Chronology of the McMartin Trial

McMartin Trial

A discussion of a biased chronology regarding pertinent aspects of the famous McMartin Pre-school Trial of the 1980s. Said to be the foundational case for the "witch-hunts" or "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s to early 1990s.

In this episode I offer some off the cuff reactions just to a timeline found on the Famous Trials website. I find it instructive and ripe for commentary since it implicitly assumes every single key aspect of the witch-hunt narrative as critiqued by Professor Ross Cheit in his fantastic book, "The Witch-hunt Narrative".

This is another entry in my much broader series that I call the Satanic Panic Reconsidered.

The standard account, as it has emerged over the years, is that in the 1980s there was a "moral panic" wherein Christian fundamentalists were running rampant and collectively lost their minds. This supposedly turned into a "hysteria" where a host of false accusations were made against people who ran daycare centers, nursery schools, and pre-schools. In turn, these were "witch-hunts" where entirely innocent people were accused of heinous acts of rape, molestation, bizarre rituals, and so forth.

The reason I have been working on this series is that the above thumbnail sketch of the standard account is factually wrong in many ways. Although it is true that some Christians made wild accusations about the dangers of rock music or playing Dungeons and Dragons, I lived during this period and knew from first hand experience that most Christians had no role in television and tabloid silliness at all. Moreover, I also knew that some of the abuse allegations were either true or had far more evidence to substantiate them than the standard account accepts. Thus, when I began my research I very quickly discovered a book by Dr. Ross Cheit that exposed the standard account as factually and provably incorrect on several material claims.

Cheit's book was rooted in some 15 years of intense research into several of the cases often casually..