March 9, 2012

“This (Breezy Point Day School) case sounds like the Windshield Pitting Epidemic….

“In the early 1950s, people in the Tacoma-Seattle area began to notice little pits in the windshields of their cars. Rumors started – Martians were landing, it was from nuclear fallout.

“Well, it turns out those pits were always there – they are in every windshield – but no one noticed them until there was anxiety about nuclear testing. For the first time, they were looking at their windshields instead of through them….

“Anxiety makes things take on a different meaning.”

– Mass hysteria specialist Gary Small, psychiatrist at UCLA School of
Medicine, quoted in Philadelphia magazine (April 1991)

Feb. 8, 2019

Second of two parts

At the core of the recent McMartin expose “They Must Be Monsters: A Modern-Day Witch Hunt” is the authors’ meticulous tracing of how the fantasies of one paranoid schizophrenic mother, Judy Johnson, fostered the longest and most expensive criminal trial in American history.

But Johnson did not act alone. Toward the end of the book Matthew LeRoy and Deric Haddad recall interviewing psychiatrist Roland Summit in his office and confronting him with evidence that – contrary to his earlier denials — he had been deeply involved not only with supporting Johnson’s bizarre accusations but also with fostering them.

I asked Haddad what lay behind Summit’s deceit.

“I suspect he was trying to cover up that he had given false testimony under oath,” he said. “He’d testified that they ‘first met’ in February 1984 – but Judy’s own calendars revealed a relationship that went back a year earlier. He may have had an influence on her before she ever even dropped her son off at McMartin.

“So when he looked over her notes, that only we had possession of, he saw that we could prove he’d lied. He got really shaky….”

If he had concerns about his professional reputation, Summit surely had much to be shaky about, including his role in whipping up panic among parents and his insistence that McMartin Preschool sat above a network of abuse-enabling secret tunnels.

July 15, 2014

Here’s the big picture from the latest campaign finance reports filed with the State Board of Elections:

Individual contributions to Nancy Lamb are almost double those to incumbent Andrew Womble ($29,821.54 to $15,571.80).

More provocative, however, are the details.

It’s not surprising that Lamb’s donors include such loyal Little Rascals alumnae as parents Jane Mabry ($50) and Lynne Layton ($250) and therapist Judith Abbott ($200).

But at least one member of the prosecutorial alliance seems to have defected: Yes, that’s Lamb’s former boss, H.P. Williams Jr., pitching in $250 to her opponent’s campaign.

Dec. 10, 2017

“Controversy over the credibility of children’s testimony has congealed into a debate between those who demand that we ‘believe the children’ no matter how outlandish their allegations and those who maintain that children are inherently so suggestible that their testimony can never be relied on upon. An interesting question that remains is why children are not believed when, as often happens, they specifically deny charges at the time they first arise….

“Why isn’t the child allowed to say no? A widening body of research shows that repeated questioning of children, especially by authoritative adults with a specific bias, will often lead to answers that conform to the interviewers’ expectations….

“Divorce, neglect, unsafe neighborhoods, bad schools – these primary social problems are not the fault of the people to whom we have entrusted our children. Forcing children to invent stories of abuse is abuse….”

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