by Richard Beck
The article generated more mail than any other in the magazine’s history.65 Not all of it was supportive. “If you ask me to believe in a systematic network of fiends, then Goddamn it, I want facts and figures,” one reader wrote. “And why, if these horrors are still going on, is the pseudonymous author writing a novel about it, instead of banging down the doors of every judicial office in the country?” Pamela Freyd, the executive director of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF), also wrote in with objections to the story. “The article presented the existence of satanic ritual abuse conspiracies as real when there is no evidence,” she wrote.
Freyd had founded the FMSF with her husband, Peter, in 1992 after the couple’s adult daughter accused her father of sexually abusing her as a child. Although the process by which Jennifer Freyd came to confront her father did not conform to the standard recovered memory narrative—she was not hypnotized in therapy, for example—and although evidence supporting the existence of false memory syndrome as a verified medical phenomenon was thin, the FMSF was soon mailing out newsletters and fielding phone calls from accused parents. By the time Pamela Freyd wrote to Ms. she was speaking on behalf of a small but growing constituency. “Repressed memory therapy is incredibly lucrative for therapists,” she wrote. “Families are being destroyed by this nonsense. Will your next article be on space alien abduction?”
The FMSF was an advocacy organization, not a research group or a think tank, and as such it devoted itself primarily to publicizing research that debunked recovered memory therapy—it actually coined the term “recovered memory therapy”—and steering legal resources toward accused parents. These were understandably felt to be urgent tasks; some therapists recommended that patients sue their abusive parents in court, and by the late nineties more than eight hundred civil suits, criminal cases, and restraining orders would be filed. (This number constitutes less than one-fifth of the number of cases in which adults recovered memories of childhood abuse.)66 But although the FMSF’s courtroom and media campaigns were ultimately effective, there are ways in which the group inadvertently deepened the confusion in which the issue was mired. Pamela Freyd’s claim that therapists were primarily in it for the money was, of course, not designed to foster understanding—everyone who is engaged in a media relations war says their opponents are in it for the money. (This includes recovered memory advocates themselves, some of whom implied, when patients began to sue them for malpractice, that the lawsuits were primarily motivated by the possibility of a big payout.)67 The FMSF also associated itself with conservative activists who believed the problems with child abuse law originated not in Michelle Remembers and recovered memory suits but with Walter Mondale. One FMSF member, when not organizing events to support victims of false accusations in Salem, Massachusetts, worked with a Republican senator to try to remove the statutory requirement from the Child Abuse Treatment and Prevention Act to report suspected abuse.68 Combined with the group’s failure to establish clear internal guidelines for distinguishing actual cases of false accusations from cases in which parents may have been using the syndrome as a cover for abuse that really took place, this left the FMSF vulnerable to criticism from those who were already inclined to see it as a cynical attempt to provide abusers with a cloak of outraged respectability.
In its newsletters and publicity materials the FMSF emphasized the damage done to families. But the real targets of recovered memory therapy were the women in whom treatment cultivated such a debilitating sense of vulnerability and helplessness. In previous decades, women who tried to tell somebody (whether a judge, a relative, or a friend) about abuse they had experienced (whether as a child or as an adult) often discovered that on this subject in particular they would not be permitted to give an account of what happened to them that others were willing to hear. Perhaps the central irony of recovered memory therapy is that in its efforts to bring the issue of child sexual abuse out into the open, it did the same thing to women, prioritizing reanimated zombie versions of Victorian-era psychological theories over anything that women might have actually had to say for themselves. As the therapy reached its media peak, it received what essentially amounted to celebrity endorsements, one of them from the producer and actress Roseanne Barr, who revealed that she had been diagnosed with MPD. Her therapist unearthed twenty-one separate personalities with names like Piggy, Fucker, and Bambi.69 She appeared on Oprah to discuss her experiences with MPD. “When someone asks you, ‘Were you sexually abused as a child?’ there are only two answers,” she said. “One of them is, ‘Yes,’ and one of them is, ‘I don’t know.’ You can’t say, ‘No.’”
Chapter 10
Repression and Desire
“In 1983 and 1984,” Kenneth Lanning wrote, “when I first began to hear stories of what sounded like satanic or occult activity in connection with allegations of sexual victimization of children (allegations that have come to be referred to most often as ‘ritual’ child abuse), I tended to believe them. I had been dealing with bizarre, deviant behavior for many years and had long since realized that almost anything is possible. Just when you think that you have heard it all, along comes another strange case.”1
This paragraph appeared on the first page of Lanning’s 1992 FBI report on ritual abuse, and the intervening years had modified the special agent’s sense of what was possible. After some five years of investigative work that failed to uncover the country’s clandestine satanic network, Lanning began to raise respectful but unmistakably skeptical questions at professional gatherings in the late eighties. In response, some of the jumpier conference attendees began to wonder aloud whether Lanning was himself a Satanist who had infiltrated the Bureau. Addressing these insinuations in his report, Lanning noted the difficulty and unfairness of being asked to prove that you are not working on behalf of a secret conspiracy. “All I can say to those who have made such allegations,” he wrote, “is that they are wrong.”
Lanning very much wanted to keep people on topic. He had spent eleven years researching and consulting on child abuse and its prevention, and he now believed that the specter of ritual abuse threatened to undo much of that work. “A satanic murder should be defined as one committed by two or more individuals who rationally plan the crime and whose primary motivation is to fulfill a prescribed satanic ritual calling for the murder,” he wrote. “By this definition I have been unable to identify even one satanic murder in the United States.” Lanning described the urge to believe in ritual abuse as an updated version of the 1950s “stranger danger” panic that swapped out the trench coat–wearing pedophile for the satanic cult. Such a conception of child abuse set out the problem in appealingly straightforward terms. “One of the oldest theories of crime is demonology,” Lanning wrote. “The devil makes you do it.”
Lanning’s long and detailed report worked step-by-step through the tangle of confusion that surrounded ritual abuse. He described how police officers attended training conferences on Satanism and then seized on ritual abuse as an explanation for a dizzying range of real and imaginary social phenomena, including, but not limited to, heavy metal, teenage depression and suicide, fabricated “histories” of witchcraft in Europe, the New World Order conspiracy, and marijuana use. He also carefully and rather sensitively explained why parents who believed their children had been abused might have been drawn to the idea that the abuse was satanic: it helped them to assuage their own feelings of guilt. If the culprits were not mere child care workers but members of a global conspiracy, how could parents have been expected to know what was happening? But none of this matched the importance of Lanning’s basic claim: satanic ritual abuse does not exist. One of the previous decade’s most prominent ritual abuse proponents was now saying not that ritual abuse had been somewhat overblown, not that its reach had been exaggerated, but that it simply was not happening.
As a national phenomenon, the ritual abuse hysteria broke down for good with the end of the second McMartin trial in 1990. Its declin
e unfurled slowly, with various detours and reversals, over the course of the next quarter-century. For convicted defendants in the day care cases, getting out of prison was a much longer process than getting into it had been, but most of them did get out eventually. Release, however, did not by any means guarantee a return to normal life. Peggy McMartin Buckey had a lot of trouble after McMartin. She became fearful of other people and would often refuse to leave her house. She filed a lawsuit against Los Angeles County and the City of Manhattan Beach alleging civil rights violations, but a federal judge dismissed it. She had a new grandson, though. Peggy Ann married in 1987, and her son was almost two years old when Judge Weisberg declared the mistrial. She said that people who recognized her on the street now frequently offered support, and she wondered where these people had been years before.2 Virginia and Peggy Ann appealed their lawsuit against Children’s Institute International and the district attorney’s office up to the federal level, but the Supreme Court refused to hear it.3 The McMartin family also sued Bob Currie for slander. A superior court judge found in the McMartins’ favor but essentially ruled that Currie could not have damaged their reputations beyond the extent to which two trials and seven years of public notoriety had already damaged them. He awarded each of the plaintiffs one dollar in damages.
Ileana Fuster, having served three of the ten years to which she had been sentenced in exchange for testifying against her husband, was released from prison in 1989 and immediately deported to her native Honduras. One year earlier, Richard Barkman, who taught at the Small World Preschool in Niles, Michigan, until being accused of ritualistic abuse in 1984, completed a successful effort to have his conviction overturned. That case began when Barkman reported a student’s mother for neglect; in response the mother accused Barkman of molesting her child, and investigators eventually persuaded more than sixty Small World kids to do the same. Facing a second trial in 1990, Barkman entered a no-contest plea to one count of assault. He was sentenced to time served and five years probation. Betsy Kelly, a former teacher at the Little Rascals Day Care Center in Edenton, North Carolina, did the same after spending two years awaiting trial in jail. She pled no contest to the charges against her in January 1994, served an additional ten months, and was released. In 1993 a New Jersey appeals court also overturned Kelly Michaels’s conviction, vacating her sentence and freeing her after five years in prison. After a chaotic hearing, Michaels rushed out of the courthouse and got in a car headed for New York City, where her family and friends were waiting. “Look at that beautiful skyline!” she said, crying, as the car approached Manhattan.4 She still faced more than one hundred counts of child abuse, but in 1994 prosecutors announced they would not pursue a retrial.
Violet Amirault and Cheryl Amirault LeFave were released in 1995. They were, respectively, the mother and sister of Gerald Amirault, and together the trio worked at the prestigious Fells Acres Day Care Center in Malden, Massachusetts, until 1984, when Gerald was arrested and charged with abusing many children. The case expanded in the usual way. One investigator said that coaxing allegations out of the children was “like getting blood from a stone.”5 Violet and Cheryl were freed on appeal when a judge ruled the earlier trial had violated the women’s constitutional rights, but then, in 1997, the state’s highest court reinstated their convictions, arguing that “the mere fact that if the process were redone, there might be a different outcome, or that some lingering doubt about the first outcome may remain, cannot be a sufficient reason to reopen what society has a right to consider closed.”6 The word “finality” appeared five times in the opinion. Cheryl was returned to prison. Violet, who was in her seventies, only managed to avoid the same fate by dying of stomach cancer before her reinstated sentence was set to begin.
The media turned against recovered memory, ritual abuse, and the day care cases more quickly and more decisively than any other institution. The first skeptical article to appear in a major national magazine was published by Harper’s in May 1990. The piece’s author was Dorothy Rabinowitz, a reporter and editorialist for a New Jersey television station who had followed the Kelly Michaels trial from the outset. After Debbie Nathan’s 1988 Village Voice story bolstered Rabinowitz’s own growing doubts about the prosecution’s case, she decided to file her own investigative report. She accused police, parents, and prosecutors of falling for “tales as fantastic as any fairy story ever told to them by the Brothers Grimm.”7 This article set the tone for the coming decade. In 1995 Violet Amirault, other day care defendants, and two professors appeared on a CNBC special devoted to the topic of wrongful child molestation convictions. Leading the panel and moderating the discussion was Geraldo Rivera, who interrupted proceedings at one point to announce that he had been “terribly wrong” to support “the ‘Believe the Children’ movement of the 1980s.” He now believed that innocent people had been wrongly convicted and that recovered memory therapy was a “bunch of crap.”8
Even TV movies changed their tune. The late eighties had seen a number of network-produced films along the lines of Do You Know the Muffin Man?, a CBS docu-drama in which a young Stephen Dorff played the older brother of a boy abused and then scared into silence by teachers at a community day care center (oddly, the film features no reference whatsoever to a “muffin man”).9 But in 1995 HBO finally aired Abby and Myra Mann’s McMartin film, Indictment. James Woods played Danny Davis, emphasizing the lawyer’s tenaciousness and downplaying his fondness for rambling courtroom monologues.10
Outside the media the panic occasionally resurfaced with surprising violence. In 1994 a police lieutenant named Robert Perez was placed in charge of all sex crime investigations in Wenatchee, Washington, a small city some 150 miles from Seattle. Though Perez took to the job enthusiastically, he said the reason for his appointment was “a mystery to him”—he did not have extensive training or relevant prior work experience.11 That summer a fifteen-year-old girl tried to poison her foster father with iodine and then accused him of raping her. Perez arrested the foster father. The next day the girl’s caseworker, Paul Glassen, reported that she had recanted her story entirely, and Perez arrested Glassen for alleged witness tampering.12 Perez expanded his investigation in 1995 and became convinced he was uncovering a ring of abusers. He believed one of the victims was his own foster child, a nine-year-old girl named Donna, and one spring day he put Donna in his police car and took a long drive through Wenatchee, asking her to point out houses in which she and her friends might have been abused. In the midst of identifying twenty-two buildings, Donna also told Perez she had been abused by a taxi driver and a delivery man on his rounds, the beginnings of a group that would eventually include forty-three arrested adults and sixty alleged child victims. Perez’s investigation resulted in the filing of more than twenty-nine thousand counts of child sex abuse, eighteen convictions, and a dozen no-contest or guilty pleas. These thousands of acts of abuse, molestation, and rape were all supposed to have taken place within a city of just twenty-two thousand people.
The Wenatchee sex ring was such an elaborate and outlandish construction that it is perhaps unsurprising that it should have fallen apart so quickly. In 1996 one of the accusing girls told a television reporter, an attorney, the Wenatchee County Commissioner, and her grandmother that Perez forced her to fabricate rape allegations.13 She also said Perez had physically intimidated her, including throwing her to the floor on one occasion when she expressed reluctance to testify. By the end of the decade almost all of the Wenatchee convictions were overturned or set aside.
Also freed in the second half of the 1990s were Alvin and Debbie McCuan and Scott and Brenda Kniffen of Kern County, California. Each more than a decade into a combined prison sentence of exactly one thousand years, the two couples were released in 1996 after an appeals court ruled investigators had coerced their children into testifying against them—the Kniffens’ sons, Brian and Brandon, said as much in television appearances.14 The appeal was the first time in six years that Scott a
nd Brenda had seen one another. “Oh god,” Brenda said when she saw her husband. “Honey, you need Rogaine.”15 Thirty-four sex ring convictions were eventually overturned in Kern County. Alvin and Debbie’s two daughters, whose initial allegations of incest at the hands of their step-grandfather and father launched the investigation, never recanted.
In 1995 the North Carolina Court of Appeals overturned the convictions of Robert Kelly and Dawn Wilson, who had worked at the Little Rascals Day Care Center in Edenton until the fall of 1989. The pair were serving thirteen life sentences between the two of them (twelve for Robert). Another Little Rascals defendant accepted a no-contest plea rather than face a trial. In 1999 Cheryl Amirault LeFave reached an agreement with the Middlesex County district attorney to serve ten years’ probation in exchange for her release, with a number of additional stipulations. One was that she have no unsupervised contact with children to whom she was not related nor any contact whatsoever with the alleged victims’ families. Another was that she not sit for television interviews or attempt to profit from her experience by writing a book about it. The following year the state’s parole board began to investigate the possibility of commuting Gerald Amirault’s sentence, and in 2001 it recommended by a 5–0 vote that he be released. Martha Coakley, the district attorney, organized press interviews for the alleged child victims—now adults—and encouraged the governor to keep Amirault in prison. In early 2002, Acting Governor Jane Swift denied Amirault’s commutation.16