Celebrity, Pedophilia, and Ideology in American Culture By Jason ...

accounts, but the jury was deadlocked on thirteen other accounts. There was a move by the district attorney’s office to accept this, but, significantly, extraordinary public lobbying took place with marches, press conferences, and appearances on talk shows, such as Geraldo and Oprah, so the district attorney gave in, but Buckey was not convicted. He had already spent five of the seven years in jail. The detrimental influence of the media, particularly confessional television shows that are supposed to be about “people power,” is obvious.

What is also clear is the damaging use of therapy. Initially, the false claims were of “ordinary” child sexual abuse, but those children working with therapists that encouraged imaginations to run riot and implanted ideas in children’s minds went on to claim adults were involved in the killings of animals and humans, acts of cannibalism, blood drinking, and coprophilia.⁴⁷ In 1990 the majority of charges in the McMartin case were dropped. This led to further investigations into false memory syndrome, and a current general belief is that in such cases psychologists placed false memories in children through suggestion, hypnosis, and other techniques. But this unquestionable belief in false memory syndrome can be considered to be yet another conspiracy theory. False memory syndrome, or recovered memory syndrome as it is sometimes known, is not a clinical medical term and was invented by parents charged with child sexual abuse.⁴⁸ The “true believers” in child sexual abuse had a major battle on their hands after accused parents of Professor Jennifer Freyd, a cognitive psychologist, founded The False Memory Syndrome Foundation in 1992, which had a remarkable international impact.

Following the rise of the Christian right, by 1994, there was a backlash in America against belief in satanic ritual abuse. The general public, and therefore juries, became skeptical of accusations, seeing them as the product of vivid imaginations imbued with stories from popular American Christianity rather than reality, making prosecution problematic. By 1994, both in the United Kingdom and in the United States, large-scale skepticism over accusations of child sexual abuse had taken hold. Those who had been convinced either they were abused or they were abusers were now claiming compensation from their therapists who led them to