All the Lies They Did Not Tell

by Pablo Trincia

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 eight-year-old niece had told social services that Lorena and her husband, Delfino Covezzi, were members of a cult that brought the children of Massa to local cemeteries at night in order to rape them, sell them to a band of pedophiles, and make them participate in human sacrifices. A horror story for the ages in a land where it seemed like nothing bad could ever happen.

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.

“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.”

Don Ettore believed that the case was a hoax. The five trials that came of it resulted in several convictions, but they never proved anything except for the existence of an ancient war, now being waged on the backs of children, by the state against the church. Emilia Romagna represented the ideal place for such a clash, according to him, because past Communist administrations had infused an insensitive anticlerical ideology into the region’s welfare and social services systems.

Reports of sexual abuse, whether true—as prosecutors alleged—or false—as Don Ettore maintained—couldn’t be boiled down to a power struggle between Communists and Catholics, no matter how prominent that struggle had been in the postwar era. I didn’t know all the details of the case yet, but I expected that the logic behind it would either be simpler and more linear, or much more complex and multifaceted, than what I was hearing from this elderly priest in black garb, with a kind expression.

The illustrated book Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy was released in 1990 as “a child’s book about satanic ritual abuse.” The psychosis also touched large multinational corporations like Procter & Gamble. Some people put forth the idea that their logo—a bearded man looking at the stars—contained references to the Devil.

All these American stories start the same way and follow a similar path: a mother is worried about her child’s sudden change in mood, she decides that he was abused, and she turns to a psychologist for help. This is incredibly similar to what happened in the Bassa in 1997, when Mrs. Tonini noticed that Dario was tired, having trouble paying attention, and tripped a bit more than usual. Was something the matter? What was it?

Lanning’s analysis was shocking. But however paradoxical it may seem, this psychological mechanism has been affecting us since the dawn of time. It’s like the Jewish ritual of the scapegoat, in which the animal was laden with all the evils of a people and sent into the desert. This allowed the community to consider itself purified. By the same token, parents unable to make sense of common phases of discomfort and distress in children try to pin their problems and anxieties on someone else.

“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.’”

The groundswell of cases was causing growing skepticism, especially among scientists. Nevertheless, America’s paranoia began to cross national boundaries at the start of the 1990s, when it arrived in the United Kingdom. Mazzoni told me that many of the British communities that succumbed to it had recently hosted seminars where experts—or alleged experts—“basically told teachers and parents about the existence of collective sexual abuse based on Satanism, and they invited parents, teachers, and social workers to question the children, without actually teaching them how to question the children. And it’s extremely curious how a few months after these seminars, the reports started to rain down.”

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.

This is so-called false memory. In 1996, the American magazine Psychology Today published a long interview with Elizabeth Loftus, a university professor who’d declared, “Eyewitnesses who point their finger at innocent defendants are not liars, for they genuinely believe in the truth of their testimony . . . That’s the frightening part—the truly horrifying idea that what we think we know, what we believe with all our hearts, is not necessarily the truth.”