Playlists \ McMartin Preschool

At the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, CA, over 100 very young children begin showing signs of sexual abuse. When questioned, they all tell the same story: there are secret tunnels beneath the school through which they are taken to be abused by adults, and perform Satanic rituals.

Accounts of tunnels under the McMartin preschool given by children claiming to have been ritually abused at the school were fully corroborated when the existence and location of the tunnels were documented by a professional team of archaeologists (Summit, 1994).

—Denying Ritual Abuse of Children, Catherine Gould, The Journal of Psychohistory

In addition, some authors of false memory hooks also turned out to be pedophile advocates. For example, one of the most widely cited books claiming that cult abuse reports were mass hysteria is Paul and Shirley Eberle's The Abuse of Innocence: The McMartin Preschool trial. Taken quite seriously by reviewers and widely quoted In later magazine articles as authoritative, the book makes such claims as that the over 100 McMartin children who reported they had been abused by a cult were all "brainwashed" and the mothers were all "hysterical" and that it was meaningless that physicians found three-quarters of the children bore physical evidence that corroborated their stories. What reviewers didn't mention was that the Eberles had been called "the most prolific publishers of child pornography in the United States" by Sgt. Toby Tyler, a San Bernadino deputy sheriff who is a nationally recognized expert on child pornography. Their kiddie porn material that I have seen and the articles they have published such as "I Was a Sexpot at Five" and "Little Lolitas" included illustrations of children involved in sodomy and oral copulation and featured pornographic photos of the Eberles.

—deMause, Lloyd, "Why Cults Terrorize and Kill Children" The Journal of Psychohistory 21 (4) 1994