A few days back, one of our readers mentioned that they’d been looking at videos covering one of the many trials that erupted during the last Satanic panic in the 1980s and 1990s; they recommended a series on the Little Rascals case. The Little Rascals daycare scandal, although it took place in Edenton, North Carolina,…
The headlines were spectacular, even melodramatic: “Satanic child-porn fraudster is ‘ruthless, manipulative’”; “Court to mull fate of online child-porn ring fraudster”. No, they weren’t referring to Abraham Christie and Ella Draper (sad to say). These headlines refer to a case last year in Johannesburg, South Africa, in which a young woman named Leone Steyn was…
Here’s a conundrum for you: let’s say you are one of a largish group of people who’ve been falsely accused of doing something terrible. Do you: Defend yourself, state emphatically that you didn’t do it, and continue to assert your innocence whenever others repeat the false allegations? Say nothing, keep your head down, pretend it…
It’s hard to live in the UK and remain unaware of the case of Samantha Baldwin, the Nottingham mother who fled family court while the judge was reading his judgement, grabbed her two children, and went on the run from police for nearly two weeks. The facts of the case are laid out in this…
If the Hampstead SRA hoax has a spiritual predecessor, we’d have to say it was the McMartin Preschool case, which heralded the 1980s daycare Satanic panic. We’ve talked about McMartin here before, and would like to draw your attention to this post from August 2015, which details what happened to one of the alleged McMartin…
A few days ago, one of our commenters mentioned a book which sounded very interesting: We Believe the Children—A Moral Panic in the 1980s, by Richard Beck.
Poor 2016. It’ll go down in history as the year of Brexit, Trump, fake news, and a string of celebrity deaths. Not really a year most of us will recall fondly…but we at Hoaxtead Research would like to offer a slightly more nuanced view of the Year that Was.
