![]() But the trial would not end for years, with no convictions, and prosecutors around the country started dozens of cases like it. All the defendants maintained their innocence.īy then, the case was a national spectacle, and prosecutors pursued it despite growing doubts about the original accuser’s story and a variety of fantastical claims from interviews, including a “goatman,” bloody animal sacrifices, a school employee who could fly and acts of violence that left no physical trace. A week later, they dropped the charges against five defendants, citing weak evidence. In 1986, prosecutors charged seven employees with more than 100 counts of child molestation and conspiracy. “The intermediary steps were people saying there was something weird or elaborate about what happened, and a fair number of those claims came out of the interviews.” The allegations “didn’t move to full-blown satanism immediately,” said Richard Beck, the author of a book about the panic. “Nobody had thought about proper forensic interviews in these situations.” “We as professionals were singularly ill-equipped,” Mr. They questioned them for hours at a time, often asking leading and suggestive questions, he said. ![]() The authorities also asked therapists to help interview hundreds of children. The letter was “a model of what not to do,” said John Myers, a professor at the University of California, Hastings, and a lawyer who represents child victims of abuse. Suddenly, it seemed, terror could be lurking in any neighborhood. Although its lurid claims were quickly challenged, the book was a best seller. The spark, she said, was “Michelle Remembers,” a book by a Canadian psychologist and his former patient about her memories of child abuse at the hands of satanists. “You hook all of those things together magically and boom - you’ve got the proper fuel for a moral panic,” she said. deYoung said, and many parents felt guilt for relying on it.Īnd after decades of denial, the public was starting to confront the problem of sexual abuse, especially involving children. Conservatism and the religious right were ascendant, and both emphasized the nuclear family. More women were going to work, by choice and necessity in the wake of the women’s rights movement and as the country struggled with a recession. When the book “Michelle Remembers” was published in 1980, introducing readers to a cast of murderous Canadian satanists, it landed on a powder keg of American anxieties, said Mary deYoung, a professor emeritus of sociology at Grand Valley State University.
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