Remembering Michelle (of Michelle Remembers)

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Satan Wants You

I watched Satan Wants You on the CBC's Documentary Channel last week. It is an extremely good documentary that should finally lay to rest any doubt about what Michelle Smith "remembered" in Michelle Remembers.

Described as:

The story of how a young woman and her psychiatrist ignited the global Satanic Panic with their book, Michelle Remembers. A young woman and her psychiatrist ignited the global Dr. Pazder in the 1980s

During the 1980s and ‘90s the world was gripped by the cultural hysteria known as the Satanic Panic. Ignited by Michelle Remembers, a lurid memoir by psychiatrist Larry Pazder and his patient Michelle Smith, rumors of Satanic Ritual Abuse spread through panic-stricken communities worldwide. Although Dr. Pazder’s methodology relied on controversial recovered-memory therapy to expose Michelle’s childhood abduction by baby-stealing Satanists, the book became a bestseller and left a wave of destruction and wrongful convictions in its wake.

In the feature documentary Satan Wants You, filmmakers Sean Horlor and Steve J. Adams dive deep into the untold story of how Dr. Pazder and Michelle Smith became international sensations, supported by the Catholic Church and amplified by law enforcement and America’s daytime TV boom. The film features shocking, never-before-heard audio recordings of the pair’s original therapy sessions and interviews with a high priestess of the Church of Satan, a Wiccan police detective, an FBI ‘Mind Hunter’ as well as the devastated families of both Michelle and Lawrence.

Satan Wants You is a compelling investigation into the roots of moral panics, cult conspiracies, and the making of contemporary legends, revealing how these events still impact and distort our reality to this day.

Looking back a decade or so in this forum there were lots of threads about Satanic Ritual Abuse with many proponents posting extensively. Those of us who skeptical took a bit of a thumping.

And, Q-Anon seems to be leading to a resurgence in his belief.

I knew most of the background about Michelle and Dr. Pazder and how they created the Satanic Panic but this documentary added a few new pieces I was not aware of previously - the financial involvement of the Roman Catholic Church in particular.

What in particular strikes me is the utter failure on the part of the main stream press in having a scintilla of skepticism and doing anything like investigative reporting. It was left to her family to do such basic research as going to her high school to find the class picture of her in year book at the time she was supposedly incarcerated by the satanists. That she was a French speaker even though the book claimed she knew not a word of French.

It is difficult to unscramble the responsibility for her lies between Pazder and Michelle as they both fed off each other. Did either or both truly believe? The documentary goes into both of these issues in some detail and does not reach a conclusion.

Her family were the first to suffer.

I don't know how you can watch this show outside of Canada but Google tells me it may be available on Apple+ or Tubi. Worth a watch if you can find it.

 

[JayUtah]

Satan Wants You
* * *
I don't know how you can watch this show outside of Canada but Google tells me it may be available on Apple+ or Tubi. Worth a watch if you can find it.

Apple TV confirms it's available for pre-order (US $12.95). I don't see a release date. As for Tubi, searching anything on there starting with "Satan" doesn't usually get you documentaries.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

I don't remember Michelle but I was seriously upset that the cook at the Little Rascals Daycare was convicted of this nonsense and given life in prison because she refused to plead guilty where she would have gotten probation. Talk about extorted plea deals. I sent $100 to help with her legal bills and so she could stay out on bail during the appeal. She was eventually acquitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rascals_day_care_sexual_abuse_trial

Dawn Wilson, the daycare center's cook and one of the accused, refused all plea bargains and elected to stand trial. During her trial, four children testified against her. After deliberation, the jury convicted her and she was sentenced to life in prison.

It was so poorly handled that even after it came out how the kids were coached to tell lurid stories some of the parents still believed the satanic rituals had occurred. Kids of those parents were destined to be messed up into adulthood and maybe for their whole lives.

Six months after Betsy Kelly's release, the North Carolina Court of Appeals reversed the convictions of both Robert Kelly and Dawn Wilson, stating that there were legal errors by the prosecution. On May 23, 1995, the prosecution dismissed all charges related to the Little Rascals case against the two.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-care_sex-abuse_hysteria


It's incredible how widespread this became. It's one reason I participated for so long in the Amanda Knox case in Italy. It was the same nonsense.

Talk about real-life modern day witch hunts.

 

[TragicMonkey]

What always struck me as extra crazy was the ludicrous credulity of some parties; not just in believing that child abuse occurred, but some believed all of what was said -- when the alleged victims said they flew through the sky and saw giraffes sacrificed and all sorts of magic occur people believed those parts, too! It wasn't just "these kids related a crazy story than included being molested, therefore they were molested" it was "these kids related stories about being molested and flying and teleportation therefore they were molested and flew and teleported"!

I know I'm more cynical than most but I find it far more believable that a daycare employee molested children than a daycare employee found a steady supply of giraffes to use for ritual sacrifice in rural North Carolina. It turns out neither event actually happened but Jesus, one of those was clearly more plausible than the other!

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

What always struck me as extra crazy was the ludicrous credulity of some parties; not just in believing that child abuse occurred, but some believed all of what was said -- when the alleged victims said they flew through the sky and saw giraffes sacrificed and all sorts of magic occur people believed those parts, too! It wasn't just "these kids related a crazy story than included being molested, therefore they were molested" it was "these kids related stories about being molested and flying and teleportation therefore they were molested and flew and teleported"!

I know I'm more cynical than most but I find it far more believable that a daycare employee molested children than a daycare employee found a steady supply of giraffes to use for ritual sacrifice in rural North Carolina. It turns out neither event actually happened but Jesus, one of those was clearly more plausible than the other!

"What the kids said must be true because, after all, kids never lie," could only be said by someone who had never met a child or had never had the experience of being one.

 

[smartcooky]

I don't remember Michelle but I was seriously upset that the cook at the Little Rascals Daycare was convicted of this nonsense and given life in prison because she refused to plead guilty where she would have gotten probation. Talk about extorted plea deals. I sent $100 to help with her legal bills and so she could stay out on bail during the appeal. She was eventually acquitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rascals_day_care_sexual_abuse_trial


It was so poorly handled that even after it came out how the kids were coached to tell lurid stories some of the parents still believed the satanic rituals had occurred. Kids of those parents were destined to be messed up into adulthood and maybe for their whole lives.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-care_sex-abuse_hysteria


It's incredible how widespread this became. It's one reason I participated for so long in the Amanda Knox case in Italy. It was the same nonsense.

Talk about real-life modern day witch hunts.

Those ******* child head-shrinker quacks who coached and coaxed the kids into saying what they did ought to be the ones being sent to prison for life, or at the very least, they should have ended up being stripped of their qualifications and be legally forbidden to practice their quackery ever again

 

[Orphia Nay]

Those ******* child head-shrinker quacks who coached and coaxed the kids into saying what they did ought to be the ones being sent to prison for life, or at the very least, they should have ended up being stripped of their qualifications and be legally forbidden to practice their quackery ever again

Agreed!!!

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Agreed!!!

Yes.

 

[KDLarsen]

Equally infuriating is when the legal establishment evidently decides to bury a case, because admitting fault would be too troublesome.

See for instance Ross Francis' articles in the New Zealand Law Journal on the Peter Ellis case, showing how the reviews in the case were basically guided towards a status quo result. Those articles were published in 2007, yet it wasn't until 2020 that Ellis had his conviction quashed posthumously.

https://web.archive.org/web/2008053...lis.org.nz/2007/2007_francis_new_evidence.pdf

 

[smartcooky]

Equally infuriating is when the legal establishment evidently decides to bury a case, because admitting fault would be too troublesome.

See for instance Ross Francis' articles in the New Zealand Law Journal on the Peter Ellis case, showing how the reviews in the case were basically guided towards a status quo result. Those articles were published in 2007, yet it wasn't until 2020 that Ellis had his conviction quashed posthumously.

https://web.archive.org/web/2008053...lis.org.nz/2007/2007_francis_new_evidence.pdf

And this is despite the fact that a number of children involved recanted their accounts many years ago.

https://www.newsroom.co.nz/peter-ellis-did-not-abuse-our-child

‘Peter Ellis did not abuse our child’

In one of the most alarming twists in this ongoing saga, during a 1994 Court of Appeal hearing the child described as the most credible complainant against Ellis sensationally recanted, saying she’d made it up.

Through her mother, we hear of their frustration and anguish that their daughter’s false evidence was relied on, and then her real evidence disregarded, in an exclusive Newsroom interview.

“There was a real panic. The whole thing, when I look back I think, how did we get caught up in this? How did this happen to us? We were a nice nuclear family. We did everything right by our children. And we got caught up in it,” the mother told Newsroom.
​

The above link contains the full text (with redactions to maintain privacy) of a letter written by the child's mother to then-justice minister Simon Power in the early 2010. It describes how the girl (28 at the time of writing) has felt guilt all her life for the fact that her false testimony put Peter Ellis behind bars. Its a heartbreaking read that fell on deaf ears!

But it has also had a much, much wider impact. It became very, very difficult to get males to go into teaching and early childhood education - when my youngest daughter graduated from Teachers College in the late 1990's, there were over 190 graduates in her year. Only three of them were males.

 

[JayUtah]

What always struck me as extra crazy was the ludicrous credulity of some parties; not just in believing that child abuse occurred, but some believed all of what was said -- when the alleged victims said they flew through the sky and saw giraffes sacrificed and all sorts of magic occur people believed those parts, too!

At least in the U.S., the accusers were people who already believed that talking snakes seduced a woman to eat a magic apple. And not just the accusers, but some cops, prosecutors, and judges. Especially in the U.S. South, some of these people were steeped in a fear of Satan and an obsession with "spiritual warfare." Then in the 1990s there was Law Enforcement Guide to Satanic Cults, a thoroughly made-up video that came with warning labels: For Law Enforcement Use Only (stuck on there by the distributor to increase sales). Just imagine! You too can be a hero to your community by rooting out this insidious criminal underground! One of the main reasons I'm an active skeptic is exactly the phenomenon of how easy it is to convince people that evil spirits and magic actually exist, and thereby manipulate them into helping ruin people's lives.

"What the kids said must be true because, after all, kids never lie," could only be said by someone who had never met a child or had never had the experience of being one.

Yet this was literally the argument, held as incontrovertibly true by the criminal justice system and the clinical healthcare community. In fact, the details about flying and eviscerating giraffes was actually held up as more proof that children were telling the truth. Why would a child make up something so detailed like that? When Beth Loftus guest-lectured in a class I took, she went on about this at some length, noting that a there's absolutely nothing in the child psychology literature to support any of jurisprudential beliefs about the credibility of child witnesses. And therefore that's one of the main reasons I'm becoming active in the legal community: to enforce rigorous standards in what is purported to be valid scientific evidence.

 

[JayUtah]

Equally infuriating is when the legal establishment evidently decides to bury a case, because admitting fault would be too troublesome.

At least in the U.S., there is a popular belief—fostered by such fantasy programs as Law & Order—that prosecutors are saintly protectors of the weak, and criminal defenders are slimy interlopers.

What really happens is that prosecutors don't want you to know how flimsy their cases often are, how often a prosecution is misconducted, and how most of their evidence and testimony relies heavily for credibility on not being too aggressively challenged. Most defendants can't afford the kind of defense it takes to mount that challenge. So when it occasionally succeeds, prosecutors have to fight tooth and nail to protect the overall illusion of infallibility. This happens even when the evidence is incontrovertible in favor of exoneration. It's still postured in TV fashion as the defense trying to get off "on a technicality" and the accused should be considered somehow "really" still guilty.

And a large percentage of judges used to be prosecutors, so there's very little available on appeal in habeas jurisprudence. The U.S. Supreme Court is homing in on the proposition that even actual evidence of innocence is insufficient to have one's case reviewed if it has been reviewed before on other grounds. They point to a fanciful legal doctrine of finality to insinuate that it's better to preserve an illusion of infallibility than to fix the system so that it actually makes fewer mistakes.

 

[Foster Zygote]

At least in the U.S., the accusers were people who already believed that talking snakes seduced a woman to eat a magic apple.

A few weeks ago my family and I were having lunch at a small restaurant close to our home here in the South Carolina Upstate. It was a Sunday, and several people from a nearby church had come there after attending the later morning service. I overheard a few people at one table discussing the subject of the sermon. One elderly woman summarized it as, "if you have the Holy Spirit in you, you can't be possessed by demons, but if you don't, demons can possess you".

The Salem witch trials, the Satanic Panic, QAnon... Given that we still live in a world where so many people literally believe in angels and demons, and that people without Correct Beliefs® can actually be controlled by the latter, I'm surprised these sorts of things don't happen more often.

 

[Foster Zygote]

What really happens is that prosecutors don't want you to know how flimsy their cases often are, how often a prosecution is misconducted, and how most of their evidence and testimony relies heavily for credibility on not being too aggressively challenged.

To me, the classic example is the case of Cameron Todd Willingham in Texas. Without going too deeply into it, people had invested so much in painting him as genuinely evil (jurors were convinced he was a "Satan worshipper" because he had heavy metal band posters on his walls) and deserving of execution that they were completely unwilling to even consider the mass of physical evidence against the prosecution's case.

 

[KDLarsen]

To me, the classic example is the case of Cameron Todd Willingham in Texas. Without going too deeply into it, people had invested so much in painting him as genuinely evil (jurors were convinced he was a "Satan worshipper" because he had heavy metal band posters on his walls) and deserving of execution that they were completely unwilling to even consider the mass of physical evidence against the prosecution's case.

One aspect I read about the case that I learned recently, was the involvement of James Grigson, the "Dr. Death" of forensic psychiatry. In that particular case, he never even met Willingham, yet he still used his expert testimoney to declare him a incurable sociopath.

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

At least in the U.S., the accusers were people who already believed that talking snakes seduced a woman to eat a magic apple. And not just the accusers, but some cops, prosecutors, and judges. Especially in the U.S. South, some of these people were steeped in a fear of Satan and an obsession with "spiritual warfare." Then in the 1990s there was Law Enforcement Guide to Satanic Cults, a thoroughly made-up video that came with warning labels: For Law Enforcement Use Only (stuck on there by the distributor to increase sales). Just imagine! You too can be a hero to your community by rooting out this insidious criminal underground! One of the main reasons I'm an active skeptic is exactly the phenomenon of how easy it is to convince people that evil spirits and magic actually exist, and thereby manipulate them into helping ruin people's lives.



Yet this was literally the argument, held as incontrovertibly true by the criminal justice system and the clinical healthcare community. In fact, the details about flying and eviscerating giraffes was actually held up as more proof that children were telling the truth. Why would a child make up something so detailed like that? When Beth Loftus guest-lectured in a class I took, she went on about this at some length, noting that a there's absolutely nothing in the child psychology literature to support any of jurisprudential beliefs about the credibility of child witnesses. And therefore that's one of the main reasons I'm becoming active in the legal community: to enforce rigorous standards in what is purported to be valid scientific evidence.

And you thought I was joking? I was just quoting what I had heard and read at the time.

I was privileged to meet Dr Loftus at a TAM. I told her that I imagined her to be eight feet tall.

 

[JayUtah]

Those ******* child head-shrinker quacks who coached and coaxed the kids into saying what they did ought to be the ones being sent to prison for life, or at the very least, they should have ended up being stripped of their qualifications and be legally forbidden to practice their quackery ever again

In the late 1990s, after the Satanic Panic had begun to subside, a few books and semi-scholarly articles were published attempting to expose what the authors saw as the "child sex abuse industry." Nowadays that phrase most often means the commercial sexual exploitation of minors. But these authors used it to describe the somewhat shadier tiers of mental healthcare such as are complained of in the rant-box above. They were trying to clean house, but it didn't really work. And no, I don't have the titles or authors handy. I'd really have to go hunting for them, but they made a big impression on me when I read them. It was my first foray into just how rotten the U.S. criminal justice system truly is.

I need to describe the backdrop. Broadly speaking, very little court-ordered behavioral therapy in the United States has any scientific evidence of efficacy. This includes such things as anger management, sex offender treatment, and some forms of addiction treatment. What is presented to the public as the judicial system attempting meaningful rehabilitation is more often a gravy train for practitioners of questionable mental healthcare modalities.

Judges and prosecutors generally don't have any experience with actual treatment regimes, so they can be persuaded by flashy pseudoscience presentations. The offender has to pay for and complete the treatment, which is sometimes just quackery. Sometimes the offender is sentenced to pay for the victim's treatment, but it's important to realize that this case is quite often legitimate healthcare. But imagine having a paying and captive clientèle stream for your quack "counseling" service guaranteed by the criminal justice system.

Against that backdrop, the authors identified two categories of questionable practice: one on the victim side and the other on the offender side. You can picture what happens on the offender side. Most convictions are plea agreements, which stipulate a confession to judgment: the defendant must concede as a matter of legally cognizable fact that everything in the police report is true, even the parts that aren't. Then he is sentenced to undergo a program of therapy from one of the court-approved providers. The approval process doesn't generally question the evidentiary basis of any of the modalities provided or the proficiency of the provider.

The offender has to undergo whatever treatment is prescribed, and pay whatever he's charged for it. It takes as long as the practitioner deems it necessary, and any objection to the principles or methods can be reported to the court as non-compliance. That can lead to revocation of parole or other consequences the offender dearly wants to avoid. The practitioner is motivated to keep the offender in "treatment" for as long as possible with practically no oversight. Under the confession to judgment, the offender isn't allowed to protest even his actual innocence, but must submit to treatment for a condition he may not actually have.

And in the case of truly messed up offenders, the treatment does little to fix the actual underlying problems. So someone who is, say, chronically violent may be deemed rehabilitated as far as the law is concerned, but have no better mental health after than before.

Standards have improved in recent years, but the authors in the 1990s identified all kinds of quackery passing as offender treatment programs and imposed as sentences. Court-ordered quackery was an industry—and some still is. There were therapy organizations set up as specialized offender treatment programs whose practitioners probably would not have been able to hold clients on a voluntary basis. They were in business only because courts sent them streams of captive clients.

On the victim side, as we've seen in this thread, you have court-appointed practitioners manipulating minors into manufacturing or embellishing tales of abuse, ritualistic or otherwise. And it gets worse. In cases where mild abuse was evident (i.e., had actually occurred), the effects were amplified in order to magnify the victim impact. Victims who displayed little if any symptoms of victimization from minor abuse were assumed to have been so traumatized by the experience that they were repressing the symptoms. Victim-side treatment programs focused not just on "recovering" experiences of abuse beyond that which had actually occurred, but on having an "appropriate" response to their trauma. The victims can only emerge from this type of quackery by accepting the role the practitioner is trying to impose on them, regardless of their actual resilience or adjustment. That then becomes actual trauma, according to the authors. The prevailing resilience model used in law in the 1990s was that even the slightest abuse would trigger profound and long-lasting effects in all children of all ages. The victim-side quacks would have to work with victims until they displayed the expected symptoms, so that they could be "cured."

Again, much has improved since then, but in the 1990s the quackish practice was to get the victim to acceptable levels of victimhood no matter what.

It would be interesting for those authors to follow up on how many of these manufactured victims such as those we've mentioned in this thread have recanted. The victim-side quackery is not at all without its actual consequences. In the mad panic to protect children, these practitioners have not only amplified children's victimhood, but also made children complicit in acts that ruined other people's lives as well as their own. There is absolutely no legitimate motive to help children that means you prolong and amplify their victimization in order to have an excuse to punish someone else. The notion that it's okay to err on the side of punishing an innocent adult rather than question the word of a precious child is emotionally appealing but critically flawed. That's precisely not how justice is supposed to work.

Anyway, this well-meaning attempt at critical review doesn't seem to have lasted long. Or maybe it had the desired effect in that things seem to be getting slowly better. But there was an attempt within the field to hold quack practitioners to account.

 

[Pacal]

Those ******* child head-shrinker quacks who coached and coaxed the kids into saying what they did ought to be the ones being sent to prison for life, or at the very least, they should have ended up being stripped of their qualifications and be legally forbidden to practice their quackery ever again

I fully agree. The quacks and liars who coached the kids into spinning those stories should indeed end up in jail. And may I point out that this sort of behavior and coaching could and certainly did result in some of the kids getting false memories of being molested.

Now tell me if there is much of a difference between actually molesting some poor kid and planting a false memory of molestation in a child!! It is disgusting. And then there is all the people falsely accused of molesting children whose lives were ruined!!!

Sadly their are still those who defend this whole absurd black comedy of horror. For example: The Witch-Hunt Narrative, by Ross E. Cheit. The book dances around the absolutely insane aspects of these coached stories, along with down playing the coaching, the obvious fact that large numbers of clearly from the begining innocent people were being accused. It relies on the old there must be a fire under all that smoke trope, well sometimes there is just smoke. Oh and once again we have a touching faith in recovered memory nonsense.

 

[theprestige]

Yeah, perceived health professionals coaching children to report thoughts, feelings, experiences, memories they don't actually experience is serious risk we should be always aware of and ready to mitigate.

 

[Orphia Nay]

Not sure if I've posted this here.

Interviews with 7 retractors who were once convinced by their therapist they had recovered memories and multiple personalities.

http://orphia-nay.blogspot.com/2020/07/are-multiple-personalities-real.html