June 13, 2012

“Actually, making a false memory is pretty easy.

“(Psychologist Elizabeth) Loftus describes a father convincing his daughter she’d gotten lost in a mall when she was five years old. At first, the daughter denied any memory of the event, but as the father provided more fake details – ‘Don’t you remember that I told you we would meet at the Tug Boat?’ – the daughter began to ‘remember’ and even provide details of her own. Eventually when her father said, ‘I was so scared,’ she responded, ‘Not as scared as I was!’…

“You can probably imagine the implications of false memory in the courtroom or on the therapist’s couch (which famously leads to the courtroom)….”

– From “How You Remember, How You Decide: Memory Part II”
by Garth Sundem in Psychology Today (October 6, 2010)

Dec. 19, 2011

“In the Little Rascals case, a handful of therapists were compensated by the state for evaluating and ‘treating’ the child witnesses. But there seemed to be other motivations for these therapists to become ‘investigators’ for the district attorney’s office. According to one mother’s testimony, one therapist seemed to have a vested forensic role.

“ ‘(The therapist) evidently had been involved in this for a long time, and she was planning on flying in experts and FBI people from everywhere, because she thought this was going to be bigger than the McMartin Preschool case in California…. And she wanted to get on this one right away, wanted to get all of these expert people in here because she knew there was a lot more to to it.’ ”

– From “Jeopardy in the Courtroom: A Scientific Analysis of Children’s Testimony”
by Stephen J. Ceci and Maggie Bruck (1995)

July 26, 2015

“A look at America’s underbelly indicates more than a ‘random’ killing (at a Lafayette, La., movie theater). Eight signs point to John Russell Houser possibly being subjected to programmed satanic ritual abuse (SRA) mind control…..”

– From “Eight Louisiana Shooter Satanic Ritual Abuse Links” by Deborah Dupré at Before It’s News (July 24)

Among those “eight signs”:

• “Houser’s Thursday night (July 23) shooting coincides with the (July 20) three-year anniversary of James Holmes opening fire at a movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado.
• “Many SRA survivors experience a difference in their normal day-to-day life one to two weeks before any major ritual celebration. These are marked on SRA calendars….. Between July 20-27, SRA-mind-controlled individuals prepare for… a blood sacrifice.”
• “Houser moved to Lafayette in early July, officials say. July 1 on the SRA calendar is designated as ‘Demon Revels Blood (Druids sexual association with demons. Any age. Female).’ The two people Houser murdered were each females…. In SRA, males dominate….”

Hard to believe, isn’t it, that the mainstream media have failed to pursue such an obvious explanation….

June 12, 2014

“He thinks the continued treatment of these cases as a modern-day episode of mass hysteria does disservice to children and even puts them in danger.

“ ‘We have, over the last 20 years, discounted the word of children who might testify about sexual abuse,’ he writes. ‘We have become more worried about overreacting to child sexual abuse than we are about underreacting to it.’

“If that were the legacy of the day-care cases, it would be a damning one. But when I spoke to psychologists in the field – those Professor Cheit cites respectfully, as well as those he attacks – they gave a different account of the science at the heart of this history….”

– From “Abuse Cases, and a Legacy of Skepticism” by Emily Bazelon in the New York Times (June 9)

Thank you, Ms. Bazelon. In the category of “fat books in desperate search of a reason to exist,” Cheit’s “The Witch-Hunt Narrative” belongs right up there with William D. Cohan’s contemporaneous “The Price of Silence,” an account of the Duke lacrosse case that sympathizes not with the railroaded (and later exonerated!) defendants but with District Attorney Mike Nifong, who was disbarred and briefly jailed for conspiring to rig the case against them.

At the core of each book is the unsubstantiated contention that something surely must have happened, either at a Durham party house and at countless day cares. Fortunately, Cohan and Cheit can only gratuitously smear the reputations of innocent defendants, not put them in prison – unlike Little Rascals expert witness Mark “where there’s smoke there’s fire” Everson.