The Outreau Case and Mass Hysteria: A Review/Essay

**** out of ****

Normally, Netflix releases true crime docuseries. But its newest docuseries is not about a crime. Oh, there’s a trial. There’s a shattered community. There are lives destroyed. But no crime was committed in the Outreau affair, an infamous French court case from the late 1990s that is the latest Netflix docuseries The Outreau Case: A French Nightmare.

A typical case of mass hysteria and moral panic, the Outreau affair was the last in a long string of cases that began in the early 1980s. Beginning in Kern County, California, dozens of cases of purported child sex abuse sprang up as far north as Canada and as far south as Florida. Most of these cases, such as the famous McMartin Preschool Trial, involved overzealous police officers, attention-seeking politicians, meddlesome therapists who implanted false memories, and a group of innocent people being purged from society.

Moral panics don’t occur from nothing. They usually appear in moments of societal unease. In the particular case of McMartin, the early ‘80s saw women going to work instead of staying home with their children, leaving them in the care of daycare workers. The residual sturm und drang led to dozens of daycare workers being accused of habitually (and often ritually) abusing children. None of which ever occurred. The McMartin Trial was the longest in California history and cost millions of dollars. To learn more about how this leap transpired (and how Satan got all in the mix), I would refer you to Richard Beck’s We Believe the Children or Debbie Nathan and Michael R. Snedeker’s Satan’s Silence or the astonishing television film Indictment: The McMartin Trial, written by Abby and Myra Mann.

At any rate, moral panics are older than America itself and, I believe, are woven into our national fabric. The most obvious example is the Salem Witch Trials, which purged undesirables under the guise of a religion but with both a town and village full of grievances. Arthur Miller saw the connection to the hysteric McCarthy hearings in the 1950s and wrote America’s greatest play, The Crucible. Little did he know his allegory would become more and more prescient as this country falls into these hysterics every twenty to fifty years or so.

When the film version of The Crucible appeared in the mid- ‘90s, most saw it as a period piece about a period piece. In fact, the film spoke to the daycare scandals of the ’80s & ‘90s, including them in the story of witch hunts. An added judge character in the screenplay version is bothered that all of the evidence is coming from the mouths of children. At that time, although the movement was dying down, these cases still came from the mouths of babes—babes who had become convinced of their abuse by helicopter moms and affirming counselors. Yet not one review of the film mentions the connotation.

But while America was the place of most of these scandals, the madness went international. People, often with good intentions, thought they were doing right by indicting seventeen adults of a pedophilic sex ring. As usual, it began with one lunatic—Mariyam Badoui—who let the whole thing spiral out of control. A young magistrate trying to make a name for himself opened up the can of worms which led to thirteen acquittals and a national mea culpa.

The defense table at the McMartin Trial.

What was refreshing about watching The Outreau Case was the footage of the French government apologizing. In America, there’s never been an apology to the lives ruined in Kern County or from McMartin or Fells Acres or Wenatchee. In fact, to this day, sadly deluded adults believe they were still parts of sex rings, Satanic Ritual Abuse, and habitual molestation as children. Every ten years or so, another digging project tries to find hidden tunnels under where McMartin Preschool used to be (according to the children, the location of some of their abuse).

The docuseries is in French, but Netflix rightfully chose to dub into English the entire series. While I usually refuse to watch a foreign-language film with dubbing, the sheer amount of talking in what is naturally a talking-head documentary was the right choice. Outreau is interesting in that it took place a year after the Kern County convictions were overturned and has no connection with anything supernatural. After all, the McMartin children were said to have participated in black masses with ritual animal slaughter. Otherwise, it is the same kind of moral panic (whether over sex or children in general) that we get caught up in every now and again.

My playwriting professor at Bennington College was Gladden Schrock, a beast of a man who, when not teaching, was a commercial herring fisherman in Maine. He became involved with the daycare scandals through his association with Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, a noted psychologist who proved false memories could be implanted in the lab (hence, nullifying a faddish trend in therapy in the 1980s called “repressed memory therapy”). Gladden was present in 1997 in Salem, Massachusetts for a “Day of Contrition” that mourned those lives ruined by mass hysteria since 1692.

He first turned me onto these phenomena as a young eighteen-year-old. I had written a play about a man falsely accused of sexual abuse and he felt I should know something about the subject. The next morning, my little mail slot was full with a ream of paper on the phenomenon. He opened my eyes to America’s weakness: its trend toward hysteria. We are living in such a time now. People are being purged for their views, their past misgivings, the stance they took as young people, etc. It is a sad fact of human life that we still, at our core, are animals who sometimes offer up their own to predators.

I urge you to watch The Outreau Case and take a course in reasonable skepticism. We live in an age where you are told to blindly believe whatever someone tells you about themselves. There is a danger in that, a grave one. Since we have not learned our lesson, it is always good to get to the nitty gritty as far as our shortfalls.

Cancellation or Practicality: The Life and Death of a Play

I rather enjoy publishing a blog post that announces a new publication. It is rather another thing to write one about the revocation of a publication, something with which I am generally unfamiliar and seems baffling that that’s even a thing.

In 2011, while I was the Artistic Director for the Pinson Valley High School Theatre Department, I realized a dream of mine since young adulthood—to write a theatrical play based on the reality, the myth, and the legend of the story of Pocahontas. Recently, I wrote about the production—it was the only time I ever really enjoyed a play of mine onstage.

My formerly-published play.

Cry of the Native Children (2011), a loose adaptation of George Washington Parke Custis’ play Pocahontas, or The Settlers of Virginia, followed up my translation of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (2010). While I initially intended the play for adult audiences, I was teaching at a school, had a large cast of males, and the timing seemed right.

A Doll’s House was staged in the fall of 2010 and, to my excitement, was published the following year by Eldridge Plays & Musicals, a theatrical licensing company based out of Florida which provides plays for community theatres and schools. They had been remarkably appreciative of the translation and, through them, it has been performed twice since—once in Minnesota (where a lot of Norwegian-Americans live) and again in Alabama.

Since I had established a relationship with them, I submitted Native Children, and it was published in 2013. Nancy Vorhis of Eldridge wrote, “It is such a refreshing change from the ubiquitous and superficial versions of Pocahontas and Capt. John Smith. You make these historical people very real to an audience, facing situations which will determine the fate of future generations. As you note, these people are sometimes ‘right’ and sometimes ‘wrong.’ Our sympathies and affinities switches [sic] back and forth. The beautiful title also calls to our emotions and intellect. This is what theatre is made for!”

Another ringing endorsement.

Sadly, I have noticed through royalty reports and its inclusion on their website that other productions were not forthcoming, despite Thompson High School once asking me if they could do the play (before it was published). This offer was apparently forgotten, and Children has languished ever since.

There are many reasons for this. First off, its cast of mostly men is nearly impossible for most theatre troupes. Secondly, I made it clear in my introduction to the published version that I would prefer Native actors to play the members of the Powhatan tribe or, at the very least, that the cast should be completely racially blind (as it was in our World Premiere). The former solution would limit its value to schools due to the population of Amerindians, the latter could be seen as insulting to certain ideologically driven directors, especially when the play deals frankly with race.

Knowing these limitations, I asked Eldridge if I could submit a different version of the play, eschewing its poetical title for something more eye-catching (perhaps including Pocahontas in the title) and writing it from the perspective of the Native women. Somehow, I could never wrestle that alligator to the ground, and I came up short.

An Eldridge display featuring my DOLL'S HOUSE.

This Tuesday, Eldridge contacted me with the following: “We were honored to publish ‘Cry of the Native Children.’ While we think it is a wonderful play, unfortunately, it has not gathered enough interest for us to continue publishing this work.”

Huh.

On the one hand, from a financial standpoint, I understand: they are less about selling books than licensing shows. On the other hand, to my knowledge, Concord Theatricals, Dramatists Play Service, and other licensing companies continue to make available plays that barely get performed. (Perhaps their playwrights sign a more air-tight contract). Since most publishing companies for plays are Print-on-Demand, it seemed silly to me that Native Children could not have at least kept its life in the hopes of finding another production, but I am not in Florida and must bear this news up here, bewildered, frustrated, and hurt.

To their credit, they have offered to send me a few more copies of the script along with promotional materials (T-shirts, posters, etc.) that they provide for theatre companies so I can have some memory of this play being published. And also, to their credit, they are continuing (for the time being) to offer the Doll’s House script, which continues to sell copies, if not inspire productions (perhaps because there are many public domain translations for which you would not have to pay a royalty and many others by more skilled translators with recognizable names).

That being said, one begins to look at this decision from a variety of angles. Certainly, since 2013, issues of race have dominated the American stage, particularly following the George Floyd murder at the beginning of this decade. Rather than the exciting racial blindness that appears on London stages (recently, an Anglo-African actor played William F. Buckley, Jr. in an adaptation of the documentary Best of Enemies), American theatre has become racially divided with each company trying to not get sued every step of the way. In addition to this, issues of gender and sexuality have come to the fore and we live in a world where a heterosexual actor often chooses not to portray homosexual characters for fear of taking a job from someone who is actually gay. I guess the term “acting” doesn’t mean much anymore.

I have zero idea what an indigenous person might think of Native Children. As hinted at above, it portrays both the English settlers and the Powhatan as equally visceral, hostile, and mistrusting. There are no good and bad guys—only misunderstanding that leads to violence. Ya know, like the real world. Perhaps the story should be told from a Native perspective for a change.

But I still was put on Earth to write plays and, when I began practicing my craft again in 2021, I entered a world where 80% of the opportunities for publishing, awards, and productions have been cut off for folks like me. In a fruitless attempt (though well-meaning) to even the playing field, most theatres are only wanting plays by BiPOC or LGBT writers. In a sense, through DEI initiatives and white people trying to atone, I have been largely shut out of the scene. Very few of the companies I’ve looked at now look at scripts blind (a la without your name on it) and I wonder about my future in such a world.

The rights have been relinquished back to me and I don’t know what to do with them. I’m rather tired of self-publishing my plays.

Back then, I was writing under the moniker Robert Cole and so Native Children was published under that pseudonym. Cole is my middle name, and I chose Robert because it means “rich in fame,” something I wished for myself though I have no idea why, given that playwrights have to teach or write screenplays in order to make a living. This was practical when I was teaching as it seemed egotistical to put “Written and Directed by” in the program. Distancing myself somewhat from the material, I thought I could get away with more and “Tittle” is not the most appealing-sounding name in the world (You would not believe what I put up with in 2nd grade). The idea of someone in the future referring to my work as Tittlian (or Tittle-like) makes me groan. Yeesh.

So, perhaps, I could look at the positive and say one of Cole’s plays is no longer published, not mine. That being said, I wish I could go back and nix the whole “Robert Cole” thing altogether. The idea of my Doll’s House being performed somewhere without my actual name now causes me great distress. Tittle may be a funny name, but it’s mine.

Oh, well. You win some, you lose some.

Do I think Native Children is my best work? Far from it. While it has some intriguing ideas, when I repurposed it for teenage actors, I had to take a lot of the bite out of it and so what exists is an almost full-length play in one act that, I suppose, now has no real future.

Do I still hold out hope that there’s a place for me in today’s theatre? It’s slight. There are a few playwrights who look like me who have been grandfathered in—John Patrick Shanley, David Lindsay-Abaire, etc. But all the Pulitzer Prizes in the ‘20s have gone to playwrights of color. I hope they are winning for the right reasons—that their plays are great drama, not just the same old stuff from a different lens. But it’s hard to be optimistic as so many ideologically driven plays (and bad management) have led a lot of theatres to lay off 40% of their staff. After all, the people who can afford to go to the theatre are largely rich and progressive. Therefore, these new crops of plays that are trying to right previous wrongs are preaching to the choir: something that’s not going to bring blue collar audiences back nor engage tourists from other parts of the country. So, who knows if there will be anywhere to have your play produced, no matter your color or sexuality.

I hope this doesn’t seem like pretentious whining. The theatre has always been ahead of television and Hollywood in terms of craving other voices—from Amiri Baraka and Ed Bullins to David Henry Hwang and Philip Kan Gotanda to Paula Vogel and Ayad Akhtar, who wrote the last great contemporary play I read, Disgraced.

And disgraced perhaps is the proper word to end on. To admit to a failure is the hardest thing you have to do. Still, I think Cry of the Native Children was an artistic success—the realization of a dream. I got it produced, I got it published, and now it’s just a memory. But all plays are. While often published, plays are ephemeral, constantly being staged and struck. They go from realities to faint memories, except for the works of the masters. I am no better and no worse than others in the same position.

Miguel Mercado in NATIVE CHILDREN.

Our Anxious World

Gore Vidal, upon arriving back in America from his Italian mansion overlooking the Atlantic Ocean—this was, perhaps, the early 2010s—was asked what had changed most concerning American society since the last time he was in the states. Watching American television, he was most amused at how sick we had all become. Endless (and endlessly long) advertisements for new medications were, even then, everywhere. The drugs seemed more and more to accommodate concocted diseases and syndromes—that is to say, the diagnoses had themselves become the result of neurotic needs we didn’t even know about. Looking at today’s world, I have to concur with Vidal. There has never been a time in my life where sickness, particularly mental illness, has been so prevalently on everybody’s lips. It’s become a sickness in itself: being perpetually sick.

COVID-19, of course, did not help. Now most people I know are bodily sick throughout the year. This is something largely out of our control. But mental illness increasingly affects people my age and younger. There could be several variables that could contribute to this. For example, it could be the speed of our society—its incessant, 24-hour “news” cycle having turned us all psychoneurotic. It could be that we’ve always been this sick and now we just have diagnoses for the problems we have. It could be due to newer food additives. To be ever the contrarian, it is also perhaps social media that has contributed to a society that wants, even desires, to be sick—a form of peer pressure or a reason (finally!) for why we’re not like other folks. When a vulnerable young person hears of an illness that matches their hypochondriac need, they have an answer.

The illness that Vidal mentioned specifically, with his trademark snarl, was Generalized Anxiety Disorder. One must admit, when looking at the term itself, it sounds like a pseudo-diagnosis for people who are generally nervous, a rather common condition which is not a condition at all, but part of the human condition. Perhaps, in the past, these nervous types lived their lives better without a diagnosis, but maybe this seems cruel. Yet, increasingly, I find myself surrounded more and more by those who suffer from anxiety (again, a rather typical aspect of human life) and, I believe, many hide behind it in order to not only not live, but to belong—to belong with others who share something. We are so fundamentally bored down here that we crave entry into cliques who share something in common. It’s part of what makes us such a divided country. We concentrate so much on what is different about us rather than what binds us: our common humanity. To belong to any of these new “communities” (really a faddish word) gives one a commonality with a minority group, a place to belong.

Anxiety has become a pandemic in itself, particularly among my miserable generation, the Millennials, and the terror before us now, Gen Z. Overly medicated already (and, therefore, taking hordes of medicine that should go to people who actually need such drugs), these groups also crave more and more CBD, Delta 8 or 9 (or, probably 20 now, I don’t know) and of course the old warhorse—alcohol—none of which actually help anxiety, but exacerbate it.

How on Earth did we become so anxious?

It is easy to look at the world of your childhood and see it as a better time—a simpler time. Yet, there’s also a nugget of truth in such an idea. In a world with multitudinous “communities” prattling on about one grievance or another, no one I meet seems happier now that they’ve found their group, happier now that they’ve found their cause, happier now that we even have these “communities” which further divide rather than unite us.

One could see this as a blinkered, even uncaring view, but it isn’t. When you have a pill, there’s no reason to objectively step back and look at the long view, which is what I always try to do in my writing. So, if it offends some people, so what? “That offends me” is one of those statements that’s like a Zen riddle. You stop and puzzle over its meaning, but it ultimately only has the meaning you assign to it. Perhaps we are not all sick. Perhaps we are unhappy and crave something to numb us out of our misery.

If I had been born even a few years later, and had gone to a public school, I probably would have been diagnosed with ADHD. After all, I developed no reading comprehension skills until well into high school. I’m thankful that I wasn’t part of a drugged generation from an early age. One used to look at the over-prescriptions of ADHD medications and shake one’s head in disgust. Now, parents who should not be parents take at face value anything a schoolteacher might say. Perhaps there is an inner desire to see their children knocked out—it would sure makes parenting (and teaching) a hell of a lot easier. It eases the anxiety of a real commitment. Then, the medicated parent/teacher can have some version of life while the medicated child misses out on childhood.

These same new crops of kiddos who began with ADHD have progressively, it seems to me, moved into depression, anxiety, and extraordinary narcissism. I’m not blaming the drugs themselves. Personally, I wish I had never even taken an Aspirin. I wonder what my life would have been like without anything to blur the edges or dull the pain. But pain, sadness, and anxiety are essential, teachable parts of living. Older generations learned how to deal with these issues. We now have succumbed to them and would prefer medication. Taking a pill, again, is easier than facing the truth.

If you have read this so far and ignored my earlier comment, I reiterate: there are people who legitimately need these drugs, from ADHD to depression and beyond. After all, depressed people can commit suicide. The fact that the drugs used to help depression tend to cause more depression and suicide proves one thing: our minds, like the oceans, are still 80% unexplored.

When taking my dad to various doctors during his last years with cancer, I realized what doctors don’t know could fill one of those above-mentioned oceans. Psychiatrists in particular pose a great threat in the sense that they can only diagnose and prescribe based on what one tells them. And people, for all the good they are capable of doing, tend to lie. Or, if not lie, obscure the truth. How on Earth can a doctor help people prone to lying (or prone to concealing information) about what’s actually going on.

Getting back to anxiety. Having suffered panic attacks myself, I know the dangers of it. So, there is no part of my heart that doesn’t go out to folks who legitimately suffer from anxiety. It is the number of people telling me that now that is discouraging and makes me cock my head to the side with a wry eye. How is it possible I have found myself working in offices where 75% of the staff have been diagnosed with this illness? They have nothing in common. They come from different parts of the country, are different ages, are different everything and yet—all suffering from anxiety. Generally. Not specifically. Specific Anxiety Disorder would, of course, limit the number of patients who could get access to the drugs (at least, in the legal way).

How in hell did we get so anxious?

Anxiety comes from dread and unease. Of course there are physiological aspects as well, but it is, for the most part, a mental malady. And mental would be a kind word to describe our society at present. I’ve never seen more angry people, more sociopaths, more depressives, more sick people in my life. Part of this is the population. When you have more people, you are bound to have more murderers, more rapists, more madness.

Recently, Larry David strangled Elmo on The Today Show because it has become the prerogative of those who educate our young to raise awareness of mental illness. Elmo was raising awareness and David finally got sick of it. I share the same feeling (and have wanted to strangle Elmo since he somehow became the most-talked-about Sesame Street character). It seems amazing to me that people who consistently raise awareness over one illness or cause, etc. don’t realize that when people are so aware, so “educated,” so “with it,” they don’t realize raising awareness in itself contributes to the neuroses of the populous. If everybody were truly aware of every social or medical ill, we would be walking around with nooses ‘round our necks. The world would seem not worth it. Hence, the need for doping in order for some coping.

A child, or any adult with a regressive brain, will hear about a new disorder and, I think, crave it. Maybe it’s not even about belonging. Perhaps it’s just everyone suspects something about them is interesting, strange, or unique. These include the generations of folks who were told the world was wonderful, they were special, and they could be anything they wanted to be. I was one of those. No wonder I’ve experienced anxiety. Once you go out in the world, you realize these things are not true and so you turn to medication to shield yourself from truth.

Of course, today, we live in a meta—postmodern-world where there is no absolute truth. I don’t think people who espouse this ideology realize how truly dangerous it is. It is okay to say that there is not a single truth for everybody. It is damaging to society to say that everyone has their own individual truth. That is pure, unadulterated narcissism. And the narcissist, deep down, knows that it is more important how loud their voice is (and how true their truth is) than the actual truth of what they are saying.

Gee, I seem pessimistic, if not nihilistic. Perhaps I am, at least when it comes to this subject. If the medications did help, one would think (again) people would be better off. I don’t see that. I see a society bent on division not diversity, a society where it is better to medicated than see with 20/20 vision, a society on the brink of its own nervous breakdown. We are all those who will suffer from this inevitable breaking point.

If there’s a throughline to any of this, it is always to question, always to doubt. Assume you are like everybody else and share everybody else’s pain (though in different guises) If one did this, I wonder how much anxiety we would feel. Wouldn’t we feel, I don’t know, comfort in knowing we’re all a little bit mad and that madness is something divinely creative in us. This would be different from finding our own support group and not feeling strange. We are all of us strange. It doesn’t mean we necessarily need a pill for it.