Feb. 8, 2012

The indignities endured by Little Rascals defendants were unending and sometimes bizarre. A University of Georgia professor enlisted by the defense to conduct a penile plethysmograph reported that Bob Kelly was aroused by videotapes and slides of only normal heterosexual activity. But the prosecution’s expert countered that not every sex offender would be caught by the test.

Fearful of a clear-thinking jury, prosecutors never missed an opportunity for gratuitous vilification. Nancy Lamb histrionically held up gold-framed portraits of 12 children as she denounced Kelly as “an evil, evil man.” H.P. Williams Jr. saw “no reason he should be restored to the community at any time.”

And how’s this for a melodramatic climax, as reported by the Associated Press:

“Some of Mr. Kelly’s victims, clutching dolls and teddy bears, sat in the front row of the spectators’ section as Judge D. Marsh McLelland… passed sentence (of 12 consecutive life terms). Later, as guards escorted Mr. Kelly out of the courtroom to a police car for the trip to a state prison in Raleigh, some of the children yelled at him, ‘I hate you!’… ‘See you in a million years!’ ”

Sept. 23, 2016

“We Believe the Children” offers a clear explanation of how a then-novel crusade for child welfare and a murk of neo-Freudian psychological theory together drove officials to find suppressed trauma where none existed, and [Richard] Beck also cites the popular nonfiction books Sybil (1973) and Michelle Remembers (1980) for their role in spreading acceptance of Multiple Personality Disorder and Satanic Ritual Abuse as authentic phenomena.

“He further argues that the day care scandals represented a conservative backlash on behalf of traditional family structures, in which fathers worked while mothers stayed at home to raise children, over the newer model of two busy parents dropping their kids off with professionals.  In this reading, the contemporaneous wave of incest survivor memoirs and self-publicizing MPD victims likewise reinforced the traditionalist ideal of helpless females unable to cope in a modern society that gave women too much sexual and career freedom.

“Maybe.  Yet Beck only devotes a paragraph or two to the burgeoning pop-culture fascination with the occult which preceded the Satanic panic, and it’s worth pointing out that, despite hit films like The Godfather and Scarface, no one in the 1980s was accused of recruiting children into a mobster underworld, and despite turmoil in the Middle East, day cares were not suspected of being fronts for Islamic terrorists.

“Rather, the emphasis on perversion, ritual killing, and cultism which characterized the scare drew on obvious sources in the mass entertainment of the mid-1960s onward.  As I’ve written in my book Here’s To My Sweet Satan:  How the Occult Haunted Music, Movies, and Pop Culture, 1966-1980,

For a culture accustomed to the bloody rampages of Charles Manson, the shameless perversities of Anton LaVey, and the no-holds-barred gross-outs of The Exorcist, such combinations of cruelty, vulgarity, and the occult [in the McMartin charges] were no longer surprising.…For a long time the public had been bombarded with messages of what Satan and Satanists were like, of the words, images, and symbols associated with devil worship, and especially of how children were Satan’s favorite victims.  It had all finally proved too much for some people.

“I believe it’s this influence that fostered the climate for McMartin and other travesties, at least as much as any right-wing fantasies about dutiful moms and dangerous outsiders….”

– From “Children of the Grave” by Canaadian author and blogger George Case (Sept. 23)

An earlier challenge to Beck’s emphasis on conservative backlash points a finger at feminism.

Oct. 31, 2011

“A highly publicized case occurred in coastal North Carolina almost 30 years ago. Making national headlines, the Little Rascals Day Care Center was run by a husband-and-wife team, Bob and Betsy Kelly…. The Little Rascals abuse case involved 90 children who all required extensive therapy sessions.”

Shouldn’t a prominent North Carolina firm of trial lawyers know better than to solicit clients with such a misleading characterization?

Do Brent Adams & Associates really believe all those children – or any of them – “required extensive therapy sessions”?

I have asked that this paragraph be removed from the firm’s website – no response yet.

March 3, 2016

“From the McMartin preschool trial in the United States in the ’80s … not one ‘satanic abuse’ network in the modern context has ever been proven to exist.

“Despite this fact people tend to remember the sensationalism of each case, and the fear and rumors generated by them. Not the final verdict, which has always been acquittal or at least the overturning of a wrongful conviction. The truth of each case gets lost in time….”

– From “Satanic Ritual Abuse: 7 Fictions That Created A Mythology” by Keelan Balderson at WideShut  (March 8, 2015)

What might it feel like, all these years later, encountering people who vaguely remember your prosecution for “satanic ritual abuse” at Little Rascals – but not your exoneration?