0:00

Hmm, what

0:06

alleging networks

0:09

of child abuse that don't really exist

0:11

my entire world

0:13

now, Jesus Christ, that was

0:15

a bad introduction. Um,

0:17

thank you, Sophie, thank you for your relentless positivity.

0:21

Uh, this is behind the Bastards.

0:23

I'm Robert Evans and my guest today

0:26

is my my friend and colleague,

0:28

Jake Hanrahan. Jake, how you doing man good?

0:31

Thanks to me, Thank you having me on again. Yeah,

0:33

and you, Jake, you have a podcast now,

0:36

another podcast. You've always had a podcast,

0:38

another one, Yeah, only

0:40

doing Q Clearance. Sophie's been hoping. We've moved

0:42

me with a podcast about

0:44

Q and On uh, and about you know,

0:47

the the searching for the

0:49

person or persons behind it,

0:51

right, Yeah, trying to trying

0:53

to kind of lay out for people that are not one familiar

0:56

as well. Like I kind of realized that a lot of the

0:58

Q and On media is refocused on

1:01

either like for Q and On people, or

1:04

it's kind of for the community. They're research

1:06

and I kind of want to bring everybody together to be

1:08

like, let's make everyone

1:10

understand it. You know what I'm saying. And

1:12

so far, so good, you know, Jake,

1:15

I I admire what you're doing. I think it's important

1:17

and I wanted to help you out. And the way I wanted

1:19

to help you out was by lending a bit of historical

1:21

context because what we have with Q and On, I think

1:23

it's it's fair to say, in brief, is

1:26

like a massive, almost

1:29

now international delusion about

1:32

networks of Satanic child

1:34

murderers and traffickers. Right, M have

1:37

you figured it out yet, Jake? Q

1:40

and On is not is

1:42

not the first time this happened. And

1:45

today, Jake, we're going to talk about the

1:48

Satanic panic. Okay.

1:53

I couldn't have guessed that one man. Um

1:55

No, it's interesting, it's interesting, it's

1:58

perfect for me. Thank you so much. I just

2:00

can't believe you haven't listened to episode

2:02

two of Q Clearance where we talk about

2:05

syntantic this,

2:07

this is it's

2:10

it was enormous. I don't I didn't know most

2:12

of this stuff when I started reading about it. It's a

2:14

fucking nightmare. And uh,

2:17

you're gonna hate this episode. I hated writing

2:19

it. Um. It involved a

2:21

lot of reading lurid, lengthy

2:24

stories of child molestation that never happened,

2:26

but that children were convinced had happened. To

2:28

them, which is somehow yeah,

2:31

more disturbing almost than actual

2:33

child molestation, like the idea that like a

2:35

kid, people convincing them it happened

2:38

to them, right, yeah, Like why would you make

2:40

someone feel the worst thing ever if they didn't

2:42

actually feel it. You know, it's completely

2:44

fucked. I

2:48

can't believe this is what you picked for, Jake.

2:51

Oh yeah, Yeah, we're gonna talk

2:53

about some fun ship. We're gonna go dungeons and dragons.

2:56

We're gonna talk about the West Memphis

2:58

three. We're gonna talk about the mcmarh in preschool

3:00

scandal. It's gonna be fucking terrible.

3:03

Um. But first we're going to go

3:05

back in time a little bit, Jake, because

3:08

the ideological soil that Q and

3:10

on and the Satanic Panic grew in didn't

3:13

start with either of those things. So let's

3:15

talk about A hundred and seventy seven

3:17

A D or c E or whatever we're supposed

3:19

to say Europe. Let's let's let's

3:21

talk about that. This is about you know, A hundred seventy

3:24

is about a century or so before Emperor Constantine

3:27

was like, you know, brought Christianity to the Roman

3:29

Empire and stuff. So things are still pretty pagan in

3:32

Roman society, but Christianity exists

3:34

and the Pagans do not like it. They've

3:36

got these like weird people, um, who are kind

3:38

of on the fringes of society, and

3:40

they start making up ship about

3:43

them. So in the city of Lyon in modern

3:45

day France, rumors started spreading

3:47

that members of the Christian community there were secretly

3:49

raping and cannibalizing their own children.

3:52

Angry and probably drunken, mobs of

3:54

pagan Romans chased the Christian community out

3:57

of their homes, beat them, stone them, and tortured

3:59

their households slaves until the slaves admitted

4:01

that their masters had been eating and molesting

4:03

babies. With confessions in hand, the mob

4:05

than massacred the entire Christian community of

4:08

Leon. So like when you're it was

4:10

cool, basically rads.

4:15

So that massacre was an example of

4:17

what anthropologists call demonology.

4:21

So not demonology, demon o I

4:23

O G y um. And

4:26

Yeah, the authors of Satan's Silence, which

4:28

is have you read that book, It's fucking Satan

4:31

Silence. Yeah, it's really good, the defining

4:34

work of the Satanic Panic era, and the

4:36

authors of that book define demonology

4:39

as the narrative specific to every

4:41

culture that identifies the ultimate evil

4:43

threatening the group. During periods of social

4:45

turmoil and moral crisis, societal preoccupation

4:48

with its demonology intensifies. So

4:50

in Pagan Rome, the ultimate evil was like

4:53

the the ultimate outsiders. The Christians at

4:55

this point, like the people saying, now there's only one got

4:57

right, So they get demonized and people start

4:59

telling stories of about the molesting and murdering children.

5:02

Now, once Christianity became the dominant

5:04

religion in Europe, its adherents found their

5:06

own evil to oppress in the way that they've once been

5:08

oppressed. In the twelfth century, a myth began

5:10

to spread across the English countryside, initially

5:13

about Jewish rabbis murdering Christian

5:15

babies. That's quickly spread all over Europe, and

5:17

you start having this like it's still around yeah,

5:21

yeah, they of course, yeah, they're always

5:23

yeah, this kind it's kind of

5:25

like it was an early meme and it's spread that way

5:28

around Europe, and like pamphlets and even like

5:30

you can still find churches in Europe

5:32

that, like in stained glass reliefs will

5:34

have like images of what's called the blood

5:37

libel rabbi's murdering Christian babies

5:39

to make mods that. Yeah, um,

5:41

and it's the same kind of thing, right, myths that

5:44

this this group of social outsiders is

5:46

gathering up and murdering and probably molesting

5:48

children. Um. And Christians

5:51

like killed so many Jews during this period as

5:53

a result of the spread of this myth that later

5:55

during the Reformation, there weren't like

5:57

any Jewish people left in a lot of communities,

6:00

so they had to find a new ultimate evil inside

6:02

their community to go after. And this

6:04

is where we get the witch hunts, right like that everybody

6:06

knows vaguely the story, and these two they

6:08

took different forms over the centuries, but the

6:10

gist of the threat was always the same. Satan

6:12

is real, and he's trying to destroy our community

6:14

via some member on the fringe of our community

6:17

who's working with the devil, right Like, that's the

6:19

the idea, and it happens a bunch of times. It happens

6:21

in Europe, it happens obviously in the United States. You

6:23

get the Salem witch trials, and

6:25

you have different groups of people targeted.

6:28

Right. Sometimes it's midwife. Sometimes it's just like

6:30

members of the community like in Salem, who start

6:32

accusing each other of things. Um,

6:34

and kind of one of the things that always

6:37

marks witch hunts is that like there may

6:39

be initially a specific group that's targeted,

6:41

but once a real good witch hunt gets going, pretty

6:44

much everyone winds up accusing everybody, right,

6:46

Like that's what we do. Yeah.

6:48

Yeah. I remember reading the Weird Story where

6:50

like a guy like pronounced something like

6:53

differently to the rest of the town and

6:55

they were just like, yeah, he's a witch exactly.

6:58

You know, people go fucking it

7:01

is one of those things. You know,

7:03

I'm a I'm a pretty staunch fan of

7:05

the concept of democracy, um,

7:08

but man, reading too much about witch hunts

7:10

makes you like, we're,

7:14

well, yeah,

7:18

they voted, yeah yeah,

7:20

drowning. Um.

7:24

Yeah. So once the United States became

7:27

a thing, it showed a marked talent for witch

7:29

hunts. And I have to say, like, y'all

7:31

over in Europe and ship can do some pretty good witch

7:34

hunts, but the USA, like, who,

7:36

we are good at mass

7:38

murdering each other over rumors

7:41

of the devil? Um,

7:44

yeah, yeah, we're fucking great at it. And

7:46

of course, like we you know, Jewish people got

7:48

blamed for a variety of things, but also Catholics

7:51

um. During the eighteen thirties and forties, Protestants

7:53

in America were so frightened of Catholics that

7:55

rumors started to spread about nuns consorting

7:58

with the devil and Moleste murder ring a bunch

8:00

of little kids. And the quote again from Satan's

8:02

Silence here, because this is some ship that sounds

8:05

exactly like the ship happening now. Several

8:07

books were written by women claiming to be x Nuns

8:09

who had escaped from convents where they witnessed orgies,

8:12

torture, witchcraft in the slaughter of infants. One

8:14

account was so popular that in the years before the

8:16

Civil War, it's sales were surpassed only by

8:18

Uncle Tom's cabin. During the same

8:20

period, X Nuns and Priest real or Famed

8:22

made a handsome living touring the country and

8:24

testifying about the slaughter of innocence at the hands

8:26

of Mother's superior and bishops. It's

8:28

the same fucking thing, Like they're going around and making money

8:31

off it. You've got like fucking pre medic types

8:33

in eighteen forty.

8:36

Yeah, it's kind of

8:38

funny though. It's like later the Catholics did do

8:40

a lot of the kids, but oh absolutely,

8:44

but not the Devil's yeah no, and

8:46

like, yeah, you have to assume that some of

8:48

this started from like well, yeah, a bunch of preestar

8:50

molested kids, right, just throwing

8:54

the devil as well, Like why not they eating them

8:56

as well? Yeah, now they're

8:58

eating them yeah my peoples. Man. Yeah.

9:02

So that's kind of the backstory of this

9:05

really weirdly consistent thing

9:07

that humans do, which is accused groups

9:09

on the margins of murdering and molesting children.

9:11

Right, It's like very consistent that it's always

9:14

like, if you're going to really demonize a group, you accuse

9:16

them of going after little kids. Um, and

9:18

it's it goes back way more

9:20

than a thousand years. I think it's like the

9:22

Oats and the Evil, right, Like that's the worst thing you can

9:24

do. Like I'm a kid, let's

9:27

go with that. Yeah, let's fucking go with

9:29

that. Um. Now, we're gonna have

9:31

to cover a lot of other backstory in the

9:33

United States before we actually get to the Satanic

9:35

Panic because the reason that the Satanic Panic

9:38

was able to get so bad, and the reason that

9:40

like, like one of the things you have with the Satanic

9:42

Panic is you have all of these like lurid stories

9:44

of devil worship and these kids testifying

9:47

that they've been raped because they've had false memories and planted

9:49

in them and stuff, and all of that

9:51

was only possible because of a shipload

9:54

of things that happened in the United States

9:56

that made it the perfect soil for something like this. So

9:58

we're gonna explain kind of all of different

10:00

things that made it possible. First. So

10:02

one factor in the Satanic Panic being

10:04

a thing that could happen was the fact that starting

10:07

with our old buddy l Ron Hubbard in the nineteen fifties,

10:09

colts started to get super mainstream

10:11

in the United States in the nineteen sixties and seventies

10:14

um and one of the ones that like got the most

10:16

public perception was the Manson Colt, which

10:18

carried out a string of grizzly murders

10:21

in August of nineteen sixty nine. The

10:23

most famous Manson killing was the murder of Sharon

10:25

Tate, Abigail Folger, and several other less

10:27

famous people. I think they killed five people at once in

10:29

this like big compound that was like Roman Polanski's

10:31

house, but he was out at the time. And these murders

10:33

were incredibly grizzly, and they had elements

10:36

that police at the time described as ritualistic.

10:38

I don't know that they actually were ritualistic murders,

10:41

but it was described as ritualistic murders. So you

10:43

have these cults. Is that great book Chaos

10:46

O'Neill, and it just dispels all

10:48

of that, like it was just again

10:52

they just rolled with it exactly. Yeah,

10:55

yeah, and it is bullshit, but people at the

10:57

time believe it. So you've got suddenly number one, cults

10:59

are all to the place, um. And then

11:01

you've got this cult murdering people. And then in the nineteen

11:04

seventies you get the Zodiac Killer and

11:06

the Son of Sam and the Alphabet Killer, and

11:08

all of these were mass murderers whose slayings

11:10

had like weird ritualistic and

11:12

occult seeming overtones to them.

11:15

So people start to like get

11:18

like really convinced that that this is

11:20

a thing that actually happens, right that like,

11:23

and they have some you know, if you are a person who

11:25

reads the news in this period, you've got

11:27

what you think is solid evidence that

11:30

this is a problem, that there's ritualistic cults

11:32

out there murdering people for a cult you

11:34

know, purposes. Um.

11:36

Now, the nineteen seventies also happened

11:38

to be the decade where Satanism went I don't

11:40

know, mainstream is probably saying too much,

11:42

but it became like it became like an organized

11:45

thing, right. Anton the Vey publishes the

11:47

Satanic Bible in nineteen sixty nine, which became

11:49

the central text for the Church of Satan, which

11:51

probably had its heyday in the nineteen seventies.

11:54

Now, the reality is that the Satanic Bible

11:56

was both largely plagiarized and more or

11:58

less just a self help book with an g rapping

12:00

to it. This did not stop people

12:02

who hadn't read it from flipping the funk out. So

12:05

the Church of Satan, again fundamentally

12:07

pretty peaceful thing, has maybe five thousand

12:10

members in the US at its height during this period.

12:12

But all of this ship happening, like you

12:14

know, with the Mansons and with these

12:16

ritual murders, and then all the ship that's happening in Hollywood

12:19

in terms of like the movies that are coming up, kind

12:21

of cooks it into the center of a conspiracy.

12:23

So in nineteen seventy three you have the best selling

12:26

novel The Exorcist adapted into a film.

12:28

We all know about the Exorcist, big part of it is demonic

12:30

possession. Um And in order to

12:32

improve ticket sales, its producers claim that it was

12:34

based on a true story, which was a lie. Um.

12:37

They were like, some elements were taken all out

12:39

of a story of an actual priest who had an x an

12:42

exorcism, but like it had bore no resemblance

12:45

to anything that happened in the book. Priest.

12:48

Yeah, yeah, priests once existed

12:50

and he was a little off. Yeah.

12:54

Demonic possession hadn't been a massive topic

12:56

in American culture in this period, um,

12:58

but after the Exorcist, it becomes

13:00

like a huge topic of discussion. For one thing, there's hundreds

13:03

of like movies that come out that are based

13:05

on like similar premises, right. The thing

13:07

that all that that like little bitty shitty

13:09

b movie producers always do like they rip off

13:12

the big popular movie. Um. And for

13:14

most Americans, obviously, this just meant

13:16

that we got a bunch of fun horror movies that

13:18

involved demonic possession. But among

13:20

the nascent Christian right, which in this period

13:22

was starting to form into a political block

13:24

for the first time in the United States, the Exorcist

13:27

was seen as a deadly warning. This was helped

13:29

along by a new species of evangelical

13:32

Christian grifter themselves inspired

13:34

by the Church of Satan, the fake former

13:36

Satanist. So you start having former

13:38

former Satanists kind of like these

13:41

former Catholic nuns popping up in this period

13:43

and lecturing about things they had supposedly

13:45

done. Now, the most prominent of these

13:48

guys was Mike Warnkey, who published

13:50

his book Satan Seller in nineteen

13:52

seventy two. Uh Satan Seller

13:55

recounted a childhood

13:57

and young adulthood that Warnkey claimed had been

13:59

spent like as a a hardcore devil

14:01

worshiper. He claimed that he'd been a Satanic

14:03

high priest and that he'd been involved in ritualistic

14:05

sex orgies. He went into detail about

14:07

ritual murders, child murder, and mass

14:09

rape, claiming that he'd participated in a

14:11

variety of capital offenses until Jesus

14:14

saved him by sending him to Vietnam.

14:16

Um that's what he

14:19

Yeah, well, horrible

14:22

guy.

14:26

Yeah, there were a lot of Satanists back in the sixties

14:28

and seventies. We had to get him all off phenomen to

14:30

clear that ship out. Um.

14:34

Yeah, it's pretty wild because

14:36

all of these guys like Warren Key would like they would all claim

14:38

to have taken part in like serious

14:40

crimes that never got investigated.

14:43

So you'd think people would be like you said

14:45

you murdered a bunch of babies, Like,

14:49

oh, like, yeah, he's just admitted

14:51

it in right, Yeah,

14:53

it's it's it's just absolutely

14:58

it does. And Warren Key, Mike Warrenkey is kind

15:00

of the biggest person, like who

15:02

starts this avalanche, and he's within the bubble

15:04

of Christian media, which was a lot smaller back then. He

15:06

was a huge celebrity and he actually cracked

15:09

over in the mainstream to an extent. He showed up on Oprah,

15:11

on Larry King and telling

15:13

lurid stories about his supposed past as a devil

15:16

worshiper. He also used his past as a Satanist

15:18

to launch a career as a Christian stand up comedian.

15:24

Yeah it's story.

15:29

Yeah, it's very funny now.

15:31

For reasons I will never be able to explain,

15:34

Warren Ca saw massive success hybridizing

15:36

his stand up routine with his

15:39

claims about child like sex

15:41

abuse and satanism um, which

15:43

led to some really baffling recordings

15:45

like the one I'm About to play you from his nineteen

15:47

eighty nine stand up routine, Do you

15:50

hear me in it? He starts with incredibly

15:52

lame jokes, and I'm gonna play you a selection of

15:54

his jokes just so you can get an idea of

15:57

what the tenner of his stand up act is. Like, told

16:00

me this is gonna be a Christian playing and I tell

16:02

you right now that bow up our own stage. He is

16:05

not a Christian because he's got that long

16:07

hair. Why do people drive on

16:09

parkways and park on driveways?

16:16

What is daylight savings time? And if

16:18

we're saving so much of it, who's got it

16:20

all? How

16:24

do you know when yogurt's gone bad? How

16:30

do you get tehlone to stick to a skillet when

16:32

nothing sticks? To tell I'm not hearing you laugh, Jake.

16:35

Do you not enjoy his comedy? I

16:38

mean, you know when you're Christmas you get like a joke

16:40

in the crack up like it's

16:42

that it's that level of like sun

16:44

Cracker jokes into like stand

16:46

up. He looks

16:49

like he just I don't know, man, he

16:51

looks actually kind of like the devil worshiper from

16:53

like Three Detectives. You know, does he does

16:55

look like a Satan's right, like

16:57

like like a movie satan it's not a no

17:00

offense to the actual Satanists in the audience.

17:03

He would cast him as one, right, Yeah,

17:05

like this guy looks evil, yeah, and

17:07

he definitely so. Like You've got those

17:10

jokes, which are like the most milk toast nonsense

17:12

that you could possibly put in a stand up routine,

17:15

And then in the middle of them, he starts

17:17

talking about deadly serious anecdotes

17:19

about ritual genital mutilation and sacrifice.

17:22

And again this is in the middle of a stand up

17:24

set to a bunch of kids. Christian

17:27

kids are Christian kids and their families.

17:29

I'm talking about a little girl who

17:32

was murdered last year in

17:36

the state of Louisiana

17:39

by having her sexual organs cut out while

17:41

she was still A lot a

17:44

lot of you think that when a Satanist kills, they

17:46

do so because they want to spill blood.

17:49

You've seen enough late night movies to think

17:51

that. But if a Satanist

17:53

or any other kind of occultist kills

17:55

an animal or a human sacrifice,

17:58

it's not to spill blood. It's to release

18:00

the life force. Because

18:03

when the life force is released and

18:05

you've done the right incantations and rituals.

18:08

You can absorb that force, they

18:10

say, and it makes you a stronger

18:12

wizard, warlock or

18:15

whatever.

18:18

The death,

18:22

more reorganizing the death, the more

18:24

force is released. So

18:27

they took this little girl and they killed her by cutting

18:29

her sexual organs out while she was still alive.

18:32

Yeah, okay, really

18:35

wait to lighten the mood. So you know,

18:37

I've done some stand up by a friends who did it.

18:40

That's a definite choice in terms of how to

18:42

end your set. Yeah.

18:44

By the way he's

18:49

saying, he's yeah,

18:51

yeah, it's not it's

18:54

complete nonsense. Why

18:58

isn't he being investiga. I'm mean

19:00

you listened to that though, and like the audience

19:02

is deadly quiet. You have to assume they were

19:04

all buying this ship. Like there seemed

19:07

to be taking him very soon, and he was taken

19:09

very seriously. Um,

19:11

which is a problem because he was a preposterous

19:14

liar. Actual journalists sat

19:16

down with Warrenkey's family and friends to ask

19:18

them about his claims, which included the fact that he

19:20

lived in a witch's coven with fift other

19:22

people, um, and that he'd

19:24

been a horrible drug addict and all of his like

19:26

family, everyone who knew him laughed at all of this, like,

19:29

of course, like we fucking grew up with him.

19:31

He's like he's he's just a

19:33

nerd exactly. Uh. And there were

19:35

a bunch of obvious holes in his story. For example,

19:38

he claimed that Charles Manson had attended one of

19:40

his deadly ritual sacrifice parties in nineteen

19:42

sixty six. Unfortunately, the exact

19:44

time that he claimed the party happened occurred

19:47

during concurred occurred at the same

19:49

time as one of manson stints in federal prison

19:51

from a parole violation, so he could

19:53

not have been there. There's actually a whole

19:55

book that like was published proving

19:57

beyond a shadow of a doubt that Warren Key was a liar.

20:00

And in fairness, the journalists were too,

20:02

Christian journalists who worked for like an evangelical

20:04

news site, who were like, this guy is like fucking

20:07

full of ship, clearly, and yeah,

20:09

like you know, there's nothing wrong with Christians, is

20:11

like even taking advantage

20:13

of like, yeah, evangelical who you

20:15

know exactly, He's he's grifting these

20:18

people by staring at them. Like

20:20

it's very horrible what he's doing.

20:22

Not only is his comedy bad, but he's he's frightening

20:24

people, and it's bad to frighten people for no reason.

20:27

I would say, yeah, so

20:30

unless it's funny, unless it's funny, yeah, I mean,

20:32

yeah, it's funny that Yeah, he's

20:35

absolutely not. Yeah.

20:37

Um but yeah. The fact that Warrenkey

20:39

was like he had a private jet at one point, like

20:42

he's he was at least he claimed he had a

20:44

private jet. I don't know, but he was very popular

20:47

like it, and he was a huge deal

20:49

for a while. Um. Now, right

20:51

around the same time Warnkey was starting to preach

20:53

about ritual satanic murder, which is again in the midst

20:55

of all these cults and zodiac killers and ship something

20:58

else was happening in Americans, I d people

21:01

were starting to accept that child sexual

21:03

abuse was a thing and was a major problem,

21:05

which is a good thing, right obviously, and

21:08

for a long time, like people, you know,

21:10

it is one of those things when you go back in time like they were. It

21:13

was kind of people really didn't give

21:15

as much of a ship about kids as you might expect

21:17

back in the day. It

21:19

was the same in the UK, yeah, absolutely,

21:22

people like, oh, we used

21:24

just let our kids out and play anytime you

21:26

could do that back then, like as if poptos didn't

21:28

exist. Yeah it was. It wasn't

21:30

like ignoring kids yeah

21:34

back then either. But yeah, they people

21:36

start to accept that it's a thing, and there starts

21:38

to be like an industry starts to build

21:40

up with people who are our child protection

21:42

advocates, which again is a good

21:44

thing, but aspects of it

21:47

go terribly wrong. Um yeah,

21:51

it's it's really messed up. Because getting people to accept

21:53

that child sexual abuse was a problem was one

21:55

of the first victories, major victories

21:57

of the modern feminist movement, right, not talking

21:59

about like the suffragets, but like people

22:01

like Glorious Steinam and stuff like like like

22:04

so it is like and this is like a

22:06

really big victory that they that they getting

22:08

people to take this seriously. And initially

22:10

their understanding and the understanding of most

22:12

people was that most abuse victims were young girls,

22:15

primarily daughters, who were violated by incestuous

22:17

fathers. Um. And it's it is absolutely true

22:20

that most kids who are molested are molested by a close

22:22

family member that or afraid of the family. Um.

22:24

Now, as a result, the problem of child

22:27

sexual abuse was generally referred to

22:29

as a problem with incest during this period,

22:31

So you'll see a lot of people talking about incest, and

22:33

they're not talking like when we talk about incest

22:35

today, it generally means something different. They're talking about

22:38

child sexual abuse as a rule when

22:40

they talk about incest in this period. So,

22:42

feminists argued that the solution to

22:44

this was greater gender equality, which would enable

22:46

girls to more effectively say no to the demands

22:49

of their abuse of male relatives, and it would allow wives

22:51

to stand up to their husbands. And they also argued that

22:53

part I don't think is accurate, But they

22:55

also argued that it would give mothers the option of taking

22:58

their kids out of the house because they'd be able to have a job

23:00

at a checking account. And that part actually does seem

23:02

like a realistic remedy. So again, yeah,

23:04

right, like, there's nothing wrong with that. Yeah,

23:08

um, it does make sense. It's

23:10

a good thing to do. But like everything

23:13

that people do, there were problematic and

23:15

and faulty aspects of it, including the fact

23:18

how people began to sort of look at

23:20

the problem of the men

23:23

who were doing the molesting. And I'm gonna quote again

23:25

from Satan's Silence here, these feminist

23:27

visions were obscured however, by an inTransition

23:30

by an intransigent society, White insistence

23:32

that the problem lay merely in the minds of a few

23:34

troubled men. Accordingly, the cure

23:36

for sex abuse was psychotherapy coupled

23:38

with family counseling. And if treatment

23:40

was all that was necessary, sex abuse was

23:42

not so much a crime as an illness. Hence, rather

23:45

than calling for careful and partial investigation

23:47

by the police, accusations demanded intervention

23:49

by psychotherapists prepared to take the side of the

23:51

grief daughter and to heal the perpetrator,

23:54

even if he insisted the charges were false. Um,

23:57

so again this we'll talk about some

23:59

of the problems that the causes. Obviously

24:01

good that it's being taken seriously, but

24:04

also yeah, well we'll

24:06

cover the aspects of this that are

24:08

problematic. So the first comprehensive legal remedy

24:10

to the problem of child sex abuse was Walter

24:12

Mondale's nineteen seventy three Child Abuse

24:15

Prevention and Treatment Act or CAPTA

24:17

and captives set aside money to reach research

24:19

child abuse for the first time, which is great, definitely

24:22

a good thing researching like the causes of it. It

24:24

also gave money to states, so they could set up treatment

24:26

programs, which was more of a mixed bag because

24:29

in order to get the Act through congressional Republicans

24:31

and get it approved by President Nixon, Mondale

24:33

had to water down some things. See the

24:36

data suggested that the most significant

24:38

driving factor behind child abuse of any kind

24:41

was poverty, but Republicans didn't

24:43

want to hear that, so out the door it went. Corporal

24:45

punishment was also understood to be a major part of child

24:47

abuse, but talking about that was seen as undermining

24:49

the authority of parents, so instead the Act

24:51

focused on physical abuse and the idea

24:53

that abuse of parents were suffering from a psychological

24:56

illness, one that could strike any

24:58

parent and one that could be cured quote.

25:02

By the time Senate hearings for Captain convened, this

25:04

medicalized interpretation of child abuse

25:06

was so firmly established that experts like Brandeis

25:09

University professor of social policy David

25:11

Gill found it impossible to promote

25:13

a different analysis to the politicians. After

25:15

doing a groundbreaking national survey of child abuse

25:17

in the nineteen sixties, Gil had concluded

25:19

that neglected battering were intimately tied

25:21

to poverty, and that the federal government's reluctance

25:24

to correct social and economic inequality

25:26

made Uncle Sam the country's worst child mistreator.

25:29

But Mondale interrupted Gil and reminded the

25:31

audience during the hearing that this is not a poverty

25:33

problem. It is a national problem.

25:36

So again, the biggest part of child abuse

25:38

is not child molestation, it's neglect and physical

25:40

abuse, which is primarily driven by poverty.

25:42

But nobody wanted to hear that in Congress, so instead

25:45

they just focused on child sexual abuse.

25:47

Sorry, as I said, you know what that kind of like reminds

25:49

me of, Like, so I've done research on all

25:52

this kind of child abuse stuff, and it is

25:54

true that there are there have been like communal

25:56

child abusage, absolutely for sure. Yes,

25:58

And then but then when they bring the devil in tweet,

26:01

it's like, oh, get the priest to sort it out, and

26:03

it just completely flies out the window and it isn't

26:05

taken seriously anymore. It's so annoying. Yeah,

26:08

it's it's very frustrating. Yeah.

26:11

Yeah. And one of the things that you see here too

26:13

is people who have no experience

26:16

in like investigating cases being

26:18

assigned to these cases because they stopped

26:20

being seen as a criminal problem. Um.

26:23

Yeah, So Congress

26:26

didn't like Professor Gill's testimony, but they really

26:28

enjoyed the testimony of a woman named Maureen

26:30

Litvin, a southern California mom who went

26:32

by the pseudonym Jolly Kay. Now

26:34

Jolly told a heartbreaking story about how

26:36

she'd been abused as a child and how this abuse had

26:39

led her to abuse her own kids. She testified.

26:41

She testified that she had once tried to strangle her daughter

26:43

and had thrown a knife at her daughter on another occasion.

26:46

Now Jolly k described her long process

26:48

of seeking treatment until finally her therapist

26:51

advisor to start a self help group, which

26:53

she eventually called Parents Anonymous.

26:55

Now, a group like this being sort of

26:57

touted as a cure for child abuse was a dream

27:00

come true for Congress because Parents Anonymous Number

27:02

one put the responsibility on abuse

27:04

of parents themselves for fixing the problem,

27:06

and it costs basically nothing to support

27:08

as opposed to alleviating poverty. Right,

27:15

That's exactly right, Yeah,

27:19

pan on Um, So Congress

27:22

did give federal support to Parents Anonymous, but

27:24

it was a hell of a lot cheaper than like fixing the broken social

27:26

safety net or raising the minimum wage or any of the other

27:28

things that might have actually done a real like

27:30

significant help. Uh. Not that it's

27:33

a bad idea to have support groups for parents

27:35

like this, but I would say that that shouldn't

27:37

be your first priority when parents are throwing knives

27:39

at kits, you know. Yeah,

27:42

yeah, So Captor was enacted

27:44

in nineteen seventy four, and among other

27:46

things, that made therapists, teachers and school

27:49

administrators mandatory reporters.

27:51

I don't know what you have if you have this in the UK, but basically,

27:53

if you're a mandatory reporter and someone

27:55

discloses child abuse to you, you

27:58

have to report it to the authority, which

28:00

is again a thing that makes

28:02

sense on paper and sometimes is

28:04

a good thing, but also is sometimes a bad

28:07

thing because the police often do a very

28:09

bad job of handling these cases, and it

28:11

makes the kid not trust whatever authority figure

28:13

they'd confided in about the abuse in the first place.

28:15

Like it's a very mixed bag, you could say,

28:18

um, But the first thing that happened

28:20

when they you know, Captive gets past is it leads

28:22

to a massive search and reported child

28:24

abuse. Suddenly it goes from something that like

28:26

very rarely got reported to something that fucking

28:29

all over the place which is because child abuse

28:31

was all over the place, right, Like, it's not a bad thing that suddenly

28:34

people are like, oh, ship, a ton of people

28:36

are abusing and molesting their kids. But

28:39

this led to a massive problem for federal

28:41

and state governments because an awful lot of

28:43

working men were revealed to be abusive

28:46

to their children. Locking these guys

28:48

up would force the state to pay for their care, and

28:51

it would remove like tax money from

28:53

the state, and it would force them to like pay

28:55

in welfare to support the family. This

28:57

was unacceptable. Thankfully, self

29:00

help, the self help therapy group models solved

29:02

this problem because instead of going to jail,

29:04

abusive fathers were sentenced to therapy,

29:06

which their families were often mandated to

29:08

attend with them, including the children they've

29:11

been fucking or hitting, like

29:15

the way to like destroy the victim even

29:17

more, right, like like you couldn't come up

29:19

with a better way of doing it. How horrible, it's

29:21

so fucked up, um,

29:24

And it's yeah, it's it's it's yeah.

29:27

This is not to say that the situation for abused

29:29

children was better prior to this, because

29:31

like for girls, and it was nearly always girls who

29:34

reported abuse back in the early nineteen seventies, the

29:36

standard procedure before captive would

29:38

be to make a report to the police, who would then force

29:40

you to undergo an invasive genital exam,

29:43

and then the cops would usually do a follow up interview which

29:45

they would they would like, show up at your school to interrogate

29:47

you and ship um and you'd

29:49

be sent to a foster home or a juvenile home, while

29:51

your abusive dad stayed with the rest of your family

29:54

so that he could threaten them into getting their stories straight,

29:56

and the charges against him would inevitably hit the

29:59

local news, which means he would lose his job, which

30:01

with the family would fall in the It was just a whole

30:03

fucking it's always been bad, right

30:05

Like when criticizing captain, I don't want to pretend

30:07

that like it was good before, because yeah,

30:10

but it's it's like putting salt in the wound a little

30:12

bit more, you know what I mean. It's like trying

30:15

to bail out the ship with the thimble exactly

30:17

exactly. So the self

30:19

help therapy group option allowed police

30:22

to keep these kind of cases quiet, which saved

30:24

on embarrassment for everybody. It also allowed

30:26

the fathers to stay employed and it avoided breaking

30:28

up the family, which religious right wingers considered

30:30

to be as much of a priority as treating battered

30:33

kids. Jake, do you like

30:35

weddings?

30:38

Have you ever been at a wedding and been like, boy,

30:40

I wish I could find a way to get several

30:42

dozen grams of hexogen explosives delivered

30:45

to this wedding, but I just don't have a

30:47

missile guidance. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

30:49

so yeah, Well the good people

30:51

at Raytheon can help you out with that, Jake, because

30:53

the missile guidance chips they make are guaranteed

30:55

to hit weddings, school buses, mostly

30:58

those two targets. Um. So yeah,

31:03

no, no, it does help if you're in Yemen. Raytheon

31:06

big presence and all right, here's the the actual

31:08

ads. All

31:14

right, we're back, we're back. We're talking about

31:16

bettered kids. Kind

31:19

of deflated a little there. So the self

31:21

help therapy group option was

31:24

was considered great by everybody but the actual

31:26

kids who were being abused. Um

31:28

And oddly enough, one of the things that's weird about it

31:31

in this period is that both kind of like

31:33

a lot of left wing folks and feminists

31:35

and the religious right kind of all get on board this

31:37

idea for very different reasons. Right, the

31:39

religious right likes keeping the family together,

31:42

um, and it likes you know, they want

31:44

to avoid divorces and and what and whatnot

31:46

at all costs. Feminists like it because

31:49

all of these groups do involve these men talking

31:51

about like they're like the things

31:54

that the horrible things that they've done, like they're horrible sexual

31:56

fantasies and stuff, which was seen as like a

31:59

use whole thing at the time, right, like there,

32:02

So it is this weird kind of situation.

32:04

And there's also you can find some writings

32:07

from some people who are like advocate like

32:09

child defense advocates and very left wing at the

32:11

time, who also like that kind of the confessional

32:13

nature of these things mirrors

32:16

like what you see in certain like left wing political

32:18

movements, the self criticism sessions. So

32:20

it's weird you get all these different like

32:23

like, all these groups who should who normally are at

32:25

each other's throats all get on board of a

32:27

very bad idea for wildly different reasons.

32:30

Yeah, a very different tech mil you know,

32:32

yeah, yeah exactly, Yeah, a very

32:34

different one. Yeah, it's bizarre.

32:37

Um, it's a really strange period to study

32:39

So if you're starting to say, boy,

32:41

it seems like all these new programs prioritize

32:44

the feelings and security of male abusers

32:46

over their female child victims, you

32:48

would be right. Uh. And the growing field

32:50

of child protection was rife with misogyny.

32:53

The best example would be Dr Roland Summit,

32:55

who was a massive piece of ship. He went on to be

32:57

a major Satanic ritual abuse

32:59

expert, and obviously everything

33:02

he ever said about Satanic ritual abuse was nonsense.

33:04

But before that he was an incest expert,

33:06

and in his expert opinion, child sexual

33:09

abuse by fathers was largely the fault of their

33:11

wives. So this guy,

33:13

who was again one of the most prominent doctors

33:15

in the field and this time describes the

33:18

behavior of child molesters as family

33:20

romance. I'm sorry,

33:25

did you have any siblings? He

33:28

had some daughters that you have to worry

33:30

for them. Um. He believed that fathers

33:32

who molested their daughters would never molest

33:35

a stranger's daughter, which obviously

33:37

is wildly untrue. In

33:42

his argument was that the attraction of these

33:44

fathers was purely two in his words,

33:47

the delicious little creatures that

33:49

the father had helped to create. So

33:58

somem It felt that basically all men considered

34:00

their daughters to be delicious, and

34:03

that the impulse to commit incest was nearly

34:05

universal from middle aged men who were anxious

34:07

about the end of their own youth men

34:09

and healthy man projecting

34:12

a little bit. Yeah yeah,

34:16

So since all men clearly want to suck

34:18

their daughters, the only reason that most men

34:20

don't is because they have healthy marriages that let

34:22

them deal with their horny nous by fucking their wives.

34:25

So when incest happens, it's the fault of

34:27

the abuser's wife who was quote absorbing

34:29

herself in a job rather than fucking

34:31

her husband hard enough to stop him from raping their daughter.

34:34

She's

34:37

it's the right wing like

34:39

defense. It's

34:42

like outrageously

34:44

fucked up. And he said this officially,

34:47

like yeah, yeah, he was very open about

34:49

this, and no one went, hang

34:52

on, like, this guy is up

34:54

to something. I would argue the right response

34:56

when someone tells you that is to just start hitting them

34:58

and not stop. Just

35:01

just immediately started punching, but

35:03

no one did. Instead, he was taken seriously.

35:07

So these beliefs were unfortunately

35:09

quite common, and one of the most popular

35:12

abuse treatment programs at the time was called

35:14

Child Sex Abuse Treatment Program or

35:16

c sat UP, SAT UP, CASSETTAP

35:19

s A C C S A T P. I

35:21

don't know how to acronymic CASSATTAP,

35:25

so you did not do great. Cassett

35:27

UP first launched in the Bay Area, and

35:29

it was geared towards preserving nuclear families.

35:32

That because basically what happened is

35:34

in the Bay Area because of a number

35:36

of things, including affluence, it's one of the first areas

35:38

that starts getting like really good reporting about child

35:40

sexual abuse. And it turns out that a bunch of fucking

35:42

dudes in the Bay Area we're raping their kids um,

35:45

which created a problem because these guides

35:47

were pretty high income. So again, the state doesn't

35:50

want to lose tax money, doesn't want their parents to go on

35:52

the doll or their their families to go on the doll

35:54

um. So c sat UP was geared

35:56

towards preserving nuclear families,

35:59

and it taught that the of sexual abuse of children

36:01

was a dysfunctional marriage. Part of

36:04

the repair work mandated by the

36:06

therapy involved the mother apologizing

36:09

to her daughter for her husband's sexual

36:11

abuse and saying you are not

36:13

to blame daddy and I did not have

36:15

a good marriage. That is why Daddy

36:17

turned to you. Wow,

36:20

it's just unbelievable, unbelievable.

36:24

That's like, I can't believe that

36:26

when the Yeah, this is the fucking like

36:29

the late seventies. Yeah, thank you,

36:32

you know what I mean? Like, no, no,

36:34

really, fucking pretty recently. Um,

36:37

we'll probably get at least one person who

36:39

as a kid like went through Sea sat

36:41

up and stuff with their family. In the comments in this episode

36:44

from I wouldn't be surprised. Um,

36:47

it's it's so fucked um, it's

36:49

so fucking wild. So,

36:52

starting in San Jose, se sat up was increasingly

36:54

mandated for father's accused of sexual abuse.

36:56

Courts often made fathers what became

36:58

known as the god fought their offer because it was an offer

37:01

they couldn't refuse. So you get caught, you

37:03

go to therapy, take probation, and avoid jail.

37:05

Almost overnight, the confession rate among accused

37:08

child molesters went from very low to nine

37:10

And again, I don't wanna. This

37:13

is a really flawed system. So we're going to cover

37:15

all the ship that's bad. It's also the aspects of it

37:17

were good because most of these guys at this point, very

37:19

few sexual abuse allegations made

37:21

by children against parents were false, right, So

37:24

the vast majority of these guys, you have to assume some

37:26

innocent people took the basically the equivalent

37:28

of a police bargain just because they didn't want to go to trial.

37:31

But the vast majority of these guys were guilty, and

37:33

at least something happened um

37:35

but c sat up led to a number

37:38

of very unsettling changes in the way

37:40

these problems were dealt with. For one thing, police

37:42

shifted away from interviewing the child in these

37:45

cases and instead started talking to their

37:47

teachers, their mother, and other adults who knew the kid.

37:49

And these second hand accounts of people who

37:51

knew the child were considered to have the same legal

37:53

weight as if they'd come directly from the child.

37:56

This is problematic for a number of reasons.

37:58

I think that as a journalist we want to stand right,

38:01

yeah, a little bit, yeah, And

38:03

it feeds into the satanic panic stuff we're gonna

38:05

talk about later. When the child was eventually questioned,

38:08

the work was done by a social worker rather than a detective.

38:10

And this may not sound like a problem because, like, if you have

38:12

a social worker who specifically trained for this ship.

38:15

That sounds good because cops are not

38:17

great at talking to kids all the time, right, right,

38:20

But there was a crime committed, right, So it's like

38:22

you need more than the social worker, right like

38:24

us, one would say. And also the social workers

38:27

were not well trained to do this. They

38:29

were well trained on how to interrogate someone without

38:31

asking leading questions, right, Police are at

38:33

least in theory, taught not to do that. Like,

38:35

obviously that's a problematical yeah,

38:39

But theoretically, a

38:41

detective who's questioning a child is number

38:44

one, not supposed to assume the allegations are

38:46

true. They're not supposed to ask the leading questions. They're just supposed

38:48

to try to have the kid talk about what happened,

38:50

and the accused enjoys the presumption of innocence.

38:52

And the social workers questioning these kids weren't

38:55

trained that way. They were trained to believe that it's always

38:57

the case that like this is this is

38:59

this per and is guilty, which is a problem

39:01

for the person interrogating the kid in this situation

39:04

because they tended to push the child to

39:06

talk about like things that the child might

39:08

not otherwise have talked about. Now, again,

39:11

not a huge problem at the time because virtually

39:13

all of these allegations of child sexual abuse were

39:15

true. But when the Satanic panic

39:17

came about, the allegations were false, and the social

39:19

workers still did the same thing. They pushed

39:22

kids. Yeah, you're seeing all of this

39:24

infrastruction their own thing against

39:26

them. So yeah, forward

39:29

right exactly, Like so you're seeing

39:31

all this kind of infrastructure that created that

39:33

allows this to happen later. So, by nineteen

39:35

seventy five, c sat UP had become so

39:38

popular that the entire state of California

39:40

adopted as the standard. Our friend. Dr

39:42

Summit attended c sat UP training and was so taken

39:44

by it but that he wrote a manifesto titled

39:47

the Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation

39:49

Syndrome. In it, among other things, he pushed

39:51

the idea that children never fabricate

39:53

the kinds of explicit sexual manipulations

39:55

they'd divulge in complaints or interrogations.

39:57

As a result, they should always be believed,

40:00

even if their story included fantastic, wild

40:02

details that seemed impossible. Again,

40:04

like you're seeing the groundwork get laid here.

40:07

Yeah, yeah, yeah. By

40:10

nineteen eighty, child sexual abuse was no

40:13

longer a dark national secret. It was a topic

40:15

widely discussed by Americans and featured in

40:17

the media, and I'm gonna quote again from Satan's Silence.

40:20

Thanks to an alliance among feminists, therapists,

40:22

and law enforcement officials, it was becoming possible

40:24

for daughters to disclose their victimization and

40:26

for fathers to admit their guilt, and national

40:28

media from The New York Times to Playboy, The and Landers

40:30

Encyclopedia and Donna Hue testimonials

40:33

abounded from repentant fathers, newly asserted

40:35

wives and girls regaining their dignity. Yet

40:38

later research would reveal that many incest

40:40

defenders also rebeless children outside their

40:42

families, and they rape grown women as well. Further,

40:44

there is evidence that, regardless of what kind of treatment, sex

40:46

abusers get, as many as one in seven goes

40:49

on to offend again. Ironically, then

40:51

politicians and child protectionists further to

40:53

keep fathers in families left many youngsters

40:55

and women at risk of further abuse, and by

40:57

pushing godfather off for confessions, the

40:59

therapy attle of sex abuse intervention replaced

41:01

skilled forensics personnel with social

41:04

workers and others who knew nothing about how to test

41:06

the validity of criminal sex abuse charges. And

41:08

who unstintingly believe them all. So

41:11

by nineteen eighty, all of the infrastructure

41:13

we're going to need to let a satanic panic

41:15

happen and had to have the legal system in

41:18

Like, further, it is in place,

41:21

right, didn't just come out of nowhere built on

41:23

without them, I guess, without trying

41:25

to do that. But like I can see what you're saying, like it just

41:28

became the perfect ground

41:30

for it, right. Yeah. And obviously like fun dr

41:32

summit, But the vast majority of the people involved in

41:34

the setting this system up are people whose motivations

41:36

are the purest it could possibly be. They want to protect

41:38

kids right there trying it's a problem,

41:42

but it's a new way to tackle it. Yeah,

41:44

yeah, And again probably up

41:46

to this point the system still does more harm

41:48

than good because it was it replaced basically

41:51

nothing, right um, But

41:54

it's about to stop being a system

41:56

that does more good than harm, right,

41:58

Like, that's that's about to change. So there's

42:01

some more background we have to lay. In nineteen seventy

42:03

nine, Jerry Fallwell and some other assholes founded

42:05

the Moral Majority, which was the first large scale

42:07

Christian right wing political organization. This is the

42:09

first time that the Christian right is like a block

42:11

in politics and it has been ever since. The

42:14

Moral Majority was initially formed due to an opposition

42:16

to Rove Wade and to force an opposition

42:19

to force integration of Christian schools. They didn't

42:21

want black people to be able to go to Christian colleges.

42:23

That was a big part of the Christian of the very Christian

42:25

of them, extremely love the neighbor,

42:29

and it was Jerry,

42:31

Yeah, yeah, very surprising stuff, um

42:34

so, and like yeah, there's there were other a

42:36

lot of other people obviously, but yeah, the Moral Majority

42:38

was fueled also by a sense of deep, deep anxiety

42:41

because women are starting to work at this point, like

42:43

full time, Like it's becoming a very major thing.

42:45

One of the things I didn't realize until I was doing this

42:47

research actually is that during this period, from

42:50

like the seventies to the eighties, women it

42:52

becomes the norm for women to work, but the average

42:54

income of households doesn't really raise

42:56

because like this is also at the time that workers

42:59

protections and right are collapsing, and like Reaganomics

43:02

starts to take over in the eighties, so like more

43:05

people like you would think that having two

43:07

incomes in a household would increase the amount

43:09

of any like disposable income people have, but it really

43:11

didn't. And again yeah, yeah,

43:14

great countries. So in nineteen eight, a

43:16

psychologist named named Lawrence

43:18

Pastor published a book about his wife

43:20

and former patient, Michelle Smith, which

43:23

you know, if your wife is a

43:25

former patient as a therapist, you

43:27

might not be a great therapist. So

43:33

her memoir, Michelle Remembers,

43:35

detailed a childhood of horrific a cult sex

43:37

abuse. Pastor claimed to have used hypnotic

43:40

regression therapy to help his wife uncover

43:42

buried memories of abuse at the hands of the Church

43:44

of Satan. Pastor also claimed, with no

43:46

evidence that Anton LaVey's church wasn't the real

43:48

Church of Satan and the one that molested his patient

43:50

wife had existed for centuries. So

43:55

and Michelle Remembers is basically

43:58

so. The claim she's making is that she became

44:01

the victim of a Satanic cult for several months during

44:03

nineteen fifty five, when she was a five year old,

44:05

she was imprisoned by them. She she like, had

44:08

all these recollections being tortured in houses and mausoleums

44:10

and seminitaries, of being raped and sodomized

44:12

with candles and being forced to shoot on a bible.

44:15

Uh, and on a crucifix, of seeing babies and adults

44:17

murdered. It's awesome because you

44:20

know that two Christians of the day like her

44:22

being like, I help, I watched babies get

44:24

murdered was the same as like and I pooped on a

44:26

Bible. Like both equally bad devil

44:28

things like the guy like with their memories

44:31

like a little bit more a little bit more offensive.

44:35

Yeah, she also had memories of having

44:37

a devil's tail and horns surgically attached

44:39

to her um. Yeah, she

44:41

there. She had memories of a cult attempt

44:43

to kill a child and make it look like an accident by

44:46

placing her in a car with a corpse

44:48

um and then crashing the vehicle. And

44:50

this is said to we have gone on for close to a year until

44:53

her faith, the fact that she was so Christian made

44:55

the Satanists give up because they just couldn't couldn't

44:58

turn her. Uh. And then she him that

45:00

she forgot the experience for twenty years until

45:02

she entered therapy with Dr Pastor, who then became

45:04

her husband. Now this was

45:06

all lies. I feel like

45:09

the therapy he was like weak, Yeah, yeah,

45:12

yeah, if you remember, we can sell

45:14

a book. And I don't know, there's a There's

45:16

been a lot of writing on this too. I haven't done enough research

45:18

to know how you know the con Michelle

45:20

was, but I'm almost certain her her husband

45:23

was in on the con or it was a con

45:25

on his behalf. Incredible. People

45:27

debunked the book immediately. For one

45:29

thing, there's a picture of Michelle in her grade

45:31

school yearbook that was taken during one of the months

45:33

when she was supposed to be hidden like locked in a

45:35

house by Satanists, which you know, all

45:39

of her names and family members who knew

45:41

her during this period basically say like, nothing out of the

45:43

ordinary happened during her childhood. Uh, certainly

45:46

nothing satanic ritual molesti. The

45:48

only abuse that Michelle endured, for certain was at

45:50

the hands of her therapist husband. The whole

45:52

idea of repressed memories, which

45:55

now we got, we're laying a lot of groundwork

45:57

here, so let's talk about the fucking idea

45:59

of repressed memories comes from. It goes back to

46:01

the eighteen hundreds when early psychologists

46:04

decided that hysteria, which is what they called women

46:06

having emotions in those days came from

46:08

someone suffering a childhood trauma that was so

46:11

terrible that they developed amnesia to dissociate

46:13

from the event. And this

46:15

is a mix of because like Freud is involved in this and it's

46:17

not all bullshit. Dissociation is a thing that

46:19

happens when you under begin with PTSD,

46:22

right, Like we've all dealt with it, Like it's a fucking

46:24

thing, But it doesn't involve forgetting

46:26

the horrible thing that happened, right, Memories

46:29

become blurry. Yeah,

46:31

yeah, I don't know, but it doesn't

46:33

sound very real. Yeah.

46:36

Yeah, Like I definitely have had memories

46:38

like that, like periods I don't remember

46:41

during the the dealing

46:43

with PTSD itself, but the actual trauma

46:45

that caused it I remember pretty darn well. Uh.

46:48

And the fact that I don't remember other things was

46:50

probably because I was like drinking and abusing

46:52

drugs massively. Yeah,

46:58

so there. Yeah, and you know you

47:00

have to assume everyone was drunk in the eighteen hundreds

47:03

too, and they were definitely on cocaine because

47:05

that's how Freud did all of his psychotherapy, So

47:07

yeah, that may have influenced the

47:10

Yeah, so Freud decided

47:12

that hysteria was inevitably caused by childhood's

47:15

sexual violation, and he pressured

47:17

his female patients to tell him detailed stories

47:19

of their abuse. And again a lot of these were probably

47:22

true, um, but also a lot of

47:24

them weren't, and he convinced himself that these stories

47:26

were hidden memories, at least for a while. He

47:28

did eventually realize that a lot of the abuse

47:30

stories his patients told him were like physically impossible

47:33

because they were just like the outlandish fantasies

47:36

um. And he kind of dropped this idea

47:39

that child that like emotional

47:41

issues like mental illness as an adult was inevitably

47:44

caused by like some sort of sexual trauma

47:46

as a child. He did kind of drop that

47:48

idea. But in the late nineteen seventies,

47:50

therapists started reviving his old

47:52

theories, and among an influential subset

47:54

of the field, repressed memory therapy became

47:57

the go to explanation for things like eating

47:59

disorders and depression. Right like, you go

48:01

to the psycho psychotherapist because

48:03

you've got intorectually there or whatever, and he's

48:06

starts trying to recover memories of you being

48:08

raped as a kid, because you must have if you have intorectsia,

48:10

right, it couldn't be caused by anything else. Um,

48:14

and yeah, this was basically nonsense.

48:16

And the problem about trying to recover implanted

48:18

memories is that generally what actually happens

48:21

is the therapist creates memories of things that never

48:23

happened from a write

48:25

up in the conversation. Now, experimental

48:27

psychologists have repeatedly demonstrated with ease

48:29

which false memories can be implanted in a sizeable

48:32

proportion of the population under well controlled laboratory

48:34

conditions, but it is undoubtedly the case that

48:36

such false memories can arise spontaneously

48:38

as well. In the context of psychotherapy,

48:40

one of the techniques that has been shown to result

48:43

in false memories is asking people to imagine

48:45

events that never actually took place. It

48:47

appears that eventually, and especially in people

48:49

with good imaginations, the memory of the imagined

48:51

event is misinterpreted as a memory for a real

48:53

event. The use of hypnotic regression is

48:55

a particularly powerful means to implant false

48:57

memories. So

49:00

this became before though,

49:02

Like as a kid, there were things that I was certain

49:05

was like what happened? And

49:07

then I get old on I think that must have been a

49:09

dream. Was like, no way it would have, especially

49:12

as a child, Like there's all sorts you could get

49:15

confused about, absolutely, and like a

49:17

lot of this is like this is part of

49:19

the problem. This is part of why. Also, if

49:21

you look at like eyewitness testimony like generally

49:23

sucks. Actually, like people are very

49:26

bad at being eyewitnesses because

49:28

our brains it all starts a wild ship.

49:30

Yeah yeah, especially when there's

49:32

like a traumatic experience, you know, yeah,

49:35

important exactly. That's why reporters

49:37

take notes, and it's why you should never listen

49:39

to anything anyone ever says. Just fucking

49:42

put on headphones to block out all

49:44

noise, fucking put on

49:47

blinders so you can't see, and just stumble through

49:49

the world and you will not believe

49:51

anything untrue. You will probably bump

49:54

into things a lot though. Yeah,

49:56

yeah, yes, here's an

49:58

ad for a product. Okay,

50:06

we're back, so yeah.

50:08

Hypnotic regression and repressed memories mostly

50:11

nonsense, basically all nonsense, but it

50:13

was considered to be pretty settled science at the

50:15

time, not by like an overwhelming number

50:18

of scientists, but by cops and judges

50:20

and TV hosts and the kinds of psychologists

50:22

who are good at talking to cops and judges and TV

50:24

hosts, right, Like, that's the group of people to

50:26

whom this has settled science for will actually

50:28

incredible researchers like, there seem to be problems

50:31

with this. Um. So, Michelle Remembers

50:33

was a hugely influential book. Uh,

50:36

it was treated as gospel by a

50:38

terrible number of people, and it actually became

50:40

a standard textbook for social workers

50:42

in the United States. Um, yeah,

50:47

yeah, it's not good man.

50:52

So Lawrence Pastor became

50:54

a recognized legal expert,

50:56

and Satanic ritual abuse, which exploded

50:58

into the mainstream is a real problem

51:01

thanks to his book. So what we have in

51:03

nineteen eighty is a situation where evangelical

51:06

Christian paranoia over the devil and the black arts

51:08

leaps over and starts to infect

51:10

mainstream society. This would

51:13

come to have a terrible impact first on two

51:15

families in Bakersfield, California.

51:17

And now we're finally into the satanic panic. Ready

51:20

excited? Yeah,

51:22

yeah, I'm so excited. It's

51:24

it's fucking awesome. So these two families

51:26

are the mccuen's and the knife Ins or

51:28

Niffins. Uh. And I'm gonna quote from a write up

51:30

in Religious Tolerance dot Org that kind of

51:33

goes over the basics of the case. The

51:35

triggering incident occurred in nineteen eighty when

51:37

Becky mccouhen disclosed that her grandfather

51:39

Rod Phelps had touched her inappropriately. The

51:42

family doctor confirmed the abuse, no charges

51:44

were late. Becky's mother, Debbie mccuhen,

51:46

arranged for her daughter to obtain counseling, but

51:48

Debbie's stepmother, Mary Anne Barber, who is believed

51:51

to have had a history of mental illness, felt

51:53

that her stepdaughter granddaughters were not being

51:55

sufficiently protected. She obtained the assistance

51:57

of the Mothers of Baker's Field, a group concerned

52:00

about child abuse. Jill had dad took particular

52:02

interest in the case. She was the spokesperson

52:04

for the group and had many relatives working for local

52:06

police forces. Miss Barbara claimed that Alvin

52:09

and Debbie mccuhen were not good parents and that Debbie's

52:11

daycare license should be revoked. She asked

52:13

the Social Services Department to make a surprise

52:15

inspection. The social worker, Betty Palco,

52:18

found no major infractions and took no action

52:20

to revoke the license. So again, no

52:22

actual evidence of serious child abuse

52:24

here, although I will say that mcwan's weren't

52:27

exactly ace parents, because later that year they

52:29

did take their two daughters on a supervised visit

52:31

to see their allegedly abuse abuse of grandfather,

52:33

and this caused Marianne to have a psychotic episode

52:36

which sent her to the psychiatric ward at a local

52:38

hospital. She eventually succeeded in getting

52:40

custody of the kids and convincing county officials

52:43

to file child endangerment charges against

52:45

the mccuen's, But because she was not at all

52:47

well, Marianne took things a step further,

52:49

and she had begun believing that the mccuhans were part of

52:51

a massive, insidious, satanic sex ring

52:53

in Kern County. As she told social workers,

52:55

there's a group of people involved in molesting

52:57

the girls. They're all in on it. So

53:01

you have one in a case of actual abuse

53:03

to some parents who probably are not being as

53:06

careful as they need to be around, a guy who's dangerous

53:09

and a woman who's maybe

53:11

schizophrenic, definitely is mentally

53:13

ill, and his hospitalized as a result. That who becomes

53:15

convinced that, as opposed to a just

53:17

a single act of of child

53:20

molestation by one guy there's a

53:22

massive conspiracy to molest all

53:24

of the kids in town. Um And unfortunately

53:27

for a shipload of people. The social workers

53:29

in Baker's Field had been trained using the textbook

53:31

Michelle remembers. So when this very

53:33

ill woman starts claiming that there's a massive network

53:36

of satanic sex abusers in town,

53:38

they believe her. Um. And by

53:40

the time the social workers sat down with the kids,

53:43

Becky and Don, both kids had spent months

53:45

listening to their very, very sick stepgrandmother

53:48

tell them they had been the victims of a ring of ritual

53:50

abusers. So these kids get repeatedly

53:52

questioned and they confirm what there's They basically parent

53:54

what their step grandmother had told them to say, and

53:56

over the months their disclosures become like weirder

53:59

and weirder. They claimed that they had been hung

54:01

from sealing hooks, beaten with belts, rented

54:03

to strangers and motels, and had been forced to

54:05

act in kittie porn movies. They claimed

54:07

they were abused by a sex ring which involved their

54:09

grandparents, their parents, their father's brothers,

54:12

friends of their parents, uh and the social

54:14

worker who did the inspection, a coworker

54:16

of their father, and to one named welfare workers,

54:18

and all these fucking people start catching charges and

54:20

getting arrested and ship um, and

54:23

their life just dynamites these people's

54:25

lives, right, like, just just based on

54:27

this one testimony. Yeah,

54:29

yeah, based on this woman and these kids who had

54:31

been in her care listening to her talk

54:34

about But it's like, you know,

54:36

the thing I always think about things like this is like racism.

54:38

Right, No one is born a racist. Kids become racist

54:40

from hearing what they from parents

54:42

usually, So it's the same kind of concept,

54:45

right, they'll just repeat that exactly

54:47

their kids, Like if you tell them as you tell

54:49

your if you tell you're like three year old,

54:51

over and over you were raped by the

54:53

devil, like, they will look I

54:57

guess I was. Yes. So the

54:59

social worker and their father's coworker

55:01

eventually had their charges dropped after their lawyer

55:03

introduced Marianne's medical records into the trial.

55:06

Was like, this woman has psychotic episodes

55:08

and as paranoid and probably schizophrenic.

55:10

Perhaps we need more than just your

55:12

testimony, right, Not that those people can't

55:15

testify when they're the victims of abuse, but

55:17

if you have them making lurid, wild

55:20

allegations and there's no physical evidence

55:22

for any of it. Perhaps you should not trust

55:24

those allegations. Maybe,

55:26

yeah, Um,

55:28

So this convinced the DA to try

55:30

to drop those two people's charges. But then the medical

55:33

records were sealed and forbidden from

55:35

being used by the defense for the mccuen's and the

55:37

Niffins, which is something

55:40

else because again all of the cops have bought

55:42

into this too. So I'm gonna

55:44

quote again from that that right up uh

55:46

in Religious tolerance dot Org quote. The Niffin's

55:49

sons, Brian and Brandon, were repeatedly

55:51

and suggestively interrogated. The

55:53

interviewers would describe a sex act and then act

55:55

that asked the child to confirm or deny that

55:57

it happened. When questions separately, each was

56:00

old falsely that their brother had disclosed abuse

56:02

by both the parents and the rest of the sex ring.

56:04

Brian and Brandon claimed that they were yelled at and

56:06

terrorized by the interrogators. They were told

56:09

that they could go home again if they testified about the

56:11

abuse. These manipulative and coercive

56:13

interrogation methods are now known to generate false

56:15

allegations. No fucking dar right

56:19

yeah. Questioning in

56:21

Baker's field went far beyond the definition of

56:23

leading and was in fact coercive, threatening

56:25

and brainwashing of young children's is like

56:27

a legal finding later. Unfortunately,

56:29

in early nineteen eight three, basic research into

56:31

child interview techniques was in its early stages.

56:33

Direct questioning and manipulation of children

56:35

was common practice. The Niffin boys finally

56:38

caved in under the pressure and said that abuse

56:40

had occurred. So yeah.

56:43

During a surprise supervised visit, Brandon Niffin

56:45

was asked by his grandmother whether the charges were

56:47

true. He answered, no, none of those things

56:50

ever happened. The grandmother was arrested

56:52

for discussing the case with her grandchild when she brought

56:54

this up. When she said, like, hey, he told me that he was lying

56:56

because the interviewers terrorized him. It's like,

56:59

he tells his grandmother they made me give a false

57:01

confession. She goes to the judge and

57:03

she gets arrested and is

57:05

banned from testifying at trial and

57:07

has her right to having custody visits like

57:09

terminated for years. Because again,

57:12

all of the people in the legal system believe all

57:14

this ship and have to seem like, oh, she's got to be part of

57:16

it, because she's trying to like there. It's

57:19

so it's unbelievably fucked

57:21

up. They just they just with

57:24

each other, right, it's amazing. Yeah,

57:27

yeah, it's fascinating. Actually, yeah,

57:29

it's it's incredibly like there's a lot

57:31

that like that is and should be studied

57:33

about this period of time because it says so

57:36

much that's very frightening about human psychology.

57:39

It's that crowd like

57:42

it's very scary. Yeah,

57:44

yep, exactly, Like it's a lot of the same stuff

57:47

that makes fascism work, right, it's just like the way

57:49

people are and the way people act in groups,

57:51

um, and the way people act when they are in a

57:53

group and all get scared of the same thing, right,

57:57

Yeah. Uh so both Niffin boys

58:00

later recanted entirely and stated that they've

58:02

been coerced to testify, and they testified again

58:04

in nineteen ninety six after the end of the Satanic

58:06

Panic, and we're able to convince a judge to

58:08

overturn both sets of convictions. But again,

58:11

like the Niffins, like their parents, has been like

58:13

a decade plus in prison along with the mccohen's

58:15

like like four people in prison for years

58:17

and years joking. No,

58:20

it's like it's unbearably

58:23

fucked up. There's a partial

58:26

happy ending here because the Niffins, like once

58:28

the kids like realized what had happened

58:30

to have been done to them and testified,

58:32

like they got to be a family with their parents again.

58:35

The mccohen's never did, because both Becky

58:37

and Down continued to maintain that their testimony

58:40

was true, and it's almost certain that both children

58:42

had false memories forced on them as a result

58:44

of improper interrogation methods. But the family

58:46

never fucking healed. Um,

58:49

it's deeply

58:51

bad. That's the side of the Satanic

58:54

panic. You don't really hear a lot about. It's

58:56

like it's kind of funny the whole things, Like, oh yeah, it's so stupid.

58:58

But then like I was doing research for this this podcast

59:01

episode the other day and it's like wow, Like, I

59:03

mean, one woman in the Italian case I was looking

59:05

at like a mother, she just killed usself. And it's

59:07

just like you just couldn't handle it, right, It's like all

59:10

based on literally nothing, nothing at all.

59:12

It ruins people. Um,

59:14

I mean, the same thing in a different way is happening

59:16

with Q and on. Right, Like you have hundreds of families

59:18

at least that have been torn apart by this sort of stuff.

59:21

It's fucked it's super fucked um

59:24

and it kind of if you kind of look at

59:27

what happens with the book Michelle remembers

59:29

and how it helps both spark the satanic

59:31

panic and how it infests you know, this this

59:33

system for dealing with child to bease that we talked about, it's

59:35

almost like an infection that comes into it

59:38

and deal all these problems and it suddenly

59:40

become actively toxic. And yeah,

59:43

it did not stay limited to Kern County

59:45

out near Baker's Field. The case of the mccuon

59:47

and the Niffin families was just the beginning in nineteen

59:50

eighty three. Not long after there and after

59:52

their initial conviction Evince in another

59:54

part of southern California. We're about to take the nation

59:56

by storm. And next episode we're gonna

59:59

talk about the mcmah in preschool trial, which

1:00:01

is the longest, most expensive trial in US

1:00:03

history and one of the most fucked

1:00:05

up things I've ever read about in my entire life.

1:00:08

You're happy

1:00:08

to read, Uh,

1:00:17

you want to plug some ship. Yeah, it's

1:00:20

just the podcast right like Q Clearance is

1:00:22

out now obviously with you guys um.

1:00:24

Popular Front is always around popular Front

1:00:27

dot cr um. One thing I do want to say though,

1:00:29

is like, especially considering this copic, you

1:00:31

know, I've done a lot of research into like various

1:00:34

kind of child abuse scandals, and the

1:00:36

thing is like they do exist, and

1:00:38

even some of the more lurid insane stories

1:00:41

have happened for real, but on

1:00:43

a way that where it's like it's nowhere near

1:00:45

as ritualistic or movie like, you

1:00:48

know. So there's a great example that

1:00:50

people to look into, um, like the

1:00:52

Monster of Belgium, a guy called Mark the Troll,

1:00:54

and like he would just had this horrific kind

1:00:57

of child abuse scandal thing

1:00:59

where he was like snapping children for higher and

1:01:01

it involves like some of the most yeah,

1:01:04

involves some of the most high level politicians.

1:01:06

This isn't a conspiracy, like, but it's one

1:01:08

of the least known ones. Because stupid

1:01:11

stuff like this gets the hearing right,

1:01:13

the more sensational, the more easy

1:01:15

to understand. Satanic stuff is

1:01:17

what people are queuing on often put out. Meanwhile,

1:01:20

people are doing very dark things and it kind of goes

1:01:22

by the wayside because obviously real

1:01:24

life is a little bit more kind of intricate

1:01:27

and confusing, you know, and

1:01:29

it's it's a real shame. It's

1:01:31

this fucking thing that happens in the Satanic panic

1:01:33

too. Were like no, like we could all

1:01:36

there is a conspiracy to traffic

1:01:38

people who are legally children, rich

1:01:41

and doubtful. Like it absolutely happened, it

1:01:43

probably still is, but like focused on

1:01:45

that, not this is

1:01:47

not Michelle's whatever the hell, it's

1:01:49

cool. Well, it's weird. It's interesting to me

1:01:51

that like the things that go viral are always

1:01:53

like to focus on tiny, tiny kids, which are very

1:01:56

it's very uncommon for like two and three

1:01:58

and four year olds to be molested. It's

1:02:00

like it's like like yeah, it's

1:02:03

yeah, men fucking teenagers, right, Like

1:02:05

that's that's bad. It's

1:02:07

right terrible and it doesn't make it any

1:02:10

better. But again it's like this is

1:02:12

the issue, right, It's like when you have people

1:02:14

like t and On specifically, one of my biggest problems with

1:02:16

them is that they make people just go, oh,

1:02:18

that's just queue and on stuff, and a lot of it

1:02:20

is just nonsense doing on stuff. But in

1:02:23

between that, there's things that really need to be looked

1:02:25

out for the safe of the victims, you

1:02:27

know, and it's like, thanks, You've

1:02:29

completely destroyed any relevance because

1:02:31

you're making things up all the time. It's

1:02:35

yeah, I mean I get why, Like it just come out

1:02:37

the Virginia Jeffrey, I think her name is pronounced,

1:02:40

who's one of the Epstein victims,

1:02:43

and like she's the one I can't blame for

1:02:45

it because it's like, yeah, you were part of a giant sex

1:02:48

abuse like conspiracy, right,

1:02:50

and even that now it makes you think it's

1:02:53

like not to say you want to believe of it. Now

1:02:55

some people will just go, oh, exactly, I've

1:02:57

heard it to do with you, and they won't look any deep. It's

1:03:00

fun. It's all. Everything is horrible.

1:03:02

Um, thanks for listening to the podcast.

1:03:05

People. We'll

1:03:07

be back on Thursday with some of

1:03:10

the worst stories you've ever heard in your life. Yeah,

1:03:17

h h

1:03:23

h