For years during the 1980s and 1990s, America became convinced that an underground network of Satanists was working together to kidnap, torture and abuse children. None of it was real, but the conspiracy theories destroyed lives and livelihoods.
The pinnacle was Geraldo Rivera's infamous NBC special "Devil Worship: Exposing Satan's Underground," which aired on Oct. 28, 1988. Rivera relied on self-proclaimed "Satanism experts," misleading and inaccurate statistics, crimes with only tenuous links to Satanism, and sensationalized media reports. It was the most-viewed documentary in television history. "There are over one million Satanists in this country," Rivera said, adding that "The odds are, [they] are in your town."
The panic grew out of the idea that memories of abuse were often repressed and could be recovered with the help of hypnosis and a therapist. This idea was popularized in the 1980 book "Michelle Remembers," co-written by a Canadian psychiatrist and the patient he eventually married (ethics red flag), in which the eponymous Michelle recovers memories of supposed ritual Satanic abuse conducted by her mother.
In 1983, the panic exploded with the McMartin preschool trial, in which a California parent accused daycare owners of sexually abusing her son. Police then sent a letter to parents warning that their children may have been abused, urging the parents to ask what turned out to be leading questions to a bunch of suggestible preschoolers. Further questioning by authorities continued in this vein, yielding alleged eyewitness accounts by children of networks of secret tunnels and witches flying through the air.
After seven years, the daycare owners were eventually acquitted or had the charges dismissed. One was jailed for five years while awaiting trials and retrials. In the meantime, similar accusations spread through daycares around the country. Most were spurred on by now-discredited methods of questioning small children, methods that often led to children making sensational accusations because they wanted to please the authority figures questioning them.
In a 1992 report on ritual crime, FBI agent Kenneth Lanning concluded that the rampant rumors around ritual Satanism were unfounded. Phillips Stevens, Jr., associate professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at Buffalo, said that the widespread allegations of crimes by Satanists "constitute the greatest hoax perpetrated upon the American people in the twentieth century."
