Or the McMartin Preschool case?
“Buckey’s ordeal began in 1983, when the mother of a 2 1/2-year-old who attended the McMartin preschool in Manhattan Beach, Calif., called the police to report that her son had been sodomized there. It didn’t matter that the woman was eventually found to be a paranoid schizophrenic, and that the accusations she made — of teachers who took children on airplane rides to Palm Springs and lured them into a labyrinth of underground tunnels where the accused “flew in the air” and others were “all dressed up as witches” — defied logic. Satanic-abuse experts, therapists and social workers soon descended on the school and, with a barrage of suggestive, not to say coercive, questioning techniques (lavishly praising children who “disclosed,” telling those who denied the abuse that they were “dumb,” introducing salacious possibilities that children had never mentioned), produced increasingly elaborate and grotesque testimonials from young children at the school.
“Believe the children” was the sanctified slogan of the moment — but what it came to mean, all too often, was believe them unless they say they were not abused. It didn’t matter that no trace of the secret tunnels was ever found, that no physical evidence corroborated the charges (a black robe seized by the police as a Satanic get-up turned out to be Peggy’s graduation gown), that none of the kiddie porn the abusers were supposedly manufacturing ever turned up, despite an extensive investigation by the F.B.I. and Interpol, that no parents who stopped by during the day had ever noticed, say, the killing of a horse. It didn’t matter that most child abuse — which after all does exist in real and horrifying form — takes place not in day-care centers but in the home, indeed within the family. The prosecution charged forward nonetheless, with a seven-year trial that became the longest and, at a cost of $15 million, the most expensive criminal trial in American history. It resulted in not a single conviction, though seven people were charged in the McMartin case, on a total of 135 counts — just a series of deadlocks, acquittals and mistrials. Buckey served two years in jail, and her son, Raymond, served five. They spent their life’s savings on lawyers’ fees and in the end went “through hell” and “lost everything,” as she put it after her 1990 acquittal.
Yet even now, the legacy of McMartin and other cases like it (Wee Care in Maplewood, N.J.; Little Rascals in Edenton, N.C.; Fells Acres in Malden, Mass.) is with us. It’s with us — this is the sad part — in policies that discourage day-care workers and teachers from hugging children or from changing diapers without a witness, lest they be accused of something untoward. It is also with us — this is the good part — in improved methods of questioning young witnesses.”