Feb. 24, 2012

“Samuel Sewall was one of nine judges appointed to hear the Salem witch trials in 1692.

“Five years later he stood up in church in front of the congregation while the minister read out his apology.

“None of his colleagues on the bench followed suit.”

– From “Judge Sewall’s Apology: The Salem Witch Trials and the Forming
of an American Conscience” by Richard Francis (2005)

No regret – or even doubt! – has ever been expressed by Judge Marsh McLelland, by prosecutors H.P. Williams, Nancy Lamb or Bill Hart or by the misguided therapists who served not the children but the Little Rascals prosecution team.

Do they ever give a passing thought to the lives they ruined?

June 24, 2013

“(I) followed the Little Rascals case closely in the Norfolk and other papers…. Moved by (its) strangeness and patent senselessness, as well as by reports nationwide at the time of what came to be tagged ‘false memory syndrome,’ I wrote and later published a short story inspired by the spectacular miscarriage of justice…. The thrust of my story was popular hysteria and jaundiced, ambitious therapists together with a grievous breakdown of the judicial system….

“I believe that behind the recovered memory and child abuse therapeutic notions of that time, so destructive of the lives of the Edenton Seven and many others, lies Freud’s almost immeasurable popular impact on our now so heavily sexualized culture – though the easy lure of the witch hunt seems to have been all too contagious in Edenton’s fearful, credulous and manipulable parents as well.”

– Historian and writer John L. Romjue of Yorktown, Va., responding to “Remembering the shame of the Little Rascals Day Care case” at North Carolina Miscellany (Oct. 24, 2011)

Although “Witches of Devon,” the title story in Mr. Romjue’s 2002 collection, veers dramatically from the course of the Little Rascals case, it does indeed capture the essence: “It had started as a rumor – and not about molestation, not at first. There had been an ‘assault’ incident at Happy Children (day care). Joanne Jamison had spanked a little girl’s bottom and not suitably apologized to the mother….”

Mills

May 26, 2018

“It’s one of the most telling shots in Ofra Bikel’s painstaking investigation into the Little Rascals child-abuse scandal in small-town North Carolina: As a convicted perpetrator [Bob Kelly] is taken away in a police car, children frolic nearby and chant, ‘I hate you, I hate you’, as their parents applaud and one adult says, ‘Let’s go get something to eat.’ ”

– From “Justice Abuse? `Frontline’ Documentary Takes Hard Look At A Small-town Scandal” by Bart Mills in the Chicago Tribune (July 20, 1993)

lawrencewright.com

Lawrence Wright

Jan. 25, 2017

“Why is there such a cultural bias toward stories of abuse – and especially toward grotesque and absurd tales, even when there is no reliable evidence that any crime occurred in the first place?

“The very people we count on to protect our society – prosecutors, police, social workers, jurors, even parents – are eliciting fantasies from children that express our worst collective fears. ….

“The libel that our society has imposed on child-care workers is a kind of projection of guilt for the damage that we ourselves have done, as parents and as a society. We have given our children to strangers to rear, and it makes us uneasy and fearful. Is it any wonder we have a bad conscience?…. ”

– From “Child-care Demons” by Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker (Oct. 3, 1994)