What the NYT gets wrong in its analysis of the Right and child sexual abuse

There is no story that the New York Times seems to get quite as wrong as the sexual abuse cases from the 1980s and early 1990s. The most recent example is senior Times write Jia Lynn Yang’s analysis of the “conservative crusade that’s about so much more than Epstein.” Yang distinguishes Epstein’s abuse of minors from other conspiracy theories for the solid reason that Epstein’s abuse “has been proved in a court of law.”

            Yang then abandons that standard entirely and asserts that the day-care sexual abuse cases of the 1980s and early 1990s “almost entirely broke with reality.” She describes “sketchy report across the country” and claims that hundreds of lives were destroyed by false accusations without recognizing, first and foremost, that sexual abuse was also “proved in a court of law” in many of the cases that Yang lumps together. Frank Fuster was convicted by jury and his conviction has rightly been upheld on appeal. So, too, Robert Halsey, James Watt, Michael Schildmeyer, Debbie Runyan, Lynn Malcom, and James Toward. All in separate cases. All rightly upheld on appeal. All detailed in my book.

            As for the McMartin case, Yang ignores the fact that there was substantial evidence against Ray Buckey. The initial allegations in the case were substantiated by medical professionals. The existence of compelling evidence against Ray Buckey explains why there was a hung jury, not an acquittal – a detail inconsistent without the idea that the case simple “collapsed.” In fact, the evidence specific to the three girls at retrial remains compelling in many ways. Yet the retrial is never acknowledged, let along examined, in accounts of the case.

Molly Fischer recently observed in (June 30) The New Yorker that:

“It would be too dismissive to call the concern over teens and technology a moral panic, as some skeptics have done. But if it isn’t a moral panic, at has at least become an irresistibly gripping cultural drama---a story operating on the level of emotion rather than data.”

The same is true of the daycare abuse cases of the 1980s and early 1990s. It is far too dismissive to write those cases off as moral panic alone. On close examination, there were a significant number of convictions that have stood the test of time and there were also cases without convictions that nevertheless involved substantial evidence of abuse.

That final group raises a significant issue that the New York Times missed: just as there were false accusations during this time, there were also false acquittals. Just as there was a crusade of sort on the Right, there was also a crusade to discredit children. Children were mistreated in cases like McMartin in ways that have rarely been acknowledged, sustaining days of grueling and inappropriate cross-examination. A key child in the Fuster case was badgered so badly by defense counsel that the judge reported him to the bar. Moreover, academics such as Ceci and Bruck executed experiments that were designed to help defense lawyers, and then they misrepresented the facts of underlying cases in the process, particularly in the Kelly Michaels case.

            In short, the infamous cases of the 1980s and early 1990s were not all the same. They were complicated cases, sometimes marred by errors by professionals, but often based on evidence that persuaded juries for good reason —or arguably should have. The complete denial of such facts remains a stain on the New York Times.