Sex, Lies, and Audiotapes - hysteria over rape and sexual child abuse

Women's Quarterly, Summer, 2001 by Rael Jean Isaac

Even those daughters who identified their fathers as the abuser blamed their mothers for failing to protect them. Some remembered the mothers' holding them down while their fathers raped them. That is what Beth Rutherford claimed happened. Rutherford, after two years in therapy, "remembered" her minister-father twice impregnating her and then performing a coat-hanger abortion (never mind that a medical examination showed she was a virgin). Rutherford convinced her sisters that they were also in danger of being murdered by their father. One sister actually went into hiding, and all three cut off any communication with both parents. Beth Rutherford has since recanted the accusations and written about her family's ordeal.

While it may be hard to summon up much sympathy for the daughter who rips apart her family because of therapist-induced delusions, in many cases she is clearly the biggest victim of all. As therapy proceeds, she produces ever more lurid memories. Indeed, in an estimated 15 percent of cases, the repressed memory patient develops memories of satanic ritual abuse. Increasingly satanic cult "survivors are realizing they were victims of their therapists and are suing them for malpractice. The evidence of therapist misconduct is so impressive, and jury verdicts have been so high that many insurance companies now settle during the trial.

Dr. Bennett Braun's insurance company settled for $10.6 million the day his trial was to begin. Dr. Braun's patient, Patricia Burgus, had, through therapy, become convinced that she had been the high priestess of a satanic cult. Hospitalized for over two years, Burgus "remembered" lit torches pushed inside her and having to eat body parts of 2,000 people in one year.

While under the care of Dr. Kenneth Olson, Nadean Cool became convinced that she had 120 personalities (including that of a duck), had knifed babies in the heart and passed them around to other cult members to eat. The psychiatrist even performed an orcism on Cool while she was tethered to a hospital bed. In the Cool case, the insurance company settled for $2.4 million after fifteen days of testimony.

If "BELIEVE THE WOMEN" produced the nightmare of repressed memory therapy, "believe the children" led to something arguably more horrific, the daycare trials. Many convicted of sexual abuse of children in their care during the 1980s and early 90s, when the hysteria was at its height, have since appealed their cases and are now free. Gerald Amirault, who has been in prison since 1986, has not been so fortunate. Amirault, whose family operated the Fells Acres Day School in Malden, Massachusetts, was convicted of abusing children with a magic wand while wearing a clown costume.

Amirault's then sixty-year-old mother, Violet, was convicted of raping children and assaulting them with a butcher knife (there were no scars). Gerald's younger sister, Cheryl, was supposed, among other things, to have slaughtered bluebirds and cut off the leg of a squirrel in front of the children. Violet Amirault was released from prison before her death in 1997. In Cheryl's case, a judge revised and revoked her sentence. A condition of Cheryl Amirault's release was that she promise to undertake no further legal efforts to prove her innocence.