Robert Evans and Jake Hanrahan trace the Satanic Panic's lineage from 177 AD Lyon blood libels to modern QAnon, highlighting how the 1973 CAPTA Act prioritized family unity over victim safety. They detail the CSATUP program's flawed "Godfather offer," which boosted false confessions to 90% by blaming mothers for abuse, alongside Dr. Robert Summit's accommodation syndrome that invalidated children's fabricated stories. The hosts critique how debunked claims like Michelle Remembers and coerced testimonies in Bakersfield cases destroyed lives, arguing that sensationalized ritual abuse narratives overshadow real crimes while tearing apart families through unverified conspiracy theories. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Helping With The QAnon Podcast00:04:29
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
How much away, Wanda, right now?
About 130.
I'm at 183.
We should race.
No, I want to leave here with my original hips.
On the podcast, The Match Up with Aaliyah, I pair prominent female athletes with unexpected guests.
On a recent episode, I sat down with undisputed boxing champ Clarissa Shields and comedian Wanda Sykes to talk about Wanda's new movie, Undercard, The Art of Trash Talk, and What It Really Means to Be Ladylike.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search the matchup with Aaliyah, and listen now.
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Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists, we have an incredible new episode this week for you guys.
We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.
They put on Lizzie McGuire at 2 a.m. video on Demand This Guide's Player.
2 a.m.
2 a.m., whatever time it is.
Lizzie McGuire and I'm watching.
Wild Match.
It was like a first closet moment for me where I was like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
No, no, no.
I was like, she's beautiful.
I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
I'm not like.
Listen to Las Co Triestas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
You know the famous author Roald Dahl.
He thought up Willie Wonka and the BFG.
But did you know he was a spy?
Neither did I. You can hear all about his wildlife story in the podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl.
All episodes are out now.
Was this before he wrote his stories?
It must have been.
What?
Okay, I don't think that's true.
I'm telling you, the guy was a spy.
Binge all 10 episodes of The Secret World of Roald Dahl now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Iris Palmer, host of the Against All Odds podcast.
Every week, I'm sitting down with exceptional people who have broken barriers even when the odds were stacked against them.
Like chef Victor Villa of VS Tacos.
You know the pequero from the Bad Bunny halftime show?
It was great.
It was a big moment.
It was special.
And I felt like I was really representing my family, you know, my brand, my city.
I was representing all taqueros, not only of like, you know, the US, but of Mexico and beyond.
All the taqueros of the world.
Listen to Against All Odds on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
What?
Alleging networks of child abuse that don't really exist.
My entire world now.
Jesus Christ, that was a bad introduction.
Thank you, Sophie.
Thank you for your relentless positivity.
This is Behind the Bastards.
I'm Robert Evans, and my guest today is my friend and colleague, Jake Hanrahan.
Jake, how you doing, man?
Good.
Thank you, mate.
Thank you for having me on again.
Yeah, and you, Jake, you have a podcast now.
Another podcast.
You've always had a podcast.
Another one.
Yeah, man.
This new one we're doing, Q Clearance.
Sophie's been helping me with a podcast about QAnon and about, you know, the searching for the person or persons behind it, right?
Yeah, trying to kind of lay it out for people that are not 100% familiar as well.
Like, I kind of realized that a lot of the QAnon media is very focused on either like for QAnon people or it's kind of for the community they're researching it.
I kind of wanted to bring everybody together to be like, let's make everyone understand it.
You know what I'm saying?
So, and so far, so good.
You know, Jake, I admire what you're doing.
I think it's important.
And I wanted to help you out.
And the way I wanted to help you out was by lending a bit of historical context.
Because what we have with QAnon, I think it's fair to say in brief, is like a massive almost now international delusion about networks of satanic child murderers and traffickers, right?
Have you figured it out yet, Jake?
Have you figured out it?
QAnon is not the first time this happened.
And today, Jake, we're going to talk about the satanic panic.
Okay.
I couldn't have guessed that one, man.
No, it's interesting.
It's interesting.
It's perfect for me.
Thank you so much.
I just can't believe you haven't listened to episode two of Q Clearance, where we talk about satanic panic.
This is so much to it.
Accusing Marginalized Groups Of Evil00:15:33
It was enormous.
I didn't know most of this stuff when I started reading about it.
It's a fucking nightmare.
And you're going to hate this episode.
I hated writing it.
It involved a lot of reading lurid, lengthy stories of child molestation that never happened, but that children were convinced had happened to them, which is somehow, yeah, more disturbing almost than actual child molestation.
Like the idea that like a kid.
People convincing them it happened to them, right?
Yeah.
Like, why would you make someone feel the worst thing ever if they didn't actually feel it?
You know, it's completely fucked.
So I can't believe this is what you picked for Jake.
Exactly.
Yeah, I can't believe that this is what you're doing.
Yeah, we're going to talk about some fun shit.
We're going to talk about Dungeons and Dragons.
We're going to talk about the West Memphis 3.
We're going to talk about the McMartin preschool scandal.
It's going to be fucking terrible.
But first, we're going to go back in time a little bit, Jake, because the ideological soil that QAnon and the Satanic Panic grew in didn't start with either of those things.
So let's talk about 177 AD or CE or whatever we're supposed to say, Europe.
Let's talk about that.
This is about, you know, 177 AD is about a century or so before Emperor Constantine was like, you know, brought Christianity to the Roman Empire and stuff.
So things are still pretty pagan in Roman society, but Christianity exists and the pagans do not like it.
They've got these like weird people who are kind of on the fringes of society and they start making up shit about them.
So in the city of Lyon in modern day France, rumors started spreading that members of the Christian community there were secretly raping and cannibalizing their own children.
Angry and probably drunken mobs of pagan Romans chased the Christian community out of their homes, beat them, stoned them, and tortured their household slaves until the slaves admitted that their masters had been eating and molesting babies.
With confessions in hand, the mob then massacred the entire Christian community of Lyon.
Back when Europe was cool, basically.
Yeah, fucking rad as hell.
So that massacre was an example of what anthropologists call demoniology.
So not demonology, demon O I O G Y.
And yeah, the authors of Satan's Silence, which is, have you read that book?
It's fucking incredible.
Satan's Silence.
Yeah, it's really good.
The defining work of the Satanic Panic era.
And the authors of that book define demoniology as the narrative specific to every culture that identifies the ultimate evil threatening the group.
During periods of social turmoil and moral crisis, societal preoccupation with its demoniology intensifies.
So in pagan Rome, the ultimate evil was like the ultimate outsiders, the Christians at this point, like the people saying, no, there's only one God, right?
So they get demonized and people start telling stories about them molesting and murdering children.
Now, once Christianity became the dominant religion in Europe, its adherents found their own evil to oppress in the way that they'd once been oppressed.
In the 12th century, a myth began to spread across the English countryside initially about Jewish rabbis murdering Christian babies.
This quickly spread all over Europe and you start having this, like it's still around always Jews, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah, of course.
Yeah, they're always, yeah.
This is kind of like was an early meme and it spread that way around Europe and like pamphlets and even like there you can still find churches in Europe that like in stained glass reliefs will have like images of what's called the blood libel, rabbis murdering Christian babies to make matzah.
Yeah.
And it's the same kind of thing, right?
Myths that this group of social outsiders is gathering up and murdering and probably molesting children.
And Christians like killed so many Jews during this period as a result of the spread of this myth that later during the Reformation, there weren't like any Jewish people left in a lot of communities.
So they had to find a new ultimate evil inside their community to go after.
And this is where we get the witch hunts, right?
Like everybody knows vaguely the story.
And these they took different forms over the centuries, but the gist of the threat was always the same.
Satan is real and he's trying to destroy our community via some member on the fringe of our community who's working with the devil, right?
Like that's the idea.
And it happens a bunch of times.
It happens in Europe.
It happens obviously in the United States.
You get the Salem witch trials and you have different groups of people targeted, right?
Sometimes it's midwives.
Sometimes it's just like members of the community like in Salem who start accusing each other of things.
And kind of one of the things that always marks witch hunts is that like there may be initially a specific group that's targeted, but once your real good witch hunt gets going, pretty much everyone winds up accusing everybody, right?
Like that's what we do.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I remember reading a weird story where like a guy like pronounced something like differently to the rest of the town and they were just like, yeah, he's a witch.
Yeah, exactly.
There was no escape.
You know, people go fucking, it is one of those things.
You know, I'm a, I'm a pretty staunch fan of the concept of democracy.
But man, reading too much about witch hunts makes you like, oh, shit.
I don't know.
We're going to hit well.
Fuck.
They all voted to kill him.
They voted.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Drown him.
Go.
It's not good.
Yeah.
So once the United States became a thing, it showed a marked talent for witch hunts.
And I have to say, like, y'all over in Europe and shit can do some pretty good witch hunts, but the USA, like, whew, we are good at mass murdering each other over rumors of the devil.
Witch hunts on steroids, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
We're fucking great at it.
Of course, like, we, you know, Jewish people got blamed for a variety of things, but also Catholics.
During the 1830s and 40s, Protestants in America were so frightened of Catholics that rumors started to spread about nuns consorting with the devil and molest murdering a bunch of little kids.
I'm going to quote again from Satan's Silence here because this is some shit that sounds exactly like the shit happening now.
Several books were written by women claiming to be ex-nuns who had escaped from convents where they witnessed orgies, torture, witchcraft, and the slaughter of infants.
One account was so popular that in the years before the Civil War, its sales were surpassed only by Uncle Tom's cabin.
During this same period, ex-nuns and priests, real or feigned, made a handsome living touring the country and testifying about the slaughter of innocents at the hands of mothers, superior, and bishops.
It's the same fucking thing.
Like they're going around and making money off it.
You've got like fucking praying medic types in 1840.
It's fucking funny, though.
It's like late the Catholics did do a lot of bad shit to the kids.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah.
But not the devil's stuff.
Yeah, no.
And like, yeah, you have to assume that some of this started from like, well, yeah, a bunch of fucking priests are molesting kids.
Right?
Just like, just throwing the devil as well.
Like, why not?
Yeah, they're eating them as well.
Okay.
Yeah, now they're eating them.
Yeah.
My peoples, man.
Yeah.
So that's kind of the backstory of this really weirdly consistent thing that humans do, which is accuse groups on the margins of murdering and molesting children.
Right.
It's like very consistent that it's always like, if you're going to really demonize a group, you accuse them of going after little kids.
And it's, it goes back way more than a thousand years.
I think it's like the ultimate evil, right?
Like it's the worst thing you can do, like harm a kid.
Exactly.
So it's like, let's go with that.
Yeah, let's fucking go with that.
Now, we're going to have to cover a lot of other backstory in the United States before we actually get to the satanic panic, because the reason that the satanic panic was able to get so bad and the reason that like, one of the things you have with the satanic panic is you have all of these like lurid stories of devil worship and these kids testifying that they've been raped because they've had false memories implanted in them and stuff, and all of that was only possible because of a shitload of things that happened in the United States that made it the perfect soil for something like this.
So we're going to explain kind of all of the different things that made it possible first.
So one factor in the satanic panic being a thing that could happen was the fact that, starting with our old buddy Lron Hubbard in the 1950s, cults started to get super mainstream in the United States in the 1960s and 70s.
Um, and one of the ones that like got the most public perception was the MAN cult, which carried out a string of grisly murders in august of 1969.
The most famous Manson killing was the murder of Sharon Tate, Abigail Folder and several other less famous people.
I think they killed five people at once in this like big compound that was like Roman Polanski's house but he was out at the time and these murders were incredibly grisly and they had elements that police at the time described as ritualistic.
I don't know that they actually were ritualistic murders, but it was described as ritualistic murder.
So you have these cults.
There's that great book right Chaos, by Uh O'neal, and it just dispels all of that like it was just it was again.
It's part of the satanic panic.
They just rolled with it.
Even exactly Satan stuff was yeah yeah, and it is bullshit, but people at the time believe it.
So you've got suddenly number one cults are all over the place um, and then you've got this cult murdering people.
And then in the 1970s you get the Zodiac killer and the Son Of Sam and the Alphabet killer, and all of these were mass murderers whose slayings had like weird ritualistic and occult seeming overtones to them.
So people start to like get like really convinced that that this is a thing that actually happens.
Right, that like it like.
And they have some.
You know, if you are a person who reads the news in this period, you've got what you think is solid evidence that this is a problem, that there's ritualistic cults out there, murdering people for occult, you know purposes.
Um now, the 1970s also happened to be the decade where Satanism went.
I don't know, mainstream is probably saying too much, but it became like.
It became like an organized thing, right.
Anton Levee publishes the Satanic Bible in 1969, which became the central text for the Church OF Satan, which probably had its heyday in the 1970s.
Now the reality is that the Satanic Bible was both largely plagiarized and more Or less just a self-help book with an edgy wrapping to it.
This did not stop people who hadn't read it from flipping the fuck out.
So, the Church of Satan, again, fundamentally pretty peaceful thing, has maybe 5,000 members in the U.S. at its height during this period.
But all of this shit happening, like, you know, with the Mansons and with these ritual murders, and then all the shit that's happening in Hollywood in terms of like the movies that are coming up kind of cooks it into the center of a conspiracy.
So, in 1973, you have the best-selling novel, The Exorcist, adapted into a film.
We all know about The Exorcist, big part of it is demonic possession.
Um, and in order to improve ticket sales, its producers claimed that it was based on a true story, which was a lie.
Um, they were like some elements were taken all out of a story of an actual priest who had an ex an exorcism, but like it had bore no resemblance to anything that happened in the book.
A priest once existed, true.
Yeah, yeah, a priest once existed, and he was a little off.
Yeah, um, demonic possession hadn't been a massive topic in American culture in this period.
Um, but after The Exorcist, it becomes like a huge topic of discussion.
For one thing, there's hundreds of like movies that come out that are based on like similar premises, right?
The thing that hall that like little bitty, shitty B-movie producers always do, like, they rip off the big popular movie.
Um, and for most Americans, obviously, this just meant that we got a bunch of fun horror movies that involved demonic possession.
But among the nascent Christian right, which in this period was starting to form into a political bloc for the first time in the United States, The Exorcist was seen as a deadly warning.
This was helped along by a new species of evangelical Christian grifter, uh, themselves inspired by the Church of Satan, the fake former Satanist.
So, you start having former former Satanists, kind of like these former Catholic nuns popping up in this period and lecturing about things they had supposedly done.
Now, the most prominent of these guys was Mike Warnke, who published his book Satan's Cellar in 1972.
Uh, Satan Seller recounted a childhood and young adulthood that Warnke claimed had been spent like as a hardcore devil worshiper.
He claimed that he'd been a satanic high priest and that he'd been involved in ritualistic sex orgies.
He went into detail about ritual murders, child murder, and mass rape, claiming that he'd participated in a variety of capital offenses until Jesus saved him by sending him to Vietnam.
Um, that's what he saved him, Mike, yeah.
Wow, what a horrible guy, a bit grim in it.
Yeah, there were a lot of Satanists back in the 60s and 70s.
We had to get them all off the nom to clear that shit out.
Um, yeah, it's pretty wild because all of these guys, like Warnke would, like, they would all claim to have taken part in like serious crimes that never got investigated.
So, you'd think people would be like, you said you murdered a bunch of babies, like, no, oh, like, yeah, he just admitted it in writing.
Like, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it just all feeds into itself, right?
Absolutely, it does.
And Warnke, Mike Warnke, is kind of the biggest person, like, who starts this avalanche.
And he's within the bubble of Christian media, which was a lot smaller back then.
He was a huge celebrity.
And he actually cracked over into the mainstream to an extent.
He showed up on Oprah on Larry King and on 2020 telling lurid stories about his supposed past as a devil worshipper.
He also used his past as a Satanist to launch a career as a Christian stand-up comedian.
Whoa, that's so American.
I love it.
Yeah, it's incredibly American.
I couldn't come up with a better like backstory.
Yeah, it's very funny.
Now, for reasons I will never be able to explain, Warnke saw massive success, hybridizing his stand-up routine with his claims about child sex abuse and Satanism, which led to some really baffling recordings, like the one I'm about to play you, from his 1989 stand-up routine, Do You Hear Me?
In it, he starts with incredibly lame jokes, and I'm going to play you a selection of his jokes just so you can get an idea of what the tenor of his stand-up act is like.
You told me this is going to be a Christian thing, and I can tell you right now, that boy up there on stage, he is not a Christian because he's got that long hair.
Why do people drive on parkways and park on driveways?
What is daylight savings time?
And if we're saving so much of it, who's got it all?
How do you know when yogurt's gone bad?
How do you get Teflon to stick to a skillet when nothing sticks to Teflon?
I'm not hearing you laugh, Jake.
Do you not enjoy his comedy?
I mean, you know, when at Christmas, you get like a joke and a cracker.
Like, it's that level of like you just turn cracker jokes into like stand-up.
God, that's bad.
He looks like he just, I don't know, man.
He looks actually kind of like the devil worshiper from like True Detectives.
You know what I mean?
He does look like a Satanist, right?
Like, like a movie Satanist, not a no offense to the actual Satanists in the audience.
You would cast him as one, right?
Yeah, like this guy looks evil.
Yeah.
And he definitely, so like, you've got those jokes, which are like the most milquetoast nonsense that you could possibly put in a stand-up routine.
And then in the middle of them, he starts talking about deadly serious anecdotes about ritual genital mutilation and sacrifice.
And again, this is in the middle of a stand-up set to a bunch of kids.
Christian kids.
Yeah, Christian kids and their families.
I'm talking about a little girl who was murdered last year, 1987, in the state of Louisiana by having her sexual organs cut out while she was still alive.
Ritual Sacrifice And False Blood00:02:24
A lot of you think that when a Satanist kills, they do so because they want to spill blood.
You've seen enough late-night movies to think that.
But if a Satanist or any other kind of occultist kills an animal or a human sacrifice, it's not to spill blood.
It's to release the life force.
Because when the life force is released and you've done the right incantations and rituals, you can absorb that force, they say, and it makes you a stronger wizard, warlock, or whatever.
Wizard.
And the longer the death, the more long the death, and the more agonizing the death, the more force is released.
So they took this little girl and they killed her by cutting her sexual organs out while she was still alive.
Yeah.
Okay.
Great comedy set.
Really?
Yeah.
Great to lighten the mood.
You know, I've done some stand-up.
I have friends who did it.
That's a definite choice in terms of how to end your set.
Yeah.
Oh, by the way, the killer got cut up and it was me.
Like, Jesus Christ.
Let me lie.
So he's saying he's a part of all this, right?
Yeah.
It's fucking complete nonsense, right?
Because this person goes, why isn't he being investigated?
And I mean, you listen to that, though, and like the audience is deadly quiet.
You have to assume they were all buying this shit.
Like they seem to be taking him very seriously.
And he was taken very seriously, which is a problem because he was a preposterous liar.
Actual journalists sat down with Warnke's family and friends to ask them about his claims, which included the fact that he'd lived in a witch's coven with 1,500 other people and that he'd been a horrible drug addict.
And all of his like family, everyone who knew him laughed at all of this.
Like, of course, like, we fucking grew up with him.
He's like, he was just a nerd.
He's just a nerd, exactly.
And there were a bunch of obvious holes in his story.
For example, he claimed that Charles Manson had attended one of his deadly ritual sacrifice parties in 1966.
Unfortunately, the exact time that he claimed the party happened occurred during concurrent occurred at the same time as one of Manson's stints in federal prison from a parole violation.
So he like could not have been there.
There's actually a whole book that like was published proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Warnke was a liar.
And in fairness, the journalists who did it were two Christian journalists who worked for like an evangelical news site who were like, this guy is like fucking full of shit, clearly.
Flawed Remedies For Child Abuse00:11:02
And we have to get it.
You know, there's nothing wrong with Christians.
It's like this guy's literally even taking advantage of like evangelicals, you know?
Exactly.
He's, he's grifting these people by scaring them.
Like, it's very horrible what he's doing.
Not only is his comedy bad, but he's, he's frightening people.
And it's bad to frighten people for no reason, I would say.
Yeah.
So.
Unless it's funny.
Unless it's fun.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, absolutely.
It's funny that he's not.
He's absolutely not.
Yeah.
But yeah, the fact that Warnke was like, he had a private jet at one point.
Like the, he's, he was, or at least he claimed he had a private jet.
I don't know, but he was very popular.
Like it in, he was a huge deal for a while.
Now, right around the same time Warnke was starting to preach about ritual satanic murder, which is again, in the midst of all these cults and zodiac killers and shit, something else was happening in American society.
People were starting to accept that child sexual abuse was a thing and was a major problem, which is a good thing, right?
Obviously.
And for a long time, like people, you know, it is one of those things when you go back in time, like there were, it was kind of, people really didn't give as much of a shit about kids as you might expect back in the day.
It was the same in the UK, actually.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, people are like, oh, we used to just let our kids out and play anytime you could do that back then, like as if torpedoes didn't exist.
Yeah, it was, it wasn't a great thing to like ignore your kids.
It's not good.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Back then either.
But yeah, they people start to accept that it's a thing.
And there starts to be like an industry starts to build up of people who are child protection advocates, which again is a good thing, but aspects of it go terribly wrong.
Save the children, am I right?
Yeah, it's really messed up because getting people to accept that child sexual abuse was a problem was one of the first victories, major victories of the modern feminist movement, right?
Not talking about like the suffragettes, but like people like Gloria Steinem and stuff.
So it is like, and this is like a really big victory that they that they get getting people to take this seriously.
And initially, their understanding and the understanding of most people was that most abuse victims were young girls, primarily daughters who were violated by incestuous fathers.
And it is absolutely true that most kids who are molested are molested by a close family member or a friend of the family.
Now, as a result, the problem of child sexual abuse was generally referred to as a problem with incest during this period.
So you'll see a lot of people talking about incest.
And they're not talking like when we talk about incest today, it generally means something different.
They're talking about child sexual abuse as a rule when they talk about incest in this period.
So feminists argued that the solution to this was greater gender equality, which would enable girls to more effectively say no to the demands of their abusive male relatives.
And it would allow wives to stand up to their husbands.
And they also argued that part, I don't think, is accurate, but they also argued that it would give mothers the option of taking their kids out of the house because they'd be able to have a job at a checking account.
And that part actually does seem like a realistic remedy.
So again, yeah.
Yeah, right.
Like there's nothing wrong with that.
Like that makes sense.
No.
Yeah.
It does make sense.
It's a good thing to do.
But like every thing that people do, there were problematic and faulty aspects of it, including the fact how people began to sort of look at the problem of the men who were doing the molesting.
And I'm going to quote again from Satan's Silence here.
These feminist visions were obscured, however, by an intransigent society-wide insistence that the problem lay merely in the minds of a few troubled men.
Accordingly, the cure for sex abuse was psychotherapy coupled with family counseling.
And if treatment was all that was necessary, sex abuse was not so much a crime as an illness.
Hence, rather than calling for careful, impartial investigation by the police, accusations demanded intervention by psychotherapists prepared to take the side of the aggrieved daughter and to heal the perpetrator, even if he insisted the charges were false.
So again, we'll talk about some of the problems that this causes.
Obviously, good that it's being taken seriously, but also, yeah, we'll cover the aspects of this that are problematic.
So the first comprehensive legal remedy to the problem of child sex abuse was Walter Mondale's 1973 Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, or CAPTA.
And CAPTA set aside money to research child abuse for the first time, which is great.
Definitely a good thing, researching like the causes of it.
It also gave money to states so they could set up treatment programs, which was more of a mixed bag.
Because in order to get the act through congressional Republicans and get it approved by President Nixon, Mondale had to water down some things.
See, the data suggested that the most significant driving factor behind child abuse of any kind was poverty.
But Republicans didn't want to hear that.
So out the door it went.
Corporal punishment was also understood to be a major part of child abuse, but talking about that was seen as undermining the authority of parents.
So instead, the act focused on physical abuse and the idea that abusive parents were suffering from a psychological illness, one that could strike any parent and one that could be cured.
Quote, by the time Senate hearings for CAPTA convened, this medicalized interpretation of child abuse was so firmly established that experts like Brandeis University professor of social policy David Gill found it impossible to promote a different analysis to the politicians.
After doing a groundbreaking national survey of child abuse in the 1960s, Gill had concluded that neglect and battering were intimately tied to poverty and that the federal government's reluctance to correct social and economic inequality made Uncle Sam the country's worst child mistreater.
But Mondale interrupted Gill and reminded the audience during the hearing that this is not a poverty problem.
It is a national problem.
So again, the biggest part of child abuse is not child molestation.
It's neglect and physical abuse, which is primarily driven by poverty.
But nobody wanted to hear that in Congress.
So instead, they just focused on child sexual abuse.
Sorry, as I said, you know what, that kind of like reminds me of like, so I've done research on all this kind of child abuse stuff.
And it is true that there are, there have been like communal child abuse situations.
Absolutely.
For sure.
Yes.
And then, but then when they bring the devil into it, it's like, oh, get the priest to sort it out.
And it just completely flies out the window and it isn't taken seriously anymore.
It's so annoying.
Yeah, it's very frustrating.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And one of the things that you see here, too, is people who have no experience in like investigating cases being assigned to these cases because they stop being seen as a criminal problem.
Jesus.
Yeah.
So Congress didn't like Professor Gill's testimony, but they really enjoyed the testimony of a woman named Maureen Litfin, a Southern California mom who went by the pseudonym Jolly Kay.
Now, Jolly told a heartbreaking story about how she'd been abused as a child and how this abuse had led her to abuse her own kids.
She testified that she'd once tried to strangle her daughter and had thrown a knife at her daughter on another occasion.
Now, Jolly Kay described her long process of seeking treatment until finally her therapist advised her to start a self-help group, which she eventually called Parents Anonymous.
Now, a group like this being sort of touted as a cure for child abuse was a dream come true for Congress because Parents Anonymous, number one, put the responsibility on abusive parents themselves for fixing the problem, and it cost basically nothing to support, as opposed to alleviating poverty, right?
Right.
So get the optionists to put out the fire.
That's exactly right.
Yeah, PNON.
So Congress did give federal support to Parents Anonymous, but it was a hell of a lot cheaper than like fixing the broken social safety net or raising the minimum wage or any of the other things that might have actually done a real like significant help.
Not that it's a bad idea to have support groups for parents like this, but I would say that that shouldn't be your first priority when parents are throwing knives at kids, you know?
Right.
Right, yeah.
Yeah.
So CAPTA was enacted in 1974.
And among other things, it made therapists, teachers, and school administrators mandatory reporters.
I don't know what you have, if you have this in the UK, but basically if you're a mandatory reporter and someone discloses child abuse to you, you have to report it to the authorities.
Yeah, yeah.
Which is, again, a thing that makes sense on paper and sometimes is a good thing, but also is sometimes a bad thing because the police often do a very bad job of handling these cases and it makes the kid not trust whatever authority figure they'd confided in about the abuse in the first place.
Like it's a very mixed bag, you could say.
But the first thing that happened when they, you know, CAPTA gets passed is it leads to a massive surge in reported child abuse.
Suddenly, it goes from something that like very rarely got reported to something that fucking all over the place, which is because child abuse was all over the place, right?
Like it's not a bad thing that suddenly people are like, oh shit, a ton of people are abusing and molesting their kids.
Right.
Yeah.
But this led to a massive problem for federal and state governments because an awful lot of working men were revealed to be abusive to their children.
Locking these guys up would force the state to pay for their care and it would remove like tax money from the state and it would force them to like pay in welfare to support the family.
This was unacceptable.
Thankfully, the self-help, the self-help therapy group model solved this problem because instead of going to jail, abusive fathers were sentenced to therapy, which their families were often mandated to attend with them, including the children they'd been fucking or hitting.
What a great solution.
Like the way to like destroy the victim even more, right?
Like it's like you couldn't come up with a better way of doing it.
How horrible.
It's so fucked up.
And it, yeah, it, it's, it's, yeah.
This is not to say that the situation for abused children was better prior to this, because like for girls, and it was nearly always girls who reported abuse back in the early 1970s, the standard procedure before CAPTA would be to make a report to the police who would then force you to undergo an invasive genital exam.
And then the cops would usually do a follow-up interview, which they would like show up at your school to interrogate you and shit.
And you'd be sent to a foster home or a juvenile home while your abusive dad stayed with the rest of your family so that he could threaten them into getting their story straight.
And the charges against him would inevitably hit the local news, which meant he would lose his job, which meant the family would fall in the, it was just a whole fucking, it's always been bad, right?
Like when I'm criticizing CAPTA, I don't want to pretend that like it was good before because it's like putting salt in the wound a little bit, man.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
It's like trying to bail out the shit with a thimble.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So the self-help therapy group option allowed police to keep these kind of cases quiet, which saved on embarrassment for everybody.
It also allowed the fathers to stay employed and it avoided breaking up the family, which religious right-wingers considered to be as much of a priority as treating battered kids.
Jake, do you like weddings?
Yeah, I love weddings.
Have you ever been at a wedding and been like, boy, I wish I could find a way to get several dozen grams of hexagen explosives delivered to this wedding, but I just don't have a missile guidance.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, some, yeah.
Well, the good people at Raytheon can help you out with that, Jake, because the missile guidance chips they make are guaranteed to hit weddings, school buses, mostly those two targets.
So yeah, you want to.
No, no, it does help if you're in Yemen.
Raytheon, big presence.
And all right, here's the actual ads.
Building Financial Legacy For Families00:03:28
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budgeta Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never, ever taught.
Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
That's great.
It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
I said, hi, dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
There's this badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk.
Come on.
On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
The entire season two is now available to binge, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
I'm an alcoholic.
And without this program, I'm going to die.
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I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really started making money.
It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating While Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
Using Con Men To Push Panic00:15:23
If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything.
But at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
They cannot feed their kids.
They do not have homes.
Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
All right, we're back.
We're back.
We're talking about better kids.
Kind of deflated a little there.
So, the self-help therapy group option was considered great by everybody but the actual kids who were being abused.
And oddly enough, one of the things that's weird about it in this period is that both kind of like a lot of left-wing folks and feminists and the religious right kind of all get on board this idea for very different reasons, right?
The religious right likes keeping the family together and it likes you know they want to avoid divorces and at what and whatnot at all costs.
Feminists like it because it, all of these groups do involve these men talking about like their like the things, the horrible things that they've done, like their horrible sexual fantasies and stuff, which was seen as like a useful thing at the time, right?
Like they're so it is this weird kind of situation.
And there's also, you can find some writings from some people who are like advocate, like child defense advocates and very left-wing at the time, who also like that kind of the confessional nature of these things mirrors like what you see in certain like left-wing political movements, the self-criticism sessions.
So it's weird.
You get all these different like all these groups who should who normally are at each other's throats all get on board of a very bad idea for wildly different reasons.
Yeah, a very different tech mill.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
A very different one.
Yeah.
Oh dear.
It's bizarre.
It's a really strange period to study.
So if you're starting to say, boy, it seems like all these new programs prioritize the feelings and security of male abusers over their female child victims, you would be right.
And the growing field of child protection was rife with misogyny.
The best example would be Dr. Roland Summit, who is a massive piece of shit.
He went on to be a major satanic ritual abuse expert.
And obviously, everything he ever said about satanic ritual abuse was nonsense.
But before that, he was an incest expert.
And in his expert opinion, child sexual abuse by fathers was largely the fault of their wives.
So this guy, who is again one of the most prominent doctors in the field in this time, describes the behavior of child molesters as family romance.
I'm sorry.
What a little father.
Did he have any siblings, Barika?
Yeah, he had some daughters, and you have to worry for them.
He believed that fathers who molested their daughters would never molest a stranger's daughter, which obviously is wildly untrue.
Sex abuse.
That's all right, then.
Yeah.
Jesus Christ.
And his argument was that the attraction of these fathers was purely to, in his words, the delicious little creatures that the father had helped to create.
Red aloe.
Red fucking flag.
So Summit felt that basically all men considered their daughters to be delicious and that the impulse to commit incest was nearly universal for middle-aged men who were anxious about the end of their own youth.
Men in healthy men, like projecting a little bit, dude.
God damn, yeah.
So since all men clearly want to fuck their daughters, the only reason that most men don't is because they have healthy marriages that let them deal with their horniness by fucking their wives.
So when incest happens, it's the fault of the abuser's wife who was, quote, absorbing herself in a job rather than fucking her husband hard enough to stop him from raping their daughter.
Jeez.
So fucked up.
It's the ultimate right-wing defense.
It's like outrageously fucked up.
And he said this officially.
Yeah, yeah.
He was very open about this.
And no one went, hang on.
Like, this guy's up to something.
I would argue the right response when someone tells you that is to just start hitting them and not stop.
Like, just immediately start punching.
But no one did.
Instead, he was taken seriously.
So his beliefs were unfortunately quite common.
And one of the most popular abuse treatment programs at the time was called Child Sex Abuse Treatment Program or CSATUP, CSATUP, Cassatapi, CSATP.
I don't know how to acronym it.
You did great.
Cassatup.
You did not do great.
Cassatup first launched in the Bay Area and it was geared towards preserving nuclear families that because basically what happened is in the Bay Area.
because of a number of things, including affluence.
It's one of the first areas that starts getting like really good reporting about child sexual abuse.
And it turns out that a bunch of fucking dudes in the Bay Area were raping their kids, which created a problem because these guys were pretty high income.
So again, the state doesn't want to lose tax money, doesn't want their parents to go on the dole or their families to go on the dole.
So CSATUP was geared towards preserving nuclear families.
And it taught that the root of sexual abuse of children was a dysfunctional marriage.
Part of the repair work mandated by the therapy involved the mother apologizing to her daughter for her husband's sexual abuse and saying, you are not to blame.
Daddy and I did not have a good marriage.
That is why daddy turned to you.
Wow.
That is just unbelievable, isn't it?
It's fucking shocking.
That's just unbelievable.
That's like, I can't believe that.
When was this in the 80s?
Yeah, this is the fucking like late 70s.
Yeah, I think.
Not even long ago.
You know what I mean?
No, no, really fucking pretty recently.
We'll probably get at least one person who as a kid like went through CSATUP and stuff with their family in the comments when this episode dropped.
I wouldn't be surprised.
Bad for them, man.
It's so fucked.
It's so fucking wild.
So starting in San Jose, CSATUP was increasingly mandated for fathers accused of sexual abuse.
Courts often made fathers what became known as the godfather offer because it was an offer they couldn't refuse.
So you get caught, you go to therapy, take probation and avoid jail.
Almost overnight, the confession rate among accused child molesters went from very low to 90%.
And again, I don't want to, this is a really flawed system.
So we're going to cover all the shit that's bad.
It's also aspects of it were good because most of these guys at this point, very few sexual abuse allegations made by children against parents were false, right?
So the vast majority of these guys, you have to assume some innocent people took the, basically the equivalent of a plea bargain just because they didn't want to go to trial.
But the vast majority of these guys were guilty and at least something happened.
But CSATUP led to a number of very unsettling changes in the way these problems were dealt with.
For one thing, police shifted away from interviewing the child in these cases and instead started talking to their teachers, their mother, and other adults who knew the kid.
And these secondhand accounts of people who knew the child were considered to have the same legal weight as if they'd come directly from the child.
This is problematic for a number of reasons.
I think that as a journalist, you understand, right?
Yeah.
A little bit.
Yeah.
And it feeds into the satanic panic stuff we're going to talk about later.
When the child was eventually questioned, the work was done by a social worker rather than a detective.
And this may not sound like a problem because like if you have a social worker who's specifically trained for this shit, that sounds good because cops are not great at talking to kids all the time, right?
Right.
But there was a crime committed, right?
So it's like you need more than the social worker, right?
Like, geez.
One would say, and also the social workers were not well trained to do this.
They weren't well trained on how to interrogate someone without asking leading questions, right?
Police are at least in theory taught not to do that.
Like, obviously, that's a problematic.
They're not able to do that.
Yeah.
But theoretically, a detective who's questioning a child is number one, not supposed to assume the allegations are true.
They're not supposed to ask leading questions.
They're just supposed to try to have the kid talk about what happened.
And the accused enjoys the presumption of innocence.
And the social workers questioning these kids weren't trained that way.
They were trained to believe that it's always the case that like this is this is this person is guilty, which is a problem for the person interrogating the kid in this situation because they tended to push the child to talk about like things that the child might not otherwise have talked about.
Now, again, not a huge problem at the time because virtually all of these allegations of child sexual abuse were true.
But when the satanic panic came about, the allegations were false and the social workers still did the same thing.
They pushed kids.
Yeah, you're seeing all of this infrastructure.
They started to use their own thing against themselves to kind of push this satanic thing forward, right?
Exactly.
Like, so you're seeing all this kind of infrastructure that created that allows this to happen later.
So by 1975, CSATAP had become so popular that the entire state of California adopted it as the standard.
Our friend Dr. Summit attended CSATAP training and was so taken by it, but that he wrote a manifesto titled The Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome.
In it, among other things, he pushed the idea that children never fabricate the kinds of explicit sexual manipulations they divulge in complaints or interrogations.
As a result, they should always be believed, even if their story included fantastic, wild details that seemed impossible.
Again, like you're seeing the groundwork get laid here.
Yeah, it's on its way.
Yeah.
By 1980, child sexual abuse was no longer a dark national secret.
It was a topic widely discussed by Americans and featured in the media.
And I'm going to quote again from Satan's Silence.
Thanks to an alliance among feminists, therapists, and law enforcement officials, it was becoming possible for daughters to disclose their victimization and for fathers to admit their guilt.
In national media, from the New York Times to Playboy, the Ann Landers Encyclopedia, and Donahue, testimonials abounded from repentant fathers, newly asserted wives, and girls regaining their dignity.
Yet later research would reveal that many incest offenders also molest children outside their families, and they rape grown women as well.
Further, there is evidence that regardless of what kind of treatment sex abusers get, as many as one in seven goes on to offend again.
Ironically, then politicians and child protectionists' fervor to keep fathers in families left many youngsters and women at risk of further abuse.
And by pushing Godfather offer confessions, the therapy model of sex abuse intervention replaced skilled forensics personnel with social workers and others who knew nothing about how to test the validity of criminal sex abuse charges and who unstintingly believed them all.
So by 1980, all of the infrastructure we're going to need to let a satanic panic happen and to have the legal system like further it is in place.
Right.
It didn't just come out of nowhere.
It was built on without, I guess, without trying to do that.
But like I can see what you say.
Like it just became the perfect ground for it, right?
Yeah.
And obviously like fuck Dr. Summit, but the vast majority of the people involved in setting this system up are people whose motivations are the purest it could possibly be.
They want to protect kids, right?
They're trying to protect them.
And it's a new thing at the time.
It's not a new problem, but it's a new way to tackle it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And again, probably up to this point, the system still does more harm than good because it was, it replaced basically nothing, right?
But it's about to stop being a system that does more good than harm, right?
Like that's, that's about to change.
So there's some more background we have to lay.
In 1979, Jerry Falwell and some other assholes founded the moral majority, which was the first large-scale Christian right-wing political organization.
This is the first time that the Christian right is like a block in politics, and it has been ever since.
The moral majority was initially formed due to an opposition to Roe v. Wade and to force an opposition to forced integration of Christian schools.
They didn't want black people to be able to go to Christian colleges.
That was a big part of it.
Oh, Christian of them.
Very Christian of them.
Extremely so.
Love thy neighbor.
And it was Jerry Fulwell of all people.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Very surprising stuff.
So, and like, yeah, there's, there were other, a lot of other people, obviously.
But yeah, the moral majority was fueled also by a sense of deep, deep anxiety because women are starting to work at this point, like full-time, like it's becoming a very major thing.
One of the things I didn't realize until I was doing this research actually is that during this period from like the 70s to the 80s, women, it becomes the norm for women to work, but the average income of households doesn't really raise because like this is also at the time that workers' protections and rights are collapsing and like Reaganomics starts to take over in the 80s.
So like More people, like you would think that having two incomes in a household would increase the amount of like disposable income people have, but it really didn't.
And again, yeah, yeah, great country.
So, in 1980, a psychologist named named Lawrence Pasder published a book about his wife and former patient, Michelle Smith, which, you know, if your wife is a former patient as a therapist, you might not be a great therapist.
Creepy alarm.
So, her memoir, Michelle Remembers, detailed a childhood of horrific occult sex abuse.
Pasder claimed to have used hypnotic regression therapy to help his wife uncover buried memories of abuse at the hands of the church of Satan.
Pasder also claimed with no evidence that Anton Levee's church wasn't the real church of Satan and the one that molested his patient wife had existed for centuries.
So, okay.
And Michelle Remembers is basically, so the claim she's making is that she became the victim of a satanic cult for several months during 1955 when she was a five-year-old.
She was imprisoned by them.
She, she like had all these recollections of being tortured in houses and mausoleums and cemeteries, of being raped and sodomized with candles, of being forced to shit on a Bible and on a crucifix, of seeing babies and adults murdered.
Yeah, it's awesome because you know that to Christians of the day, like her being like, I help, I watched babies get murdered was the same as like, and I pooped on a Bible, like both equally bad devil things.
Like the guy like with the memories like a little bit more, a little bit more offensive.
Yeah.
Shot in the Bible.
We've got she also had memories of having a devil's tail and horns surgically attached to her.
Yeah.
She had memories of a cult attempt to kill a child and make it look like an accident by placing her in a car with a corpse and then crashing the vehicle.
And this is said to have gone on for like close to a year until her faith, the fact that she was so Christian, made the Satanists give up because they just couldn't turn her.
And then she claimed that she forgot the experience for 20 years until she entered therapy with Dr. Pasder, who then became her husband.
Now, this was all lies, Jay.
I feel like part of the therapy, he was like, we can sell the book here.
Yeah.
If you remember, we can sell a book.
And I don't know.
There's been a lot of writing on this too.
I haven't done enough research to know how in on the con Michelle was, but I'm almost certain her husband was in on the con or it was a con on his behalf.
And credible people debunked the book immediately.
For one thing, there's a picture of Michelle in her grade school yearbook that was taken during one of the months when she was supposed to be hidden, like locked in a house by Satanists, which, you know, all of her neighbors and family members who knew her during this period basically say like nothing out of the ordinary happened during her childhood.
Certainly nothing satanic ritual molesty.
The only abuse that Michelle endured for certain was at the hands of her therapist husband.
The whole idea of repressed memories, which now we got, we're laying a lot of groundwork here.
Freud, Trauma, And False Memories00:03:18
So let's talk about where the fucking idea of repressed memories comes from.
It goes back to the 1800s when early psychologists decided that hysteria, which is what they called women having emotions in those days, came from someone suffering a childhood trauma that was so terrible that they developed amnesia to dissociate from the event.
And this is a mix of, because like Freud is involved in this, and it's not all bullshit.
Dissociation is a thing that happens when you under dealing with PTSD, right?
Like we've all dealt with it.
Like it's a fucking thing, but it doesn't involve forgetting the horrible thing that happened, right?
Right.
Just memories become blurry.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know, but it doesn't sound very real.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like I definitely have had memories like that, like periods I don't remember during the dealing with PTSD itself, but the actual trauma that caused it, I remember pretty darn well.
And the fact that I don't remember other things was probably because I was like drinking and abusing drugs massively during that period, you know?
That's called a blackout robert.
Yeah.
So there, yeah, and you know, you have to assume everyone was drunk in the 1800s too.
And they were definitely on cocaine because that's how Freud did all of his psychotherapy.
So, yeah, that may have influenced them.
Fuck him, Freud, man.
Yeah.
So, Freud decided that hysteria was inevitably caused by childhood sexual violation.
And he pressured his female patients to tell him detailed stories of their abuse.
And again, a lot of these were probably true, but also a lot of them weren't.
And he convinced himself that these stories were hidden memories, at least for a while.
He did eventually realize that a lot of the abuse stories his patients told him were like physically impossible because they were just like outlandish fantasies.
And he kind of dropped this idea that like emotional issues like mental illness as an adult was inevitably caused by like some sort of sexual trauma as a child.
He did kind of drop that idea.
But in the late 1970s, therapists started reviving his old theories.
And among an influential subset of the field, repressed memory therapy became the go-to explanation for things like eating disorders and depression, right?
Like you go to the psychotherapist because you've got anorexia or whatever, and he starts trying to recover memories of you being raped as a kid because you must have if you have anorexia, right?
It couldn't be caused by anything else.
And yeah, this was basically nonsense.
And the problem about trying to recover implanted memories is that generally what actually happens is the therapist creates memories of things that never happened.
So I'm going to quote from a write-up in the conversation now.
Experimental psychologists have repeatedly demonstrated with ease which false memories can be implanted in a sizable proportion of the population under well-controlled laboratory conditions.
But it is undoubtedly the case that such false memories can arise spontaneously as well in the context of psychotherapy.
One of the techniques that has been shown to result in false memories is asking people to imagine events that never actually took place.
It appears that eventually, and especially in people with good imaginations, the memory of the imagined event is misinterpreted as a memory for a real event.
The use of hypnotic regression is a particularly powerful means to implant false memories.
So this becomes.
I've had that before, though.
Like as a kid, there were things that I was certain was like happened.
And then I'll get older and think, hang on, that must have been a dream because there's no way it would have happened.
It never happened that way, you know.
And especially as a child, like there's all sorts you could get confused about.
Economic Components Of Thriving Communities00:04:55
Absolutely.
And like a lot of this is like, this is part of the problem.
This is part of why also, if you look at like eyewitness testimony, like generally sucks, actually.
Like people are very bad at being eyewitnesses because our fucking brains do all sorts of wild shit.
Yeah.
Especially when there's like a traumatic experience, you know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Notes are so important.
Exactly.
That's why reporters take notes and it's why you should never listen to anything anyone ever says.
Just fucking put on headphones to block out all noise.
Fucking put on blinders so you can't see and just stumble through the world and you will not believe anything untrue.
You will probably bump into things a lot though.
Be more fun though.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yes.
Here's an ad for a product.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ango Moda.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of love.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On a recent episode of the podcast Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
Financial education is not always about like, I'm gonna get rich.
That's great.
It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
I said, hi, dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk.
Come on.
On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversation about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
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Wild Allegations Without Physical Proof00:13:20
Okay, we're back.
So, yeah, hypnotic regression and repressed memories, mostly nonsense, basically all nonsense, but it was considered to be pretty settled science at the time, not by like an overwhelming number of scientists, but by cops and judges and TV hosts and the kinds of psychologists who are good at talking to cops and judges and TV hosts, right?
Like that's the group of people to whom this is settled science for.
Well, actually, credible researchers like, there seem to be problems with this.
So Michelle Remembers was a hugely influential book.
It was treated as gospel by a terrible number of people and it actually became a standard textbook for social workers in the United States.
Jesus, really?
Yeah, a lot of Michelle Remembers.
Yeah, it's not fucking good, man.
Oh, dear.
So Lawrence Pasder became a recognized legal expert in satanic ritual abuse, which exploded into the mainstream as a real problem thanks to his book.
So what we have in 1980 is a situation where evangelical Christian paranoia over the devil and the black arts leaps over and starts to infect mainstream society.
This would come to have a terrible impact first on two families in Bakersfield, California.
And now we're finally into the satanic panic.
Ready?
You excited?
Ready.
Yeah, I'm so excited.
It's fucking awesome.
So these two families are the McCoohins and the Nifans or Niffins.
And I'm going to quote from a write-up in religious tolerance.org that kind of goes over the basics of the case.
The triggering incident occurred in 1980 when Becky McCoohan disclosed that her grandfather, Rod Phelps, had touched her inappropriately.
The family doctor confirmed the abuse.
No charges were laid.
Becky's mother, Debbie McCoohan, arranged for her daughter to obtain counseling.
But Debbie's stepmother, Mary Ann Barber, who is believed to have had a history of mental illness, felt that her stepdaughter granddaughters were not being sufficiently protected.
She obtained the assistance of the Mothers of Bakersfield, a group concerned about child abuse.
Jill Haddad took particular interest in the case.
She was the spokesperson for the group and had many relatives working for local police forces.
Miss Barber claimed that Alvin and Debbie McCoohan were not good parents and that Debbie's daycare license should be revoked.
She asked the social services department to make a surprise inspection.
The social worker, Betty Palco, found no major infractions and took no action to revoke the license.
So again, no actual evidence of serious child abuse here.
Although I will say the McEwen's weren't exactly ACE parents because later that year they did take their two daughters on a supervised visit to see their allegedly abusive grandfather.
And this caused Marianne to have a psychotic episode, which sent her to the psychiatric ward at a local hospital.
She eventually succeeded in getting custody of the kids and convincing county officials to file child endangerment charges against the McCoohans.
But because she was not at all well, Mary Ann took things a step further and she had begun believing that the McCoohans were part of a massive insidious satanic sex ring in Kern County.
As she told social workers, there is a group of people involved in molesting the girls.
They're all in on it.
So you have, one, in a case of actual abuse, two, some parents who probably are not being as careful as they need to be around a guy who's dangerous, and a woman who's maybe schizophrenic, definitely is mentally ill and is hospitalized as a result of it, who becomes convinced that as opposed to a single act of child molestation by one guy, there's a massive conspiracy to molest all of the kids in town.
And unfortunately for a shitload of people, the social workers in Bakersfield had been trained using the textbook Michelle remembers.
So when this very ill woman starts claiming that there's a massive network of satanic sex abusers in town, they believe her.
And by the time the social workers sat down with the kids, Becky and Dawn, both kids had spent months listening to their very, very sick step-grandmother tell them they had been the victims of a ring of ritual abusers.
So these kids get repeatedly questioned and they confirm what their, they basically parrot what their stepgrandmother had told them to say.
And over the months, their disclosures become like weirder and weirder.
They claimed that they had been hung from ceiling hooks, beaten with belts, rented to strangers in motels, and had been forced to act in kiddie porn movies.
They claimed they were abused by a sex ring, which involved their grandparents, their parents, their father's brothers, friends of their parents, and the social worker who did the inspection, a co-worker of their father, and two unnamed welfare workers.
And all these fucking people start catching charges and getting arrested and shit.
And their life just dynamites these people's lives, right?
Like just based on this one testimony.
Yeah, based on this woman and these kids who had been in her care listening to her talk about the thing I always think about things like this is like racism, right?
No one is born a racist.
Kids become racist from hearing what they hear from racist parents, usually.
So it's the same kind of concept, right?
They'll just repeat that shit.
Exactly.
They're kids.
Like if you tell them, If you tell your like three-year-old over and over, you were raped by the devil, like they will eventually believe it.
Yeah.
All right.
I guess I was.
Yes.
So the social worker and their father's co-worker eventually had their charges dropped after their lawyer introduced Mary Ann's medical records into the trial and was like, this woman has psychotic episodes and is paranoid and probably schizophrenic.
Perhaps we need more than just her testimony, right?
Not that those people can't testify when they're the victims of abuse, but if you have them making lurid, wild allegations and there's no physical evidence for any of it, perhaps you should not trust those allegations.
Yeah, maybe.
Yeah.
So this convinced the DA to try to drop those two people's charges, but then the medical records were sealed and forbidden from being used by the defense for the McCoons and the Niffins, which is something else.
Because again, all of the cops have bought into this too.
So I'm going to quote again from that write-up in religious tolerance.org: quote, the Niffin sons, Brian and Brandon, were repeatedly and suggestively interrogated.
The interviewers would describe a sex act and then ask the child to confirm or deny that it happened.
When questioned separately, each was told falsely that their brother had disclosed abuse by both the parents and the rest of the sex ring.
Brian and Brandon claimed that they were yelled at and terrorized by the interrogators.
They were told that they could go home again if they testified about the abuse.
These manipulative and coercive interrogation methods are now known to generate false allegations.
No fucking duh, right?
Wow, yeah, you don't say.
Yeah.
Questioning in Bakersfield went far beyond the definition of leading and was, in fact, coercive threatening and brainwashing of young children.
This is like a legal finding later.
Unfortunately, in early 1983, basic research into child interview techniques was in its early stages.
Direct questioning and manipulation of children was common practice.
The Niffen boys finally caved in under the pressure and said that abuse had occurred.
So, yeah, during a supervised visit, Brandon Niffin was asked by his grandmother whether the charges were true.
He answered, no, none of those things ever happened.
The grandmother was arrested for discussing the case with her grandchild when she brought this up.
When she said, Hey, he told me that he was lying because the interviewers terrorized him.
So, like, he tells his grandmother, they made me give a false confession.
She goes to the judge and she gets arrested and is banned from testifying at trial and has her right to having custody visits like terminated for years.
Because again, all of the people in the legal system believe all this shit and have to assume, like, oh, she's got to be part of it because she's trying to like, it's so, it's unbelievably fucked up.
They just, they just all created a conspiracy with each other, right?
It's fucking amazing.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's fascinating, actually.
Yeah, it's, it's incredibly like there is a lot that like that is and should be studied about this period of time because it says so much that's very frightening about human psychology.
It's that crowd mentality, right?
Like, it's very scary.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yep.
Exactly.
Like, it's a lot of the same stuff that makes fascism work, right?
It's just like the way people are and the way people act in groups and the way people act when they are in a group and all get scared of the same thing.
Right.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So both Niffen boys later recanted entirely and stated that they'd been coerced to testify.
And they testified again in 1996 after the end of the satanic panic and were able to convince a judge to overturn both sets of convictions.
But again, like the Niffins, like their parents had spent like a decade plus in prison along with the McCoons, like four people in prison for years and years.
You're joking.
No, it's like it's unbearably fucked up.
There's a partial happy ending here because the Niffins, like once the kids like realized what had happened to that, been done to them and testified like they got to be a family with their parents again.
The McCooins never did because both Becky and Dawn continued to maintain that their testimony was true.
And it's almost certain that both children had false memories forced on them as a result of improper interrogation methods, but the family never fucking healed.
It's deeply bad.
That's the side of the satanic panic, right, that you don't really hear a lot about.
It's like, it's kind of funny.
The whole thing's like, oh, yeah, it's so stupid.
But then, like, I was doing research for this, this podcast episode the other day, and it's like, wow, like, I mean, one woman in the Italian case I was looking at, like a mother, she just killed herself.
And it was just like, she just couldn't handle it, right?
It was like, yeah, all based on literally nothing.
Nothing at all.
It ruins people.
Yeah.
I mean, and the same thing in a different way is happening with QAnon, right?
Like, you have hundreds of families at least that have been torn apart by this sort of stuff.
It's fucked.
It's super fucked.
And it kind of, if you kind of look at what happens with the book Michelle remembers and how it helps both spark the satanic panic and how it infests, you know, this system for dealing with child abuse that we talked about, it's almost like an infection that comes into it.
And deal all these problems in it suddenly become actively toxic.
And yeah, it did not stay limited to Kern County out near Bakersfield.
The case of the McCoon and the Niffin families was just the beginning.
In 1983, not long after their initial conviction, events in another part of Southern California were about to take the nation by storm.
And next episode, we're going to talk about the McMartin preschool trial, which is the longest, most expensive trial in U.S. history and one of the most fucked up things I've ever read about in my entire life.
You happy, Jake?
You ready?
Yeah.
You psyched up, babe.
Let's fucking do it.
Oh, yeah, man.
You want to plug some shit?
Yeah, man.
I guess just the podcast, right?
Like, Q clearance is out now, obviously, with you guys.
Popular front is always around, popularfront.co.
One thing I do want to say, though, is like, especially considering this topic, you know, I've done a lot of research into like various kind of child abuse scandals.
And the thing is, like, they do exist.
And even some of the more lurid, insane stories have happened for real, but on a way that where it's like, it's nowhere near as ritualistic or movie-like, you know.
So there's a great example that people should look into.
Like the monster of Belgium, a guy called Mark Dutreau.
And like, he just had this horrific kind of child abuse scandal thing where he was like kidnapping children for hire.
And it involves like some of the most, yeah, it involves some of the most high-level politicians.
This isn't a conspiracy, like, but it's one of the least known ones because stupid stuff like this gets the hearing, right?
The more sensational, the more easy to understand satanic stuff is what people like QAnon often put out.
Meanwhile, people are doing very dark things and it kind of goes by the wayside because obviously real life is a little bit more kind of intricate and confusing, you know, and it's a real shame.
It's this fucking thing that happens in the satanic panic too, where like, no, like we could all, there is a conspiracy to traffic people who are legally children for the rich and powerful.
Like it absolutely happened.
It probably still is.
But like focus on that.
Like, not this, not Michelle's memory or whatever the hell it's called.
Well, it's weird.
It's interesting to me that like the things that go viral are always like the focus on tiny, tiny kids, which are very, it's very uncommon for like two and three and four year olds to be molested.
It's like, it's like 15 traffic.
Like, yeah, it's men fucking teenagers, right?
Like that's the thing.
That's bad.
It's terrible.
Right.
It's terrible.
And it doesn't make it any better.
But again, it's like, this is the issue, right?
It's like, when you have people like QAnon specifically, one of my biggest problems with them is that they make people just go, oh, that's just QAnon stuff.
And a lot of it is just nonsense QAnon stuff.
But in between that, there's things that really need to be looked out for the safe for the victims, you know?
And it's like, oh, thanks.
You've completely destroyed any relevance here because you're making things up all the time.
It's yeah, I mean, I get why, like, it just came out that Virginia Juffrey, I think her name is pronounced, who's one of the Epstein victims.
His name is QAnon now.
And like, she's the one I can't blame for it.
Cause it's like, yeah, you were part of a giant sex abuse.
Like conspiracy.
Right.
And even that now makes you think, like, not to say you wouldn't believe it, but now some people would just go, oh, exactly.
I've had it to do with you.
And they won't look any.
It's fucked.
It's all everything's horrible.
Thanks for listening to the podcast, people.
We'll be back on Thursday with some of the worst stories you've ever heard in your life.
How much away, Wanda?
Right now, I'm about 130.
Worst Stories You Will Ever Hear00:02:16
I'm at 183.
We should race.
No, I want to leave here with my original hips.
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They put on Lizzie McGuire at 2 a.m. video on demand.
This guy's playing.
2 a.m.
2 a.m.
Whatever time it is.
Lizzie McGuire and I'm wild.
Wild bad she were with.
It was like a first closet moment for me where I was like, They're like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
No, no, no.
I was like, she's beautiful.
I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
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You know the taquero from the Bad Bunny halftime show?
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