The Satanic Panic In 1980s America
666 FilmsMichelle Remembers, the book that arguably kickstarted the Satanic Panic in the United States.
In 1980, Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and his psychiatric patient Michelle Smith published a book titled Michelle Remembers. In it, Pazder claimed to have used the (now discredited) “recovered-memory” therapy on Smith to uncover the truth of her past trauma.
According to Pazder, when Smith was a child, she had been the victim of “Satanic Ritual Abuse,” inflicted on her by a powerful Satanic cult.
The book helped spark a global moral panic as the public began to fret that Satanic cult members were walking among them, secretly inflicting their cruel will on the innocent. Soon, thousands of other unsubstantiated cases of ritual sex abuse were being reported around the world.
At its height, the Satanic Panic inspired parent groups to advocate against pop culture phenomena they deemed to be demonic, including Dungeons & Dragons and heavy metal and rock music.
The panic reached a boiling point during the McMartin Preschool trials.
In 1983, Judy Johnson, the mother of a young boy at McMartin Preschool in California, called the police to report that her son had been molested by a McMartin teacher named Ray Buckey. Police later released a letter to all McMartin Preschool parents, warning them that their children may have been abused at the school.
This caused a panic among parents, and before long, more allegations of child abuse and satanic rituals at the school surfaced. However, when professionals interviewed the children about possible abuse, they used inappropriate and leading questions to get them to concoct stories.
Meanwhile, Johnson’s claims grew increasingly outlandish. For instance, she claimed Buckey had made her son ride naked on a horse, and that Buckey had worn a Santa Claus costume during the abuse. In 1985, Johnson was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, but by that point, the case had already blown up in the media.
In the end, federal investigations into the school turned up zero evidence of ritual sex abuse. It appeared that the entire case had been an outbreak of mass hysteria. All charges were dropped in 1990, but the damage had been done. By 1984, the McMartin Preschool had permanently shut down, unable to salvage its reputation in the face of the scandal.
UCLA/CC BY 4.0Virginia McMartin, founder of the McMartin Preschool, appears in court.
According to the New York Times, some 200 people were arrested on charges related to Satanic activity during the Satanic Panic, and dozens were convicted, including the West Memphis Three in Arkansas.
But of the roughly 12,000 claims of ritual sex abuse made during this period, not a single one could be validated by the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect.
“The evidence wasn’t there, but the allegations of satanic ritual abuse never really went away,” Ken Lanning, a former FBI agent from the Behavioral Science Unit, told the New York Times. “When people get emotionally involved in an issue, common sense and reason go out the window. People believe what they want and need to believe.”
