A Blueprint for Social Engineering

Strategies of Misdirection in the McMartin Ritual Abuse Case

Reading The Witch-Hunt Narrative : Politics, Psychology and The Sexual Abuse of Children by Ross E. Cheit

Audio version

Aid to Denial: Spinning the Narrative

The Witch-Hunt Narrative begins with an analysis of the McMartin preschool case from 1983. It shows how the case—or rather the narrative that was spun around it—has become the basis for a larger narrative that is central to an ongoing agenda to discredit all claims of ritual and organized abuse of children, even as such crimes have become more and more a matter of public record.

What this amounts to is a kind of moving, multi-purpose cover-up, a “denial-aid” for every occasion. Belief in a “satanic panic” in the US in the 1980s compounded the idea of “mass hysteria” (specifically of the moral kind), as well as “false memories” (an idea sourced in the thoroughly discredited False Memory Syndrome, but miraculously resurrected by the tireless efforts of Elizabeth Loftus in the 21^st century).

Cheit’s book makes clear that any “moral panic” or “mass hysteria” that occurred in the 1980s in relation to McMartin was—if not entirely justified—very much the effect and not the cause of the many testimonies of child sexual abuse of a ritual kind. The “witch-hunt narrative” is a tissue of lies that has cemented a distorted but complex set of beliefs about human psychology and society that in turn facilitates continued suppression, denial, and dismissal of similar cases of organized malevolence and high-level abuse.¹

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In the introduction, Cheit writes,

a close examination of the witch-hunt canon leads to some unsettling questions. Why is there so little in the way of academic scholarship about these cases? Almost all of the major witch-hunt writings have been in magazines, often without any footnotes to verify or assess the claims made. Why hasn’t anyone writing about these cases said anything about how difficult they are to research? There are so many roadblocks and limitations to researching these cases that it would seem incumbent on any serious writer to address the limitations of data sources. Many of these cases seem to have been researched in a manner of days or weeks. Nevertheless, the cases are described in a definitive way that belies their length and complexity, along with the inherent difficulty in researching original trial documents (p. 13).

Cheit’s book is based on “the first systematic examination of court records in these cases” and argues that “even though many cases have been held up as classic examples of modern American witch-hunts, none of them truly fits that description.” Though McMartin comes close, “a careful examination of the evidence presented at trial demonstrates why, in my view, a reasonable juror could vote for conviction, as many did in this case” (p. 13-14).

Other cases that have been painted as witch-hunts turn out to involve significant, even overwhelming evidence of guilt. There are a few cases to the contrary, but even those are more complicated than the witch-hunt narrative allows. In short, there was not, by any reasonable measure, an epidemic of witch-hunts in the 1980s. . . . More surprisingly, a substantial number of the cases held up as witch-hunts actually included credible evidence of abuse or even something stronger than that. But that is only apparent after doing extensive original research on a substantial number of cases. . . . There is scant recognition that there were true cases of sexual abuse in daycare centers during this time period. . . . Although it has become impolitic to ask whether children are being unduly discredited in court, there are several reasons to think they are. The arguments about child suggestibility have evolved into a much more expansive effort to label children as tainted, even in cases with strong corroborative evidence. There has also been an effort to discredit disclosures simply because they were delayed. That worrisome development appears to be part of a larger movement to dismiss the expertise and knowledge of child abuse professionals (p. 14-16).

Cheit is not arguing for a conspiracy, however—he is incomprehensibly dismissive of such an idea—but for something more “organic.”

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Cheit’s book is essential reading for setting the record straight and potentially dismantling a false cognitive syndrome. If only he had he taken it further—exactly as far as the material demands—rather than drawing an arbitrary line at what he considers “fantastic” or implausible.

One might think that the mythic narrative of the witch-hunt and of a “satanic panic” would have become—in the years since McMartin—increasingly unconvincing to people, in the light of everything that’s been coming to light, post-Dutroux, post-Savile, post-Epstein. And yet somehow, despite this, this period has yet to be reevaluated in the light of current awareness, and so the narrative has not been discredited or dispelled. To some degree, it has even gained momentum.

This suggests a disturbing possibility: that the less convincing a cover-up is revealed to be, the more obviously false a narrative, the greater the need to believe it becomes.

A Mixed Blessing

Cheit’s book is a well-researched, well-cited, well-argued, in-depth exploration of the witch-hunt narrative, using documented evidence to demolish it, and to establish the reality of ritual child abuse. At the same time, maddeningly, Cheit is bizarrely dismissive of any kind of organized ritual abuse, or even organized pedophilia!

Cheit seems unaware that, at the time of publication (2014), organized pedophile rings had come to light in relation to daycare centers in the UK (specifically in Islington, London), which is the exact same focus of his book, in the US.

So either Cheit is suffering from a blind spot, or he is working strategically to disassociate his study from more controversial areas of “conspiracy theory,” or to avoid its being grouped in with more unfiltered and hysterical—or at least more extreme— interpretations of the same social phenomena.

But is it really necessary for him to actively dismiss any of these things in order to maintain his academic credibility? He could have avoided expressing an opinion, or simply admitted to not knowing. Unfortunately, he doesn’t do that, and so (perhaps unwittingly) his book becomes part of the cover-up, as well as the uncovering.

What Cheit reveals with his right hand, he covers up with his left.

How to Create a Satanic Panic

Cheit continues:

In the years since the McMartin case ended, the popular narrative that has risen to prominence is that the case lacked any factual basis. Instead, it has become the foundational case in the witch-hunt narrative. This narrative is applied so completely to the McMartin case that it may be difficult to imagine there is anything left to say about it. The McMartin case has, quite simply, come to be seen as baseless. Under this view, all of the child molestation charges were “trumped up.” They were a “hoax.” Although this view is widely promoted and accepted, it is contradicted by court transcripts and various other records in the case (p. 23).

Cheit thoroughly establishes this claim in the first part of his book.²

At least eight families with children who attended McMartin Preschool in 1982 or 1983 “reported what they viewed as incriminating statements or highly suspicious behavior suggesting sexual abuse at the preschool” (p. 40). This was in response to a September 1982 letter from the Manhattan Beach Police Dept. about possible abuse in the school by Ray Bucky.

The case began with this letter, before the media got hold of it, before there was any kind of “hysteria,” and before the involvement of the Children’s Institute International (CII), who were later accused of leading child witnesses to confabulate stories.

The case began, simply enough, with parents trying to ascertain whether their children had been interfered with, and with their testifying to or reporting their findings.

The police reports from the week immediately following the letter also reveal a phenomenon that has been overlooked in the rush to characterize this time in terms of hysteria, with clear signs of parental reluctance to address the issue or to get involved in any way. . . . A full-text search of the CII interviews with all the children who ended up in the criminal trial reveals that the following words do not appear even once in any of the interviews. Satan, devil, tunnel, candle, grave, chant, cemetery, robe (p. 40, 41).

It becomes clear to me, on revisiting this material in 2024, that there has to be some sort of reasonable explanation for why so many otherwise intelligent people—even today—were made to believe that “mass hysteria” mysteriously confabulated a whole litany of false allegations about the most horrifying sorts of child sexual abuse within US institutions. How is it possible for anyone to convince themselves that “hysteria” caused dozens of people to imagine crimes, rather than to logically assume that the crimes caused the hysteria, and hence lead to some degree of distortion of the events?

The answer is: Satanism. Without the Satanic elements, such broad, far-reaching, and firmly established “skepticism” (denial) could never have happened.

Ergo, the very element that makes the crimes so horrific and bizarre—and so attention-grabbing—is central to their being successfully covered up.

It is therefore logical to suppose that the satanic elements, whether staged at the time or later invented (or both), were intentionally included in the abuse and/or the testimonies—as a way to discredit the victims.

This possibility, so far as I know, was never raised in any investigations, at the time or after; in fact, and as far as I recall, even Cheit does not mention it.

Yet the choice to emphasize these elements (and possibly exaggerate them) was almost certainly deliberate, at least some of the time, as a means to discredit the whole thing, since this was exactly the effect that including these elements had. This is quite different from Christians hearing a few devilish details, panicking, and then going into overdrive—but it is also quite complementary with it.

The “satanic panic” response could, after all, have easily been predicted, and it could have been manipulated to happen, by ensuring that those particular elements were present, and/or overstated.

An Infiltrated Investigation?

In the evolution of the case, over time, “the idea took hold that the case involved multiple defendants and multiple crime scenes, both at and away from the preschool” (p. 49). As Cheit has it, children were pressured and manipulated into telling things. Most of the children interviewed, he says, had nothing to say, but the CII assumed they were being threatened into silence (a logical but risky assumption). According to Cheit, this idea first emerged in the questions asked, “long before it appeared in any answers” (p. 46).

This appears to be the primary basis for eventually dismissing the whole case as a case of false allegations due to moral panic and witness-coerced testimonies. Working backwards from this outcome, then, it becomes reasonable to ask whether there were infiltrators in the CII—either actual perpetrators or allied with the perpetrators—deliberately misdirecting the investigation, to elicit false or exaggerated testimonies.

This is not an idea Cheit considers, because he is dismissive of the idea of organized ritual abusers within the institutions. He sticks to “a few bad apples” reading of the data. But since he never explains why he dismisses the possibility of conspiracy or organized pedophile rings, I can only deduce that Cheit is not finding any evidence for this because he is not looking for it.

The mistakes that were made at CII are pivotal to explaining how the McMartin case spun out of control. The interviewers, in an earnest attempt [but was it?] to avoid dismissing children’s voices, heard far more than they were actually told. Convinced that the children were afraid to talk, they coaxed responses that seemed to confirm their view. Faced with the implausible idea that all of the teachers in the school participated in the abuse, they came up with a conspiracy theory about a national network of child pornographers (p. 68).

Cheit makes no attempt to explain what is empirically implausible about these ideas. It seems based on the assumption that, if such were the case, child abusers would have had to infiltrate a pre-school and replace all the good people, in a sort of Invasion of the Body Snatchers scenario.  This conspicuously ignores the possibility that such abusers could be organized enough to create institutions, schools, daycare centers, precisely in order to have access to children.

Of course, this is an appalling possibility to consider, but there’s nothing specifically implausible about it, except perhaps for the scale of such an operation. Perhaps Cheit believes that such deviants couldn’t possibly be that well-organized, but I don’t see any evidence to argue that, since cases such as the Dutroux affair in Belgium and Islington care-home child sexual abuse give the lie to it.³

Cheit writes, “The therapists got so caught up in the satanic abuse theme that some of them persisted well into the 90s with their conspiratorial theories.”

And then, in the 2000s, such claims began to enter the mainstream, both as soberly reported facts, and as grossly simplified counter-narratives (QAnon).  If Cheit has changed his viewpoint since then, I haven’t heard anything about it.

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Returning to the CII, if some children can be led to make false accusations, then this can be used to invalidate all the allegations, regardless of how compelling the evidence. And this is exactly what happened. So were the children deliberately led to confabulate stories, not out of Christian hysteria, but out of a criminal strategy designed to protect the guilty?

The witch-hunt narrative is that overzealous Christians—parents, therapists, lawyers, and police—coaxed children into inventing stories. The result—as Cheit makes plain—is a smokescreen by which the actual perpetrators slipped away.

It’s not difficult to imagine that very cunning perpetrators could have foreseen this result, could have worked it out in advance, knowing that it would work. Stir up a frenzy and direct the attention towards innocent parties, towards crimes that never happened, and the real crimes will get lumped in with the false ones.

Such a strategy is similar to a magic trick that depends on directing the audience attention away from the sleight of hand by creating a distraction, a song and dance. The distraction not only makes it possible for the guilty to slip away, it also makes the guilty look innocent, because they’re suddenly in the company of the wrongly-accused, rather than being starkly highlighted in the context of the crimes themselves.

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The witch-hunt narrative is a psyop. It’s social engineering in miniature. In light of my current focus on Rene Girard, it’s worth noting how mimesis, and an awareness of mimesis, could also be a factor when it came to engineering this kind of hysteria and achieving the desired end.

In retrospect, the mistakes made during this critical phase of the CII evaluation seem fairly clear. What remains less clear is why such a shaky foundation of interviews resulted in seven defendants being charged and in official claims that far more people were probably involved. In other words, why did so many people come to believe, based on so little evidence, that there had been such widespread abuse? (p. 59)

Again, perhaps some of these investigators didn’t ever really believe that? Perhaps they only claimed to believe it, knowing it would be strategically effective to do so?

The behavior you want to elicit from people, you must first model for them. At the same time, the behavior that people are seeing in others—or are projecting onto others or imagining in others—they will end up imitating.

A knowledge of this is fundamental to crowd control and social psychology, and thence to social engineering.

The McMartin case is a microcosm.

Criminals Amongst Us

One reason people look away and stay focused on the distraction, the false narrative, is that it’s very disturbing to start to see how criminals operate, how they walk amongst us unrecognized and unchallenged. In order not to lose sight of what this is actually about, let’s look more unflinchingly at these crimes for a moment.

Cheit cites the medical evidence for child sex abuse in some horrific passages.

An exam revealed an enlarged vaginal opening and markedly red mucous membranes. Later, a colposcopic exam found a remarkable scar that, given its stage of healing, was diagnosed as “between two and four weeks old.” Chapman recounted those facts to the Crown Jury in March. But Brianna, who had just turned four, was considered too young to testify. Her older sister Nancy, who was almost seven, was interviewed. She was slated to testify instead. However, she became one of the untold casualties of the McMartin case. Nancy literally had a nervous breakdown in June 1984, was hospitalized after a period of continuous vomiting and dehydration, and was subsequently removed from the witness list. Ellen Chapman, the mother, still testified at the preliminary hearing, but all she was allowed to say in her direct testimony, given that her daughter was not a complaining witness, was that Brianna attended McMartin in the fall of 1983, that Peggy Bucky made a strange comment in the fall about “checking Ray for hard-ons,” and that her daughter left the school on January 12th, 1984. The normally contentious defense attorneys who drew cross-examination of some children out for more than a week didn’t ask Chapman a single question. This eliminated any danger that she would be given the opportunity to explain why her daughter left McMartin and what Dr. Hager observed when examining the child shortly after her complaints in January 1984. The jury never heard any of that. Other than Brianna Chapman, however, there were enough problems with the interviews in January that they are generally not useful in assessing whether or not a child was sexually abused. The problems with source attribution apparently increased in January as more parents sent their kids to CII and more parents told other parents about their experiences. There are several examples in the interview transcripts where a child makes it clear that his or her seemingly incriminatory statements against Ray Bucky or others are based on something told to the child by a parent (p. 56).

If you find this material deeply disturbing (and who wouldn’t?), it’s significant to consider (something Cheit brings up in his book) that the period of the McMartin case coincided with the widespread public acknowledgement of child sexual abuse in society. This had been a social secret, “the best kept secret,”  for a very long time. Jeffrey Masson’s book about Freud’s suppression of the seduction theory, Assault on Truth, came out during this period (1984), so one could say that the whole of US society got “triggered” at being confronted by the recognition of this terrible secret.

If an awakening was occurring, or at least an acknowledgement, it’s easy to posit the kind of distress that this would have caused, and how that distress might have interfered with people’s ability to think clearly, or to act rationally. Not to the extent of an actual witch-hunt, but to the extent of over-diagnosing, asking leading questions, mishandling evidence, rushing to charges, and so on.⁴

Fallacies Upon Fallacies

The grand jury saw no reason to draw distinctions between possible defendants and took a kind of all-or-nothing approach. Ironically, by accepting all of the claims, they helped to ensure that ultimately none would result in convictions (p. 76).

There seems to be something about human psychology that makes it very difficult for most people to think in ambiguity. We think in black and white, all or nothing, even when there’s no logical basis for doing so.

Logically, just because many defendants are accused of similar crimes means neither that they’re all guilty or that they’re all innocent. Each has to be viewed as an individual case. An awareness of this tendency to want to lump all testimonies together may have proven very useful, in terms of pulling the wool over people’s eyes.

“This couldn’t possibly be everyone I know who’s in on this,” we think, therefore it can’t be anyone. In my email back and forth in 2016 about Aleister Crowley’s involvement in child sexual abuse as part of his occult methodology, Peter Levenda argued with me that he had spent time with many occult groups, he had “met these people,” and he was confident that no child abuse was going on.

This is based on a very obvious fallacy to begin with, which is that we can tell a predator when we see one. It is hard to really see how such a belief holds up in people’s minds, but maybe it is partly out of fear of participating in a witch-hunt!⁵

Levenda piled fallacy on top of fallacy when he argued that, having met a bunch of occultists and decided that they’re okay (based on nothing but a belief in his own ability to subjectively determine guilt), there’s nothing going on at all.

A Blueprint for Social Engineering

Social engineering is impossible to understand if we think of the whole of history being socially engineered from the outside. But it isn’t like that. It’s an internal control that requires a certain kind of leverage.

Things trickle from the top down through mimesis. Things that have influence on us as individuals—whether it’s historical events or charismatic figures—once they reach the collective become a “mass movement.” That’s social engineering.

The McMartin case demonstrates how this was done, in terms of creating a narrative that fabricated behaviors and how those behaviors then became actual—only not in the way they were told in the narrative.

The moral panic that was alleged to have occurred in the witch-hunt narrative, on the part of Christians and concerned parents and whatnot, against a satanic ritual abusing cult, is established as false by Cheit’s book. Yet it did determine the behavior of those who believed it, and those who believed the witch-hunt narrative have themselves fed a kind of moral panic against a perceived moral panic.

One of the things Cheit points out is that the supposed moral panic was all about believing the children, to protect the children, and that this was perceived to have led to unfair persecutions, scapegoating, of adults. But the actual narrative that has arisen from that false narrative, or been cemented by it, is the opposite. It asserts the need for the protection of adults from accusations of abuse, and it allows for the continued persecution of children.

Of course, the children become adults, including the adults who are persecuting and the adults who are believing in the false narrative, and who are concerned about being persecuted wrongly. All these adults were once children, and probably in many cases they were victims of persecution, one way or another. The exploited child becomes the exploiting adult that then exploits the child, ad infinitum, perpetuating the wound within itself in order to keep that child powerless and silent, so we won’t ever have to experience the pain and the distress of what is happening under our noses.

The moving forces in promoting the witch-hunt narrative include journalists, defense lawyers and defense-oriented expert witnesses. What is remarkable is that these actors seem to mirror, in fervor and tactics, the very things they claim to abhor. Instead of disregarding evidence that might point away from guilt, they disregard evidence that points towards it. Instead of automatically believing any child accusation, they seem to automatically believe the denial of any adult. Instead of assuming all of the medical evidence presented by the prosecution must be true, they take the position that it should all be rejected. In this way the McMartin case provided the foundation for a narrative that would eventually extend well beyond the case (p. 86).

A Dangerous Safety Valve

In our exchange, Peter Levenda was not only pushing the narrative of the witch-hunt on me, but suggesting that the problem of unjust accusations via moral panics is as serious a threat as the threat of organized abuse.

It is as if there’s a scale, and on one side you’ve got organized ritual abuse, and on the other you’ve got “mass hysteria and witch-hunts,” as if—at best—the two were somehow equal. Either mass hysteria explains away all the organized abuse claims; or it must be weighed against such claims, and made to cast doubt upon them.

It’s certainly true that people do get hysterically upset about child abuse and pedophilia; but as Michael Lesher points out in his book Sexual Abuse, Shonda and Concealment in Orthodox Jewish Communities, people abhor child abuse in the abstract, but they tolerate it in reality. And this strange fact is rarely, if ever, factored in.

No doubt, there have been cases of innocent teachers being fired for getting too close to children, or of parents getting prosecuted for photographing their children naked. No doubt there are many such consequences that are regrettable. But what’s not being considered is how this is actually inseparable from the fact that systemic child sexual abuse is tolerated in reality, is protected, is condoned, and rarely ever leads to charges, never mind convictions (as Cheit makes clear in his book).

Most confounding of all, a normalization of child sexuality (starting with Freud and Havelock Ellis, reaching its apotheosis with the UNESCO attempt to legalize the sexual “instruction” of infants) seems to be proceeding in tandem with the inevitably growing but mostly undirected outrage.

This is a key thing to get our minds around: the abhorrence of child abuse in the abstract allows for the tolerance of it in reality. This is because the outrage—which is partially an expression of powerlessness—is a form of compensation that acts as a safety valve, letting off steam but doing nothing to address the cause of the pressure.

1. This analysis might also be applied, possibly, to the 1997-2000 Outreau case in France, which has just been used as the basis for (what looks likes) another Netflix "true crime" whitewash. The trial was apparently sabotaged by the obviously guilty perps making very broad accusations of other community members, some of whom may well have been innocent, while others more likely were not. Children's accounts were also discredited for being too fantastic.

The theme of the case, the high number of children recognized as victims, the potential murder of a child, as well as the number of adults indicted and kept in pre-trial detention made this case a national headline and gave rise to strong public criticism. The particularities of the trials of the Outreau affair made it a sensitive and controversial subject, while the words of the child victims have been misrepresented and not all those acquitted would be innocent. The Outreau affair caused distrust among young victims in France, with a 40% drop in child sexual assault convictions in the decade following the acquittal on appeal. [A supposed] partial judicial error led to provisional detentions between 2001 and 2004. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outreau_case

This happened exactly congruent with the Dutroux affair in Belgium (1989, then 1996-2004), as if by design (and d'Outreau = Dutroux).

2. One thing of note is Cheit’s mention of Abby Mann, the screenwriter of Indictment, an Oliver Stone-produced HBO film starring James Woods which (as Cheit sees it) was largely responsible for cementing the witch-hunt narrative in public awareness. The film was highly praised as being strictly factual, even though it was very clearly anything but. (So much for Oliver Stone the conspiracy-savvy Hollywood filmmaker. Certainly, his involvement in this project throws his affiliations and integrity into serious question.) Cheit notes that Abbie Mann was “at the scene” (McMartin) from very early on, and was researching it from the start. And according to Cheit, Mann framed his view of the case around one of the parents of the alleged abused children, Judy Johnson, and her supposedly “suspect personality.” Mann used a fictionalized version of her story, Cheit argues, making it central to Indictment, as a way to drive home the witch-hunt narrative. Cheit considers Johnson an obvious candidate for a scapegoat, and the selection of a scapegoat—somebody that we can all agree is guilty—is central to the creation of the witch-hunt narrative. Yet in this case, it’s not the pedophile, the alleged child abuser, it’s the concerned mother of the abused child. Johnson had some kind of nervous breakdown during the course of the McMartin case. Mann was working with the prosecutor, Glenn Stevens, while he was researching his screenplay, and the transcripts of their conversations over several months demonstrate that Mann and his wife formed a view of Johnson that went against what Stevens told them on the subject. In one conversation, Stevens pushed Mann to explain why he kept coming back to Johnson. Mann’s answer was that she had a suspect personality, though Stevens did not agree. Stevens claimed that Johnson did a very good job on the stand, which Cheit says is very different from how Johnson was portrayed in the movie, and in the witch-hunt narrative about McMartin, in which she is routinely described as mentally ill from the start. Johnson did eventually die, allegedly, of alcohol abuse, and certainly it appears she had a breakdown and became an alcoholic after discovering her child had been abused. Cheit acknowledges that there is no doubt that a case like McMartin could potentially break a person, citing Paul Bynum, a former Manhattan Beach Police Department officer who worked as an investigator for the defense in the McMartin case, and who committed suicide the day before he was supposed to testify in the McMartin case. Of course, Bynum may have been suicided, but there were reports of secondary trauma among hardened reporters who covered the case, and I think it’s worth emphasizing how exposure to this kind of material, and attempting to research it, attempting to find out the truth about it, is by its very nature destabilizing. This is even without considering the possibility, even the likelihood, that people who were involved in researching it might have suffered some abuse in their own childhood, and might not even be aware of it. (See pages 24-27.)

3. Similarly, on page 78, Cheit mentions “fantastic claims,” citing a boy being forced to drink rabbit’s blood. Yet Cheit doesn’t take the time to explain what, specifically, is so fantastic about the claim. (It is not as if it is the blood of a unicorn being drunk, after all.) Cheit also dismisses the tunnels under McMartin, and he doesn’t seem to be aware that tunnels were discovered, or at least that there is evidence that tunnels were discovered, including FBI documents. How could he have missed that? Cheit notes that most or all of the children who made tunnel claims were going to the same therapist, which is a significant detail if true, and if the tunnels were part of the means of discrediting the stories. If the tunnels were either invented, or it was believed they never would be discovered, then it would make sense if a complicit therapist was drawing that stuff out of child victims. I don’t know if the tunnels were real or not, because I haven’t been able to verify the supposed FBI documents that I have seen, that show maps of them.

4. Doctors (allegedly) over-diagnosing children “helps explain why parents became convinced that their children had been sexually abused if they weren’t, even if their statements at CII were ambiguous or strained credulity” (p. 60). Even if over-diagnosis happened (which Cheit questions), once again this could also have been deliberate.

5. I recall meeting an occultist once in London who had met Michael Aquino, and who told me with a straight face that, if Aquino was guilty of any of the things children alleged about him, he would have to be an “Ipsissimus”—the highest grade in the Golden Dawn—to be able to seem so innocent!