You are reading False Choices, a substack dedicated to the proposition that there are much better choices available to a great people than the ones offered. Every Wednesday I publish a story, sometimes fiction, or sometimes, like today, a non-fiction account. Thrilled to have you along - thank you!
On a recent drive to Traverse City, or Tragic City as some call it, fentanyl being as ubiquitous as it is, I passed a Day Care Center with one of those cute names even a three year old can love. With nothing pressing on my mind that day, an odd thought passed through my brain for no apparent reason. I wonder aloud if anyone remembers the Day Care hysteria of the 1980’s and early 90’s?
“Probably not,” Mary answered, “there’s been another hysteria every few years since, a person can’t keep up with all of them.”
“They’ve definitely accelerated, that’s true. There has to be some instability, some underlying cracks in the foundation, for a society to have a new hysteria almost yearly,” I said. “We now use crisis language, hysterical language, to discuss everything, everyday. Hysteria is a lifestyle now.”
Well, we did our shopping and ran our errands, and when we got home I could not let a sleeping dog lie, so I got on the internet to piece it all together again, and there was a lot to review. As it turns out I was only vaguely familiar with the whole episode. I was only tangentially aware of this particular hysteria at the time; I was in my early 20s to mid 30s working a lot, getting married, buying a home, becoming a parent. It was only much later when Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote about the plight of the Amirault family from Massachusetts in The Wall Street Journal that I read about the extreme madness that took over the country, and sent many innocent people to jail for decades for the crime of taking care of children at a day care center.
How it starts
It started, of course, with a book. In the case of the Day Care hysteria, it was Michelle Remembers, published in 1980. Written by Laurence Pazder and his patient, and later wife, Michelle Smith. Pazder was a Canadian board certified MD and Psychiatrist. During sessions of hypnosis, Michelle remembered a satanic ritual cult, her abuse and many other bizarre acts, which took place when she was five years old. The book was a huge best seller, and it created two distinct but related hysterias: child molestation and repressed memory syndrome. It took time but the book was eventually completely discredited.
Of course Laurence and Michelle became wealthy, left their spouses and married. But the book was just the beginning. Pazder and Smith were guests on multiple talk shows, both radio and tv. Then Pazder and his satanic ritual abuse cult creation were featured on ABC’s 20/20 show. Shortly after Pazder and others started a road show where the focus was supposedly on training law enforcement on this new discovery of child abuse by satanic cults.
How It Continues
A grifter can see a good grift from a mile away, and it wasn’t long before the grifters showed up en masse. New books hit the shelves, every talk show had a ‘serious’ discussion of satanic rituals. Every local newsroom wanted to be first to break the story of a local day care center where children were ritually molested.
The first of these started in later 1983, in Los Angeles, California. A mentally disturbed mother, Judy Johnson, went to police with a charge that her 2 1/2 year old was molested at the McMartin preschool. (The boy had other molesters as well, and had been attacked by wild animals.) The original investigation led to no charges against the suspect Ray Buckey, for a lack of evidence. But then the local authorities sent a letter to all the parents who had children at the school asking them to speak to their own children about what happened at the school. Here’s a quote from the letter, with added bold emphasis:
Records indicate that your child has been or is currently a student at the pre-school. We are asking your assistance in this continuing investigation. Please question your child to see if he or she has been a witness to any crime or if he or she has been a victim. Our investigation indicates that possible criminal acts include: oral sex, fondling of genitals, buttock or chest area, and sodomy, possibly committed under the pretense of "taking the child's temperature." Also photos may have been taken of children without their clothing. Any information from your child regarding having ever observed Ray Buckey to leave a classroom alone with a child during any nap period, or if they have ever observed Ray Buckey tie up a child, is important.
You can just imagine what blew up at this point. Parents started to call each other, the worry became acute anxiety and so many made claims to the police that the police enlisted the help of local social workers to screen the children. Before long a group of uncertified social workers, and frankly amateur child therapists, at the Children’s Institute International, CII, were interviewing over 400 children about abuse with leading and coercive questions.
The transcripts are cruel to read. A child would say “no” multiple times to questions about abuse at the school until the interviewer would tell them that other children, smart children, already made claims of abuse. Eventually, the children came to the conclusion that the only way to escape the interview was to agree to say “yes” to questions of abuse. Of course they found a multitude of abuses. The abuses included not only sexual molestation, but animal sacrifice, and transportation to other locales where the satanic rituals were held. Once the children began to make ‘confessions’ the genie was out of the bottle and magical activities became the norm. They are children after all, and magic is how they understand the world they live in and have no other way of explaining. The District Attorney’s team took the ‘evidence’ from CCI to present their case to the grand jury, who returned indictments against the owner of the school, 76 year old Virginia McMartin, her daughter Peggy McMartin Buckey, her children Peggy and Ray Buckey, and three other teachers at the school, all women. Ray Buckey, unbelievably, was in jail for 5 years, and in two trials was never convicted.
What was never found was evidence of any kind. No injuries to a child, no bodily fluids, no tunnels or airplane rides, no skeletons of small animals, or a horse. Though the police said that the motivation for the molestation was porn, no pictures or other media of the crimes was ever found, not a single one! But seven people, 6 women and a man, lost everything they owned defending themselves, plus their good name and reputation. 60 Minutes and Mike Wallace actually did a very good report on what transpired during the McMartin fiasco here. It starts at the 2:00 mark and only last about 24 minutes but its the best report done at the time. I strongly recommend watching it, because it’s hard to believe that something this crazy happened in America, and that perfectly normal people were roused to action by this madness. Even with the ludicrous charges that the children made, over 90% of the public believed the children were telling the truth. Within just a few weeks of the story breaking, eight other child care centers in Los Angeles county were investigated for child abuse. The hysteria would soon head east.
The Children’s Institute International was run by Kee McFarlane, you can find her resume here. McFarlane herself was later discredited because authorities learned that she was an uncertified social worker, not a psychological therapist in any sense, and in a relationship with the ambitious reporter for a local television station, Wayne Satz, who broke the McMartin case and worked it into impressive ratings for his station. The lead prosecutor in the case was Lael Rubin. She was always happy to talk to the press and she got away with some pretty unethical moves during the trial, like withholding the fact that the original complainant, Judy Johnson, was a lifelong alcoholic with mental problems, who also charged her ex-husband with molesting their son. Neither McFarlane, Satz or Rubin paid any price for the hysteria they all helped to create.
There were protest marches, for the prosecution! People held up signs and bumper stickers to “Believe the Children.” Can you imagine standing up in the middle of this and saying, “I’m very skeptical because I don’t understand how you can have the crimes the children allege and not have found any evidence; seems like there should be lots of evidence because crime scenes contain loads of evidence, always.” But no one stood up and made this claim. It took the FBI itself 9 years to figure out what was going on.
The New York Times, in a retrospective on the hysteria, interviewed the FBI Agent, Kenneth Lanning who wrote the Investigator's guide to allegations of 'ritual' child abuse for the bureau in 1992. It’s a very well done, short video of 13 minutes. Lanning admits that he believed the children at first, but the lack of evidence over time, even as the number of charges grew exponentially, convinced him that something else was going on. His document details many of the issues in the McMartin case and many of the other cases that came to court in the 80’s and 90’s.
How It Ended
Eventually, law enforcement, as documented by the Investigator’s Guide linked above, came around to understand that they were dealing with a hysteria, not, as Kee McFarlane once stated ‘a nationwide conspiracy of satanic sexual abusers fronting as day care operators’.
No one from the media has yet to issue a correction, much less an apology, for the madness that they helped to cause. If it’s any consolation, the main culprit for the media madness, Wayne Satz, died before his 50th birthday of a coronary. Kee McFarlane is no longer willing to talk about the fiasco she helped to create. Gone silent as they say. Lael Rubin was denied a judgeship, for good reason. When interviewed years afterward by The New York Times for their video, she noticeably took no responsibility for her ethical lapses and overzealous personal ambition in pursuit of convictions in, her words, “the biggest child molestation case in history.”
We know child molestation happens, unfortunately. But children like all victims need to be handled correctly. We have enough crime and tragedy to deal with; it hardly makes sense to create more of the same out of nothing. While the child care hysteria has passed, it’s unreliable and irresponsible cousin repressed memory syndrome continues along and a good deal of Americans still believe in the idea that memories can be suppressed, and later ‘discovered’ through therapeutic hypnosis. Fortunately hundreds of therapists lost their license to see clients when they took the dark journey into repressed memories through hypnosis. The professional accrediting bodies have now completely discredited the entire repressed memory process. You can read about it here.
I’ve linked to some excellent sources of information above, but there’s also a very good retelling in a 1995 HBO movie that you also watch for free on Youtube here. Strongly recommended as an excellent film, not melodramatic, and very close to the truth.
The child care sexual abuse scandal, now forty years later, is still a strong reminder of how our public policies are often shaped by hysterics and zealots, more interested in personal ambitions than by public service.
A telltale sign that we are dealing with an hysteria is the desire to cut off debate. We’re told that there’s a consensus, that there’s no time for the messy, drawn out process of discussion and debate. We are told by hysterics that there are no other choices. Nonsense, there are other choices, and calm, reasonable people need to come back to the conversation and make our voices heard. Opposing points of view are not ‘misinformation’, or ‘disinformation’. They are vitally necessary for a functioning democracy.
Some people hate confrontation and argument. I understand. It can be uncomfortable. But putting off difficult conversations doesn’t make problems go away. The real tragedy of the child care hysteria is that some of the children, after relentless interrogation, came to believe that they were ritualistically abused by satan worshippers. The interviewers created false memories that are now part of these poor people’s psyches. This happened because we were told we have to “believe the children.” Only an unfeeling idiot would ask questions. Skepticism proves your probably a molester yourself. Even an FBI agent with years of experience was drawn into the cult of belief for a time. It can happen to us all, and the only way to avoid it is to ask questions of everything and everybody, including, most importantly, yourself.