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From the time the Amiraults were
first accused, in 1984, one small knot of parents
remained steadfastly unconvinced that the proprietors of
the Fells Acres Day School had conducted a program of
mass terrorization and sexual abuse of three- to
five-year-olds.
Among that group of
unbelievers--later to be described, by the prosecutors'
experts, as "parents in denial"--was Deborah Hersey, who
had, she attests, good reason for her failure to
believe. Either she or her husband was forever popping
into the school unexpectedly, picking their son up at
odd times--and when they did, Violet Amirault would wave
them ahead, telling them to go and find the boy, Mrs.
Hersey remembers, usually with apologies for being too
busy to accompany them. "There were no locked doors, no
secret rooms, the atmosphere was wide open, nobody
escorted us." Then there were the interrogations by
police inspector John Rivers, who was, Mrs. Hersey soon
concluded, evidently determined to convince her that her
child had been molested. Throughout that interview, she
recalls, she wondered with alarm what the result would
have been had she been a touch more gullible--or less
afraid.
She soon had the answer. Parent after
parent filed charges. In 1984, and later, skepticism
about alleged abuse was a rare commodity, not least in
the local press. "Kid Sex Victims May Total 20," the
Boston Herald informed readers in blazing headlines.
News stories led with the prosecutors' allegations
introduced as fact: "The production of kiddie-porn
videotapes of small children engaged in sex acts with
adults was a full-scale, behind-the-scenes operation at
a Malden day-care center shut down by the state, sources
close to the case said yesterday." But the Herald was
scarcely alone in Massachusetts or anywhere else where
the sizzling abuse prosecutions had been mounted, in the
readiness to accept as revealed truth all that the State
alleged against the supposed violators of children. The
State could, after all, offer page after page of what
its prosecutors described as the children's allegations.
Released on bail, just after the
first accusation made against him on Labor Day, 1984,
Gerald Amirault looked up to find his face on the
television screen. The Fells Acres story had begun its
long nightly run on the local news. Now--and it was a
fact that still had the power to shock Gerald--when he
walked into a store women sometimes screamed. Of the
accused family, he was the one who had for the longest
time thought that the huge mistake would soon be
revealed--everything would be cleared up. Violet
Amirault was more worried. Still, none of the Amiraults
had the slightest idea, in the fall of 1984, that they
were now entered into a process leading inevitably to
the loss of all that they had--to long years in prison.
As in all of these prosecutions, the
weight of the heaviest charges--and prison terms--fell
upon the male. Gerald was given a 30-to-40-year
sentence. (Robert Kelly, convicted in the notorious
Little Rascals Day Care case in Edenton, N.C.--just
overturned--received 12 consecutive life terms.) That
tendency to single out the man as prime predator was
nowhere more clearly reflected than in an interview
prosecutor Lawrence Hardoon gave a Boston television
reporter. Asked how to guard against child abuse, Mr.
Hardoon advised watching out for a child suddenly
uncomfortable "being in the company of male relatives."
The inevitability of the fate that
overtook the Amiraults could be read from the atmosphere
of the times. (Their cases were begun just a year after
that of the fabulous McMartin prosecution in Manhattan
Beach, Calif., where investigators calculated at least
1,200 children had been molested in the South Bay area
alone--one third of the population.) Pre-schools by the
hundreds were closed down, in the ensuing fever of
suspicion.
In such times, there was no defense
argument equal to the tormenting vision conjured by the
State in the Amirault trials, of small children
threatened with murder if they told of their rapes with
knives and sticks. No proof of the Herculean--and
sometimes hilarious--efforts to manufacture abuse
testimony, no lack of physical evidence, could prevail
against such a vision.
In recent weeks--with the Amiraults
once more in the news in Boston--it became possible to
get a taste again of the assumptions and tone of these
prosecutions. The idea was, quite simply, that the
children must be believed, that they deserved to be
believed even when their testimony was incredible--and
that whoever refused to believe them had traduced the
trust of these small witnesses.
Confronted, now, with increasing
numbers of press inquiries about the substance of the
case against the Amiraults, former prosecutor Lawrence
Hardoon and Massachusetts Attorney General Scott
Harshbarger give answers faithfully reflecting the
attitudes that prevailed at the trial. The attorney
general has explained that those who raise questions
about the conviction of Violet Amirault, now 71, her
daughter Cheryl, 38, and son Gerald, 41--imprisoned now
for eight years--are determined to abandon child victims
and to drive sexual abuse "back into the darkness." To
questions about the way the accusations of abuse were
extracted, the attorney general and the prosecutor reply
that the juries and appellate judges had spoken: that,
moreover, to raise such questions now is to expose the
children and their families to pain and suffering.
That it should be argued,
confidently, that the plight of three
citizens--imprisoned now for eight years--should not be
investigated, lest the question raised disturb the peace
of the plaintiffs, is eloquent testimony indeed to the
assumptions that prevailed during the time of the
Amiraults' trial. Nor can it be argued that appellate
judges were necessarily immune to the spirit of the
times.
Least of all were the accusing
parents immune. They lived in the time of the
experts--experts who now taught people how to grieve,
where once no one thought to require instructions in
mourning--experts, who have, above all, brought home to
parents the notion that they knew nothing whatever about
their children.
For parents so educated, it was
possible to be convinced by social service workers, the
prosecutors' abuse investigators and other counselors
that their children had daily suffered unspeakable
atrocities--whose effects they themselves simply lacked
expertise to see. It became possible to believe that
their children had been tortured sexually, been forced
to watch animal mutilation and to ingest urine, and been
threatened with death for two years--and that the
children could continue, nonetheless, to go to the
school happily every morning and show no fear of their
alleged torturers. Just after the first allegations
against Fells Acres became public, the papers were
filled with quotes from parents telling of their
children's love of the school and worry that they
wouldn't be able to attend anymore.
In the case of at least one or two of
the plaintiff-parents, to be sure, their willingness to
believe the prosecutors had more complex roots. Prior to
Gerald Amirault's sentencing, prosecutor Hardoon
summoned parents to the stand. Among them was the
husband of the couple who had a lien put on Violet
Amirault's house and property just four weeks after the
first accusations, which they removed only after Mrs.
Amirault (faced with a need to pay lawyers) agreed to
give them an extra $50,000 in any insurance settlement.
This witness spoke at great and
fluent length on the evils of child abuse and his rage
at what had happened to his own child. He wanted the
maximum sentence to be imposed on Gerald to "ensure that
society's children were protected from this travesty."
Further, he noted, abuse of children was in his view
"not a treatable condition."
Doubtless, this witness spoke with a
certain authority. Some months after delivering these
words, the parent--employed as a counselor at an
institute for troubled children--molested a youth under
treatment at the center. Confronted with the charge, he
confessed, and, as the social service report relates,
resigned soon after.
By now, most of the great
headline-making prosecutions identical to Fells
Acres--McMartin, Wee Care in New Jersey, Edenton--have
been overturned and discredited. Confronted with
otherworldly charges of molestation, the McMartin juries
threw out most of them, deadlocked on a handful, and
ultimately failed to return a single conviction. In the
Wee Care case, appellate judges reversed the conviction
on the ground, among other reasons, that the State's
investigators had clearly led the children into their
accusations. In Edenton, the justices found "flagrant
violation of the rules of evidence."
The question often arises as to how
the prosecutors themselves could actually have believed
in the fanciful claims mounted in the Fells Acres case,
or the others. The prosecutors did not of course sit
around conspiring to imprison innocent people. They were
men and women of their times, consumers of the lore of
their times--lore about vast networks of child molesters
and pornographers lurking behind nursery school doors
and elsewhere, lore about magic rooms and the rest.
There were not many chief law
officers like Bucks County, Pa., District Attorney Alan
M. Rubenstein. Confronted, in 1989, with the abuse
charges extracted by the usual experts and the
by-now-standard charges of animal mutilation (a bunny),
forced ingestion of urine, and children spirited from
the schools to be assaulted, Mr. Rubenstein sought
evidence beyond that of allegations. Finding none
against the accused teacher of the Breezy Point School,
he refused to prosecute. Enraged, the accusing parents
proceeded to file civil suits eventually dropped.
Though the crimes and various exotic
lewd practices charged against the Amiraults so exactly
mimicked those of the McMartin case, Wee Care and the
rest, former prosecutor Hardoon has gone to some pains,
in the past few months, to assert that the Amirault case
had nothing in common with these. In the McMartin case
too, the State's charge--trumpeted nationwide--was that
the accused was involved in child pornography, of which
no shred could ever be found. In the Wee Care case,
prosecuted in the same period, the accused was alleged
to have raped children with forks, magic wands, pencils.
All this notwithstanding, Mr. Hardoon a few weeks ago
told a sympathetic local reporter that when he had heard
Fells Acres testimony about penetration with pens and
pencils and magic wands, he had been "completely
puzzled." But thereafter he had come upon pictures of
child pornography--and had, Mr.Hardoon declared, "what I
would almost describe as a revelation."
During the eight years the Amiraults
have been imprisoned, the state of Massachusetts has
gone on about its business. During the course of that
business, the state commuted the sentences of some eight
women convicted of killing the husbands or mates who had
battered them. Gov. William Weld's decision to commute
the sentences of the women known as the Framingham
Eight, who had clearly been brutalized, was widely
endorsed. Violet and her children were in a less
fortunate position, carrying as they did the weight of
an accusation more potent than killing--namely
allegations of child sex abuse.
The Framingham Eight women had done
what they had done--and there were the bodies to show
for it. The Amiraults, tried in a plague era of accusal,
had been convicted on no evidence of anything done--and
there were no confessions to show for it. These are the
facts with which, sooner or later, the governor of
Massachusetts will have to contend. |