Reading for My Life

by John Leonard

  For that matter, as much as the sixties may have been about Dylan and Joplin and Vietnam, they were also about Blow Up, Kurt Vonnegut, and Twiggy. As the seventies were about disco and the eighties about AIDS. Think of jet planes and birth control pills, of drive-ins and drive-bys, of transistors and malls. As Billy Joel once explained: “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”

  This much can still be said for our troubled culture: the sexual abuse of children not only turns the stomach and breaks the heart; it wounds the soul as well. It can’t be figured according to any ordinary moral arithmetic. The violation of a child also violates our fundamental notions of ourselves as guardians, what we owe to the innocent and defenseless, how we feel about family and authority, who we want and need to be. Faced with such violation, our helplessness is both a personal nightmare and a subversion of the social fabric. We want to avert our eyes. No wonder Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed was published for decades without Stavrogin’s confession.

  Something About Amelia started it on television, in 1984, with Glenn Close as the incredulous mother, Roxanne Zal as the abused daughter, and Ted Danson, already two years into Cheers, as the father who promised never, ever, to do it again. But between Something About Amelia and the close of the 1980s an odd thing happened. In spite of facts we knew perfectly well—acts of domestic violence occur every fifteen seconds; 4 percent of American families are abusive to children; almost 3 million cases of suspected child abuse were reported in 1992; more than a third of American girls are sexually molested, usually by men they trust—the focus on television somehow shifted from family to strangers. And so did the blame except insofar as parents were at fault for entrusting their children to these strangers. Especially culpable were moms who insisted on punching a clock or playing tennis when they should have been home with their angelfood cupcakes—unless of course they were welfare mothers, who didn’t deserve children. (Although we can’t ever prove anything about pop culture and the zeitgeist, we can at least point to a correspondence between this new network emphasis and the great porn scare, the Christian fundamentalist backlash, homophobia, “victimology,” and a Reagan-Bush antifeminist agenda.) Amelia’s own Ted Danson was part of the shift, when he coproduced a 1986 TV version of Jonathan Kellerman’s novel When the Bough Breaks, starring himself as the child psychologist who tracked down and smashed a ring of well-heeled, politically connected pedophiles. Suddenly, as in I Know My First Name Is Steven, kidnapping made a comeback. Or, in Judgment (1990), the Roman Catholic Church was accused in court of covering up for a Louisiana priest who’d seduced altar boys (“We’re going to sue God!” exulted Jack Warden), as the mother church and Canadian provincial government itself would go on trial in The Boys of St. Vincent miniseries (1994). Worst of all in these paranoia sweepstakes, in both Do You Know the Muffin Man? (1989) and Unspeakable Acts (1990), preschool day-care centers were nests of pedophilic vipers. Behind Tiny Tot’s locked doors at afternoon naptime…

  But the revised emphasis elsewhere was on the barbarians who cruised outside the gates. I Know My First Name Is Steven, the 1989 NBC miniseries, was a very Grimm fairy tale at the end of which everybody was eaten up by guilt instead of wolves. (What are fairy tales, anyway, if not coded fables of child abuse?) In real life, a dreamy and troubled seven-year-old Steven Stayner was kidnapped in 1972, on his way home from school in Merced, California. In real life, in motels and shacks all over northern California, he was sexually abused. In real life, he escaped seven years later and only when his captor stole another little boy. And in real life, he couldn’t go home again. He wasn’t the same boy, his family wasn’t the same family, and the very idea of “home” had been violated. TV told this savage story without a fabric softener. As Steven’s father, John Ashton was all but destroyed by bewilderment. As Steven’s mother, Cindy Pickett found you can’t love somebody back to health. As Parnell, the horn-rimmed, chain-smoking kidnapper, Arliss Howard was a soft-spoken monster with delusions of divine afflatus. As teenaged Steven, Corin Nemec came back to Merced a self-blaming wild boy. By devoting as much time to what happened after his homecoming as to the abduction, I Know My First Name Is Steven did the uncompromising work of art. It was as if Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun had gone on to tell us the future of the blank-eyed boy who survived the war. Steven’s kidnapping seems to have corrupted everybody. They didn’t know how to feel about what they would rather not imagine. It’s not just that the Brothers Grimm taught us to fear Black Forests, nor that we have always been fascinated by tales of wild boys raised by wolves, as we’ve been fascinated since the start of our country by the captivity narratives of children stolen by Indians and of slaves in the Middle Passage; and, since late in the nineteenth century, by Freud’s seduction theory; and, since the middle of the twentieth, by death-camp horrors. Family itself is a kind of ecology, an interdependence of organisms in an environment. No matter how arbitrary that environment is, the organism adjusts or dies. People, unfortunately, can adjust to almost anything, and yet hate our own adaptations. Like Steven, we may not forgive ourselves. It’s one thing to tell our children not to talk to strangers. It’s another if the child is a stranger, to us and to himself.

  Even scarier, because more artful, was The Boys of St. Vincent. Just minutes into the first hour of a nightmare miniseries about an orphanage in Newfoundland in the 1970s, the janitor tells the superintendent: “There are things in life that are broken and can’t be fixed.” Halfway through, what’s broken beyond fixing has come to include the little boys abused by the All Saints Brothers and the very idea of accountability. The police suppress a report of their investigation. The Church and the Ministry of Justice conspire at a cover-up. Brother Lavin, who insisted that his “special boy” call him “Mother,” is permited to leave both the Church and Newfoundland for Montreal where he will father children of his own. When I first saw The Boys of St. Vincent, at a screening of Banff Television Festival prize-winners, most Canadians hadn’t. Its broadcast up north had been delayed until the conclusion of the trial in the case that inspired director John N. Smith, who cowrote the script with producer Sam Grana and poet Des Welsh. More than a legal nicety, this delay seemed a scruple. So powerful was the film, trapped in dream-speed, drugged with menace, painterly yet visceral, you wanted to lay about you with an ax. So mesmerizing was Henry Czerny as Lavin, handsome, even dashing, princely but satanic, that you saw him in your cutthroat mirror like an evil eye. So corrupt were the agencies charged with protecting these abandoned boys, for whom there was neither appeal nor meaning, that you felt orphaned yourself: bereft. Part I was medieval: Never mind the telephone or the swimming pool where a ten-year-old discovered what being Brother Lavin’s special boy really meant. At St. Vincent’s, 1975 could be 1275, all passion and agony in a gothic vault of skeletal shafts, stained glass, and morbid candles; gargoyles and Gregorian chants. With a crucifix slung in the belt like a cudgel, in cassocks like black sails, the brothers patrolled corridors and tucked-in barracks beds as if they were cowboy Templars. Obedience had nothing whatever to do with God; power was sickly erotic; the only gravity was despair. Part II jumped to 1990: We met the damaged boys grown up around their wounds, and their corruptors at bay in the headlines. The modern imagination tried to come to grips with age-old evil in the distinctively modern manner, with a courtroom trial, a royal commission, a psychiatrist, and a call-in radio talk show. But the mind fell down like a torn black kite. So much for Boys Town.

  No such art, but similar fears, applied to Do You Know the Muffin Man? and Unspeakable Acts. Until Muffin Man, we had not seen on television so many children so vilely used, so numb and inward, so trapped in shame, so disbelieved by so many adults, so tormented by their peers, so ridiculed on cross-examination by a hateful defense attorney. Nor had we experienced to such an excruciating degree the corresponding powerlessness of parents unequipped to make “the bad thing” all right, cancel it out, even to exact revenge. At a preschool, of all places… the hooded figures, burning candles, and porn
ographic Polaroids. About the “satanic” component of Muffin Man—the magic names (Virgo, Isis) and murdered rabbits, the bloody altars and black-mass pentagrams—I expressed some reservations in a magazine article in October 1989. But this was the lazy agnosticism of the armchair critic. You make reservations, but never actually go anywhere. Besides, had not Muffin Man been “inspired” by a “true” story? Hadn’t we already read in the papers about similar cases of “ritual abuse” in Los Angeles, El Paso, and the Bronx?

  Three months after the murdered bunny rabbits in Muffin Man on CBS came a dead chicken in Unspeakable Acts on ABC. As chickens go, this dead one was a red herring, introduced early in a TV movie “based on” accusations of child abuse at a day-care center in Dade County, Florida, and then dropped before the trial, as if a Chicken Little in Burbank were having second thoughts. I certainly was. We were asked to believe the children, which ought to have been easy. After all, they accused Gregory Sierra, who had brought with him to the TV movie all those bad vibes from his many lowlife roles on Miami Vice. But looking at the therapists who coached the children in their testimony, the screen got smaller. It was impossible not to suspect the therapists themselves of something ulterior: Brad Davis, with his self-righteous little blond ponytail, and Jill Clayburgh, on some sort of Simone Weil starvation diet, seemed almost to slither, in thrall to an extraterrestrial music. Their eyes glistened, as if from esoteric rite. They were… creepy.

  We’ve come to an interesting intersection of television and other American cultures. The Movie of the Week (MOW) had not, of course, invented alcoholism, cancer, wife-beating, child abuse, madness, murder, or rape. On the other hand, although we lack the helpful statistics, it’s hard not to imagine that a steady diet of such movies encouraged more Americans to report intimate crimes; leave abusive homes; go into therapy and twelve-step programs; petition courts, legislatures, and the media for redress of grievance; feel anxious and speak bitterness and sue. Because MOWs as a genre tend to emphasize the vulnerability of women and children, they also doubtless contributed by feedback loop to what critics came to characterize as a “victim psychology” and “political correctness.” (Amazing really that sensitivity to other people’s pain should somehow turn into a whole new rhetoric of ridicule, as if empathy and old-fashioned “knee-jerk liberalism” were any threat to the paychecks, perks, and power games of a muscular patriarchy; as if feeling bad on behalf of the aggrieved were simultaneously lily-livered and totalitarian. Or even worse: un-hip; less than way-cool.) But in the related hysterias about incest and satanic ritual abuse, television was far behind the cultural curve, so late it was out of any loop.

  We first heard about ritual child abuse in February 1984, when newspapers, radio, and TV excitedly reported accusations that for two decades teachers at the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach had tortured and raped small children and killed their bunny rabbits. (Bunnies were to ritual abuse scenarios of the 1980s what black helicopters would become for right-wing militia fantasies in the 1990s.) That spring, in Jordan, Minnesota, there were twenty-four arrests for membership in a kiddie-porn sex ring said to murder babies, drink their blood, and toss their corpses into a river. In April, a janitor and three teachers at Chicago’s Rogers Park Day Care Center were accused of boiling and eating babies. In May, in Reno, a Montessori day school was shut down on account of satanic rites and a “naked movie star game.” In Memphis in June, a teacher’s aide and a Baptist minister at the Georgian Hills Early Childhood Center were brought up on charges of sexual assault and animal sacrifice. All that summer, from Malden, Massachusetts, to Sacramento, California, from West Point to Miami, hysteria spread. According to Satan’s Silence, an angry account of “the Making of a Modern American Witch-Hunt” by Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker (1995), accusations of ritual abuse triggered criminal cases in more than a hundred communities between 1983 and 1987. On the one hand, forks, spoons, screwdrivers, Lego blocks, monster masks, mind-altering drugs, feces-eating, and urine-drinking; on the other, battered-child syndrome, rape-trauma syndrome, child-sexual-abuse-accommodation syndrome, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Janet Reno prosecuted the Country Walk case in Dade County, Florida. When Kelly Michaels’s conviction was overturned in 1995, the aspiring actress and part-time worker at the Wee Care Day Nursery in Maplewood, New Jersey, had already served seven years in prison, with another forty to go, for atrocities that supposedly ranged from licking peanut butter off children’s genitals to playing piano in the nude. As for the case that started it all, after seven years in court and $15 million in expenses, nobody associated with the McMartin Preschool was ever convicted on a single count of anything—not of sodomy, rape, group sex, satanism, or even excessive fondling; not of “Goatman,” the Alligator Game, the ritual murder of a horse with a baseball bat or the cutting off of the floppy ears of bunny rabbits and making munchkins drink their blood, much less membership in what the media had called “a nationwide conspiracy of pedophiles in day-care centers.”

  The counterattack actually began on television. In 1990, in the churchgoing community of Edenton, North Carolina (population five thousand), seven defendants at the Little Rascals day-care center were charged on 429 separate counts of abusing children with knives, forks, scissors, needles, and hammers. Public-TV producer Ofra Bikel went to Edenton and talked, on camera, to almost everybody—accused, accusers, relatives, neighbors, lawyers, therapists, even many of the children named in the indictments—and the result was a 1991 Frontline documentary, “Innocence Lost,” that won not only an Emmy and the Columbia University–Alfred I. duPont Silver Baton but also scared the hell out of those of us who had been predisposed throughout the eighties to believe whatever children said or whatever their therapists had coached them to say. After a mixed bag of guilty verdicts in 1993, Bikel returned to Edenton for another batch of interviews and to Frontline with a four-hour reconstruction, overview, and cry of rage. After the first program, it’s amazing anyone in North Carolina would talk to her again, but most just couldn’t help themselves, including a judge with hindsight doubts and five troubled members of the jury that sent Bob Kelly, the co-owner of Little Rascals, to prison for twelve consecutive life sentences.

  Because of Ofra Bikel, We the Jury know more than the actual jury did about Edenton as a frazzled community, about social-service agencies with their own agendas, about cops wanting to close an ugly case, about psychiatrists with ego investments, about similar cases falling apart in other states, and even about jury irregularities in Edenton itself. To our watching, we bring some history and respond (again, not ignobly) with a visceral rush. We start taking everything personally. For instance, I didn’t much care for the shifty-eyed Kelly. His wife, Betsy, seemed nicer, although she grew old before our eyes. And Betsy’s passionate younger sister, Nancy, was immensely appealing. Whereas Bob’s principal accuser, Jane Mabry, was somehow operatic and ulterior. And many of the parents who turned against the Kellys, including Bob’s lawyer once he was told that his own child might have been a victim, were clearly hysterical. (Well, wouldn’t you be, if you thought for a minute… ?) After which electronic personalizing, we all turn into advocates: No way, looking at such Little Rascals caretakers as Robin Bynum and Dawn Wilson, could we believe either capable of such devil-worship horrors. Hadn’t they been offered a plea bargain, even after the verdict on Bob Kelly? Knowing she was innocent, Wilson rejected such a bargain, and was sentenced to the max. How come? Jurors told Bikel they hadn’t trusted what little there was of medical evidence. (Of physical evidence, there was none.) Nor did they credit certain details of the children’s testimony. (Like Bob shooting babies.) But they took into their deliberations the lurid reports of the therapists, and these had apparently been decisive. Bloodlust, besides, has its own momentum, and so does bad faith. (If Bob was guilty, didn’t Dawn have to be?) And now everybody felt bad.

  No one felt worse than Bikel, who refused to let go of her subject. Two years later in April 1995, she returned to Frontline
with four more hours on “Divided Memories.” She interviewed dozens of adult “victims” who, after years of “repressing” memories of childhood sexual trauma, “recovered” these memories in therapy. She interviewed members of the families of these “victims.” She quizzed the therapists themselves, careful to sort out differences between hypnosis and “reparenting,” between “reparenting” and “age regression.” She talked to psychologists who blame Freud for having abandoned his seduction theory and to lawyers who are suing everybody, including, to their indignant surprise, the therapists themselves. It turns out that some of these patients “recovered” memories of ritual abuse in previous lives. It also turns out that, if any of these therapists had the slightest doubt whatsoever about the nightmare tales to which they had given such color and shape, they didn’t think factual accuracy really mattered. What the patient felt was all that counted. “Confabulation,” defined by the dictionary in its strictly psychiatric sense as “replacement of a gap in memory by a falsification that the subject accepts as correct,” seems to be contagious—as it had been among teenaged girls in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, and was again among goat-faced Bolsheviks at Stalin’s show trials in the 1930s.