On December 11, a jury in Wenatchee, Washington, acquitted Robert and Connie Roberson of 14 counts of child molestation. Since March, the Robersons had been in custody, charged with raping children on the altar of their church during Sunday services (Roberson is a Pentecostal minister). For those who followed their trial — as well as the trials of some of the 40 other people in Wenatchee who have been arrested on similar chaiges recently — the outcome came as a relief but not as a surprise. Like many people accused of serious crimes, the Robersons have always claimed they are innocent. Unlike most, they almost certainly are.
Thousands of miles away in New York, in the editorial page offices of the $ UWall Street Journal, a writer named Dorothy Rabinowitz anxiously waited for the verdict in the Roberson case. Since the late 1980s, Rabinowitz has worked to free a number of people she believes were wrongly convicted of molesting children. She has been startlingly successful. For all of the high-minded talk that swirls around journalism, few reporters actually write stories that change people’s lives for the better, that right egregious wrongs or make society a more decent place. Rabinowitz has. At least five people imprisoned on child sex charges can trace their eventual release — and vindication- directly to her efforts. And not one of them has gone on to commit other crimes after getting out.
Rabinowitz had campaigned particularly hard for the Robersons, whose tangles with the local police and prosecutors contained so many examples of corruption and coercion that her columns on the subject were titled simply, “Wenatchee: A True Story.” She was elated by the acquittal. But there are still 19 people from Wenatchee in prison on molestation charges Rabinowitz considers untrue. And she intends to do her best to get them out.
The chain of events that first drew Rabinowitz’s attention to false accusations of sexual abuse began on April 30, 1985, when a four-year-old boy went for a checkup at a pediatrician’s office in suburban New Jersey. As a nurse took his temperature with a rectal thermometer, the boy made an offhand remark. “That’s what my teacher does to me at nap time at school,” he said.
At another time, in another place, the boy’s statement might have been dismissed as the idle comment it was. As it happened, his words were taken as evidence by the nurse and his mother — and later by police, prosecutors, and a jury — of sexual abuse at the hands of his teacher, 23-year-old Kelly Michaels.
Within weeks, Michaels, a Catholic-school girl from Pittsburgh with no histor y of abusing children, had been hauled in and, despite passing a polygraph exam , charged with crimes that horrified even vetera n cops. Over the span of seven months, prosecutors claimed, Michaels had molested every child — all 51 of them — enrolled at the Wee Care Day Nursery in Maplewood, New Jersey, where she worked. (The charges ultimately were pared down to those involving just 31 children.)
And not just molested them. According to testimony, coaxed from the children by therapists, Michaels had repeatedly violated them “with knives, forks, a wooden spoon, and Lego blocks”; licked peanut butter and jelly off their genitals; played Jingle Bells on a piano in the school’s music room in the nude; and “made them drink her urine and eat a “cake” of her feces.” One child testified that Michaels, apparently in a fit of pique, had turned him into a mouse. Another “told the court that Kelly had forced him to push a sword into her rectum.”
All of this had happened, prosecutors alleged, daily, on three different floors of the busy Episcopal church building in which the school was housed. Meanwhile, no adult had noticed any sign of the supposed abuse, nor had any child reported it to his parents — indeed, long after charges against Michaels were filed, many of the kids continued vehemently to deny that they had been abused at all. And, despite the brutal and bloody nature of many of the acts described, not a single piece of physical evidence to corroborate the charges was presented.
There were, in other words, significant weaknesses in the state’s case. Strangely, however, nobody but Kelly Michaels and her family seemed to notice. Not the general news media, which, in predictably sensationalistic coverage, accepted the prosecution’s position uncritically. Not local politicians, who used the case to trumpet their own vigilance and compassion. And certainly not the jury, which in the spring of 1988 found Kelly Michaels guilty on 115 counts of molesting 20 small children. (She was found not guilty, incidentally, of the original charge, taking a child’s temperature with a rectal thermometer. ) Three months later, Michaels was sentenced to 47 years in prison.
One person who did notice that something seemed amiss was Rabinowitz, a long- time media critic and free-lancer. Her best-known book is New Lives, a study of Holocaust survivors. Rabinowitz, who was working for channel 9 in New York City at the time of the trial, told her editor she planned to do an on-air commentary raising the apparent inconsistencies in the case. “Forget it,” he said — no defending child molesters on TV.
But Rabinowitz didn’t forget it. Though the transcript of the trial had been sealed, she managed to obtain a copy of it and spent the following months steeping herself in information about the prosecution of Kelly Michaels. What she found confirmed her suspicion that Michaels had been railroaded. Co- workers at Wee Care had been bullied into testifying against Michaels; one who held out was charged with failure to report child abuse. Parents had been organized and meticulously coached by zealous therapists employed by the state. The judge had not allowed defense experts to examine the allegedly abused children. There was even foreshadowing of the O.J. Simpson spectacle: “For the jurors who doubted that one woman could commit so many awful crimes,” Rabinowitz wrote later of the trial, “Assistant Prosecutor Sara McArdle reminded them in her summation that Adolf Hitler, “one man,” had persecuted not a “little school,” but the “entire world” Jews, Gypsies, Czechs and blacks. ‘ Blacks of course were not among Hitler’s victims, but many of the jurors were black.”
Most damning of all, Rabinowitz Dorothy Rabinowitz discovered that social workers — most of whom came across in transcripts as abysmally trained ideologues-had all but forced the children to make claims of abuse against Kelly Michaels. Therapists used anatomically correct dolls to “suggest” ways that children might have been molested. In one exchange Rabinowitz uncovered, a social worker and college psychology major named Lou Fonolleras tells a child, “If you don’t help me, I’m going to tell your friends that you not only don’t want to help me but you won’t help them.” Many of the children, it turned out, continued to refuse to “help” Fonolleras and his colleagues. Which, according to the therapists, was itself a sure indictment of Kelly Michaels: Molested children are often in denial.
Disturbing as the obvious malfeasance in the Michaels case was, Rabinowitz so on learned that similar cases were being prosecuted all over the country. Begin ning in the mid-1980s, hundreds of people — teachers, ministers, daycare worke rs, and others who worked with children-were sent to prison on the basis of tes timony every bit as fantastic as that presented at the Michaels trial. In Memph is, a preschool teacher was convicted of molestation after it was alleged she h ad blown up a hamster in front of her class with a bomb. Kids in Chicago testif ied they were made to eat a boiled baby. Other children told of being raped by maniacal clowns, or made to sacrifice animals in satanic rituals in graveyards. In the longest criminal trial in American history, a California preschool teacher named Virginia McMartin (who died last week at the age of 88) was accused along with her grandson of molesting more than 1,000 children. According to young witnesses, she used a honeycomb of secret (and, it was later determined, non-existent) tunnels under her office to accomplish the deed.
Far from being dismissed as ridiculous, cases like these were either turned into ominous headlines by newspaper writers or cited by liberal columnists as the inevitable product of a male-dominated society. New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen defended the accusers of Kelly Michaels in a column entitled “Believing the Children.” Gloria Steinem urged authorities to find the tunnels under Virginia McMartin’s preschool as soon as possible.
Virtually alone among members of the press, Rabinowitz recognized the dramatic rise in sex abuse cases for what it was — a dangerous outbreak of mass hysteria, nurtured and abetted by a burgeoning class of therapists, shrinks, and crank spiritualists with an ideological (and financial) stake in portraying children as sexual victims. Rabinowitz began organizing the evidence she had gathered into a magazine article. Her 12-page, rigorously reported case study of the Kelly Michaels affair, “From The Mouths Of Babes To A Jail Cell: Child Abuse and the Abuse of Justice,” appeared in the May 1990 issue of Harper’s and immediately provoked outrage among readers, drawing more letters than any article the magazine had published in memory.
Among those who read the piece was Morton Stavis, a long-time leftist lawyer from New York. Stavis called Rabinowitz and offered to take the case pro bono. Since his colleagues at the Center for Constitutional Rights (which he had helped to found) refused to have anything to do with the case, Stavis worked out of his house, his expenses paid by, as Rabinowitz puts it, “three Jewish businessmen who read Harper’s” and were moved to contribute. “My wife got sick reading that,” one of the men told Rabinowitz. “I want to give you money.”
Three years later, just as an appeals court was about to hear Michaels’s case, Stavis was killed in an accident; an old friend of Stavis’s, William Kunstler, and another lawyer, Robert Rosenthal, took his place. In March 1993, the court overturned Kelly Michaels’s conviction. Some months later, the district attorney’s office declined to retry the case. After five years, Kelly Michaels left prison.
Rabinowitz, who by this time had become an editorial writer and television critic at the Wall Street Journal, had little opportunity to savor the victory before being thrust once again into a strikingly similar sex-abuse case. Like Kelly Michaels, Violet Amirault had been accused, along with her son and daughter, of assaulting children at a nursery school they ran in Malden, Massachusetts. If anything, however, the charges against the Amiraults were even less believable than those leveled against Michaels. They included raping children with sticks and knives, mutilating animals, coprophagy, trips with a sinister clown to a “magic room,” and chilling visits from R2D2, the squat robot from Star IVars. Again, children not readily forthcoming with spicy details were deemed by social workers “not ready to disclose.”
Rabinowitz immediately took up the Amiraults” cause in the pages of the $ IJournal. Many journalists in Boston were skeptical of her efforts. Some were hostile. “Journal Writer Defends Malden Child Abusers,” said one headline in the
Boston Herald. The city’s local alternative paper implied that Rabinowitz was in league with the North American Man-Boy Love Association. Rabinowitz ignored it and went on to write three columns on the Amiraults under the title “Darkness In Massachusetts.” Each was a combination of moving prose and exhaustive reporting. The columns showed, among other things, how the obviously innocent Amiraults had been done in by an unscrupulous district attorney with political ambitions. (That prosecutor, Scott Harshbarger, is now the attorney general of the state of Massachusetts.) The first installment, which ran in January 1995, ended with these words: “As was true of the witch trials of an earlier Massachusetts, this prosecution will, in time, be the source of amazement and horror. In the meantime Violet Amirault lies locked in prison along with her son and daughter, while the days and years of life slip past.”
Within weeks, irate readers had sent in more than $ 70,000 in contributions t o a tax-exempt defense fund Rabinowitz had set up for the Amiraults. Lawyers ca lled to offer their services gratis. Rabinowitz, backed by the newspaper, kept the pressure on, churning out signed and unsigned editorials on the plight of t he Amiraults. By August, the Amirault women were free, their convictions overtu rned. (The third Amirault, Gerald, remains in prison, his first appeal denied.)
Though the rash of mass sex- abuse cases seems to have abated some in the last several years (thanks in no small part to what Rabinowitz has done), the question remains: How did one middle-aged media writer, with no formal training as a reporter, recognize the single greatest outbreak of American McCarthyism since McCarthy himself — and why did just about everybody else in the press miss it?
Simple, she says: “The absolute gullibility of journalists. They accepted every word the prosecutors told them. And they believed in experts.” Rabinowitz didn’t.
In other words, a lone journalist refused to be snowed by ruthless prosecutors, asked tough questions, raked muck, stood up to the Establishment, and in the end rescued unjustly imprisoned people from the clutches of a corrupt justice system.
Sound familiar? But here’s the 90s twist: That lone journalist is on the right.
By Tucker Carlson
