Oct. 16, 2014

“A 38-year-old man from Statesville has been accused of molesting children as young as 3 years old at the day care where he worked in the 1990s….

“Police said a girl came to them in 1999 and said (Joshua Maurice) Young had molested her at the day care between 1994 and 1995, when she was 3 years old. The alleged assaults happened in a part of the building away from the other children….

“The Statesville Police Department investigated then, according to Capt. David Onley… but no charges were filed….

“In June of this year, another alleged victim came forward, Onley said. This one said she was molested by Young at the day care between 1995 and 1997. The earliest incidents happened when she was 3, she said.

“ ‘We had a female tell us exactly the same story – same place, same details as (the first) one,’ Onley said. ‘It gave validity to that (first) one. And then we had to go track down that first victim.’ ”

– From “Day care worker accused of sexually assaulting 3-year-olds in 1990s” by Cleve R. Wootson Jr. in the Charlotte Observer (Oct. 15)

Is Joshua Maurice Young guilty as charged? I have no idea. But given the history of day-care sex abuse prosecutions, the case against him certainly warrants a skepticism by police not indicated in this account.

Nov. 14, 2012

“Prosecutors building these high-profile cases well understood the problems posed by the strange charges and the fantasy-riddled narratives of the child plaintiffs. How could they make credible to jurors the extraordinary prowess of defendants who could assault whole classes of preschoolers daily, dressing and undressing 20 or more, all accomplished in a half hour’s time, in a busy school, with no one noticing, no child ever sent home with mismatched socks?…

“Jurors had to be given a reason that 4-year-olds could be raped with butcher knives that left them uninjured, could be tied naked to trees and raped in broad daylight….

“The state’s solution lay with their experts – witnesses who could explain and render such mysteries comprehensible.”

– From “No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness and other Terrors of Our Times” by Dorothy Rabinowitz (2003)

Ah, those invaluable mystery-solving experts – such as Eileen Treacy of the Kelly Michaels trial, Kee MacFarlane of McMartin and of course Mark “Where there’s smoke….” Everson of Little Rascals.

What would prosecutors have done without them? (Probably, a helluva lot less harm.)

Dec. 7, 2016

“If you do a Google search right now for ‘McMartin preschool tunnels,’ you will be inundated with ‘studies’ and ‘reports’ that ‘prove’ the tunnels did exist, and that the lurid fictions prompted out of the children by ambitious social workers were therefore true. Nothing dies on the Internet, not even the most arrant lunacy….

“One of [Donald Trump’s] primary surrogates, Scottie Nell Hughes, told an NPR panel that ‘There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts.’ But we have not ‘entered’ an age of post-truth politics. We’ve been living in it for years. The Executive Branch of the government just has been slow to catch up. Now, it’s right there with the rest of us, god help the country. We’re all just the children of McMartin now. We’ll say anything we’re told until we come to believe it ourselves.”

– From “America Was Always a Nation of Conspiracy Theorists. Now, They’re Simply More Dangerous: Lessons from Pizzagate” by Charles P. Pierce in Esquire (Dec. 5)

Aug. 29, 2012

“Los Angeles County’s Satanic Abuse Task Force, an official sub body of the Los Angeles County Women’s Commission, concluded (in 1992) that Satanists were trying to pump diazinon poison into their office and home air vents in order to silence them. Task force members became suspicious, according to president Myra Rydell, after experiencing bouts of profound exhaustion, headaches and, perhaps most significantly, ‘the inability to think straight.’

“McMartin parent Jackie McGauley, also a task force member, told a reporter that, according to her doctor, diazinon would be ‘virtually impossible to detect’ if given in small doses over a long time period. The County’s epidemic specialist said that diazinon was easy to detect and after his own investigation called the claims ‘outrageous.’”

– From “The Dark Truth About the ‘Dark Tunnels of McMartin’” by John Earl (IPT Journal, 1995)

No single reason accounts for the country’s belated skepticism about ritual abuse, but the poison-gas episode in Los Angeles surely qualified as a “jump the shark” moment.