Oct. 7, 2015

“Sodom Laurel was first named Revere, and is still Revere on topographical maps, but I seldom hear anyone call it anything but Sodom. (Madison County native Dellie Norton said) she had heard that years ago, when logging first came to the region, there were numerous logging camps and a lot of men away from home, with money and time on their hands. Violence and promiscuity were rampant. Dellie had heard that a preacher, upon arriving in Revere and having seen the residents firsthand, remarked ‘You people are just like a bunch of Sodomites.’ The name stuck.

“Lately, partly for religious reasons and, of course, the negative connotations of the name Sodom, some community members have started using the name Revere again…. But also times have changed – the community is quieter than it used to be – Revere seems a more apt description of the place.”

– From “Sodom Laurel Album” by Rob Amberg (2002)

I guess it fits that a defendant unfortunate enough to be charged with “satanic ritual abuse” would also be unfortunate enough to have his hometown known as Sodom – a coincidence surely snickered about in the culturally hostile courtroom in Asheville where Junior Chandler was convicted.

Coincidentally, the district attorney in a Hendersonville ritual abuse prosecution infamously ranted about Michael Alan Parker’s having resided in “Sodom and Saluda.” (The jury bought his Bible-pounding, but Saludans weren’t pleased.)

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.

Jan. 11, 2013

“Chris Bean (Bob Kelly’s lawyer until becoming involved as a child-witness parent) told me that when the townspeople first saw the documentary, they thought it was OK and that nobody thought my film had personally misrepresented them.

“But then, he told me, the firestorm of national attention began and people were writing to the mayor, to the townspeople, to many of the families I interviewed, and it was like a house of cards, you know. It all came tumbling down on them.”

– Ofra Bikel, quoted in the Newark Star-Ledger (July 18, 1993)

“The only woman who never complained after the first film,” Bikel said, was Jane Mabry – Patient Zero in the rumor contagion.

Sept. 9, 2016

“Strange what we worry about when it comes to our children. A great deal of the culture-war politics of the 1980s consisted of theatrical wailing about threats to our children that were either entirely made up or wildly exaggerated: The boys in ‘Stranger Things’ love to play Dungeons & Dragons, and, in a rare oversight, the series does not even touch on the minor cultural panic surrounding that game in places such as small-town Indiana, where D&D’s supernatural elements sparked terrified tales of occult experimentation.

“It’s not for nothing that this came around the same time as the Salem-style mass hysteria over ‘Satanic ritual abuse’ at the nation’s child-care centers, with fanciful worries about Luciferian cults obscuring the more straightforward anxiety associated with abandoning one’s children to child-care facilities. Yesterday’s Satanic cultists and Alar [a controversial apple growth inhibitor] are today’s online predators and brain-scrambling vaccinations….”

– From “Familiar Things: The TV series ‘Stranger Things’ portrays family breakdown yesterday and today” by Kevin D. Williamson in National Review (Aug. 29)

…and clowns?