Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

by Kurt Andersen

When the American Psychological Association surveyed its members, 93 percent said they believed the people claiming satanic ritual abuse were telling the truth. If the mental health professionals and journalists and police had become convinced it was real, so inevitably did prosecutors. In two national studies at the time, one by the American Bar Association and another by a team from the University of California at Davis, a quarter of prosecutors surveyed said they had handled cases of ritual abuse. From the early 1980s through the early 1990s, around two hundred Americans were indicted and prosecuted in dozens of states as satanic ritual abusers. More than eighty were convicted, some of them sentenced to long prison sentences for imaginary crimes. The first big outbreak was in and around Bakersfield, a place known for extreme Christianity and for political and cultural conservatism. A new hard-line county prosecutor was elected in 1983 and promptly created a ritual abuse task force. County social workers, including the one assigned to debrief the allegedly abused children whom the county had removed from their homes, had attended one of the law enforcement seminars about satanic crimes with Michelle Remembers on its syllabus—and soon the children were repeating the familiar story: blood-drinking, cannibalism, rape by chanting people in robes, babies bred for sacrifice. Local law enforcement guessed that thirty babies had been sacrificially slaughtered. No babies had been...