Moral Panic

The Return of Moral Panic

A scholar tries-and fails-to rehabilitate the sex-abuse hysteria of the '80s.


The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology and the Sexual Abuse of Children, by Ross E. Cheit, Oxford University Press, 508 pages, $49.95

Twenty years ago, the elderly owner of the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California; her daughter, grandson, and granddaughter, who worked at the day care center; and three female teachers were charged with unspeakable crimes against children. The allegations, which included not just sadistic sexual abuse and the production of child pornography but Satanic rituals, became fodder for newspaper headlines and breathless TV reports. After a three-year trial that remains the longest and costliest in United States history, the case ended in 1990 without a single conviction.

By then, the panic about pedophile rings and devil-worshiping cultists lurking in child care centers had already spread nationwide, with dozens of new stories springing up from coast to coast. In one of the most sensational cases, 24-year-old Margaret Kelly Michaels, who had worked at Wee Care Nursery in Maplewood, New Jersey, was convicted in 1988 on 115 counts of molesting 20 children ages three to five.

Five years later, Michaels's conviction was overturned after appellate courts found that the children's testimony was hopelessly tainted by suggestive and coercive questioning. This ruling, the Brown University political scientist Ross Cheit writes in his new book, The Witch-Hunt Narrative, marked "a turning point" in the backlash against a perceived hysteria around child sexual abuse—"a major shift in the press, academia, and the courts." Under the new view, the day care child abuse cases of the 1980s were irrational witch hunts that swept up the innocent and victimized the very children they were purporting to protect. By the time the movie Indictment: The McMartin Trial aired on HBO in 1995 to near-universal acclaim, this perspective had gone fully mainstream.

Cheit sets out to provide a counter-backlash. While he admits that there was some "overreaction" and injustice to innocent people—including "five, possibly six, of the seven defendants" in the McMartin case—he argues that the "Satanic panic" hysteria is a myth rooted in exaggeration and distortion. His argument is twofold: first, that the number of cases involving outlandish claims of large-scale molestation with ritual-abuse aspect is too small to sustain the notion of a national witch hunt; second, that many of the defendants, including Michaels, were almost certainly guilty.


Take the McMartin case. In Cheit's view, the only male defendant, Raymond Buckey, really was a child molester, and his actions may have been abetted by his grandmother, McMartin Preschool owner Virginia McMartin. As proof, he points to allegedly strong medical evidence of abuse in several children, as well as what could be considered unusual sexual behavior by Buckey.

Regarding the former, Cheit himself acknowledges that "changes in medical knowledge that occurred between 1984 and the late 1980s" cast doubt on much of the expert testimony for the prosecution: It is now known that anal and genital inflammations and lacerations in young children, once believed to be clear signs of sexual abuse, also occur frequently in kids who were not abused. But he asserts that for several children, including three-year-old Matthew Johnson—whose mother, Judy Johnson, was the first parent to raise the alarm about alleged sexual abuse at the McMartin Preschool—examinations yielded "evidence that seems significant even with the benefit of advancements in medical knowledge" (emphasis added). At times, Cheit admits that this evidence is inconclusive and hopelessly compromised by overdiagnosis.

As for Raymond Buckey's suspicious behavior, it boils down to testimony that he often walked around preschool grounds wearing loose shorts and no underwear, resulting in occasional accidental exposure; that he was once seen reading Playboy "with kids on his lap"; and that neighbors sometimes saw him masturbating in his bedroom without turning the lights off or pulling the window shades down. (While Cheit writes that "several neighbors" mentioned this to the police, the notes cite a statement from just one couple.) All this may be inappropriate, but it is hardly enough to indicate that someone is a child molester.

Cheit severely undercuts his own credibility when he sets out to rebut the claim that "the McMartin case was started by the delusions of a crazy woman"—Judy Johnson, who died of alcohol poisoning in December 1986. Cheit concedes that by the summer of that year, Johnson was clearly unstable and paranoid. (He leaves out the fact that she was hospitalized for a psychotic episode much earlier, in March 1985.) But he argues that it was probably the McMartin case that brought on her mental instability, not the other way round. Says Cheit, "What is taken as an article of faith—that Judy Johnson was delusional from day one—is flatly contradicted by all of the available evidence."

As proof, Cheit invokes Glenn Stevens, the prosecutor who left the district attorney's office in January 1986 due to doubts about the McMartin case and gave extensive recorded interviews to screenwriters Abby and Myra Mann (the husband-and-wife team that went on to co-write Indictment) shortly thereafter. According to Cheit, Stevens told the Manns that Johnson had no mental health issues when she first reported her son's alleged abuse in August 1983 and was a "great" witness at the preliminary hearing in July 1984.

Yet in 1990, Stevens told the New York Times that "Judy Johnson was psychotic before she filed the first police report." And Cheit's insistence that "there is no evidence…that Johnson was mentally unstable" in August 1983 elides the fact that over the next several months, her allegations grew increasingly bizarre. By December, she was talking about children being taken to a car wash and a ranch to be molested. In February 1984, according to a deputy D.A.'s notes, her reports featured Satanic rituals in a church involving a goat, a lion, and the sacrifice of an infant whose blood her son was forced to drink; her son's ears, nipples, and tongue being stapled; and the claim that at some of the church orgies, Raymond Buckey "flew through the air."

In the Wee Care case, Cheit seeks to rebut the belief that the grotesque accusations against Kelly Michaels—who was said to have penetrated children with plastic utensils and made them perform oral sex, drink her urine, and eat her feces—were the product of an overzealous investigation in which kids were coaxed and badgered into disclosing abuse. (The panic was initially triggered by a little boy's comment, while having his temperature taken rectally by a nurse, that his teacher did this to him at school. Though he clarified that "her takes my temperature," his comment was taken as a reference to being sodomized.) While conceding that there were highly improper interrogations, Cheit argues that none of them involved children who actually testified at trial—and that a number of children did, in fact, make extremely damaging spontaneous disclosures and exhibit shocking sexualized behavior.

This contradicts the conclusions of the New Jersey State Superior Court, which clearly stated in its opinion overturning Michaels's conviction that all the children were exposed to improper influence—from investigators, parents, or classmates. According to the ruling, "The record of available interviews does not disclose that any of the children related their testimony of the alleged abuse by 'free recall.'" Cheit relies on parents' accounts of incriminating child statements and disturbing symptoms of abuse, but we only have his word that these accounts were not tainted by their context as well.

Yet Cheit's bias is evident throughout his counter-narrative. He is intent on reading something sinister into the fact that Michaels left her job at Wee Care shortly before the investigation began and into a teacher's testimony that Michaels once mentioned she wasn't wearing underwear. He mentions a psychologist's evaluation of Michaels as "sexually confused" without revealing that this determination was based largely on her possible homosexuality (Michaels had had some sexual experiences with women in college) as well as uncorroborated speculation about incest in her family. He omits the fact that, as Debbie Nathan reported in The Village Voice in 1988, a second expert who evaluated Michaels found "absolutely nothing" to suggest sexual pathology.

In a particularly deplorable innuendo, Cheit asserts that Michaels "wrote a 'poem' in her preschool roll book that contained arguably lurid lines" and that she was oddly evasive when asked about it. In the endnotes, he quotes only bits and pieces ("the smell of your flesh," "your body will leave me") on the grounds that the full text may be "copyright-protected by Kelly Michaels." He also says that this "strange" poem is quoted in Lisa Manshel's 1989 book Naptime, a pro-prosecution account of the Michaels case.

Intrigued, I ordered a copy of Naptime. Here is the poem in its entirety:

Are you
going about this
the wrong way?

He says what do you want?
I say, Hey, what did you say?

But I know
with the smell of your flesh, (I know)
in a flash as you dress
your body will leave me.

What's "lurid" and "strange" is the suggestion that this verse somehow incriminates Michaels as a likely child molester.

Cheit examines a number of other cases that have been described as day-care witch hunts (saving a major one, that of the Fells Acres Day Care Center in Massachusetts, for a future book). He claims that some of them don't fit the witch-hunt narrative at all because, for instance, they don't include allegations of Satanic rituals—even though, by that strict standard, the Michaels case doesn't fit the profile either. And he argues that while some of these cases did involve grave injustices to innocent defendants, most have strong evidence of guilt which the "narrative" leaves out.

I fact-checked, as best I could, one of his case summaries. It involved Sandra Craig, a Maryland-based preschool owner who was found guilty of molesting a six-year-old girl and was charged with abusing nearly a dozen more children (but never went to trial on those charges because her conviction was dismissed and the case collapsed). Not surprisingly, it turned out to be a hodgepodge of facts, half-truths, and evasions.

Cheit stresses that the prosecution's medical expert found several girls at the day care facility to have "remarkably consistent" vaginal scarring similar to the girl Craig was convicted of abusing. He doesn't mention that this testimony was called into question on appeal, or that the girl was discovered to have named other perpetrators at various times, or that other child witnesses recounted such implausible acts as being anally violated with a screwdriver and buried in a box. He mentions that Craig's teenage son, Jamal, was also accused of child molestation, but he leaves out the fact that it was Craig herself who called social services to report that a girl had complained of sexual abuse by Jamal. He says Craig's defenders hyped the claim that she killed a rabbit as alleged proof of a Satanic ritual element in the case, and that they neglected to acknowledge that there really was a rabbit at the preschool and that it died. But the existence of the rabbit—which is, in fact, brought up in one of the appellate briefs for the defense—hardly supports claims that Craig bludgeoned it to death in front of the preschoolers. That the children's fantasies had some link to reality doesn't make them any less fantastic.

Do all these cases add up to a nationwide witch hunt? Cheit scoffs at claims of hundreds or even thousands of hysteria-driven child abuse cases. But even if there have been some exaggerated estimates, he ignores or brushes aside compelling evidence that the day-care sex abuse/ritual abuse panic in the 1980s (and even the early 1990s) was very real. While Cheit acknowledges the media hype surrounding the issue, he makes only passing mentions of the Los Angeles County Ritual Abuse Task Force, which he admits "followed dozens of 'leads.'" He does not mention the congressional hearings on the subject, or investigations such as the one conducted by University of California-Davis psychologist Gail Goodman for the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect. In a sample of nearly 7,000 psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers who returned a questionnaire Goodman and her team sent out, 11 percent had encountered alleged ritual abuse allegations involving child victims and 13 percent had encountered cases of adults who believed they were survivors of ritual abuse. None of those cases could be substantiated.

Cheit almost completely ignores the phenomenon of adult "survivors" discovering, usually in therapy, "repressed memories" of childhood sexual abuse. Yet this was closely related to the child abuse hysteria, and it generated equally lurid and bizarre allegations. Nor does he acknowledge non-day-care cases in which such claims resulted in lengthy investigations, arrests, or even convictions. Ray and Shirley Souza, an elderly Massachusetts couple, were convicted of molesting their two granddaughters in 1993, based on fantastic accusations first elicited in therapy, and remained under house arrest until the sentence ended in 2002. In Pennsylvania in 1991, Richard and Cheryl Renee Althaus were charged with abusing their daughter Nicole, a troubled teen who had fallen under the influence of a teacher obsessed with the Satanic peril; eventually, Nicole began to claim that her parents were cult members and had used her to breed babies for sacrifice. (The case fell apart after FBI agents were brought in to look into the girl's allegations of kidnapping and homicide. Not surprisingly, they quickly realized these were fabrications.)

If it sounds like Cheit has an agenda to push, that may be because he does. In the preface, he claims that his personal interest in the subject stems mainly from his volunteer work with convicted sex offenders. But there is a more personal dimension, too: As a boy, he was molested by the administrator of a summer camp (who later corroborated the abuse in a taped telephone conversation). These experiences faded from Cheit's memory for years until he read a book on sexually abused boys. In his discussion of Cheit's story in the 1995 book Victims of Memory, journalist Mark Pendergrast notes that it's far from clear whether Cheit actually repressed the memory and whether he believes massive repression of memories is possible. Nonetheless, in the 1990s, Cheit emerged as a vocal polemicist against critics of the recovered-memory phenomenon.

The Witch-Hunt Narrative is a continuation of this crusade, with Debbie Nathan—whose reporting played a major role in the exoneration of Kelly Michaels—as Cheit's principal bête noire. (Nathan says that she provided Cheit, at his request, with important materials for his research. Her name does not appear in the acknowledgements.)

Cheit believes the witch-hunt narrative has harmed society, arguing that it has encouraged a dismissive and skeptical attitude toward children's reports of sexual abuse. Yet some of the cases he cites as proof of this dismissiveness ended in convictions that were upheld on appeal. Several times, Cheit returns to the cover-up of Pennsylvania State University football coach Jerry Sandusky's molestation of children as emblematic of our culture's failure to take child abuse seriously enough. But the Penn State fiasco had nothing to do with mistrusting children's claims and everything to do with bureaucratic incompetence and willful blindness to the misdeeds of a high-status local hero.

It is ironic, or perhaps symbolic, that this book has arrived in the midst of a new wave of sex-crime hysteria. Just recently, in the impassioned debate over the sexual molestation charges against Woody Allen, such feminists as Jessica Valenti and Roxanne Gay revived the call to "believe the survivor." The same mind-set also appears in the current campus climate of pressure to accept virtually all allegations of sexual assault regardless of evidence. Despite Cheit's attempted debunking, the lesson of the witch-hunts still stands: Emotion-driven, faith-based crusades against repellent crimes are a grave danger to justice.

NEXT: School Shooter Targeted Own Cousins


  1. Why does Reason hate the children?

    1. Because they are parasites and wreckers (of nice things)?

      1. They don’t smoke pot and have butt sex – unless they’re being ritually abused.

  2. Very good article. Personally, I would not shed a tear if we exterminated any “adult” (20+) who sexually assaults a kid under 12, but our natural rage against the perpetrators of these disgusting crimes, coupled without our passion to defend innocent children, makes most of us (including me) imperfect judges of the often horrific, nauseating allegations. In child sex abuse cases, we must be damn certain of guilt before we convict. Also, when a 16-year-old cheerleader is screwing a 15-year-old quarterback (with his enthusiastic consent), it’s not child molestation, it’s high school.

    1. And if we did execute such people, what standard of proof would we require? Whatever one we pick, if it isn’t one hell of a lot better than “A large assortment of self-described child advocates have their panties in a bunch” we are going to end up murdering the innocent.

      The Childcare Abuse hysteria should have been stopped cold the first time the prosecutors brought to trial a batch of charges that were physically improbable. It didn’t. A large swath of the people responsible should be in jail, and aren’t.

      1. The charges in the McMartin case, which I believe kicked off the hysteria, where so ridiculous that it’s hard to believe anyone took them seriously to begin with.

        1. According to the movie, one of the kids identified Chuck Norris as a co-conspirator in the McMartin case.

          1. The also said that the teacher killed rabbits and human infants in satanic rituals, that Ray routinely pranced around the school in a superman cape and santa claus outfit, that the kids were taken to a zoo and molested by lions and tigers and bears; and that Judy Johnson’s kid was trampled by an elephant at one of the zoo orgies.

            1. There was ample evidence that Judy Johnson molested her own kid. That was about it for the physical evidence in that case.

              1. I thought it was her ex husband molesting the kid. No?


            Evidence from the prosecution

        2. I went to McMartin, and was interviewed as part of the case. My parents let the interview go on for about 5 minutes before they figured out it was bullshit.

          90% of the parents came to the same conclusion. The other 10%? It was just sad. It became part of their identity. 20 years later, there were still bumper stickers in the community that said “we believe the children”….

          1. Were there any that said “If you believe the children, you are nucking futs?

            1. Radio talk host Bob Grant kept saying he believed the NJ case was real.

              1. And airheads on MSNBC believe in Global Warming …. and probably the immaculate conception of Barak Obama, and the Easter Bunny.

          2. Did they ever get the fork out of your ass? The one they stuck up there on the space ship when you were playing “naked movie star” Or maybe that was the Little Rascals daycare in Edenton, NC.


      I’m confused why you are even using the qualifier “under 12”. So it’s better if a 13 year old, or for that a matter even a 30 year old is being sexually assaulted?

      Are you implying, if someone touched my penis when I was 11, and then someone savagely anally raped me when I was 13, the savage anal raping at age 13 would clearly be least severe of the two incidents?

      The person who merely touched my penis when I was 11 should be put to death, but the savage anal rapist who raped me when I was 13 should get a lesser punishment?

      1. I am cool with executing the adult who anal raped you @ 13. Sorry to hear about your pain. Hope your assailant is long dead and roasting in hell now. You seem to be asking: Is raping a 12 year old worse than raping a 13 year old? Yes, a tad worse in my book. Kind of like how I believe murdering 26 people is a bit worse than murdering 25. Do I assert that one who attacks an 11 year old deserves “more” killin’ than the attacker of a 10 year old? Nah. If you can prove guilt, I say exterminate ’em both ASAP. If you raped an 18 year old, you are a terrible criminal but not a child molester.

        1. Tommy,
          Beware. Plopper has a rep, shall we say.

        2. I wasn’t implying I was actually anally raped. I was speaking hypothetically.

          My point is that there is a difference in severity between being groped and being brutally anally raped, a much bigger difference than age.

  3. “our culture’s failure to take child abuse seriously enough”


    Because I missed the part where ritual child abusers were being celebrated… well, except for Michael Jackson.

    1. And Roman Polanski.

      1. Oh, right.

        Does the former president fingerbanging cow-faced interns more than half his age qualify as something we also failed to take seriously enough?

        1. I’ll be talking about it plenty come 2016. Especially if the feminists get involved in Hillary’s campaign.

        2. The problem there wasn’t really child molestation. The problem there was the the Leader Of The Free World (?) is supposed to do better, mistress-wise, than banging the help. I mean, when JFK was porking Marilyn Monroe he was taking advantage of a woman with the emotional maturity of a six-year-old, but she was the National Sex Symbol. It looked better.

        3. Hey now! The electorate spoke. And they wanted four more years of President Date Rape.

  4. I wonder if Kathleen Morris, once a prosecutor in Minnesota cracked on child abuse, showed up in the book. Here’s the Chicago Tribune on Ms. Morris’s prosecutorial technique.

    Panel`s Report Rips Sex-case Prosecutor


  5. While I have no personal knowledge of Rosse Cheat fucking goats the rumors of his goat fucking are so widespread that they must contain a kernel of truth

    1. B-a-a-a-a-h humbug.

    2. Many people have commented on it. I’ve yet to hear credible denials. It seems, well, it just seems…

  6. The media, Oprah and Nancy Grace types play a significant role in stoking panics – not just regarding child sexual abuse.

    Remember JonBenet Ramsey? Her parent were basically convicted in the court of public opinion because she participated in pageants. Another twist on the same theme.

  7. Fun fact: Judy Johnson the psycho that started the McMartin witch hunt also accused Ray Buckey of repeatedly breaking into her home and sodomizing her dog.

    1. She made quite a few accusations.…..2_1_12.htm

  8. A friend of mine had their life ruined by false molesting charges.

    His wife left him and took their daughter to another town. She went to work for a law firm. One summer he had custody of the daughter. At simmers end she went home and all was well. During the summer a school yard friend of hers was actually molested. The little girl became jealous of all the adult attention her friend was getting so she told her teacher that her dad did that to her also and the hunt was on.

    The lawyer that the ex was fucking helped the ex to crucify my friend. With zero proof his life was ruined and he was broken both financialy and spiritually. Mutual friends, (real friends, the others deserted him ) kept him on informal suicide watch during one particular bad spell.

    People who make false molestation accusations and the “therapist” who aide and abet leading testimoney from innocent children should be hung and quartered. That punishment is too good though for the gung ho prosecutors who make it all possible. My mind isn’t evil enough to think up an approtiate punishment for them.

    1. I can’t agree more. don’t forget politicians who try to ride to fame on the names of dead white girls. and the parents of dead/disappeared children, who make a name for themselves off of what was perpetrated upon their children. is a special place in hell for them too.

  9. I believe Janet Reno rode to the USAG office on crap like this

    1. Martha Coakley, currently running for MA Governor, is one of the people who helped brainwash the Fells Acres children into believing they had been molested.

      Anybody not hired by the government who treated the children this way would be considered a pervert and offender of the worst order. But when the government does it, it’s virtuous.

  10. my co-worker’s half-sister makes $81 /hour on the computer . She has been out of a job for 5 months but last month her pay check was $17027 just working on the computer for a few hours. visit here…


    1. And she molests children on camera for a paycheck? I mean, that’s the only connection to the thread that I can see?..

      1. The above post was a reply the the ubiquitous “making money on her laptop” spam, which struck me as even less appropriate than usual for this thread. Now it seems to have been removed.

        Not before time.

        1. I like it the way it is.

        2. “Now it seems to have been removed.”

          New policy? It’d be nice.

  11. my co-worker’s mother makes $71 /hr on the laptop . She has been unemployed for 9 months but last month her payment was $17334 just working on the laptop for a few hours. published here


  12. My roomate’s aunt makes $71 /hour on the laptop . She has been out of a job for six months but last month her income was $12021 just working on the laptop for a few hours.
    You can try this out. ?????

  13. Why would someone at Oxford University Press defile their brand (previously associated with a highly regarded History of the United States series) with a bag of refuse that no reputable American publisher would touch?

    It quite likely is a matter of internal British politics: some over there are trying to stir up a “moral panic” of their own with some true charges against deceased celebrities and sometimes more debatable charges against present-day figures.…..1404743166

  14. Cathy Young nails it. Also recommended: this point-by-point rebuttal to Cheit by Debbie Nathan and the National Center for Reason and Justice:…..-rebuttal/

    I blog about the Little Rascals Day Care case and other episodes from the SRA moral panic at littlerascalsdaycarecase dot org

    At least one victim of the day-care panic is still imprisoned — after 27 years!…../16364569/

  15. Does Ross Cheit, as Young suggests, have “an agenda to push” either because of his volunteer work with convicted sex offenders or because he was molested by an admitted sex offender at a summer camp? If so, then does Mark Pendergrast, cited here by Young, have an agenda to push as a father accused of incest? Do we call Cheit a “vocal polemicist” for establishing a website listing corroborated recovered memory cases? In the “impassioned debate” Young refers to here, might there also be a parallel call by some to “believe the accused”?

    1. The negative labels stick to Cheit only because of the systematic dishonesty of his book as shown by Cathy Young here and Debbie Nathan at the NCRJ site. In contrast, Pendergrast’s work has held up well under examination.

      Nathan, a principal target of Cheit’s book, does not put her reputation behind a claim of innocence without careful and skeptical examination of court records and other original materials.



  17. This writer says, ” It is now known that anal and genital inflammations and lacerations in young children, once believed to be clear signs of sexual abuse, also occur frequently in kids who were not abused.”
    Sure, defense attorneys for accused child molesters might say this. But it’s not enough to toss out, “It is now known.” Find the study that backs this up, read beyond the abstract to make sure the data support the abstract, then cite it.

    1. A bracing real-life example of a physician acknowledging and acting on advances in abuse diagnosis:

      “…. The only physical evidence to suggest Christy might have been abused came in the form of testimony from a then-novice emergency room doctor, Michael Mouw, who examined Christy in August of 1991. At the couple’s [Fran and Dan Keller] trial just more than a year later, Mouw told jurors that he found deformities to Christy’s genital area that could have been caused by sexual abuse. When he was contacted by the [Austin] Chronicle… Mouw said that not long after he testified against the Kellers, he realized that what he thought were injuries were in fact ‘normal variants’ of female genitalia. He said he had been trained in medical school and in the ER to have a pro-police/prosecution bias, and that with the training and experience he’s gained in the intervening years, he knows now not only that he was wrong about what he thought he saw, but also that he was not qualified in 1991 to conduct a pediatric sexual assault exam or to draw any conclusions about whether abuse had taken place….”


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