"Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth"
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Antisemitic conspiracy QAnon has roots in the ‘Satanic Panic’ sparked by the bestseller
In the late 1970’s, the United States was seeing a spike in anxieties over women entering the workforce, the influence of Satanism in entertainment and schools, and the idea of organized child abuse. What had been bubbling up exploded into a full-blown moral panic with the publication in 1980 of Michelle Remembers, which purported to be the results of over a year of “recovered memory therapy” of a woman claiming to have been the victim of a vast conspiracy of Satanic ritual abuse.
Written by the alleged victim, Michelle Smith, along with her therapist, Dr. Lawrence Pazder, Michelle Remembers seemed to blow the lid off unspeakable horrors perpetrated against Smith by the Church of Satan – beginning when she was a child in the mid-1950’s. And after decades, Smith finally had her memories unlocked by hundreds of hours of specialized therapy. The resultant scandal lit the first embers of what became known as the Satanic Panic, a more than decade-long farrago of bizarre accusations, criminal trials, relentless fear, and an industry of supposed experts on Satanism and ex-Satanists ready to tell their story.
The links with anti-Jewish hate conspiracies are significant.
According to a Missouri Legislative Library report, the contemporary QAnon or Pizzagate conspiracy movement, which can be traced back to a mishmash of historic antisemitic conspiracies like the blood libel and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, has its “most direct recent antecedent” in the American Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s.
Michelle Remembers is mostly thought of as a curiosity now, a work that generated headlines and a windfall for its authors, and little else. But the Satanic Panic never entirely went away, and the book that started it is still believed as a work of nonfiction by some – and its subject has never recanted any of the allegations she made nearly 50 years ago.
Through it all, Pazder and Smith – who had gotten married during their sessions – became wealthy media stars. Then it all fell apart, as the book’s veracity and Smith’s story were questioned by journalists and skeptics, while the Church of Satan threatened to sue the authors for libel. The Satanic Panic needlessly terrified parents around the country and subjected innocent teachers and preschool staff members to prison sentences, based in large part on the unprovable allegations of a book that used junk science to make accusations that had no evidence to support them.
As the authors write in Michelle Remembers, Pazder began treating Smith on and off in the early 1970’s for depression. At some point in 1976, Smith struggled with trying to articulate something she was trying to remember, then went into a hypnotic trance and spent nearly half an hour screaming in the voice of a five-year-old child. Pazder then spent the next 14 months digging up Smith’s repressed memories, going though a host of unspeakable horrors at the hands of Satanist Anton Levey’s Church of Satan – horrors perpetrated at least in some part by her abusive mother. Some of these include repeated rape, forced participation in human and infant sacrifices, a staged car crash meant to terrify young Michelle, and being buried alive in a cemetery plot. Finally, the torture ended with a nearly three-month long “Feast of the Beast” ritual, where Satan himself appeared. Finally, Smith shut the memories away for two decades until they were coaxed out of her by her future husband.
When Smith and Pazdur wrote their experiences up as a book, it immediately scored them a six figure advance – part of the half a million dollars they’d make off both the book and its film rights. And its graphically lurid allegations, written to tug at the emotional heartstrings of its terrified reader, were equally lucrative for its publisher. Michelle Remembers sold hundreds of thousands of copies in the US, and turned its authors into a two-person cottage industry of expertise in Satanism. They toured the country to promote the book, and by the decade had made countless appearances on TV. Pazder and Smith began leading seminars to help law enforcement spot similar “Satanic ritual abuse” in their own communities, and sure enough, they spotted it everywhere. Hundreds of criminal investigations were sparked either by attendees of their seminars or by paranoid parents who took offhand comments by small children as proof of vast rings of devil worship and sex abuse.
By 1983, America was hooked on the idea of Satanic abusers lurking around every corner, and as Pazder and Smith became rich and famous, many other innocent people got tangled up in the web they were weaving.
Dozens of cases brought by state and local officials against schools would become the legacy of the Satanic Panic that Michelle Remembers kicked off. And no case gained more infamy than what became known as the McMartin Trial. In the summer of 1983, Judy Johnson, the parent of a young boy at the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, Calif., accused an employee of sexually abusing her son. The police sent a letter to about 200 families, asking them in part to “please question your child to see if he or she has been a witness to any crime or if she has been a victim,” while listing off a variety of graphic crimes that Johnson alleged had took place.
Because very young children will often answer difficult questions with what they think their parents want to hear, local police were deluged with nonsensical allegations. Many involved crimes or incidents that were impossible, such as “goatman” hybrids abusing them, children trafficked through non-existent underground tunnels, or employees flying through the air. Nonetheless, therapists interviewed the children with leading questions, resulting in hundreds of felony charges filed against the school’s owners and staff. Pazder and Smith themselves became involved in the “investigation,” with Pazder appearing on 20/20 in 1985, as the Panic and the McMartin Trial were in full swing.
The case dragged on for nearly a decade, through two trials, with many of the defendants spending much of that time in prison, unable to make bail. Finally, years after initial accuser Judy Johnson died of chronic alcoholism, all the charges were dropped and the cases were dismissed. Hundreds of other cases ended with acquittal or dismissal as well. By then, the public had turned on both Michelle Remembers and the idea of repressed memories being unlocked through therapy. Just as there was no compelling evidence of organized ritual abuse at the McMartin School or any other school, there was no compelling evidence of organized ritual abuse against Michelle Smith.
Works like Michelle Remembers, that grab audiences with lurid allegations of unspeakable things done by the most evil people, are often discredited almost immediately. And that discrediting usually has little impact in dulling the effectiveness of the work. Just as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were exposed almost right away as a forgery, yet have fired the imaginations of antisemites for generations, Michelle Remembers was exposed very quickly by a reporter for the Canadian magazine Macleans. In the piece, published just after the book’s release, the allegations Smith made against her mother were refuted by Smith’s sisters and father, the supposed car crash was exposed as having no corresponding police report, and the author pointed out that it was a gross violation of medical ethics for a patient and therapist to marry each other. As the book and the Panic it caused took off, other journalists and experts assailed its story. Even contemporary reviews of the book were skeptical, with a Washington Post writeup of Michelle Remembers allowing merely that it was “not impossible” that Smith suffered the horrors she described. At the same time, the Church of Satan threatened to sue Smith, causing her and Pazder to remove mentions of it from subsequent printings.
Ultimately, Pazder’s “recovered-memory therapy” was decried by the psychiatry industry as ineffective and prone to producing false recollections. The Satanic Panic faded from public interest as police and insurance companies finally became more skeptical of its outlandish claims. And Pazder never held public sway so closely again, dying in 2004. But the repercussions of the moral panic sparked by Michelle Remembers are still being felt in our culture right now. Many of the teachers and parents accused of ritual abuse languished in prison for decades, with one Texas father exonerated in 2023 after spending more than two decades behind bars based on allegations of ritual abuse that the court admitted never took place.
The Panic’s ongoing effects are still being felt in subsequent conspiracy theory movements like Pizzagate and QAnon, which both revolve around lurid allegations of horrific crimes against children, perpetrated by Satanists capable of outlandish deeds. QAnon pushes many of the same emotional buttons as Michelle Remembers did, only its conceptual text is a series of internet message board posts too vague to be debunked, rather than the specific allegations of one woman.
Individual panics come and go, but panic, it seems, will always be with us.
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