Tag: satanic panic

Shahzia Sikander Sculpture Beheaded at the University of Houston

A Shahzia Sikander statue at the University of Houston was vandalized following previous protests by right-wing groups.

The 18-foot-tall bronze monument to women and justice was beheaded in the early morning on July 8 while the campus was experiencing harsh weather and power outages due to Hurricane Beryl.

Footage of the vandalism was obtained by campus police, according to the New York Times, which first reported the news.

“We were disappointed to learn the statue was damaged early Monday morning as Hurricane Beryl was hitting Houston,” Kevin Quinn, the university’s executive director of media relations, said in an email to ARTnews. “The damage is believed to be intentional. The University of Houston Police Department is currently investigating the matter.”

The female figure, whose braided hair forms a pair of horns, wears a lacy collar in allusion to similar ones worn by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the late Supreme Court justice.

The sculpture was installed in a plaza at the University of Houston after five months of display to critical acclaim at Madison Square Park in New York City. But when it traveled to Houston, it drew criticism from the anti-abortion Christian group Texas Right to Life, which called for a campus-wide protest “to keep the Satanic abortion idol out of Texas.” The University of Houston responded by cancelling a planned opening and artist talk, as well as choosing not to show an accompanying video work also by Sikander.

It’s worth noting that Sikander’s artist statement about the work contains no mention of Satanism. “The rams’ horns are universal symbols of strength and wisdom,” Sikander told Art in America earlier this year. “There is nothing Satanic about them.”

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Our nightmare by the four Hampstead mothers falsely accused of being satanic paedophiles: Middle class women who were forced to turn detective to jail their tormentors speak for the first time

There’s a photo on Anna’s phone which captures what she now knows to be the final day of normal life for her family: it shows her nine-year-old daughter making her way to school across a snowy Hampstead Heath.

‘When I looked back on that picture, I realised I had no idea then how much our lives were about to change,’ Anna recalls. ‘It was the last snapshot of life as we knew it.’

Because the next day — February 5, 2015 — Anna and her husband, along with other parents and staff at her daughter’s pretty North London primary school, found themselves caught in a nightmare.

Two young children of a fellow parent at the school — in one of the wealthiest areas of London, home to celebrities including Jonathan Ross, Helena Bonham Carter and Dame Judi Dench — had begun to make a series of extraordinary and horrifying allegations.

Anna was just one of the adults connected to the school accused by the brother and sister of being part of a Satanic paedophile ring that indulged in horrendous ritual abuse and murder.

So outlandish were these allegations — among them that they were Devil worshippers who had sex with children, made child sacrifices and drank their blood — it is hard to imagine that anyone could take them remotely seriously.

And it’s important to say here that those accused were entirely innocent. But this is the internet age, where there is a ready audience for everything.

And so, fuelled by conspiracy theorists, the lurid allegations went around the world. To say that it upended the lives of those involved is an understatement.

The names, addresses and phone numbers of the parents, school staff and pupils identified as being involved were published online, and they were inundated with death threats.

The parents were contacted by vigilantes saying they would snatch their children to take them to safety. Equally horrifyingly, paedophiles would ask about their children’s sexual preferences.

It was, Anna recalls, ‘like being under siege’.

When they appealed to the police for help, they were told the harassers could not be prosecuted. Stymied, too, by internet giants doing little to shut down the relentless online content, it was left to the parents themselves to do what they could to protect their families.

Ultimately, it would take the determined and extraordinary efforts of four mothers in particular, who, working until the small hours, month in month out, meticulously gathered evidence that would lead to the prosecution of two of the most vocal online conspiracy theorists.

N ow, for the first time, the mothers have told their story in a compelling Channel 4 documentary, Accused: The Hampstead Paedophile Hoax, which explores both the devastating impact of the allegations and their determined fightback.

‘For years we had to keep this dignified silence, because we were trying to build a legal case and we didn’t want to jeopardise that,’ says Anna. ‘Now, finally, we get to have our voice.’

A voice, yes, but not a face. Along with the other mothers who appear in the documentary, Anna is choosing to remain anonymous.

On film, their words are spoken by an actor, and they are referred to by pseudonyms. They are determined to protect the privacy of their now grown-up children.

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Utah May Soon Ban Non-Existent ‘Satanic Ritual Abuse’

Let me tell you a terrifying fact: 72 percent of the Amazon reviews of the book Satan’s Underground give it 5 stars. If you’re not familiar, the book is the “memoir” of a woman named Lauren Stratford, aka Laurel Rose Wilson, who claimed to have been a victim of Satanic ritual abuse. This is despite the fact that Stratford was outed as a fake decades ago, and that after her claims were thoroughly debunked by the evangelical magazine Cornerstone, she embarked upon a career as fake Holocaust survivor Lauren Grabowski until she was outed by Cornerstone again, along with another fake Holocaust survivor whom she claimed to remember.

This is very easily available information. So easily available that even some of the positive reviewers acknowledge it. They even say that they know that this particular account of Satanic ritual abuse might be nonsense, but that they appreciate the book because they know it for sure happens to other people. Somewhere. This isn’t the kind of thing I should be shocked by, having covered conspiracy theories and Satanic panic and Q-Anonsense for the last million years, and I’m not. I do, however, remain profoundly creeped the fuck out.

Last week, also decades after anyone could even almost reasonably believe that “Satanic ritual abuse” is a real thing outside of their own fevered imaginations, legislators in the state of Utah advanced a bill outlawing “ritual abuse.” This feels pretty deeply ironic given that we have many, many proven instances of actual abuse within the Mormon church and literally zero proven incidents of “Satanic ritual abuse” … anywhere.

The bill has already received a “favorable recommendation” from the House Judiciary committee and a large majority of the Legislature are on board.

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A Profile of “Misinformation Expert” Brandy Zadrozny

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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AI Artist Creates Satanic Panic About Hobby Lobby

People on social media are sharing pictures of what they think are Satanic-seeming displays from Hobby Lobby stores and vowing never to shop there again much like many people refuse to drink Bud Light or shop at Target for bigoted reasons. Aside from the fact that Americans are currently eager to boycott any company that feigns tolerance at marginalized people, there’s one big problem with these Hobby Lobby store pictures: They’re not real. 

These pictures of Satanic merchandise on the shelves of Hobby Lobby were made by Jennifer Vinyard using the AI image generating tool Midjourney. That didn’t stop people from credulously sharing the photos on Facebook and TikTok as if they were real and expressing their shock and horror that Hobby Lobby, which bills itself as a Christian company, was selling giant statues of Baphomet.

Vinyard, an Austin-area pharmacist in training, generated the pictures with Midjourney and posted them to her personal Facebook, Reddit, and an AI art group on Facebook on June 5. The public post in AI Art Universe went viral and, as of this writing, has been shared more than six thousand times. The post gained more than 100 comments before the page shut them down.

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Sunday School Scapegoats: How D&D And Heavy Metal Became Targets For Satanic Panic

The Satanic Panic started in 1980 with a book, Michelle Remembers, co-written by Michelle Smith and her psychiatrist (and future husband) Lawrence Pazder. Claiming to be the true tale of Michelle’s childhood – as remembered through the now-discredited practice of recovered memory therapy – Michelle said that she was abused by the Church of Satan, starting at the age of five. Among her claims were that she witnessed human sacrifices, was rubbed with blood and body parts of those sacrificed, tortured, and forced to take part in a non-stop, 81-day ritual in an underground room in a cemetery that summoned Satan, removed visual evidence of the abuse she had undergone, and hidden the memories until “the time is right.”

Almost immediately, the debunking began. Most notably, during the alleged 81-day ritual, Michelle still attended school and showed no signs of abuse. Michelle was unable to identify any of the hundreds of alleged participants in the ritual, except for her mother. There was no historical record of a car accident as described in the book. Pazder also never attempted to contact the police to investigate any of the alleged crimes Michelle “remembered.” Despite this, Pazder and Smith became celebrities in their “field.” Pazder was used as a consultant in the McMartin preschool trials, and Smith appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s daytime talk show. Michelle Remembers was used in training material for law enforcement and social workers.

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Survivors Alleging Satanic Ritual Abuse Raise Awareness Amid Media Claims of ‘Panic’

Survivors alleging satanic ritual abuse (SRA) and their advocates are continuing a decades-long fight to advance their cases as media companies push a narrative that the type of abuse they allege is largely the creation of a social panic.

Last month, the South by Southwest film festival screened “Satan Wants You,” which “tells the untold story of how the Satanic Panic of the 1980s was ignited,” according to the festival’s website. Echoing years of skeptical news coverage, the description adds that “satanic rumors spread through panic-stricken communities across the world, leaving a wave of destruction and wrongful convictions in their wake.” Other “satanic panic” warnings can be found in recent coverage of cases in Scotland and Utah while the backlash against Sam Smith’s Grammys performance has prompted similar caution.

But for advocates like Cindy Metcalf, the “Satanic Panic” narrative is false and degrades the stories she encounters on a regular basis. In March, Metcalf’s newly formed group Relentless Hope held a meeting in the Salt Lake area for survivors to discuss potential legal options for pursuing allegations involving the Church of Latter-Day Saints (LDS).

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Satanic panic is making a comeback, fueled by QAnon believers and GOP influencers

On June 1, David Leavitt, the prosecuting attorney for Utah County, stood behind a lectern in his windowless Provo office before a gaggle of reporters. Wearing a gray suit and an exasperated look, he wanted to make something categorically clear: Neither he nor his wife were guilty of murdering or cannibalizing young children.

It was, by all accounts, a strange declaration from the progressive Republican prosecutor, a Mormon and younger brother of a former Utah governor, Mike Leavitt, who had earned a name for himself by prosecuting a well-known polygamist in 2001. But David Leavitt was up for re-election, Utah County voters would start casting ballots the next week, and the allegations, ridiculous as they may have sounded, had started to spread online and throughout the community. 

Some of Leavitt’s most high-profile political opponents were willing to at least wink at the allegations against him: Utahns for Safer Communities, a political action committee opposing Leavitt’s re-election, posted his news conference to YouTube with the caption, “Wethinks He Doth Protest Too Much,” and on their website, the group wrote that Leavitt “seems to know more than he says.” 

Leavitt lost the election, most likely not just because of the allegations against him but because of his liberal style of prosecution in a deeply conservative county where opponents labeled him as “soft on crime.” But the allegations’ impact on Leavitt was clear. After decades of serving as a city and county attorney with grander plans for public office, Leavitt now doesn’t think he’ll run again. 

“The cost is too high,” he said recently in an interview from his home.

Leavitt’s experience is one of a spate of recent examples in which individuals have been targeted with accusations of Satanism or so-called ritualistic abuse, marking what some see as a modern day version of the moral panic of the 1980s, when hysteria and hypervigilance over protecting children led to false allegations, wrongful imprisonments, decimated communities and wasted resources to the neglect of actual cases of abuse.

While the current obsession with Satan was boosted in part by the QAnon community, partisan media and conservative politicians have been instrumental in spreading newfound fears over the so-called ritualistic abuse of children that the devil supposedly inspires, sometimes weaving the allegations together with other culture war issues such as LGBTQ rights. Those fears are powering fresh accusations of ritual abuse online, which are amplified on social media and by partisan media, and can mobilize mobs to seek vigilante justice. 

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Why Was There A Goat At The Queen’s Funeral?

Many users on Twitter noticed something that was bizarre about the Queen’s funeral procession and that was the fact that a goat was leading it!

During the third day of the Queen’s funeral procession, a Shenkin goat wearing a strange uniform led Welsh soldiers at a ceremony in Cardiff, Wales.

Many users on the internet automatically associated the goat as being symbolic of the Baphomet which is a deity that is worshipped by the occult that resembles a goat.

However many historians have come out and said the goat is a mascot for the Royal Welsh regiment and is meant to bring “good luck”.

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How a Fake Anonymous Diary Helped Launch the 1980s Satanic Panic

In 1971, the YA book Go Ask Alice hit shelves and almost immediately set off a firestorm. Purportedly the real-life diary of a straitlaced teen girl who lost her life to drugs, it was an instant hit, touted by critics across the country as a must-read for parents and teenagers alike. Over the ensuing decades, it sold tens of millions of copies — beloved by teens for its frenetic entries about taboo subjects, and by adults because it was a text they could point to as proof of the ills of drugs. But by the early 21st century, questions had arisen about the book’s veracity, as well as the true identity of its “anonymous” author — something only known by the book’s editor, a supposed child psychologist named Beatrice Sparks.

It was Sparks who captured Rick Emerson’s imagination one day back in 2015. Driving home from lunch, Emerson — who wasn’t born when the book came out, but lived through the Reagan-Era D.A.R.E. classes and War on Drugs it helped to fuel — began wondering about the mysterious author. Who was she, really? Where could he find out more about her? When he got home, he realized that the book he wanted to read didn’t exist, so he set out to write it himself. What he discovered was more shocking than he could have imagined. “Go Ask Alice was the bright, shiny object that started the story,” he tells Rolling Stone. “But then it got much bigger, much faster.” 

In short, Emerson found something that one of her follow-up YA books, Jay’s Journal, an equally suspicious “diary” of a teen boy’s descent into occultism and suicide, may have helped ignite that other late-20th-century moral freak-out: the Satanic Panic, a two-decade span of Americans blaming the devil and occultists for everything from depression to suicide and murder. “As I worked my way from the outside in, [I realized] the shadow and the scope and the scale that these books had, especially combined,” he says. “It went literally from Hollywood to the Oval Office to Quantico, and then into high schools in small towns throughout America.”

Seven years since that idea popped into his head, Emerson has finally published Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries, out this month from BenBella Books. Based on intensive research — scouring Sparks’ personal letters; conducting dozens of interviews with those who knew the real families who lost children, and with the families themselves; meticulously picking through Sparks’ other books, as well as their source material — he’s created a portrait of a fabulist so intent on spinning her legend that she stole the stories of others for her own gain. But in telling the real stories, he also brings a sort of justice for the kids and their families whose experiences had been exploited for profit.

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