Egad. The voice of reason. From a retired LEO no less.
Prepare to be excoriated by all sides and the middle, Ian. Thanks for writing for the voice of reason.
Epstein's death was inconvenient (or very convenient, YMMV) from the perspective of acquiring information more-or-less first-hand.
I will admit, not being a sworn officer, that given the opportunity I'd have used methods for which you'd have been forced (at least under the U.S. Constitution) to arrest me. Not that our government has ever used illegal methods of interrogation. Oh no, not us. Never.
ADDENDUM: No. No charcoal braziers, hammers or tongs. Scopolamine and it's successors come to mind. Accomplished interrogators (like the late David Drake) don't need them, just time. I'm sort of a knuckle-dragger, chemicals work.
The Satanic Panic was, as we say in west Texas, 'fucking bullshit': don't forget that it was also highly intertwined with additional bullshit about how "Dungeons and Dragons was a gateway to devil worship!!1!11!!".
You're 100% on target here Ian: actual bad actors got away with some horrible stuff because all the focus was on the politically magnetic & 'sexy' insane & utterly unsubstantiated claims about ritual satan worship.
I freely admit I haven’t dug deep into it because I have not been in the headspace to handle horrors, but every time I see a claim about “pizza code” or “cream cheese” it makes me angry… because you’re right. The wild-ass theories are removing attention from actual victims.
I’ve been on both sides of the information fence regarding investigations, and I watch people make shit up out of whole cloth that I *know* is false all the time, even just in my little corner of the world. And just because no one who actually knows immediately steps up saying “that’s wrong” they run with it.
The thing so many people don’t understand, or refuse to acknowledge is this: if you are not in an investigative role, you will never get all of the information about any investigation. Ever. Active investigations require discretion and even secrecy to be effective. Multiple suspects will circle the wagons and get their stories straight, hide or destroy evidence, or disappear. Not to mention victims, particularly victims of violent or sexual crimes, deserve to not have their genuine trauma put up on billboards for the world to see.
It’s bad enough what victims go through to get justice in the easiest possible scenario: a simple investigation followed by charges and a plea deal. Even there the victim is traumatized again with at least one interview, and knowing that law enforcement, prosecution, defense counsel, and their abuser get to see it all. If it goes to trial it’s on show for a judge and or jury, all of the aforementioned, plus whoever chooses to attend. And in this day and age, criminal proceedings are live-streamed, increasing the exposure.
As a member of the public even if a case goes to trial and you’re there for every second… you still won’t find out everything. Evidence is cherry picked for trial, on both sides, things can be disregarded or disallowed. All of the details are not presented.
There’s a murder case in Texas County Oklahoma involving five defendants, two have taken plea deals for reduced sentences in return for testimony, one has pled no contest, and two are at this point planning to go to trial. One of those defendants’ counsel filed over twenty motions recently, including motions to remove the death penalty from consideration and- and I wish I were kidding about this- a motion asking the judge to order the victims families not to show emotion in the courtroom during trial. They seriously asked a judge to order the families of two women who were brutally murdered not to have facial expressions in the courtroom. Because it might influence a jury.
That is the level of fuckery possible in a trial, and things like that are why the public will never have all of the information about an investigation, until after the fact, and only if they get the records from every entity involved and go through it themselves. Even then, unless you know how to go through those records, (and let the evidence show its own conclusions) you aren’t going to be able to put all of the puzzle pieces together.
People need to stop creating more horror than already exists in that situation… the real victims do not deserve to be disregarded for wild ass conspiracy theories.
I personally knew a mother and son caught up in that. The case was flimsy to start with. The sons charges were eventually dismissed. His mother was convicted in a jury trial on reduced charges. The judge took a lot of heat for granting her bail pending appeal, but as the court of appeals reversed and dismissed, with some powerful language about proscutural misconduct, that blew over. But it hung over their heads for years. And his mother's day care business was destroyed. And she never worked in the industry again.
I remember studying the satanic panic in college. One particular sad case involved a police officer who sent his daughters to a church summer camp. At the summer camp they did the recovered memories woowoo, and the daughters started claiming their father was part of a satanic group that abused them. At first the father denied everything, But as the pressure mounted, he started believing the recovered memory BS and confessing to anything they accused him of. His minister didn't believe any of the claims and visited the officer in jail. He started making up new claims that the officer also admitted that he did. This led to the officer being acquitted, and his family getting help being deprogrammed from believing this BS.
My daughters were 6 and 7 attending school in Seal Beach, just down the road from Manhattan Beach which was the center of national attention for that 7 year long investigation and trials in that legal debacle, The McMartin Pre-School Trials. In the end there were no convictions that survived appeals and dismissals once the reality of the situation was realized...that the prosecutor, Ira Reiner, jumped on manufactured psychobabble "evidence" of massive, bizarre and widespread pedophilia of pre-school children to make a name for himself and further his political ambitions. It all morphed into a national hysteria. I think that many sane people realized it was just so much impossible hokum but to speak out at the time was to be excoriated. It was an early lesson for some people to distrust those in authority...the government, but the media most of all.
Whether Jeffrey Epstein was or wasn't a pedo is irrelevant. He enabled pedos and allowed them, on his private property, to commit felony crimes. The required result is two parts. First and foremost the perpetrators MUST be found, prosecuted, and if found guilty, incarcerated. Second, and probably more requiring of a gentle hand, is the recognition of and care for the victims.
Too many people in power let that power go to their heads, and not the big head only. Evil will always be with us, however, allowing it to continue without fighting it is as much a sin as the criminal act.
The voice of reason. As the previous commenter said. People did some disgusting things. If criminal put them away. A lot of people do things I think are disgusting. Not all criminal. Great reasoned column.
The victims of the Child Care Abuse hysteria (by which I mean the poor adults convicted of abuse), which was part of the Satanic Panic, were convicted based on evidence that should have been thrown out with great force. Much of the testimony admitted woukd have left unmistakable physical evidence, or}f which there was none.
Sadly, the whole episode discredited ALL recovered memory, and some is real. My wife recovered memories of abuse after reaching adulthood with huge gaps in her memories from about six until she reached her early teens. The memories she recovered were recovered without hypnosis or drugs, and were entirely consistent with the known personality of the person involved. I have read of other such cases, but they are drowned not just by fantastic allegations such as the ones involved in the Satanic Panic, but by cases where the ‘memories’ involved are far more mundane but contradict known behavior of the supposed abusers and known and verifiable facts.
Recovered memories are like ballistic fingerprints; they CAN be indicators, but are by no means 100 % reliable. They can be a useful tool of thoughtful therapy, or they can be as badly misused as a screwdriver deployed as a chisel.
That situation never ended for male teachers. I had to be extremely careful around my students, always with another adult nearby or multiple students, so that a false accusation would not be used against me by an unethical, biased principal or LEO. I could not hug children or let them hug me when they were going through a rough patch. And the kids in the DoDDS schools had many rough patches when parents deployed.
Anyway, I don't trust many people, including many of the individuals working in child protective services—there is a case in the Florida panhandle where a doctor called DCF about a parent asking questions about the medicine the doctor prescribed for a child with cystic fibrosis—to do their job ethically and accurately. Heck, you can find this happening to a lot of parents when a child, or the parents, are misdiagnosed.
Thanks for bringing this up, LawDog. Our country needs to have a serious conversation about false accusations while we hunt down the abusers enabled by Epstein.
I grew up in the back end of the Satanic Panic. My significant other's family experienced it first hand. She is part of the Keller family, and they have one of the more famous cases from within the Panic era.
in 1991, Fran and Dan Keller were accused of Sexual Abuse on a child in their daycare. This was brought to light through psychiatric probing of the child whose parents were going through a divorce. This turned into an avalanche of parents hurling accusations based entirely in fear. Stories of blood laced kool-aid, animal sacrifices, white robes and candles, and other acts that are not tame.
The trial transcript reads like a circus.
The only evidence that was brought against them was manipulated and coached children's testimonies, and that was enough to get them 48 years in prision.
In 2013 the case came under re-evaluation because the prosecutor had been caught tampering evidience and turns out he had a long history of it. Turns out, he was basically coaxing the children to say these things with leading questions, badgering, and lying to them about their friends had said it happened.
2017 the charges were dropped, but they'd already spent 20+ years in prision under false charges. They got a massive government payout from it, but the damage was done. Not just to them, but the Keller name. The Keller family had various affordable daycares all over the country until that trial came down.
There’s the use of obvious code words (dentist, beef jerky, etc.) salted through the files. No idea what they could be referring to. But they are catnip to conspiracy theorists. Unfortunately, the track record of conspiracy theorists in recent years has been, well, not bad.
I couldn't agree more. I'm pretty tired of the allegation is proof crowd. All it takes to destroy someone is the mere allegation of wrong which pretends that there aren't such things as liars and bash faith actors. I want every guilty person convicted, but we need proof, not mere allegations
The Washington, DC metro area had the highest incidence of disappeared children in the country, at more than double the next highest region. Their rate of convictions for murder hover around 15%. Their conviction rate for reported rapes (most aren't) is around 2%. (These figures are out of date by ten years, but I doubt they've changed much.)
During the tenure of President Barack Obama, the owner of a small pizza shop (Comet Ping Pong) was listed as one of the 20 most powerful people in Washington, DC.
BHO ordered the FBI to not arrest pedophiles. They continued the investigations in spite of this order, but made no arrests until a week after Trump took office the first time. Then they arrested thousands in California alone.
"the owner of a small pizza shop (Comet Ping Pong) was listed as one of the 20 most powerful people in Washington, DC." You forgot to add "By GQ magazine".
I wonder why people would continue to leave off the fact that GQ-bloody-magazine -- that strong-hold and bastion of political analysis -- was who named Alefantis as one of the most powerful people in DC?
"The Washington, DC metro area had the highest incidence of disappeared children in the country, at more than double the next highest region." has been debunked, refuted, and shown to be utter bushwa multiple times over multiple years.
In 2024 -- the number of missing children in the District of Columbia was ... seventy-three (73). 66 of those were recovered.
For the same period, of the 58 counties in California, 37 of them had a higher "incidence" of missing children -- Nevada County has a population of 102,000 compared to 700,000 population for DC -- yet Nevada County had 79 missing children in 2024, compared to DCs ... 73.
On top of California, municipalities in Texas and Florida lead before DC is shows up.
"Their rate of convictions for murder hover around 15%.". No, the rate of conviction by jury runs about 18%. The other 82% are by plea bargain -- like the rest of the United States. The rate of murders cleared by DC Metro from 2015 to 2024 runs between 52% to 72% -- guess what? Which is about par for major metropolitan areas.
"BHO ordered the FBI to not arrest pedophiles." No, the conspiracy is that he ordered the FBI to remove pedophiles from the background check system, and is based on rage-bait headline on a bogus website.
The arrest of thousands of pedophiles in one state in one week would result in someone talking about it.
I'm not sure I believe in a grand government pedophilia ring conspiracy. What I do believe is that it is necessary to have people around that do keep under age girls and boys available for special clients that once they get talked into stepping over the line or tricked into stepping over the line can then be controlled forever more. This has been going on forever and is organized. I have seen enough stuff over a period of decades to truly believe that it happens all the time. Blackmail over illegal sexual conduct is the best control you can have. You tell one person that is already controlled to party with another person you want to control. A couple of parties with legal age girls then unknowingly becomes one with some under age ringers. They don't even have to do anything actually illegal just wake up from the mickey in their drink and shown posed pictures of them with the girls and they don't even realize they didn't do it. Now you have I will tell your wife blackmail and, oh your going to jail and I have the pictures to prove it blackmail. Then you vote the way your told, drop charges or squash investigations when told and those are added items to your number of illegal actions. before long they just do what they are told and maybe get a perk here and there as the carrot.
Egad. The voice of reason. From a retired LEO no less.
Prepare to be excoriated by all sides and the middle, Ian. Thanks for writing for the voice of reason.
Epstein's death was inconvenient (or very convenient, YMMV) from the perspective of acquiring information more-or-less first-hand.
I will admit, not being a sworn officer, that given the opportunity I'd have used methods for which you'd have been forced (at least under the U.S. Constitution) to arrest me. Not that our government has ever used illegal methods of interrogation. Oh no, not us. Never.
ADDENDUM: No. No charcoal braziers, hammers or tongs. Scopolamine and it's successors come to mind. Accomplished interrogators (like the late David Drake) don't need them, just time. I'm sort of a knuckle-dragger, chemicals work.
Lived thru that time.
The Satanic Panic was, as we say in west Texas, 'fucking bullshit': don't forget that it was also highly intertwined with additional bullshit about how "Dungeons and Dragons was a gateway to devil worship!!1!11!!".
You're 100% on target here Ian: actual bad actors got away with some horrible stuff because all the focus was on the politically magnetic & 'sexy' insane & utterly unsubstantiated claims about ritual satan worship.
These are equally messed up times, unfortunately.
Oh, yes. My brother and I were heavily into D&D at the time. Sigh.
I freely admit I haven’t dug deep into it because I have not been in the headspace to handle horrors, but every time I see a claim about “pizza code” or “cream cheese” it makes me angry… because you’re right. The wild-ass theories are removing attention from actual victims.
I’ve been on both sides of the information fence regarding investigations, and I watch people make shit up out of whole cloth that I *know* is false all the time, even just in my little corner of the world. And just because no one who actually knows immediately steps up saying “that’s wrong” they run with it.
The thing so many people don’t understand, or refuse to acknowledge is this: if you are not in an investigative role, you will never get all of the information about any investigation. Ever. Active investigations require discretion and even secrecy to be effective. Multiple suspects will circle the wagons and get their stories straight, hide or destroy evidence, or disappear. Not to mention victims, particularly victims of violent or sexual crimes, deserve to not have their genuine trauma put up on billboards for the world to see.
It’s bad enough what victims go through to get justice in the easiest possible scenario: a simple investigation followed by charges and a plea deal. Even there the victim is traumatized again with at least one interview, and knowing that law enforcement, prosecution, defense counsel, and their abuser get to see it all. If it goes to trial it’s on show for a judge and or jury, all of the aforementioned, plus whoever chooses to attend. And in this day and age, criminal proceedings are live-streamed, increasing the exposure.
As a member of the public even if a case goes to trial and you’re there for every second… you still won’t find out everything. Evidence is cherry picked for trial, on both sides, things can be disregarded or disallowed. All of the details are not presented.
There’s a murder case in Texas County Oklahoma involving five defendants, two have taken plea deals for reduced sentences in return for testimony, one has pled no contest, and two are at this point planning to go to trial. One of those defendants’ counsel filed over twenty motions recently, including motions to remove the death penalty from consideration and- and I wish I were kidding about this- a motion asking the judge to order the victims families not to show emotion in the courtroom during trial. They seriously asked a judge to order the families of two women who were brutally murdered not to have facial expressions in the courtroom. Because it might influence a jury.
That is the level of fuckery possible in a trial, and things like that are why the public will never have all of the information about an investigation, until after the fact, and only if they get the records from every entity involved and go through it themselves. Even then, unless you know how to go through those records, (and let the evidence show its own conclusions) you aren’t going to be able to put all of the puzzle pieces together.
People need to stop creating more horror than already exists in that situation… the real victims do not deserve to be disregarded for wild ass conspiracy theories.
Ok rant over.
I personally knew a mother and son caught up in that. The case was flimsy to start with. The sons charges were eventually dismissed. His mother was convicted in a jury trial on reduced charges. The judge took a lot of heat for granting her bail pending appeal, but as the court of appeals reversed and dismissed, with some powerful language about proscutural misconduct, that blew over. But it hung over their heads for years. And his mother's day care business was destroyed. And she never worked in the industry again.
I remember studying the satanic panic in college. One particular sad case involved a police officer who sent his daughters to a church summer camp. At the summer camp they did the recovered memories woowoo, and the daughters started claiming their father was part of a satanic group that abused them. At first the father denied everything, But as the pressure mounted, he started believing the recovered memory BS and confessing to anything they accused him of. His minister didn't believe any of the claims and visited the officer in jail. He started making up new claims that the officer also admitted that he did. This led to the officer being acquitted, and his family getting help being deprogrammed from believing this BS.
My daughters were 6 and 7 attending school in Seal Beach, just down the road from Manhattan Beach which was the center of national attention for that 7 year long investigation and trials in that legal debacle, The McMartin Pre-School Trials. In the end there were no convictions that survived appeals and dismissals once the reality of the situation was realized...that the prosecutor, Ira Reiner, jumped on manufactured psychobabble "evidence" of massive, bizarre and widespread pedophilia of pre-school children to make a name for himself and further his political ambitions. It all morphed into a national hysteria. I think that many sane people realized it was just so much impossible hokum but to speak out at the time was to be excoriated. It was an early lesson for some people to distrust those in authority...the government, but the media most of all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial
Whether Jeffrey Epstein was or wasn't a pedo is irrelevant. He enabled pedos and allowed them, on his private property, to commit felony crimes. The required result is two parts. First and foremost the perpetrators MUST be found, prosecuted, and if found guilty, incarcerated. Second, and probably more requiring of a gentle hand, is the recognition of and care for the victims.
Too many people in power let that power go to their heads, and not the big head only. Evil will always be with us, however, allowing it to continue without fighting it is as much a sin as the criminal act.
Thanks for a reasoned discussion.
This. And no ignoring any names that seem real inconvenient. No pretending.
The voice of reason. As the previous commenter said. People did some disgusting things. If criminal put them away. A lot of people do things I think are disgusting. Not all criminal. Great reasoned column.
The victims of the Child Care Abuse hysteria (by which I mean the poor adults convicted of abuse), which was part of the Satanic Panic, were convicted based on evidence that should have been thrown out with great force. Much of the testimony admitted woukd have left unmistakable physical evidence, or}f which there was none.
Sadly, the whole episode discredited ALL recovered memory, and some is real. My wife recovered memories of abuse after reaching adulthood with huge gaps in her memories from about six until she reached her early teens. The memories she recovered were recovered without hypnosis or drugs, and were entirely consistent with the known personality of the person involved. I have read of other such cases, but they are drowned not just by fantastic allegations such as the ones involved in the Satanic Panic, but by cases where the ‘memories’ involved are far more mundane but contradict known behavior of the supposed abusers and known and verifiable facts.
Recovered memories are like ballistic fingerprints; they CAN be indicators, but are by no means 100 % reliable. They can be a useful tool of thoughtful therapy, or they can be as badly misused as a screwdriver deployed as a chisel.
That situation never ended for male teachers. I had to be extremely careful around my students, always with another adult nearby or multiple students, so that a false accusation would not be used against me by an unethical, biased principal or LEO. I could not hug children or let them hug me when they were going through a rough patch. And the kids in the DoDDS schools had many rough patches when parents deployed.
Anyway, I don't trust many people, including many of the individuals working in child protective services—there is a case in the Florida panhandle where a doctor called DCF about a parent asking questions about the medicine the doctor prescribed for a child with cystic fibrosis—to do their job ethically and accurately. Heck, you can find this happening to a lot of parents when a child, or the parents, are misdiagnosed.
Thanks for bringing this up, LawDog. Our country needs to have a serious conversation about false accusations while we hunt down the abusers enabled by Epstein.
I grew up in the back end of the Satanic Panic. My significant other's family experienced it first hand. She is part of the Keller family, and they have one of the more famous cases from within the Panic era.
in 1991, Fran and Dan Keller were accused of Sexual Abuse on a child in their daycare. This was brought to light through psychiatric probing of the child whose parents were going through a divorce. This turned into an avalanche of parents hurling accusations based entirely in fear. Stories of blood laced kool-aid, animal sacrifices, white robes and candles, and other acts that are not tame.
The trial transcript reads like a circus.
The only evidence that was brought against them was manipulated and coached children's testimonies, and that was enough to get them 48 years in prision.
In 2013 the case came under re-evaluation because the prosecutor had been caught tampering evidience and turns out he had a long history of it. Turns out, he was basically coaxing the children to say these things with leading questions, badgering, and lying to them about their friends had said it happened.
2017 the charges were dropped, but they'd already spent 20+ years in prision under false charges. They got a massive government payout from it, but the damage was done. Not just to them, but the Keller name. The Keller family had various affordable daycares all over the country until that trial came down.
So yes, I fully understand your point.
There’s the use of obvious code words (dentist, beef jerky, etc.) salted through the files. No idea what they could be referring to. But they are catnip to conspiracy theorists. Unfortunately, the track record of conspiracy theorists in recent years has been, well, not bad.
I couldn't agree more. I'm pretty tired of the allegation is proof crowd. All it takes to destroy someone is the mere allegation of wrong which pretends that there aren't such things as liars and bash faith actors. I want every guilty person convicted, but we need proof, not mere allegations
The Washington, DC metro area had the highest incidence of disappeared children in the country, at more than double the next highest region. Their rate of convictions for murder hover around 15%. Their conviction rate for reported rapes (most aren't) is around 2%. (These figures are out of date by ten years, but I doubt they've changed much.)
During the tenure of President Barack Obama, the owner of a small pizza shop (Comet Ping Pong) was listed as one of the 20 most powerful people in Washington, DC.
BHO ordered the FBI to not arrest pedophiles. They continued the investigations in spite of this order, but made no arrests until a week after Trump took office the first time. Then they arrested thousands in California alone.
These are facts. Make of them what you will.
"the owner of a small pizza shop (Comet Ping Pong) was listed as one of the 20 most powerful people in Washington, DC." You forgot to add "By GQ magazine".
I wonder why people would continue to leave off the fact that GQ-bloody-magazine -- that strong-hold and bastion of political analysis -- was who named Alefantis as one of the most powerful people in DC?
https://www.gq.com/gallery/50-most-powerful-people-in-washington-dc
Sodding GQ Magazine. Seriously?
"The Washington, DC metro area had the highest incidence of disappeared children in the country, at more than double the next highest region." has been debunked, refuted, and shown to be utter bushwa multiple times over multiple years.
In 2024 -- the number of missing children in the District of Columbia was ... seventy-three (73). 66 of those were recovered.
For the same period, of the 58 counties in California, 37 of them had a higher "incidence" of missing children -- Nevada County has a population of 102,000 compared to 700,000 population for DC -- yet Nevada County had 79 missing children in 2024, compared to DCs ... 73.
On top of California, municipalities in Texas and Florida lead before DC is shows up.
"Their rate of convictions for murder hover around 15%.". No, the rate of conviction by jury runs about 18%. The other 82% are by plea bargain -- like the rest of the United States. The rate of murders cleared by DC Metro from 2015 to 2024 runs between 52% to 72% -- guess what? Which is about par for major metropolitan areas.
"BHO ordered the FBI to not arrest pedophiles." No, the conspiracy is that he ordered the FBI to remove pedophiles from the background check system, and is based on rage-bait headline on a bogus website.
The arrest of thousands of pedophiles in one state in one week would result in someone talking about it.
Ah, the Satanic Panic. Everything was 'Satanism!@!!!QQQ!!!!!!!'
Remember it well. Then again, I was studying Anthropology and Lloyd the Elder was LEO. Some of those discussions got interesting.
I'm not sure I believe in a grand government pedophilia ring conspiracy. What I do believe is that it is necessary to have people around that do keep under age girls and boys available for special clients that once they get talked into stepping over the line or tricked into stepping over the line can then be controlled forever more. This has been going on forever and is organized. I have seen enough stuff over a period of decades to truly believe that it happens all the time. Blackmail over illegal sexual conduct is the best control you can have. You tell one person that is already controlled to party with another person you want to control. A couple of parties with legal age girls then unknowingly becomes one with some under age ringers. They don't even have to do anything actually illegal just wake up from the mickey in their drink and shown posed pictures of them with the girls and they don't even realize they didn't do it. Now you have I will tell your wife blackmail and, oh your going to jail and I have the pictures to prove it blackmail. Then you vote the way your told, drop charges or squash investigations when told and those are added items to your number of illegal actions. before long they just do what they are told and maybe get a perk here and there as the carrot.