Our Withch Trials

...Not to mention Dorothy Rabinowitz...

...Rabinowitz notes that one child on the stand reported that Kelly made him push a sword in her rectum...

...The system of justice in which Violet Amirault believed had not only wrecked her life...

...In a number of high-profile cases, prosecutors and therapists alike were convinced that satanic cults were at work...

...Ironically the term "Stoll's evidence" is used to refer to the California Supreme Court's recognition of the right of those accused of bizarre sexual acts against children to introduce expert psychological evidence, including the results of recognized tests, as evidence that they do not fit the profile of sexual deviants...

...Professional associations failed to police or even question the coercive therapeutic tactics that produced the childrens' testimony...

...The Amirault family even turned over personal records, producing some of the most painful moments in the book...

...Nor was Satan lacking...

...I actually want it to self-destruct...

...Neither in this or other cases did the outright absurdity of much of the children's testimony—or the fact that none of the children had said anything to their parents at the time or shown any reluctance to go to nursery school in the morning—raise questions in the minds of prosecutors, judges, or juries...

...Three-quarters of those the Department had accused of abuse or neglect were ultimately exonerated on appeal, indicating, said the judge, something seriously flawed in the system...

...She would serve five before the case was thrown out on appeal...

...I cannot utter any word without this poison coming through...

...The most famous involved Wenatchee, a small city in the apple-growing region of Washington state where over forty people were arrested, several charged with 2,400 or more counts of sex abuse...

...John Stoll is also still in prison...

...Nor can these cases be separated from the simultaneous wave of recovered memory therapy, built upon a false notion of memory as a camera that stores every experience, which is then subject to precise retrieval...

...She has since made sworn affidavits about the coercion to which she was subject and the falsity of her ‘`confession," but this has not helped her former husband...

...Abandoned by a physically abusive husband, she was initially forced to go on welfare to support her three small children...

...I am a demon of the worst kind...

...it injured her soul...

...As the few who spoke out in 1690 are honored now, so will the small number who championed the victims in our own era be honored then: people like Ofra Bikel (whose television documentaries played a major role in ultimately freeing the Edenton 7), Robert Rosenthal, who defended so many in the courts at great personal sacrifice, and Kathryn Lyon, who first uncovered the abuse of justice in Wenatchee...

...She came to know the defendants and their families, and lets the reader into their lives...

...Her chief focus is the Amirault case in Massachusetts, in which Violet Amirault, the proprietor of Fells Acre nursery school, her son Gerald, and daughter Cheryl, both of whom worked at the school, were all convicted of multiple charges of sex abuse, with Gerald sentenced to thirty to forty years (sixteen years later he is still in prison), mother and daughter to eight to twenty years...

...Arrested in 1985, Michaels was charged with 131 counts of sex abuse against twenty children, ages three to five...

...In Bakersfield, for example, authorities dredged a lake and excavated backyards searching for twenty-nine babies said to have been killed and partly eaten in satanic rituals by members of the supposed "sex ring," despite the fact that no baby had been reported missing...

...The latter, while admitting serious problems with the original trial, claimed that the public after so many years was entitled to "finality" in the case...

...Most people assume Stollthereby won his freedom, but because of a technicality, it was the sentence of two codefendants that was overturned...

...I do not have enough space or time to vent it all...

...Eventually all would be released on appeal, but in many cases their lives had been ruined, their children permanently lost or alienated...

...The moral panic extended from supposed "sex rings" preying on small children to the day-care programs in which many middle-class families put their preschoolers, suddenly suspected of being rife with vicious abusers...

...One of the victims in the 1982 Bakersfield, California "sex ring" case, the first of the mass cases of mythical abuse (fifty people charged, twenty-six convicted), Stoll has now served nineteen years of his life sentence...

...Rabinowitz records Violet's notes dated April 1989: "The catastrophe goes on...

...Rabinowitz skillfully interweaves the painful Amirault saga (the arrests, the trial, the appeals, the overturning of the verdicts of thetwo women, the reinstatement of their sentences by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, the unanimous vote of the Governor's Advisory Board on Pardons and Paroles that Gerald be released) with the unfolding of the other cases...

...Feminist Andrea Dworkin wrote that, for a woman, the home is the most dangerous place in the world...

...Rabinowitz, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for her fifteen-year crusade to expose and reverse these convictions, tells the story simply, sparely, and calmly...

...As a result, even the reader who knows the outcome will feel almost unbearable tension as the families wait in a series of courtrooms while trial judges—convinced the original trials were a farce and determined to free the Amirault women—battle with the judges of the Supreme Judicial Court, equally determined to put the defendants back in prison...

...Rabinowitz does not make sufficiently clear that the cases she describes are only the tip of the iceberg...

...And Rabinowitz is mistaken in saying that by the late 1990s, except for the Amiraults, "the convictions in all such headline-making cases of mass abuse had been thrown out by appeals courts around the nation...

...If the Rabinowitz book finally sparks widespread public concern about these cases, perhaps others will be encouraged to probe more widely and deeply into the roots of the hysteria and the failure of our institutions to guard against it...

...We are incredulous that at Salem judges and public alike would believe girls writhing and shrieking that they were at that moment being pinched by the accused sitting far away in the dock...

...Therapists established a new specialty of helping young women "recover" memories of incest, suppressed, so the theory went, as too horrible for ordinary memory to record...

...For example, Ileana Fuster, Frank Fuster's former seventeen-year-old wife, imprisoned for eleven months (much of it in solitary confinement), steadily denied any abuse had occurred until she was subject to prolonged recovered memory therapy in prison...

...Although Rabinowitz takes no credit in this book, Michaels, like several others of whom she writes, would owe their release in good part to the publicity—and funds for appellate lawyers—her articles generated...

...Frank Fuster, victim of the prevailing hysteria in what at the time was the biggest headline-making case of them all, Country Walk (named for the upscale suburban-Miami development in which it unfolded), remains in prison after eighteen years...

...But if Rabinowitz has already chronicled the legal outrages in her Wall Street Journal columns, the book allows her to give the story a fuller human dimension...

...But she built a new life for her family by starting Fells Acre day care, building it up over twenty years into a flourishing institution...

...Some of these bewildered innocents were given multi-life prison sentences for crimes that never happened...

...Readers who followed Rabinowitz's articles in the Journal will find much that is familiar in this book...

...Rabinowitz describes Violet Amirault as a strong, upbeat personality, a first-generation Italian American who deeply believed in American democracy...

...Yet the charges that recently passed muster in American courtrooms were no less bizarre...

...In No Crueler Tyrannies, Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal's formidable editorial page provides an invaluable introduction to the nightmare world of ludicrous accusations, self-righteous prosecutors and off-the-wall therapists, complicit judges, credulous media, and hysterical publics that numbers of child-careworkers found themselves trapped by in the 1980s and 1990s...

...I have no space for anything or interest in this world...

...She sat in the courtroom through many of the trials and was present at moments of high drama when appeals decisions were handed down...

...This book is a brief introduction to a subject that has been shamefully underreported: it is not and does not pretend to be an exhaustive account...

...Michaels was sentenced to forty-seven years in prison...

...Two years ago a federal judge ordered the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services to overhaul its child abuse and neglect investigations—the judge concluded they were one-sided, based on little evidence and unfairly blacklisted child-care workers...

...In the early 1970s, radical feminists like psychiatrist Judith Herman began to argue that millions of women had experienced "incestuous abuse" at the hands of their fathers...

...I have, I feel, outlived my usefulness on earth...

...One hundred forty-seven of his 165-year sentence remain to be served...

...came the question...

...Robert Rosenthal, the appellate attorney whom Rabinowitz praises for winning the freedom of many of the falsely accused in her book, has called the Country Walk case "the worst I have ever seen"—and he has seen a lot...

...I do not believe I can be of any help to my family...

...None of the vaunted protections of individual rights in our legal system functioned: indeed, traditional rules of evidence and procedure were thrown out the window with nary a protest from watchdog associations like the American Bar Association or even the ACLU...

...It is a safe bet that more Americans know about the Salem witch trials than any other event in the 1690s...

...Many would be sentenced to long prison terms and fifty children would be removed to foster care, most on the testimony of a mentally disturbed child (who later admitted it was all lies) living in the home of the police officer who conducted the investigation...

...She said, 'Thank you...

...And yet along with the new view of sexual self-expression as a right akin to freedom of speech—is there a single show on prime time television that could have passed network self-censorship even in the 1970s?—there has been a largely unnoted flip side: panic that sexual abuse of children is endemic to this society...

...She confines the account to six cases she herself actively pursued, beginning with Kelly Michaels, a young teacher at the Wee Care Day Nursery in Maplewood, New Jersey...

...Then, at the age of sixty, guilty of no wrong, she—along with her beloved children—became an outcast, scorched by disgusting charges of sexually assaulting the children entrusted to her care, imprisoned, her appeals repeatedly denied by indifferent courts...

...What did Kelly say when you took the sword out...

...Equally striking has been the absence of public outrage...

...As in the other cases, the charges were the work of therapists who over many months badgered, bribed, coaxed, and coerced reluctant preschoolers—who initially denied anything happened—into saying what prosecutors wanted to hear...

...Confining herself to the cases she has covered, Rabinowitz does not even mention some of the most famous trials—for example, that of the Edenton 7, so called after the seven people arrested for supposedly massively abusing children at the Little Rascals Day Care in Edenton, South Carolina...

...What is true of Illinois is doubtless true of other states operating under the same provisions of the Child Abuse Protection and Treatment Act of 1974, which not only set up a whole child-abuse "industry" but made false charges of abuse penalty-free...

...I am eaten away with rage and hatred...

...It is the Boy Scouts who are on the defensive now...

...It is likely that three hundred years from now more Americans will know of the strikingly similar sex-abuse madness of the last twenty years than about a host of events now far higher on the public radar screen...

...Often a single case will have both elements...

...While Madison Square Garden overflowed with supporters of convicted cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, there have been only scattered small support groups for the victims of these egregious trials...