The Truth Narrative: Ross E. Cheit & Witch Hunts

Last week, in reviewing Netflix’ new docuseries The Outreau Case: A French Nightmare, I brusquely went over a subject near and dear—the daycare sex abuse scandals of the early 1980s to the mid-1990s. In addition to the books I recommended to you (by Richard Beck, Debbie Nathan, etc.), there are a litany of other articles and books on the subject. For the McMartin trial in particular the resources of Paul and Shirley Eberle are indispensable (read The Abuse of Innocence: The McMartin Preschool Trial and The Politics of Child Abuse).

However, for those of you interested in the subject, you might come across another book: Ross E. Cheit’s The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children. While it may seem strange to criticize a book from ten years ago, it has implications that threaten to turn what they call today the “narrative” in Cheit’s favor. If Cheit had been successful, it would have revictimized the victims. As it is, there is no book I’m more ashamed to own than his. In fact, Oxford University Press should be ashamed for publishing it.

A handsomely designed and well-cited volume, Cheit attempts to “take back” the narrative by claiming, through what I’m sure was arduous research, that abuse did occur in all of the cases. Needless to say, the “Satanic Panic” has been thoroughly debunked and none of the convictions (save one, thanks to the blindered view of Janet Reno) have ever held muster. Because, again, nothing happened.

It was an example of rampant mass hysteria—a moral panic I hope we never go through again as a society. Cheit has continued periodically to add to his case through blog posts on his website. The extent to which his book is taken seriously, I can’t be sure. When it first arrived, the Catholic Church cases and Penn State were happening and actual child abuse was being taken seriously. Since then, particularly after the last seven years, the subject of sexual abuse in general has been so widespread, I fear Cheit’s tome will reach the hands of those not intelligent enough to see the smoke screen Cheit weaves.

It is a delicate subject, so I will try to go easy on him. In point of fact, Cheit should have never written the book given he himself was the subject of child sex abuse. In elder language, he has a dog in the fight. He desperately wants the children to be believed as we non-deluded folk want the real victims (those accused) to be believed and fully exonerated. To mention that I feel for Dr. Cheit’s childhood experience should go without saying, but the subject being what it is, his work would be akin to someone who had been robbed trying to find guilt in everyone accused of theft. It is an impossibility and, in the end, sad.

I’m beginning to hate the word “narrative” in its contemporary context. Other words like iconic, gaslighting, lenses, etc. follow suit for me. They sound intelligent and, given their wide-spread usage through social media, I think people feel they’re smart when they use them, but really it is just an example of everyone talking like everyone else. Given the internet’s ubiquity (and I realize the irony as you’re reading this online), we will all eventually have no culture, no words specific to region, no color to our speech due to the internet autocorrecting not only our thoughts, but our ideas. Just as I typed this, the computer changed “auto-correcting” to “autocorrecting.”

Professor Cheit’s book is aptly titled given his premise. He goes through all the cases—with the most weight given to McMartin—and cherry picks “evidence” from the trials to spin the narrative back to something happened even if it did not revolve around Satanic Ritual Abuse (another myth that got caught up in the mix). Cheit opened old wounds that had not even healed in a (probably) sincere attempt to recapture the public’s imagination from a different side, given the fact that he had supposed eagle-eyed vision, writing nearly a decade after the last cases were winding down.

In the end, Cheit’s book might as well be a proponent of the flat-earth theory. The nearly one hundred pages of footnotes (that often attack good-faith writers critical of the trials at the time and after, especially the Eberles) could denote to the undiscerning reader that Cheit knows what he’s talking about. This is a Professor at an Ivy League institution, of course. But I’ve read books where half the page-length is devoted to notes and often see it as simple over-compensating for avoiding the truth.

I bought Cheit’s book as soon as I heard of it. I’ll admit I bought it under the presupposition that Cheit agreed with virtually every psychological and sociological assessment of the situation, but I was wrong. I should have gathered his argument from the title, but I was so consumed by the subject at the time, that I didn’t even read the blurb. When the book arrived at home, I dove head-first into it as I often do with non-fiction (fiction takes a lot more time for me to digest and process). It is a book of utter delusion from (again, I think) a sincere human being who wants to “believe the children.”

That catchphrase, used by Beck for his concise telling of the McMartin case, was on many a hastily-put-together poster board in the ‘80s. If you even dared to question the cases at that time, you were open to death threats and all kinds of chicanery. In fact, after HBO premiered Indictment: The McMartin Trial, the Mann home (Abby and Myra Mann, the screenwriters) was burned to the ground, most likely by McMartin parents who still, according to a recent Oxygen documentary, still believe something happened.

I feel for Cheit’s childhood psychological scars, but his book is one of many which proves all you have to do is twist evidence and shape-shift quotes to prove your point. Harold Bloom noted, correctly, in the mid-‘90s that a feminist or Marxist reading of a play by William Shakespeare will teach you a lot about feminism and Marxism, but not anything about the play. Included in this is the various Freudian readings of Sophokles and Shakespeare. His views tell you something about Freudianism, not about the great tragedies of antiquity. Likewise, Cheit cuts the cloth to fit his fashion and presents his own “narrative.”

And Freud is a good note to end on. Because of his salacious (and wrong) Seduction Theory which even he recanted, the world caught onto the idea of repressed memories in the ‘80s. Such cases broke up many homes and destroyed countless lives and they are related to the false memories implanted by therapists in the daycare cases. While Cheit is not as good a writer as Freud (the most generous thing I can say about Freud is he was a gifted creative essayist but not in any way a clinician), they both espouse/d ideas dangerous to society. The truth rarely matters.

Or at least we hope it does.

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.