Dec. 16, 2011

Alan Rubenstein, who as district attorney refused to prosecute the Breezy Point case, is now a Bucks County Court judge.

Unlike H.P. Williams Jr., who was D.A. during the Little Rascals case, Rubenstein speaks freely about how he addressed claims of ritual abuse in a local day care.

“There was no more ambitious D.A. than me,” he recalls. “I reveled in the limelight….

“When we first got the allegations, I said to myself, ‘Satanic ritual abuse – I’ll be on the cover of Time magazine! I’ll prosecute it personally. I’ll get these bastards and put them away for life.”

But it didn’t take long for him to reverse course.

“Breezy Point was around the corner from me.  My own son had gone there. I just couldn’t see Doug Wiik in (prison) stripes… The more I thought about it, the more obvious it became that nothing had happened there…

“I put our two best county detectives on the case, and I rode them like the Pony Express.”

The resulting 60-plus-page “Investigation into Breezy Point Day School” is a model of lucid, understated logic that blows to smithereens any notion of wrongdoing:

“We have determined that the allegations are unfounded and without merit…. No credible evidence exists to support them. In stark contrast, the evidence produced during the past 11 months indicates facts in direct, clear conflict with the charges leveled by the parents on behalf of their minor children.”

Here are three excerpts that convey the reach of the investigation:

• “In the opinion of this caseworker, ‘The child clearly exhibited the inability to distinguish what was true and what was not true.’ ”

Such insights seem to have been beyond the skills or preconceptions of caseworkers in Edenton.

• “The parents, when confronted with the clear discrepancy between the child’s description of the room and its actual physical layout, have contended that the owners of Breezy Point remodeled the room, removed the fireplace, put up plasterboard and added additional windows so as to change the character of this area to avoid detection. No evidence of remodeling was uncovered during this investigation.”

Passages such as this would be hilariously deadpan, were the subject not so weighty.

• “Bucks County detectives, acting upon (claims that the children were secretly transported to the Royce Hotel), traced all records from the teacher’s family credit cards, including American Express, MasterCard and Visa, to determine if any of these individuals charged rooms or lodging at the hotel. Ledger and registration books were also examined…. A check of these records proved entirely negative.”

In Bucks County no allegation was too bizarre to investigate. In Edenton no allegation was too bizarre to presume true.

March 28, 2012

Had North Carolina prosecutors been interested in anything other than racking up convictions, they would’ve given earnest consideration to analyses such as this one in the Los Angeles Times in 1990, barely a week after a jury returned not guilty verdicts in the McMartin Pre-School case:

“Experts across the country say the interview techniques intended to extract the truth from youngsters who attended the Manhattan Beach nursery school were so misguided as to make the children seem coerced, rehearsed and ultimately unbelievable to the jury….

“According to both child development and criminal defense experts who have closely monitored the case for the last six years, some of the adults — the parents, the prosecutors, the therapists — who tried hardest to find out what happened in the first place may have done the most to confuse the case in the end…. Most of the children were never given the chance to simply tell what, if anything, happened to them.

“‘They were never given the opportunity to tell their stories as they knew them, in their own words, until long after their minds had been contaminated with the thoughts and fears of the adults around them,’ said David Raskin, a psychologist at the University of Utah who has been studying child abuse cases for the last 15 years. By then, he said, it was too late.”

Contamination proved every bit as rampant among child-witnesses in the Little Rascals case, but prosecutors had learned from McMartin to conceal it by denying access to verbatim records of therapists’ interviews.

April 15, 2013

This from Detroit reader P. Karr:

“Raised by a mom who survived the Blitz of London, I was taught that fascism often appears at the hands of lawmakers and is then carried forth by the public at large – said public believing whatever convenient lie is crammed down its throat….

“The Edenton prosecutors’ refusal to apply reason was frightening. But not near as frightening as their hubris, their moral flogging of the accused and their trotting them out in order to inflame the public. They may as well have sewn gold stars on the shirts of the Edenton Seven….

“I wonder if it ever occurs to the prosecutors that a refusal to apologize – indeed, to even question if they may have been wrong – is the hallmark of the sociopath.

“Something tells me not.”

Dec. 5, 2012

As noted previously, my requests for retraction to Nursing Research and Child Abuse & Neglect went nowhere. But I found a spark of interest at a third journal, Relational Child & Youth Care Practice.

As well I should have – in 1990, RCYCP (then known as the Journal of Child and Youth Care) published not just a single article affirming the existence of day-care ritual abuse but an entire special issue.

“In the Shadow of Satan: The Ritual Abuse of Children” included “A Case of Multiple Life-Threatening Illnesses Related to Early Ritual Abuse” by Rennet Wong and Jock McKeen, “Ritual Child Abuse: A Survey of Symptoms and Allegations” by  Pamela S. Hudson and “Satanic Ritual Abuse: A Cause of Multiple Personality Disorder” by George A. Fraser.

My request for retraction elicited this response from RCYCP:

“…. Carol Stuart and Grant Charles, Editors of RCYCP… have agreed that a statement in the next issue about the original article and the wrongful prosecution of these defendants would be appropriate.  Could you please provide… a draft of what you think is appropriate, ensuring correct names, etc. Our editors will then review and finalize and confirm any questions or issues with you.”

Boy, was I excited! This is what I proposed:

“In 1990 the Journal of Child and Youth Care (now Relational Child & Youth Care Practice) published a Special Issue entitled ‘In the Shadow of Satan: The Ritual Abuse of Children.’

“All five articles in the issue were based on the writers’ erroneous belief in ‘satanic ritual abuse,’ a moral panic that led to wrongful prosecutions against day cares in the United States, Canada and elsewhere during the 1980s and 1990s.”

A few days later I received this change of plan from RCYCP:

“We have carefully reviewed the 1990 Special Issue… and found no reference to the Edenton Seven or the Little Rascals Day Care. As such, our editors will not be printing a retraction.”

Of course, I responded:

“The Little Rascals and McMartin cases were but two manifestations of the moral panic of satanic ritual abuse. In the 1980s and early 1990s, numerous similar, if less publicized, prosecutions occurred across North America and as far as New Zealand and Germany.

“All these cases were rooted in the belief affirmed and promoted in the Special Issue….

“Little Rascals and McMartin are mentioned only indirectly, but my request for a retraction addresses – as does the issue – the entire false concept of satanic ritual abuse.
“I hope this clarification will move the editors to reconsider.”

So far, it hasn’t.