All the Lies They Did Not Tell

by Pablo Trincia

What had I become? I was thirty-seven years old and had somehow lost my connection to that bright-eyed twentysomething-year-old who had decided to become a journalist because he cared about people. I had to go back to being that person.

Lorena Morselli, a kindergarten teacher in Massa Finalese, a little town outside Modena. Her life had been shattered by a lengthy trial in which she was accused of ritual satanic abuse and sexual violence against her four children, whom she hadn’t seen since they were little.

Her three oldest children confirmed their cousin’s account, accusing Lorena of psychological violence, kidnapping, rape, and murder in cemeteries, where she and her husband forced the children to watch and actively participate in all manner of crimes.

I didn’t know whether to believe her. Her story had plenty of holes. I had questions. Why had her children said those things? I was confused, both as a journalist and as a father. Lorena said the psychologists planted stories in the children’s minds, turning them against their parents.

“My children weren’t the only ones to be taken away,” she told me. “Between 1997 and 1998, in Massa Finalese and Mirandola, social services took away fourteen . . . no, wait, fifteen . . . actually, sixteen children. All from families accused of the same things.”

I talked to many people who had lived there for many years, but no one seemed to remember this story. It had filled the pages of the local papers week after week, but now it was just a hazy memory of something that had happened “out there” in that land of open fields, of commuter towns where Modenesi and Mirandolesi don’t like to venture, other than to find a good osteria every once in a while.

The amnesia seemed to extend to Massa Finalese, a village outside Finale Emilia that had also been devastated by a tidal wave of trials.

I got the same reaction I’d received in Mirandola. People narrowed their eyes, as if struggling to think back in time, but all they could remember were brief flashes of a story I seemed to know more about than they did.

Did they really not remember? Or were they pretending not to because they didn’t want to talk about it?

Court experts had evaluated the children’s statements with a method called criteria-based content analysis, which is used to ascertain the reliability and truthfulness of abuse victim testimony. It uses a set of indicators, including logical structure, spontaneous correction, self-deprecation, and quantity of realistic details, like descriptions of physical sensations tied to the abuse.

“Finding the bad guy restores peace of mind,” Giuliana Mazzoni told me. She is a world-renowned professor of psychology who specializes in mass psychosis. “It restores the ability to live with oneself and not have to say, ‘It’s my fault.’”

What all these experts seemed to overlook was that the children’s stories could have been contaminated in some way. Someone could have planted a seed in their memories. It then blossomed and grew over time until it devoured their real experiences, substituting them with something that was partially or completely artificial. This phenomenon has been studied for a long time in the rest of the world, but it remains underestimated, especially among psychologists who aren’t familiar with the research on the mnemonic functions of the brain.