The witch-hunt narrative is a really popular story that goes like this: Lots of people were falsely convicted of child sexual abuse in the 1980s and early 1990s. And they were all victims of a...

interview from Ross E. Cheit about The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children (Oxford University Press, February 2014).In the foreword to your book you mention a book titled Satan’s Silence was...

In all the interviews I have done, I cannot remember one offender who did not admit privately to more victims than those for whom he had been caught. On the contrary, most offenders had been...

My life hasn’t been perfect, yet I’ve never wasted my time envying anyone else. If something wasn’t the best it could be – I made it better.

Not only do skeptics such as Lanning choose to ignore eyewitness/victim accounts of ritual criminal activity, they apparently also choose to overlook the significant number of cases of ritual abuse in which perpetrators have confessed...

far more cases (of ritual abuse) end in acquittal” than in conviction.In fact, 58% of the ritual abuse cases in the Finkeihor (1988) study that went to trial resulted in convictions. In the Kelly (1992b)...

Sweetheart, I’ll be a Marine ‘til they bury my cold, dead, decrepit ass in the ground a good fifty or sixty years from now.

In court the next morning I sat at a table in the judge’s chambers. On the other side of the table, close enough for me to reach across and touch him, sat Ted Bundy. He’s...

Well before she became famous — or infamous, depending on where you cast your vote — Loftus’s findings on memory distortion were clearly commodifiable. In the 1970s and 1980s she provided assistance to defense attorneys...

If this demonstration proves to hold up under replication it suggests both that therapists can induce false memories and, even more directly, that older family members play a powerful role in defining reality for dependent...

false convictions” by defense lawyers and political activists deserve far greater scrutiny from the media and the public.journal: Cheit, Ross E. “The Legend of Robert Halsey.” Journal of child sexual abuse 9.3-4 (2002): 37-52.