In early February 2023, NBC News Senior Reporter Brandy Zadrozny contacted me to see if I was available to discuss my reporting on the ongoing Utah County Sheriff’s Office (UCSO) investigation into “ritualized child sexual abuse”. Mrs. Zadrozny is known as NBC’s “Misinformation Expert” and regularly reports on what she calls conspiracy theories.
I had been following the Utah investigation since summer 2022 and was one of the few journalists who approached the story with the respect it deserves. In short, in May 2022 the UCSO announced their investigation into child abuse. This announcement was quickly followed up by a press conference from Utah County Attorney David Leavitt where he claimed that he was potentially a target of the Sheriff’s investigation and wanted to make it clear that he and his wife were “not cannibals” or “child abusers”.
In September 2022, the UCSO arrested former therapist David Hamblin, who had been accused of abusing his own daughters as far back as 1999. Charges were brought against Hamblin in 2012 but were dropped in 2014 after prosecutors said they struggled to gain access to evidence they needed. It is in the 2012 case against Hamblin where his alleged victims also accuse David Leavitt of being involved in sexual abuse.
Hamblin is not currently being charged for the same alleged crimes in the 2012 case, but rather new charges brought about by former patients. In September of this year the USCO also arrested Hamblin’s ex-wife Roselle “Rosie” Anderson Stevenson on one count of sodomy on a child, for an offense against a girl under age 13.
In pursuit of the Hamblin story I have written 8 articles exploring the Sheriff’s investigation, as well as claims of sexual abuse throughout Utah’s history and within the Church of Latter day Saints, also known as the Mormon Church.
When Zadrozny first reached out she said she was working on a “project about the David Hamblin case” and was not clear “what form this project will take”. She said she had seen my coverage of the Hamblin case and the allegations against him from the 2012 case. “Frankly, to experts I’ve spoken with, the allegations resemble those from the 1980’s “Satanic Panic” era. I’d be interested in hearing your perspective,” she wrote.
The mention of the “Satanic Panic” was not surprising given Zadrozny’s previous reporting on the David Hamblin case. I dissected Zadrozny’s one article on David Hamblin in my September 2022 piece, Are the Children Lying? Re-Examining the Satanic Panic. Zadrozny attempts to frame the UCSO investigation as a symptom of ongoing Qanon fantasies. She claims Qanon conspiracies are a part of the revival of what has often been deemed the “Satanic Panic”, a period in the 1980’s and 90’s when people around the world began reporting instances of sexual abuse and murder of children involving rituals performed by cults often labeled “satanic”.
Zadrozny’s entire reporting is predicated on the idea that during the “satanic’ or “moral panic” conservative and religious folk around the world bought into a mass hysteria where parents and children made up claims about participating in, or being victim of, ritual abuse by organized cults. The perpetrators and the cults they allegedly work with were often labeled Satanic. Whether or not the various cults and individuals were actually practicing worship of an entity called Satan is debatable, but the fact is that hundreds of reports were made across Europe, Australia, and the United States throughout the 1980’s and 90’s.
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