I recently had a Twitter exchange with someone who I respect greatly about the whole Dylan Farrow/Woody Allen issue. I found Woody Allen funny for many years - and still do watching his earlier movies, but that wasn't hardly the motivation for my comments entreating a larger perspective on the issue.
It was the McMartin preschool affair that did that.
In the 1980s and 1990s, crazy things happened in the American justice system, besides the Woody Allen sexual abuse charges: Eric and Lyle Menendez, the McMartin preschool trials, the Roxanne Pulitizer divorce trial, the William Kennedy Smith rape trial, etc., etc., leading up to the O.J. Simpson trials and finally, the Bill Clinton affair.
The thing that sticks in my mind is the McMartin preschool trial. People paid with years of their lives for what we learned from that, and we're fools if we don't put those lessons into practice.
The McMartin preschool trial was a day care sexual abuse case of the 1980s. Members of the McMartin family, who operated a preschool in California, were charged with numerous acts of sexual abuse of children in their care. Accusations were made in 1983. Arrests and the pretrial investigation ran from 1984 to 1987, and the trial ran from 1987 to 1990. After six years of criminal trials, no convictions were obtained, and all charges were dropped in 1990. When the trial ended in 1990 it had been the longest and most expensive criminal trial in American history.[1] The case was part of day care sex abuse hysteria, a moral panic over alleged Satanic ritual abuse in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Read the whole thing...people had their lives destroyed over false testimony. IT HAPPENS. I, for one do not want that to happen to anyone. More to come...
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