Nov. 14, 2011

Raymond Lawrence, then director of chaplains for Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York, attended Bob Kelly’s trial on several occasions and founded the Committee for Support of the Edenton Seven.

This passage is excerpted from a memoir I asked him to write for littlerascalsdaycare.org:

“One Monday morning on arriving at my office I noted a special delivery overnight package in my mail pile. Just as I walked in, my secretary buzzed me to say I had a long distance call asking whether I had opened the package. I told her to get the number and I would call back.

“Instead, the caller said he would call back. I assumed it was the kind of crank call which often comes to chaplains.

“When I finally turned to the special delivery package, I found inside cashier’s checks made out to various defendants in an amount of about $450,000.

“Finally the donor called back, but he didn’t want his name disclosed to the secretary or anyone else. He felt the case was a witch hunt, and he was in solidarity with the accused. He was a businessman who had made a fortune in the emerging computer industry. A year later he gave another $300,000.

“When I flew to Ohio to meet him, he told me he had a terminal illness, and some years later he died. He was a humble, unassuming man. I was in awe of his sensitivity and generosity.”

Oct. 12, 2011

In the digital age more than ever before, no bad idea ever dies. Consider (neo)Nazism, creationism and vaccine-caused autism.

Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, ritual sex abuse is still being promoted as a significant national peril.

The possibility of another episode of day-care hysteria – e.g., Little Rascals, McMartin, Fells Acres, Wee Care – has lessened but certainly not vanished. A repeat of history requires only an angry parent or two, an agenda-guided therapist and a fervid prosecutor.

Nov. 26, 2019

I’ve previously cited here and here Elle magazine’s deeply reported 1993 article on the Little Rascals case. You can read it here.

But I had somehow overlooked this response to Greensboro journalists Edward Cone and Lisa Scheer from assistant attorney general Bill Hart. It has not aged well.

Dear Ed and Lisa,

I have read your recent article in Elle Magazine, “The Demons of Edenton.”

I found it interesting that you chose to leave out the fact that Chris Bean, now a District Court Judge, had initially represented Bob Kelly as his lawyer, until he found out that his son had been abused.

I also found it interesting that you chose not to include the fact that Bob Kelly’s jury had the full benefit of the experience, knowledge, and wisdom of both Maggie Bruck and William Kenner through their testimony at his trial.

Notably absent from your article was any balancing psychological viewpoint to the Bruck/Kenner/Ofshe propaganda. You had access to the testimony of Mark Everson, a psychologist who testified for the state at Bob Kelly’s trial, but did not quote him. You criticized Roland Summit, but did not quote him….

Sincerely,
William P. Hart
Special Deputy Attorney General

I won’t use this post to address all of Hart’s claims, but….

– Chris Bean’s role in the case, far from being culpatory for Bob Kelly, actually provoked stinging criticism from the North Carolina Court of Appeals. “This boils down to the most fundamental questions of fairness,” Judge Gerald Arnold said. “When you have an attorney testifying that ‘I was Mr. Kelly’s attorney and I believed in him very strongly until I learned the truth, that is to say that he’s guilty, and then I was shattered.’ How can there be more prejudicial, stronger evidence put before a jury than to have a former attorney, the defendant’s attorney say that?” Further, Bean was among those parents whom prosecutors inappropriately but persuasively presented as de facto experts on child psychology.

– Mark Everson, UNC psychologist, was tragically influential with a “coherent package” of misconceptions he clung to long after they had been exposed by updated research. And of course there’s his jaw-dropping “where there’s smoke there’s fire” argument….

– Los Angeles psychiatrist Roland Summit, a key player in the McMartin Preschool trial, tried too late to shed responsibility for the many defendants wrongfully convicted by his “child sexual abuse syndrome” theory.

Bill Hart’s letter didn’t mention it, but I have to wonder whether this was the Elle passage that actually got under his skin most annoyingly:

“[Hart] is emotionally involved in the Little Rascals case to a startling degree. Last year he married Patricia Kephart, the mother of a Little Rascals child, who Hart had become romantically involved with during his prosecution of the case. ‘If anything it’s made it more difficult on me,’ he says of his entanglement in the investigation.”

There are huge and obvious problems with Hart’s behavior, but his “difficult” personal consequences don’t rank high on the list.

Jan. 23, 2013

“Ritual sex abuse is back. Recently (in 2003) I heard that a conference on the topic was being held for psychotherapists.

“It was planned not to critique a nasty period in the annals of American hysteria but rather so that attendees could learn to ask patients if they’ve ever been raped in day care by secret devil worshipers.

“This stuff was debunked in the 1990s as a type of urban myth. Yet it keeps cropping up, complete with pseudo-scientific theories about the psychology of so-called victims – theories that likewise refuse to die.

“One such theory is that children who are molested often grow up to deny that the crime ever happened. Many do so, the theory holds, because people commonly repress or dissociate from memories of horrific trauma – particularly sex abuse.

“This idea has been repeatedly discredited by research psychologists. But… in pop culture and among many child-protection workers, it’s still de rigueur to think that a child who was fondled or raped is at risk of burying the memory.”

– From “The Exorcists” by Debbie Nathan in the Washington Post (May 4, 2003)