In 1984, Uncle Sam sent me to a specialized military school in Orange County, California. We had our evenings and weekends off, and it was an exciting time to be there because the Summer Olympics were underway in nearby Los Angeles. I didn’t meet any athletes, but the restaurants and malls were packed with thousands of spectators and giddy celebrity-hunting tourists.
Young soldiers are almost as fit as Olympians, or so we told ourselves, and so we began to prank the visitors by posing as foreign competitors. I have to admit that I misrepresented myself as a “Freench high johm-pair olympique.”
It’s hard to be convincing when your buddies are snorting and undermining your ruse within earshot of your audience, but it was some of the best fun I ever had lying.
In other words, I’m probably not the best guy to deliver a sermon on Exodus 20:16 (the Ninth Commandment): “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” But hey, I didn’t disparage the French high jumpers. I didn’t accuse them of collaborating with the Germans, or watering down the champagne.
Bearing false witness is a much more serious matter, nothing to chuckle about.
Ira Reiner
Just a few miles up the coast, in the southwest corner of Los Angeles County, there was another, darker kind of excitement in 1984. District Attorney Ira Reiner had signed off on 115 astonishing child abuse charges against the operators of a day care center, including three generations of founder Virginia McMartin’s family. The accusations eventually expanded to 321 counts, with 48 alleged victims.
They were accused not only of sodomizing the children, but of having sex with animals, drinking blood and eating feces. According to the government, they took the children into tunnels beneath the day care center for depraved satanic activity, then cleaned them up and brought them back to the surface before parents arrived to reclaim them.
The founder’s grandson Ray Buckey was denied bail, and would spend five years in a jail cell without being convicted of wrongdoing of any kind. Prosecutors immunized a lowlife criminal cellmate against previous perjury charges and called him to testify that Buckey had confessed in jail to the abuses.
Ray Buckey
Buckey’s mother Peggy was at liberty during six years of legal proceedings only because she posted $1 million in bail. So, she probably had to scrape up $100,000 (nonrefundable) for her bail bondsman. Her mother, the 77-year-old founder, spent six of her final years hearing her family’s reputation blackened. None of the defendants were convicted of anything in the six-year, $15 million prosecution. Thank God for trial by jury.
The original accuser was a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic who died of chronic alcoholism before the marathon preliminary hearings concluded. She accused not only the day care staff but her ex-husband of sodomizing her son.
She was not the only nut case eager to victimize the McMartins. A social worker with the Children’s Institute International (CII) interviewed 400 children extensively and suggestively, using anatomically correct dolls.
Peggy McMartin Buckey
She was a former lobbyist for the National Organization for Women, and a grant evaluator for the National Center for Child Abuse and Neglect. Aside from the monstrous injustice to the defendants, her child interview methods were an intellectual scandal. We know this because the interviews were recorded.
The police department’s idea of an investigation was to send a “Dear Parent” form letter to 200-day care customers, naming Buckey as a suspected child molester and inviting parents to corroborate the paranoid schizophrenic woman’s charges against him.
The news media, whom we trusted in those days, were in bed with the prosecution, perhaps literally. The Los Angeles Times metro editor who oversaw his paper’s coverage of the McMartin prosecution was engaged to the chief prosecutor, and they later married. It became obvious during the proceedings that the prosecutor leaked prejudicial information to a Times reporter under her fiancé’s supervision.
An ABC broadcast journalist broke the McMartin abuse story and carried the steady stream of accusations uncritically, and mostly uncontradicted. He kept his romantic relationship with the CII social worker confidential. It must have seemed like a very small and claustrophobic world to Ray Buckey and his mom Peggy.
It’s easy now, 30 years later, to dismiss the absurd accusations as a “moral panic,” a hysterical contagion comparable to the Salem witch trials. But it didn’t seem so ridiculous at the time. We saw a general pattern of adults betraying parents’ trust, whether in the entertainment industry, public schools or youth organizations.
We didn’t know the original accuser was mentally ill and a chronic substance abuser. We didn’t know about collusion between unethical prosecutors and journalists. We didn’t know the police investigation was a sham. Parents had vulnerable children at stake, and were entitled to err on the side of caution. It’s no disgrace that we guessed wrong.
What’s shameful is when we lock our guesses in, when we lose interest in the evidence. This often takes the form of a statement like “children never lie” or “a child has no reason to lie.” Really?
One of the McMartin accuser children matured into a truthful and remorseful adult. “Never did anyone do anything to me,” he recalled over 20 years later, “and I never saw them doing anything. I lied.”
He recalled the suggestive questioning by his parents, guided by the social worker: “Anytime I would give them an answer they didn’t like, they would ask me again and encourage me to give the answer they were looking for.”
Let’s not kid ourselves that we are above moral panics now. Some of us still treat evidence like a nuisance, and facts like annoying technicalities. It’s human nature.
It was on full display in Ferguson when hateful people demanded the prosecution of a compassionate young police officer on the strength of slanderous accusations, against all evidence, that he was a lawless white racist.
It was roaring in Durham, North Carolina, when surly street mobs, Jesse Jackson, 88 Duke University professors and an unethical prosecutor accused three male students of rape, based on their false accusation by a bipolar, drug-abusing stripper who is now serving a prison sentence for second-degree murder.
As Henry Kissinger once said, even a paranoid can have enemies. Moral indignation isn’t necessarily bad. But indignation isn’t moral if it’s indifferent to truth.
I welcome the recent movement to denounce men who have sexually harassed or assaulted women. But it should be subordinated to evidence. Otherwise it runs the risk of deteriorating into a counterfeit of justice.
When we try to shoe-horn collective, societal justice into the resolution of an individual case, we are tempted to discount the facts of individual guilt or innocence. It’s natural to become impatient with the details of the evidence, because we believe what’s at stake is more important than the fate of one accused person.
Unless you are that person.
One man is a sexual victimizer; another man isn’t. It ought to matter which is which.
