly five years. His mother had been freed months earlier on $295,000 bail. He walked through a crowd of reporters to Danny Davis’s car in complete silence. One condition of the release required Ray to surrender his passport. Another forbid him from having unaccompanied contact with anyone under the age of fourteen unless the child was a blood relative.70

  Chapter 7

  Two Families

  The great yellow journalist Geraldo Rivera hosted the 1988 television special Devil Worship: Exposing Satan’s Underground nine days before Halloween. The two-hour broadcast opened with a warning. “This program deals with devil worship and satanic beliefs,” a narrator said. “Because of the program’s theme and controversial subject matter, parental discretion should be exercised.”1

  Parents were at the center of Exposing Satan’s Underground from start to finish. Cutting away to commercial breaks, Rivera repeatedly begged parents to get their young children out of the living room in anticipation of the next segment’s gruesome content. (He encouraged teenagers, however, to watch along with their parents, as the program might help them recognize and avoid the attractions of Satanism.) After interviewing an eighteen-year-old serving a life sentence for an allegedly satanic murder, Rivera cut to the boy’s mother and asked her to describe the months that preceded her son’s crime. “Pete gradually withdrew from family life,” she said. “That is probably one of the main things I noticed. He even got to where he avoided eating meals with us.”

  Parents also served as the program’s voice of moral responsibility, with one father expressing his opinion on whether a practicing member of the Church of Satan should be allowed to serve in the military. “Well, I think in this election year we’ve heard a lot about values, Geraldo,” he said. “We’ve heard a lot about our children, that little children should be saying the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag.” He found it “inconceivable” that “we can have somebody in our army, as a colonel, leading our troops into battle who is opposed to the very concept of God, and whose whole purpose is to fight against God.” The special cycled through interviews with therapists, detectives, Charles Manson, and a retired FBI officer, but Rivera never lost sight of his most important audience segment. “Coming up,” he said before the final commercial, “we’re going to have warning signs that you should watch for, parents.”2

  Rivera spent a lot of time on the day care cases, spelling out the link between Satanism and “the vilest crime of all: sexual abuse of children.” Two-thirds of the way through he opened up a live satellite feed to a Manhattan Beach living room, where eleven McMartin parents sat facing the camera in two rows. “We know that the parents and children allege child abuse,” Rivera said by way of introduction. “What is much less known is that they say it was ritual abuse as part of a satanic cult.” These were the parents who had not been asked to provide testimony at the McMartin trial, whose children had not been included on the district attorney’s official complaint. As though to compensate for their exclusion from the formal judicial proceeding, they had done more than any other group to pursue the satanic ritual abuse theory involving the McMartin Preschool. Geraldo asked the group’s spokesman, Bob Currie, to explain why he believed the abuse had been satanic. Currie had an agitated affect on camera. He spoke a little too quickly and a little too loudly:

  Well the easiest reason to that question, Geraldo, is the fact that when the children started talking, they started talking about robes and candles. They described an Episcopal church. And once they started narrowing that down, you could see it had to be Satanic. It’s very important in Satanic religions to have a priest, because they truly do believe in power. . . . The truth about Satanism is they truly do use blood, and they mix it with urine, and then they also use the real meat, the real flesh. This is what makes Satanism true, and this is what 1,200 molested kids in the city of Manhattan Beach have told the sheriff’s department. And it’s an outrage that we are where we are w
ith this case, these poor, unprotected kids that have, uh, that’s a third of the school system in the city of Manhattan Beach that’s been molested. We have eight preschools closed here. This is the child molestation capital of the world. We have more preschools closed in this city than any city this side of Detroit, and I’m not picking on Detroit.3

  Geraldo also broadcast a taped interview with four McMartin children. Seated outside on a sunny afternoon, he asked one girl what she meant when she said her teachers molested her. “Touching us in places we don’t want,” she replied. “They would scare us really much.”4

  A little more than a year later, many of these children returned to Geraldo’s studio with their parents for an update on the trial. They were older now, some of them in adolescence, and when Peggy Ann Buckey appeared via satellite for an interview they visibly seethed with rage. Bob Currie’s son said he and other kids had stayed up until three in the morning the night before the broadcast, telling stories about McMartin. When Peggy told Geraldo she was teaching again, someone in the audience yelled, “Don’t send your kid to that teacher!” The children smiled as other audience members broke into loud cheers. When Peggy Ann Buckey called the whole case a witch hunt, a woman in the audience derisively yelled, “That’s right! We’re looking for witches, aren’t we?”5

  Most of the time parents were the only victims in full public view, speaking to reporters and founding activist groups while judges told journalists not to print the children’s names. Watching the children on Geraldo tremble with such obviously authentic anger and fear, however, one begins to wonder just how much effort their parents put into stoking and encouraging that anger at home, how much the trials must have transformed their private lives. Some of the parents even managed to identify positive aspects of what would otherwise have been an unmitigated nightmare. “It was rather a lucky situation to have this happen in my family,” Bob Currie said brightly during his second Geraldo appearance. “It allowed me the pleasure and the time to take full-time off work and develop this material.”6

  It is hard to know for sure, however, what effects Currie’s mind-set, with its sadness, its rage, and its make-lemonade-out-of-lemons quality, had on his son. By the late 1980s research psychologists were beginning to comb through the child interviews therapists and detectives conducted in day care and sex ring cases, testing for the extent and limits of a child’s suggestibility or the effects of a therapist telling a subject that all of his friends already told what happened.7 These studies were possible because there were transcripts and videotapes of the interviews to study. But nobody transcribed the conversations that took place in the car going to or from Children’s Institute International, nor did anybody set recording devices on mantelpieces around the South Bay as parents asked their children about McMartin in 1984. This makes it difficult to understand just what the ritual abuse cases did to the families they swept up or how the investigations changed their ways of talking and thinking.

  By the second half of the 1980s, with Ronald Reagan in office and populist evangelical conservatism at its peak, profamily rhetoric was politically triumphant. A central element of the neoconservative surge that began in the 1970s, this rhetoric was such an effective instrument of the Republican social agenda that only the most radical leftists even bothered trying to challenge it. Feminists were one such radical group. “As our cultural myth would have it,” Ellen Willis wrote, “the family is not only a haven in a heartless world but a benign Rumpelstiltskin spinning the straw of lust into the gold of love.”8 But critiques like these never became part of mainstream discourse, according to which the nuclear family was just as sacred to the American way of life as the Constitution. How people actually lived, however, suggested much more ambivalence about the benefits and costs of family life. The 1980s were also a decade in which the national marriage rate continued a steady decline that had begun in the sixties and seventies, and for those who stayed married, the single-income household with a male breadwinner in the workplace and a housewife preparing meals became a perpetually unattainable ideal. Americans had sex and raised children as they had in the past, but most of them no longer had those experiences in the context of a single marriage that would last for the rest of their lives. 40 percent of all Americans born in the 1970s spent at least some time living with a single parent, but politicians in the 1980s almost never recognized these experiences except to condemn them.9

  The McMartin parents on Geraldo, with their angry paeans to child protection and harsh justice, said all of the things people expect nuclear families to say when speaking in public. But the private experiences of families involved in different day care and ritual abuse cases around the country were much less straightforward, and families’ private reactions to those experiences were often colored by ambivalence and confusion. Feelings of anger, guilt, and victimization sometimes overlapped to such an extent that they could not be distinguished from one another. This is true of families with alleged child victims, families with alleged abusers, and families with both. Fortunately—and unfortunately, as it turned out—at least one of these families made extraordinarily detailed documents of their own.

  Before he led chemistry classes as a Long Island schoolteacher, Arnold Friedman made a brief go at a career in music. He spent his twenties playing Latin jazz at resorts in the Catskills under the stage name “Arnito Rey,” and for years afterward he gave piano lessons in his family’s living room. In 1982 Arnold began to supplement these music lessons with computer classes conducted in his basement on 8-bit Commodore 64s. The desktop computer was still a new invention then, but Great Neck was an affluent town where people wanted the best for their children, and familiarity with this new technology would look good on college applications years down the line. Arnold soon had classes running almost every night of the week.

  Arnold and his wife, Elaine, had three children of their own: David, Seth, and Jesse. The boys inherited their father’s love of performance. Equipped with home video cameras, the brothers put on sketch comedy shows and musical performances for one another around the house, and they also took their act out on the town, using vegetables as pretend microphones while conducting man-on-the-street interviews at grocery stores. These videos were the connective tissue of their relationships with one another and with their father, who often joined in the fun by playing a role or providing musical accompaniment. Elaine was not involved; she was less outgoing than her husband and children, and she was sometimes made to feel bad about not keeping up with their endless stream of jokes. But she and Arnold believed their family was a happy one, more or less. In 1984, at the age of fifteen, Jesse began to help out with his father’s basement computer classes. He was the youngest member of the family.

  A pedophile is not the same thing as a child abuser. “Pedophile” refers to anyone who is sexually attracted to prepubescent children, whereas a child abuser is someone who actually acts on those desires. Whether Arnold Friedman was a child abuser became a very controversial topic in the late 1980s, but there is no question that he really was a pedophile. It is probably impossible to know for sure when and where Arnold’s sexual troubles began. Maybe in childhood, maybe in adolescence; maybe it had something to do with his younger brother, Howard.10 What is known is that his legal problems began in 1984, when postal inspectors intercepted a package containing child pornography, sent from the Netherlands and addressed to Arnold Friedman’s home in Great Neck. On its own, simply receiving child porn in the mail did not constitute a crime. In order to make an arrest, the government needed Arnold to send something back. “What we would do then,” a postal inspector said in an interview, “is initiate a correspondence with Arnold so that we can determine whether he is in fact willing to violate the statute.”11 It took three years of cajoling letters, but the government, posing as a fellow pedophile in search of magazines, finally got Arnold to send a package containing child porn (the enclosed note read, “Enjoy!”). Then the Feds arrived at the Friedma
n house one day in 1987 with a search warrant. They found a stack of magazines behind the piano in the basement.12

  They also found a partial list of students who attended the computer classes. Once the police realized that Friedman had groups of children in his basement almost every night of the week, they decided they were dealing with a different kind of investigation. They brought in a detective named Fran Galasso, then working as the head of the Nassau County Police Department’s Sex Crimes Unit, to organize a group of detectives to interview Friedman’s current and former students.

  In 2003 a director named Andrew Jarecki released his documentary film Capturing the Friedmans, in which he spoke with a number of those who were involved in the interviews that followed Arnold’s arrest. The computer students were eight, nine, and ten years old. “They came in and they said, ‘We know something happened to [your son],’” one father recalled. “They didn’t say ‘Believe.’ They said, ‘Know.’” Ron Georgalis, who attended the classes and insisted that nothing criminal took place, remembered listening in on police officers’ initial conversations with his parents. “I remember actually eavesdropping on what they said [happened]. And what they said made my heart race.” Other students experienced the kind of badgering and harassment that characterized other child care abuse investigations. “They told me repeatedly that other students in my class had already told them that they had been abused,” one former student said, “and that they were certain that in fact I had also been abused and that I should tell them so.”