Satanic Panic!

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Speaker 2 I'm Jane Marie and this is the nightmare.

Speaker 3 Happy Halloween, everybody.

Speaker 2 Today, we're going to talk about Satan.

Speaker 2 Sarah Marshall, who you know from your other favorite podcast, You're Wrong About, has a new show out called The Devil You Know, all about the Satanic Panic in the 80s.

Speaker 4 So this is a mini-series that I've made with CBC podcasts, and it's a total of 16 delicious episodes on the spread of the satanic panic and trying to get at what that looked like through individual testimony because I've been researching the satanic panic since I was in grad school and it has gone from something that felt kind of inert and a part of history that we hadn't reckoned with yet to a part of the present day that was happening right now

Speaker 4 like polio

Speaker 4 And it's been a wild ride. And one of the things that I love that I was able to do on the show is that, you know, researching this topic for such a long time

Speaker 4 left me with quite a lot of questions really about like what was it like to be the child of someone who was going through recovered memory therapy and who was consequently really suffering in her day-to-day life or what was it like to be one of the real people

Speaker 4 who knew the people who became the characters and Michelle remembers as they were writing this book that helped start the panic.

Speaker 4 And just these questions about, you know, what was it like to be a teen who was profiled as a Satanist for no particular reason, just because something shocking happened in town and the police had no better ideas.

Speaker 4 These questions about how to try and observe the satanic panic through the kinds of individual people who were affected by it, almost like the way I think in retrospect you would try and depict an actual disaster.

Speaker 4 That's kind of one of the things the show is trying to do.

Speaker 3 So I was alive for this and

Speaker 3 sneaking episodes of the Phil Donahue show and stuff. So I was very plugged in

Speaker 3 to what was happening.

Speaker 4 That was hard news at the time.

Speaker 5 I know, seriously.

Speaker 4 Well, there's this book that comes out in 1980 called Michelle Remembers, and kind of speaking to what you're saying about Donahue, I think there's this thing to growing up in the 80s and 90s where as a child of Oprah and the Oprah's book club, you'll kind of believe anything, you know, because Oprah was a big proponent of satanic panic stories in the 80s when she was kind of trying to make her name in daytime TV, as was everybody else.

Speaker 4 Like Donahue and certainly Geraldo, and really anyone with a daytime TV presence, and a lot of people trying to get into prime time too on a national scale, we're gravitating towards a satanic panic as a topic.

Speaker 4 Because it, I mean, what could be better in terms of ratings and getting people to stay on your channel or to stay through commercials?

Speaker 2 I have to pause it for a second to say this opening sequence for Phil Donahue's show goes on forever.

Speaker 2 And all it is is B-roll of a plane taking off and then a city skyline with the word Donahue over it. And then it says, Donahue, Donahue, Donahue, Donahue, Donahue,

Speaker 2 and then cuts to the studio. So let's start from the top.

Speaker 2 Oh, but also, this gives me an opportunity to play a piece of tape that I've been wanting to squeeze into some episode somewhere for years. This has nothing to do with the satanic panic.

Speaker 2 It has to do with ghosts. I found this while I was Googling Kyle Richards' acting career, you know, Kyle from The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
Found it years ago. Show it to my friends.

Speaker 2 Show it to my lovers. Now I'm showing it to you.
This is a TV show in the 80s called Down to Earth. And the theme song tells the entire story of the show.

Speaker 2 You don't even need to watch the show after you listen to the beginning of it. Okay, let's

Speaker 3 back in the days of Valentino,

Speaker 3 we know a maid named Ethel was so bright and alive,

Speaker 3 but she was struck down by a trolley golly,

Speaker 3 said goodbye in 1925.

Speaker 3 Ethel in heaven awaited patiently to earn her wings and be an angel fancy free.

Speaker 3 Sixty years later, the opportunity

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Speaker 4 Boo-boop-boop-da-doo, 23 skidoo.

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Speaker 3 Richard, Lissy, Dwayne, and JJ2.

Speaker 3 Now she must be a 1980s lady.

Speaker 3 Down to earth, it's so angelical.

Speaker 3 Down to earth, it's quite a spectacle.

Speaker 3 Down to earth, it's just

Speaker 7 Is the caller there?

Speaker 3 Yes, I'm the caller. Yes, go ahead.
I thoroughly believe that these people

Speaker 3 are of the devil, of Satan.

Speaker 6 Do they trouble you?

Speaker 3 Oh, I think it's a disgrace. Well, what's going to happen?

Speaker 7 What will happen

Speaker 7 outside of your baby not being fed while you're talking

Speaker 7 you really feel that they are emissaries of the devil the devil has sent them is that it i believe that

Speaker 4 okay i appreciate your call okay i thank you the thing that gave it a lot of credibility was this bestseller that came out in 1980 it was called michelle remembers and it occupied this uncomfortable place in terms of truth or fiction where it was marketed as non-fiction.

Speaker 4 It was told as a real story, a real story about this woman who went into therapy and whose therapist regressed her to her childhood and she realized that her mother had given her to a satanic cult.

Speaker 8 Basically, what I remembered was a 14-month period of my life at age five where I was given to a group of people whom at first I wasn't aware of what they were doing other than to a child.

Speaker 9 They were adults doing things I couldn't understand and that frightened me.

Speaker 8 About three months, three and a half months into the remembering, I realized through the ritual and repetition that these people had that they were involved in some type of satanic church.

Speaker 4 And And she had witnessed Satan coming back, or I don't know if he ever left really, but Satan manifesting and giving his plan for the 70s and 80s. And

Speaker 4 it was a book that was, you know, treated by notably some police officers and social workers as absolute fact.

Speaker 4 And it warned that basically, you know how we just started thinking about child abuse and specifically child sexual abuse as a real problem in society.

Speaker 4 Well, we really need to be looking out for satanic abuse, so keep your eyes open for that one. And I think that that

Speaker 4 because this book was treated with such seriousness, which it didn't deserve at all, it was not fact-checked, as

Speaker 4 most non-fiction books aren't to this day, and it was written with a pretty clear agenda. And what was that agenda?

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 4 we have these two people at At Center, Lawrence Pasder and

Speaker 4 this woman, Michelle, who have been therapist and patient for a while. Michelle comes back into therapy.
She's extremely depressed. She's just had a miscarriage.

Speaker 4 And interestingly, her male therapist perspective is, how could she possibly be so upset? And it's like, well,

Speaker 4 she just had a miscarriage. Women don't really need, we don't need a reason that involves the devil and God in a battle for the soul of mankind to be so upset.

Speaker 3 Oh, that's what he was trying to suss out? It wasn't just a quality of her. Like, hmm, I wonder why she's upset.
It was like, we're going to get to the bottom of this. And I bet at the bottom of this.

Speaker 4 It really didn't take him long to formulate a theory because he

Speaker 4 puts her in what seems to be a trance-like state. There's language that suggests it's hypnosis or something like it, although the book never calls it that, to be clear.

Speaker 4 And she describes this sort of, this imagistic scene where there's there's women and they're lighting candles and they kind of put her on top of a counter and forget her.

Speaker 4 And from this, he deduces that she's recovering memories about witchcraft and her mother being involved in witchcraft.

Speaker 4 And from this, you know, because again, this is the mid-70s when this therapy begins. So, I mean, the exorcist has just come out.
There's a lot of Satan media.

Speaker 4 And there's a sort of implicit idea for a lot of people that the Manson family were somehow satanic,

Speaker 4 which it was true only in the sense that they were overly devoted to a short little guy who had gained the control of some young women. But

Speaker 4 you don't have to be a supernatural being in order to do that in America. That's kind of the scary part.
And so we had these two people who were concocting this story together.

Speaker 4 And, you know, while doing this therapy, Dr. Pasdra and Michelle at a certain point begin to have an affair.

Speaker 4 And it seems like there's this necessary act of moral laundering happening where, in order for it to be okay what they're doing,

Speaker 4 they have to be battling Satan himself, because then, you know, you can kind of have an affair with whoever you want as long as you're protecting mankind from Satan, I guess.

Speaker 3 What?

Speaker 4 This is what I mean. No one ever says this, but this is my analysis.

Speaker 4 So, Larry and Michelle do quite a bit of touring to promote it. They go on local TV stations.

Speaker 4 So I think that

Speaker 4 they really put their backs into it. And

Speaker 4 it's not a huge bestseller. It's not on the level of JAWS, which actually their publisher had worked on previous to this, which to me says a lot about

Speaker 4 its apparent viability as a commercial venture.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 it does become highly successful and influential and especially in Victoria, which is Victoria, BC, which is where these people live.

Speaker 4 It's extremely well known.

Speaker 4 And from what I can tell from ha you know, having talked to people who grew up there at the time, just kind of created this idea that if your parents didn't keep a closer eye on you, you were going to get nabbed around potentially any corner.

Speaker 3 I mean, Victoria's a city, but it's not the biggest city in the world. You know, like, how many people were implicated around there?

Speaker 4 It's a hard city to hide Satanists in, you know.

Speaker 4 And it did have

Speaker 4 really an effect on people and created some paranoia, and I'm sure created quite a lot of trouble for people that they wouldn't have otherwise had.

Speaker 4 I mean, it is, you know, it's kind of much like Portland historically, it's a city where there is, you know, a higher concentration of druids and sort of Wiccan types than in other places, but they just want to leave pickles out in the moonlight, you know?

Speaker 4 That's fine. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah. That's good for us, really.

Speaker 4 And then what is interesting is that you can kind of see looking at 60s and 70s media that there is a trend toward fear of Satan, right? We have the Manson family freaking people out.

Speaker 4 We have Rosemary's Baby and the idea that there's some

Speaker 4 kind of implicit connection between these two events. And also like Rosemary's Baby is a very scary movie.

Speaker 4 And it's scary because Satan can be scary, but it's mainly scary because men are scary and marriage is scary and so on. But, you know, Satan gets to ride on John Cassavettes' coattails.

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Speaker 4 And I mean, you know, speaking of Donahue and everything, one of the things that occurs to me about this topic and also why I'm drawn to it is that, you know, I grew up in the 90s watching cable TV specials, and I feel like my perspective from that is like, I grew up watching Unsolved Mysteries.

Speaker 4 I'm prepared to believe anything.

Speaker 4 Like, I was watching, I'm watching Unsolved Mysteries again lately, and it continues to be probably the best TV that, you know, anyone ever made in terms of sheer entertainment for lack of budget.

Speaker 4 And the opening of the one I was just watching is Robert Stack saying,

Speaker 4 These two men got in a car accident, and afterwards, both of them claim to have become clairvoyant. Can a car accident cause clairvoyance? And you're like, absolutely it can't.

Speaker 4 But yeah, let's waste 15 minutes.

Speaker 4 We're at grandma's house. Exactly.

Speaker 3 I was just going to say,

Speaker 3 we didn't have cable, but my grandma was also glued to court TV

Speaker 3 in the 90s. And that was fun.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and just the idea that like TV was bringing us closer to the truth, which it was in some ways, and then also just making some boss reenactments of stuff that for sure didn't happen.

Speaker 4 But yeah, I mean, it spread everywhere because we had this general trend towards Satan,

Speaker 4 fear of Satan in 60s and 70s media, this idea that the Christian right was pushing back with that any alternative culture, especially like witchy stuff or tarot cards or horoscopes or Stevie Nick's records were were leading your child directly to Satanism.

Speaker 4 It wasn't just harmless hippie-woo-woo stuff. It was a flirtation with the occult that was part of Satan's agenda was the argument.

Speaker 4 The problem then

Speaker 4 with

Speaker 4 looking at alleged preschool abuse cases, which is how this begins to spread around, interestingly, is that no one has really figured out how to to forensically question children yet.

Speaker 4 Like, questioning about child sexual abuse is something that police departments have really just started to bother with, and so there's not a sense of best practices for anything that people are doing.

Speaker 4 So, if you have someone who goes in specifically trained to think there's thousands of undetected Satanists abusing children,

Speaker 4 and I'm going to find some, then what turns out to be the case, and probably anyone who's interacted with young children can guess this, is that if you think you know

Speaker 4 what the child is going to say, you can pretty much get them to say it and convince yourself that that wasn't you implanting the idea in their head. That was just them expressing it.

Speaker 4 And things got a lot hairier.

Speaker 4 There's a lot of questioning of children that involves like really pressuring them as if they're co-defendants in some kind of an armed robbery case in a way that's very unsavory to read.

Speaker 4 But basically the McMartin case in Southern California and Manhattan Beach becomes national news and then 8382, because that's every parent's worst nightmare that my child is being abused at the daycare center that I'm being guilt-tripped for leaving them at and that costs too much anyway and that not only are people incompetent, which I might be afraid of, but they're Satanists,

Speaker 4 that becomes something that kind of becomes a meme and people keep finding because they keep looking for it.

Speaker 4 Then it was some very aggressive interview tactics where essentially, you know, to build on this idea of interviewing children like co-defendants or co-conspirators, you would have a child who would be led through

Speaker 4 a conversation that would kind of change rules as it went, you know, so potentially it would start with asking about this teacher, what they may or may not have done, what they're like, and then leading into imaginative play.

Speaker 4 And then if that imaginative play, you know, involving puppets and things like that, touches on anything that the person questioning the child has been trained to see as satanic, which if you're trained off of Michelle Remembers and the kind of later

Speaker 4 satanic abuse detection materials that police departments around the country are creating.

Speaker 3 Like, what kind of stuff?

Speaker 4 There's a case in New Jersey where a child says that the teacher used peanut butter in a ritual.

Speaker 4 And then when peanut butter is found in the preschool or in the daycare kitchen, it's treated as a smoking gun kind of a moment because a child mentioned peanut butter and therefore there can't be peanut butter there.

Speaker 4 Really, you know, dolls, I think, can be implicated because of the idea that they can be used

Speaker 4 in rituals or to substitute for

Speaker 4 dead babies. Because the other issue is that, unfortunately for all of us, Michelle Remembers involves a lot of descriptions of babies being sacrificed as part of satanic rituals.

Speaker 4 And so, one of the boilerplate questions when you're going into

Speaker 4 questioning in one of these cases, having been trained on this piece of alleged nonfiction, is like, well, these Satanists, they love to get low-paying jobs and daycares doing backbreaking work because

Speaker 4 they need kids for their rituals. They want to have large groups of hard-to-control preschoolers to carry out their rituals because they, I don't know,

Speaker 4 they need their vitality

Speaker 4 or something.

Speaker 4 And they just need toddler vibes. It's hard to say why.

Speaker 4 And, you know, it's kind of a basic case of blood libel, too, right? Where if you want to dehumanize people as fast as possible, you accuse them of baby killing.

Speaker 4 And that pretty much gets the job done.

Speaker 4 But it's also, I mean, the thing about little kids, which I think, again, those of us who have like been around little kids, like not even as parents, because like sort of

Speaker 4 they're around, you know.

Speaker 4 You realize that some number of them in a very wholesome way love to get gory,

Speaker 4 you know, and love to say somewhat distressing things or to observe something normal and talk about it distressingly, you know?

Speaker 3 They also like to make a lot of shit up and they also

Speaker 3 like to impress their parents and they also like to follow the rules when they notice them happening. Right.
I can see there's a bunch of different reasons why little kids would say things like that.

Speaker 4 Right. And, you know, and that you're in a situation where

Speaker 4 you understand

Speaker 4 potentially because it's made very explicit to you that until you say something extreme, you're not going to get out of here.

Speaker 4 That you get like a strong positive reaction when you say something extreme. There's this

Speaker 4 case further down the line of a woman named Patty Burgess who was institutionalized for her alleged multiple personality disorder. And it was really kind of a breathtaking case of

Speaker 4 abuse of power by a therapist because

Speaker 4 she had children and

Speaker 4 at least one of them was institutionalized as well and he was given stickers when he produced stories about what happened in this satanic cult that

Speaker 4 people were trying to get evidence about from him and he was just making things up and one of the things he invented that really shocked the people taking care of him as

Speaker 4 must as something that had to be true is that when you eviscerate someone, their innards smell bad.

Speaker 4 And which, A, I feel like, you know, we're not giving kids enough credit if we don't think they could guess that. And B, he got that from

Speaker 4 The Empire Strikes Back when, of course, we learned that tauntons smell better on the outside.

Speaker 4 And then what we start to see is a movement within therapy where you can go in and say, I was watching Donahue, I saw about satanic ritual abuse,

Speaker 4 I'm worried that that happened to me because I'm also being told that, you know, one of the key beliefs of

Speaker 4 kind of pop psychology at this time is that it's very normal to repress memories and not just to not remember something because it was traumatic, because you dissociated during it, because it's just something that you've actively not remembered, which I think is a very real phenomenon, but that your brain has this fantastic power to be able to protect you by saying, this is too traumatic for the person experiencing it, so I'm just going to put it away in this nice lockbox.

Speaker 4 And then when you're old enough and mature enough and in a stable enough place to deal with it, then you're going to take it out and you're going to be able to remember everything.

Speaker 4 And you're going to be able to practically go back in time and re-experience it. You know, that's statistically

Speaker 4 not that unusual is kind of the belief at the time to be able to repress large swaths of your life.

Speaker 4 And there's this idea that in the same way that there are all these Satanists that nobody ever thought to look up before,

Speaker 4 some therapists at the time seemed to believe that a significant significant percentage of women have multiple personality disorder.

Speaker 4 And what appears to be true is that there's a certain number of women who can be induced to present multiple personalities, especially if they're encouraged to write journal entries as them and name them and take on different character traits.

Speaker 4 And so it's... Not men.
No, who cares about men?

Speaker 4 But it is kind of funny because in terms of the sheer folly of these people, when kind of a big part of the story is women seeking therapy and very sensibly saying, I have an idea of what my issues are and I want to talk about them.

Speaker 4 And therapists being like, no, you don't.

Speaker 4 I'm deciding what we're talking about and I'm going to destroy your life. It's going to be great.

Speaker 4 And your insurance is going to pay me so much money because I'm going to keep you under hypnosis for four hours at a time.

Speaker 3 Well, I'm just thinking of the lack of evidence for any of it.

Speaker 3 You know, you hear the trials and stuff, but you don't hear about these huge satanic cabals being swept up.

Speaker 4 No, and yet we started finding other cabals. You know, in the 90s, we found Waco.
It was there. You know, it's a...
Yeah. When the Branch Davidians set up shop, they leave a pretty sizable footprint.

Speaker 4 So why are the Satanists invisible the way they are?

Speaker 4 At a certain point, you know, you start wondering, with all these Satanists operating seemingly constantly, and

Speaker 4 with all these stories of people sacrificing babies, I guess mathematically it stops lining up, right? You're like, where are the babies coming from? How come no one's missing all of these babies?

Speaker 4 And how is Satan able to not leave a shred of physical evidence, even one time? And at a certain point, the only possible answer has to be that the magic of Satan is making all of it make sense.

Speaker 4 Like, you kind of have to believe in Satan

Speaker 4 more than almost any Satanist ever could in order to make the theory work in a weird way.

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Speaker 4 Two of the names that are important in kind of the very first wave of people pushing back against this from any kind of position of authority are Debbie Nathan, who was a journalist who was in Texas at the time, and Ken Lanning, who was working with the FBI and who was

Speaker 4 an agent tasked with basically trying to check out these stories for a long time and determine if there was any validity to them, and who ultimately thought, you know, well,

Speaker 4 gosh, if there's not a single piece of evidence of any of this ever occurring,

Speaker 4 that would really suggest that this isn't happening. And so, of course,

Speaker 4 by the time he issued a report stating this, things had become so heated that true believers in the satanic panic then basically just turned around and accused him of being in cahoots with the Satanists, which meant that the FBI was as well.

Speaker 4 So you can't trust the FBI now.

Speaker 4 And so this is, you know, so by the late 80s, early 90s, you had to be a conspiracy theorist on the level of thinking thinking that, you know, the United States federal government was wrapped up in this as well for the whole thing to continue to make sense.

Speaker 4 There's something I see in the satanic panic boiled down to its essence that feels like the conspiracy theories of today, not just for the way Satan is involved in them, but because it feels like, you know, as complicated as it gets, and I feel like I've already led us down so many different cul-de-sacs that, you know,

Speaker 4 but I feel like already at this point, it feels so complicated how this manifested. But I think what you can boil it down to is

Speaker 4 this extremely sustained, increasingly ridiculous effort to avoid the point, right? Because the point in the late 70s is like, huh, child abuse is actually pretty rampant and child sexual abuse

Speaker 4 isn't, contrary to basically what parents were doing before, something that you can can get a child to forget about and not be traumatized by if you never, ever, ever talk about it and hope that they don't remember it.

Speaker 4 This is essentially,

Speaker 4 you know, the best that parents had come up with. And so this idea that sexual abuse is a real endemic problem, that sexual assault is something that

Speaker 4 everyone

Speaker 4 socialized as female is experiencing in one way or another, if not directly, then certainly indirectly, and it sort of through the shared trauma

Speaker 4 of just growing up in the world. And it feels like there's a moment when we also are being asked to look at the fact that

Speaker 4 so many women and children are staying in abusive situations because they can't leave, because the nuclear family is being protected at the expense of everything else, and because

Speaker 4 women aren't able to make it on their own at this point, you know, for very systemic reasons, because they don't have the same power as wage earners. They don't have the same legal protections.

Speaker 4 They don't have effective legal protections against domestic abuse and against any man who wants them back, essentially.

Speaker 3 How do you feel after reporting this show? Are you feeling the same way? Like, is it, are you satisfied?

Speaker 4 Good question. I mean, I feel like I would

Speaker 3 I would

Speaker 4 maybe feel most satisfied if it wasn't happening so much right this second, you know, because it feels like

Speaker 4 part of me wants to have, and this is tying into the whole satanic panic lore of like

Speaker 4 getting people to believe something extreme out of the desire to be heroic.

Speaker 4 But like, I really, I want to stop it from happening so much again, you know, because we have just this kind of but again, it's like

Speaker 4 I can't take on Satan, you know, we've been blaming Satan for stuff for hundreds of years, you know, I think the thing too is that Satan is kind of the great enabler in North American history.

Speaker 4 You know, if you want to pillage and commit genocide and take people's lands, you can accuse them of being in league with Satan and then you can kill whoever you want.

Speaker 4 You know, Satan, Satan weirdly, I think in terms of how he functions for American history and colonial European history, kind of allows you to commit murder and call it good, you know?

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 so I think, like, I'm not going to take the ability to say that anything you find threatening is satanic away from people because we've been using Satan for a long time, and this is just the latest chapter in that.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 I feel...

Speaker 4 I do feel really satisfied in terms of just having been able to talk to the people that I've gotten to talk to and to be able to just hear what it was like for them to be there as this unfolded because I think I started approaching this story as a student of history and feeling like it was a chapter of history and then I think the closer that I got to it and the more truly amazing people that I got to talk to in the course of this the more it

Speaker 4 I was finally able to integrate it

Speaker 4 into my worldview and to hopefully communicate that as is just something that happened day by day to people and was extremely confusing to live through until one day you could look back on it and see the whole sweep of things.

Speaker 4 But at the time that it's going on, it's just daily life and everyone is just trying to figure out how to survive within that, just like today.

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