Jan. 9, 2012

Perhaps the most inexplicable of the prosecution’s targets was 40-year-old Scott Privott, owner of an Edenton video store and shoe repair shop.

Son of a district court judge, he served as president of the local country club. No evidence ever surfaced to support the rumor that Privott’s video store was a hub for child pornography or to counter his claim never to have even set foot on the Little Rascals premises. According to the prosecution, children at the day care identified him as a perpetrator.

In April 1993 his bail was reduced from $1 million to $50,000, and he was released on bond from Chowan County Jail. Fourteen months later, Privott accepted the state’s offer of a plea of no contest, still insisting on his innocence, and received a sentence of time served with an additional five years probation.

He says he has been happily married for 14 years and doesn’t want to reveal where he now lives. I asked him to share some recollections about the case:

“Bob and I were more acquaintances than close friends. I played golf with him when he was the pro. Bob rented movies from my store, and he and many others would come by and have coffee and just talk. In fact, many of the accusing parents rented movies from me. (Bob Kelly suspects Privott may have been drawn into the case when Kelly’s truck was seen parked in front of the video store.)….

“In jail I spent the time reading and watching TV. We weren’t allowed newspapers, so I wasn’t sure what was being written about the case…. At times it was hard to keep my spirits up. I had gallbladder surgery and recuped at Central Prison in Raleigh and at McCain (Correctional Hospital in Raeford, closed in 2010)….

“Jail had just a walled-in area for outside activity, but at McCain I enjoyed being able to walk around the yard with others awaiting trial…I was in “safekeeping” and actually met some intelligent, thoughtful people. I never had any problems, as the majority knew the entire LRDC case was a farce….

“My wife came on Sundays, but as the years rolled on the visits were less and less, and then I noted a change I had been kind of expecting. She brought my mother with her, and in the later years she stood back and kind of let the visits be between mother and son. It turned out she had met someone new in her life. She didn’t have the nerve to tell me, but I figured it out….”

Oct. 8, 2012

“Even those (ritual-abuse day-care cases) that resulted in acquittals… reflect hundreds of children and their family members referred to counseling.

“Many families were limited to a handful of approved counselors, who also helped police and prosecutors by eliciting testimony from the children. One must wonder what these counselors counsel these children about, particularly in cases in which allegations were later proved to have come from them rather than from the children – and considering that the children began showing symptoms of abuse only after disclosing – the reverse of abused children’s usual responses to counseling.”

– From “Assessing the Costs of False Allegations of Child Abuse: A Prescriptive” by Susan Kiss Sarnoff (IPT Journal, 1997)

What a calamitous exploitation of the children – but what a canny career move for the therapists!

May 5, 2015

“Its members are, it’s claimed, drawn mainly from a school and church in Hampstead (a North London suburb). They are said to wear shoes made of baby skin, to dance with the skulls of dead babies and to sexually abuse young children. But the (satanic ritual) cult doesn’t exist. The claims are, according to a High Court Judge, ‘baseless’ and those who have sought to perpetrate them are ‘evil’….

“Why, after a police inquiry and a family court judgment which unequivocally rubbished the notion of satanic abuse in Hampstead, are the allegations still proliferating on the Internet and being spread all over the world? We hear from the supposed cult members who have had their personal details and photographs published online and received death threats. And we ask about the welfare of the two children at the centre of it all who were coerced into fabricating the fantastical story….”

– From “The Satanic Cult That Wasn’t” by Melanie Abbott on BBC Radio (April 23)

This half hour of BBC coverage skillfully demolishes every iota of the Hampstead claims, but of course facts aren’t what engage the eagerly gullible. Since video of the 8- and 9-year-old siblings telling their concocted horror stories was uploaded onto YouTube, it has been watched more than 4 million times.

May 11, 2012

“One of the attorneys preparing the appeal brief for Mr. Kelly found a tape of an interview with a child that had been taped over with another interview, but retained the last five minutes. The attorney (described Brenda Toppin’s approach as) ‘not only suggestive, but coercive to the point of brutality. The child’s crying and pleas to stop are met only by Ms. Toppin’s promise to stop when the child said what she wanted to hear’….

“(This discovery) is especially shocking because Officer Toppin denied under oath that she was coercive, suggestive or leading in her interviews.”

– From “What I learned from the Edenton Little Rascals sex abuse trial” by
Moisy Shopper, M.D. (in the peer-reviewed journal Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 2009)