Wall Street Journal Articles and Letters on Fells Acres

Letters Rebutting Prosecutors

• Jonathan Harris 03/15/95
• Stephen Smith 03/15/95
• Mark Pendergrast 03/15/95
• George Chapman Singer 06/20/95
• James D. Irvine 06/20/95
• Sherry Levine 06/20/95
• Phillip Wood 06/20/95
• Joel V. Sanders 06/20/95
• Tim Boman 06/20/95
• Lloyd W. Martinson 06/20/95

A Darkness in Massachusetts

WALL STREET JOURNAL (J) 01/30/95
Copyright (c) 1995 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

By Dorothy Rabinowitz

  On Labor Day 1984, 60-year-old Violet Amirault -- proprietor of the
thriving Fells Acres Day School in Malden, Mass. -- received a call
about a child abuse accusation against her son. Two days later the
police arrested 31-year-old Gerald (who worked at Fells Acres) on
charges of raping a five-year-old boy, a new pupil.
   In short order, the hideous crimes supposedly committed by Gerald
began to multiply -- as did the number of the accused. Soon, Violet
Amirault herself and her newly married 26-year-old daughter, Cheryl,
were also charged with having perpetrated monstrous sexual crimes
against children ages three to five. Police asked the Amiraults no
questions. Instead, they summoned parents of Fells Acres children to a
meeting at the station house -- where they were instructed to look for
symptoms of sex abuse.
   Within three years, Gerald Amirault was convicted of assault and
rape of nine children. In a second trial his mother and sister were
convicted of roughly the same crimes against four children. Gerald,
sentenced to 30 to 40 years, has now been in prison since 1986. His
mother, now 71, and sister Cheryl, now 37, were given eight to 20
years. Both have been imprisoned, at the Massachusetts Correctional
Institute at Framingham, for nearly eight years.
   At the time of their sentencing, prosecutor Lawrence Hardoon
complained that the punishment was too light for such crimes: and
indeed, the prosecution had brought forth some remarkable accusations
against the Amiraults.
   Children had supposedly been raped with knives -- which
miraculously failed to leave any signs of wounding or other injury --
and sticks, and been assaulted by a clown (allegedly Gerald) in a
"magic room." Some children told -- after interrogations by
investigators -- of being forced to drink urine, of watching the
Amiraults slaughter blue birds, of meeting robots with flashing
lights. Violet Amirault was accused of shoving a stick into the rectum
of a child while he was standing up, and of raping him with "a magic
wand." Mrs. Amirault was convicted of these charges. The child also
testified he was tied naked to a tree in the schoolyard, in front of
all the teachers and children, while "Miss Cheryl" cut the leg off a
squirrel.
   Who would have credited such witnesses, such testimony? The
Amirault family was charged in the midst of the great wave of high-
profile child abuse cases sweeping the country in the 1980s -- all of
them magnets for ambitious prosecutors. Among them was that of day-
care worker Kelly Michaels, reported on these pages. But the prime
child abuse extravaganza -- and the one the Amirault prosecutors
clearly took for their model -- was the now notorious McMartin
Preschool case in California, involving alleged abusers Ray Buckey and
his mother, sixtyish administrator Peggy McMartin Buckey.
   True, there was a certain inimitable grandeur to the McMartin epic,
involving as it did claims of abuse in underground tunnels, of
molestation in hot air balloons, and similar marvels. As recently as
three years ago die-hard believers among the plaintiff parents were
still to be found at the school site, faithfully conducting their
searches for the underground tunnels.
   That the wave of spectacular child-abuse trials emerged in the '80s
was no accident. The passage in 1979 of the Mondale Act ensured a huge
increase in funds for child protection agencies and abuse
investigators. With the outpouring of government money came a huge
increase in agencies and staffs, which in turn begat investigations
and accusations of child sex abuse on a grand scale. An industry had
been born.
   Nowhere was the fervor of the search for abuse more evident than in
the case constructed against the Amiraults. Her husband gone from the
household, an impoverished Violet Amirault had built her highly
successful day care center -- in operation for 20 years -- alone, and
from nothing. Over the years the school became her life, next to her
children. It was clear, when the sensational prosecutions began, that
of the thousands of children previously graduated from Fells Acres,
none had any stories of abuse to tell.
   So the world was left with the state's contention: that Mrs.
Amirault, at the age of 60, had suddenly taken to raping small
children and terrorizing them into silence. When her daughter, Cheryl,
was married in 1983, all the pupils and their parents were invited to
the church -- an event that occasioned a front page picture of the
"kindergarten teacher with a hundred children" in the Boston Herald.
Among those children happily giving their teacher kisses were those
who some months later would be served up to tell of terrors inflicted
by Miss Cheryl, her mother and brother.
   As soon as the accusations surfaced, the school's teachers were
grilled -- but none could be found who saw anything wrong going on at
the school. One or two of them disliked Violet, an exacting school
head, but still they could come up with nothing, frightened though
they were by unsubtle threats from the police, who repeatedly accused
them of lying.
   Still, the police investigators' effort to find abuse testimony
pales beside the surreal interrogations conducted by such as pediatric
nurse Susan Kelley, who developed most of the children's allegations
of abuse. Over and over, the interviews show, the children say nothing
happened, nobody took their clothes off, they know nothing about a
magic room or a bad clown. But the interviewer persists. In the world
of these examiners, children are to be believed only when they say
abuse took place. Otherwise, they are described as "not ready to
disclose."
   The Fells Acres children were bribed with gifts, assured that their
little friends had already told about the bad things and "helped so
much." At one point the interviewer tells a child that her friend Sara
had said "the clown had you girls take your clothes off in the magic
room."
   Child: "No, she's lying."
   Nurse: "She's lying? Why would she lie about something like that .
. . ?"
   Child: "We didn't do that."
   Next the interviewer tells the child, "I really believed her [Sara]
because she told me all about it, and she even told me what the clown
said."
   Child: "What was it?"
   No sane person reading the transcripts of these interrogations can
doubt the wholesale fabrications of evidence on which this case was
built. Nor could any reasonable person who looked at the trial
transcript doubt that three innocent citizens were sent to prison on
the basis of some of the most fantastic claims ever presented to an
American jury.
   Forced to come up with motives, the prosecutors hit on child
pornography. With no evidence whatsoever that the Amiraults had
engaged in such crimes, the Commonwealth brought forth a postal
inspector Dunn to regale the jury with detailed descriptions of child
pornography. When the Amirault women's appeal was refused, Justice
Paul Liacos said, in an eloquent dissent, "the court today condones
the admission in evidence of highly inflammatory and prejudicial
evidence." Clearly, the justice charged, the Commonwealth wanted the
jury to infer that because pornographers having no connection with the
defendants took pictures of children, so had the defendants.
   The accused in the McMartin case are now free. Kelly Michaels, too,
now has her freedom -- but for the Amiraults, a far grimmer story from
the outset, prospects remain bleak. The thought of the whole family in
prison, Cheryl says, "is too much for any one of us to endure. I can't
look into my mother's eyes."
   When the Amirault women were sentenced, Prosecutor Hardoon
announced that it was "impudent of them" to continue maintaining their
innocence. Nevertheless, after eight years in prison they continue to
do so -- as does Gerald, in Plymouth Correctional Facility. One parole
board member told Cheryl that until she confessed she'd be going
nowhere. None of the Amiraults are about to confess to what they have
not done.
   After the first time the women were refused parole, the judge who
presided over their trial decided they had served enough time and
issued an order to revise and revoke their sentence. Agitated
prosecutors succeeded in getting the courts to overturn the revise-and-
revoke order -- a ruling unprecedented in Massachusetts history. As in
some crude melodrama, the women, unaware and thankful to be going home
again, were stopped just before they got to the exit. Back they went
deeper into the system -- to be refused parole again and again.
   Scott Harshbarger, the district attorney whose office prosecuted
the Amiraults -- and who ran for re-election advertising that fact --
is now attorney general of Massachusetts. Some months after the
Amiraults were all convicted and in prison, Mr. Harshbarger presided
over a celebratory convocation on the Fells Acres case, billed as "a
model multidisciplinary response." Prosecutor Hardoon is now in
private practice -- in a firm specializing in civil awards for sex
abuse.
   In Massachusetts armies of journalists from the Boston Herald, the
Boston Globe, and local TV followed this prosecution and its
preposterous evidence. Today only silence reigns on the Amiraults and
the great abuse trials that occasioned so much fevered reporting. Not
long ago a Boston Globe editor dismissed a would-be contributor on the
subject, saying "I sent two reporters to cover the story at the time
and they said the Amiraults were weirdos."
   Can such a miscarriage of justice -- if one can use so bland a term
for so horrific a tragedy -- be sustained by the will of state
prosecutors? As was true of the witch trials of an earlier
Massachusetts, this prosecution will, in time, be the source of
amazement and horror. In the meantime Violet Amirault lies locked in
prison along with her son and her daughter, while the days and years
of life slip past.
   ---
   Ms. Rabinowitz is a Journal editorial page writer.

Letters to the Editor: The Real Darkness Is Child Abuse

WALL STREET JOURNAL (J) 02/24/95
 Larry Hardoon's Letter
Copyright (c) 1995 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

008  As the chief prosecutor of both of the Amirault cases I am writing
to prevent the public from being misled into believing that an
injustice occurred as Dorothy Rabinowitz alleges in her Jan. 30
editorial-page piece "A Darkness in Massachusetts."
   Her suggestion that the convictions were based on "some of the most
fantastic claims ever presented" presumptuously ignores the reality of
the cases. The three Amiraults -- Gerald, Violet and Cheryl -- were
convicted after two trials before different judges and juries almost
one year apart. They were represented by able and well-known defense
counsel. The convictions were upheld after review by state and federal
appellate courts. The McMartin case in California was the result of a
botched legal system and Kelly Michaels's conviction was overturned
because of legal errors. Contrary to Ms. Rabinowitz's implication, the
Amirault convictions were neither of these.
   The first trial involving Gerald Amirault lasted a record three and
a half months. Nine children and their parents testified and were
subject to extensive cross-examination. The second trial of Violet and
Cheryl Amirault involved five children. The entire proceedings were
public and extensively covered by the media.
   The children testified to being photographed and molested by acts
that included penetration by objects. To the average person unfamiliar
with the gruesomeness of child pornography, the allegations of
penetration by objects seem bizarre. The testimony of a postal
inspector experienced in child pornography was properly admitted to
educate the jury regarding the plausibility of the children's
testimony.
   The overturned order of the trial judge changing Violet and Cheryl
Amirault's sentences five years after they were imposed was nothing
more than a political squabble between the judge and the parole board
over who dictates the appropriate release time for convicts. Violet
Amirault was convicted of threats to commit a crime and Cheryl
Amirault was convicted of assault and battery for acts committed while
in prison. These subsequent convictions may have played a role in the
decision of the parole board to deny parole.
   Amirault was handled differently from cases in other parts of the
country. The initial investigation and interviewing of the children
was divided among different investigators, contrary to the assertion
in the story that the allegations were developed through one pediatric
nurse. Uniquely similar disclosures came from children with no
connection of any kind to each other who were handled by different
teams of investigators. Many children involved in the prosecution were
from families who were initially hostile or skeptical toward the
prosecution. Only after these children made unexpected disclosures
directly to parents did they join the prosecution effort. The
implication in the article that the children's allegations of abuse
were tainted by improper interviewing is groundless and not true.
   Studies show, as did testimony from a nationally recognized
pediatric gynecologist, that most sexually molested young children
have absolutely normal physical examinations. However, in Amirault,
the majority of the female children who testified had some relevant
physical findings, as did several female children involved in the
investigation who did not participate in the trial. The findings
included labial adhesions and hymenal scarring of the sort present in
a very small percentage of nonsexually abused children.
   The defendants had a full and fair opportunity to present any
evidence they wanted the jury to consider. Although it has no
significance in a court of law due to the presumption of innocence and
the right against self-incrimination, the choice by Violet and Cheryl
Amirault not to testify in their own behalf at trial can certainly be
the subject of conjecture by the public at large. They passed up the
single most important opportunity they had to tell their story. Isn't
this fact, unmentioned by Ms. Rabinowitz, something the public ought
to know?
   The investigation and handling of these cases was not flawless. In
1984, when the Amirault case began, law enforcement was just beginning
to cope with the explosion of sexual abuse into the criminal-justice
system. Improvements have been implemented since then, many of which
had their inception in that case. Today, there are still more
innovations that can be implemented by the judicial system to make the
process fairer to both the children and the defendants in these cases.
   Ms. Rabinowitz's article is a superficial, one-sided look at a case
handled extensively and carefully by the legal system. The victims and
their families in these cases have been irrevocably harmed by what was
done to them by the Amiraults. Every argument raised by Ms. Rabinowitz
was ably presented by the defense at the trials. The juries, by their
verdicts, rejected these arguments. Justice was done.
   Laurence E. Hardoon
   Boston
   ---

Scott Harshbarger's Letter

   Ms. Rabinowitz's article on the Amirault case is an ill-informed
rehashing of allegations that have all been made and dismissed by the
courts many times before. It is unclear what her immediate agenda is
other than early parole for three child-abusers. What is clear is that
her views, if broadly accepted, would end child sexual-abuse
prosecutions based on child witnesses and would mean that many child-
abusers would go free.
   I reject absolutely her view that we can't trust child witnesses
and prosecute successfully -- meaning fairly -- child-abuse cases. I
refuse to see child abusers escape justice. I will fight to ensure
that the backlash that Ms. Rabinowitz's article represents doesn't
drive child sexual abuse back into the dark corners of America's
conscience.
   From the beginning, our prosecution of the Amirault case was
handled carefully and meticulously to avoid the problems encountered
in the other cases mentioned in the article.
   Defense counsel raised every argument that Ms. Rabinowitz made,
including the possibility that the child victims had fabricated,
imagined or been coached into telling false stories. The arguments
were rejected by two separate juries, two separate trial judges and
three separate appellate judges.
   The system worked, justice was done, and the Amiraults are where
all serious child-abusers should be: serving long sentences in state
prison.
   Ms. Rabinowitz believes that "the most fantastic claims ever
presented" were pushed by ambitious prosecutors, swallowed whole by
gullible juries, sustained by two judges and upheld by three appellate
courts. What she is saying is that the American judicial system cannot
handle cases that rest on the testimony of children. Following such a
line of logic, we should no longer prosecute child-abuse cases unless
there is an independent adult witness who will testify against the
abuser -- an unlikely event, given that child sexual abuse is a crime
committed in secret against a child usually in the custody or control
of the abuser. To fail to prosecute such cases where there is credible
evidence is ludicrous and would only reward cunning child-abusers.
   No one wants to believe that humans are capable of horrors such as
child abuse. Sadly, we know that some are.
   The way to react to the horror of child sexual abuse is not to
disbelieve the victims and to let the abusers go free. The way to
react to the disturbing reality of child abuse is to develop new and
better ways to investigate, prosecute, deter and, ultimately, prevent
child abuse.
   The reality is that children, just like the adults they watch and
learn from, generally, but not always, tell the truth. That is why we
developed new protocols that would protect the integrity of the
prosecutorial process and would separate and prosecute only the cases
in which sufficient credible proof existed to demonstrate that abuse
actually had occurred.
   The professionals involved in child sexual-abuse prosecutions --
the police, district attorneys, victim advocates and physicians --
should be outraged at Ms. Rabinowitz's accusations. Her allegation
that Child Abuse Units are an "industry" that sprang up to fill
federal-grant requirements is absurd. In Massachusetts, the explosion
in the number of child-abuse referrals came first, as a result of the
Child Abuse Reporting Law. In the year after the law was passed, the
number of cases referred to my office jumped to 732 from 44. Child
Abuse Units were a response to the huge increase in the number of
reported cases.
   Where would Ms. Rabinowitz draw the line? If the system can't
handle the testimony of children, would she trust the testimony of a
mildly retarded victim? What about a very elderly or a disabled or
other vulnerable victim?
   While, as a prosecutor, I would always like to have additional
evidence, especially in these difficult cases, the reality is, due to
the type of crime we are dealing with, many times such additional
evidence just doesn't exist. We don't just throw up our hands and let
the abuser walk away in such cases, but that is what Ms. Rabinowitz
would have us do.
   Not so long ago in Massachusetts, a woman who had been raped had to
have another witness or other objective proof in order to bring a
case. Would Ms. Rabinowitz have us return to the objective-proof
standard for those cases also?
   We have come so far in the past 20 years dealing with rape,
domestic violence and child abuse. Let's not let a thoughtless and
uninformed backlash drive us back into the darkness.
   Scott Harshbarger
   Attorney General
   State of Massachusetts
   Boston
**********************************************************************

A Darkness in Massachusetts II

WALL STREET JOURNAL (J) 03/14/95
Copyright (c) 1995 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

By Dorothy Rabinowitz

  A few months after Violet and Cheryl Amirault were imprisoned for
committing, the State alleged, barbarous sexual assaults on small
children, the prosecutors sponsored a seminar titled "The Fells Acres
Day School Case -- A Model Multidisciplinary Response. . . ."
   At this meeting, led by then-District Attorney Scott Harshbarger
(now attorney general of Massachusetts), social service workers,
therapists and other State witnesses paid tribute to all who had
brought the case to its fruition. Sixty-three-year-old Violet
Amirault, proprietor of Fells Acres in Malden, Mass., and daughter
Cheryl had been sentenced in 1987 to eight to 20 years. Tried
separately, Gerald, Violet's son, received 30 to 40 years.
   Among the speakers at the convocation was co-prosecutor Patricia
Bernstein, who told how, thanks to a sensitive and creative judge, the
child plaintiffs had been allowed to sit facing the jury, rather than
the accused. Other speakers pondered problems encountered in this
model case. Some Fells Acres parents, for instance -- described as
being "in denial" -- had refused to believe the charges. Another
expert spoke on physical evidence of abuse at Fells Acres -- a
delicate issue, given the fact that the prosecutors had been unable to
produce any piece of such evidence. A prosecution witness, this
speaker (a pediatric gynecologist) had provided one of the more
memorable pieces of medical testimony heard at Gerald Amirault's
trial.
   Testifying with regard to a child who claimed that Gerald had
penetrated her anally with a knife, Dr. Jean Emans offered a
supporting statement -- namely that an object could "touch the hymen
on the way to trying to find the anus" without penetrating the vagina.
The object in this instance was a butcher knife.
   Informative as the district attorney's seminar was, certain
questions remained unanswered. The State, for example, had charged
only the Amiraults -- though child after child had named other
teachers. Promised rewards, children repeatedly offered details about
how Miss Anne Marie or Miss Joanne or Miss Carol had (along with the
Amiraults) assaulted them. The State had chosen, as the theme of its
sensational case, a story of a dark family conspiracy. It was a story,
clearly, in which other teachers -- family outsiders -- had no place.
   The case against the Amiraults began in 1984, when the parent of a
five-year-old filed a complaint of abuse against 31-year-old Gerald,
father of two and expecting a third. Employed at the school, Mr.
Amirault had changed the child's wet underpants, later delivered to
the pupil's house. The complaining parent, who said she had been
concerned with abuse because her brother had been molested as a boy,
would subsequently offer several different versions of events. In the
meantime, the first charge brought a pile-on of others.
   Following Gerald Amirault's arrest without questioning, the Malden
Police called a meeting. Here, some 80 parents of Fells Acres students
were instructed to go home and question their children about a magic
room, a secret room and a clown. Not for nothing did the word quickly
spread among the children that Gerald Amirault had done something bad
and that it involved a magic room and a clown.
   Then and later, prosecutors would ask, rhetorically, how so many
children could all talk about a magic room and the bad clown
(allegedly Gerald) if the charges were not true. The answer, of
course, was to be found in the continuous introduction of these
subjects by parents and investigators. The well traveled bad clown of
this case had already shown up in headline-making child abuse trials
across the country, as had the alleged mutilated animals that surfaced
here.
   At the district attorney's seminar on Fells Acres, Malden Police
Inspector John Rivers revealed perhaps more than he intended when he
told the assemblage that interviewing the children was "like getting
blood from a stone." But the children were not stones and so would, in
the end, yield to persuasion and "tell things." One child said more
than a dozen times in her interview that Gerald Amirault had not
touched her sexually.
   Interviewer: "Did anybody touch Penny [the child's friend] on her
bum?"
   Child: "Nobody. Nobody didn't do it."
   Four more times the interviewer asks if anybody touched the
children -- to which she gets the same answer of "no," "no." Asked
still again, the exhausted child finally erupts.
   "Nobody didn't do it!"
   In time, with subsequent interviews, the child would finally say
what the interrogator wanted her to say. So was born another set of
charges.
   It was clear, after the first charge, that nothing in the
Amiraults' heretofore abundant and busy existence would ever be the
same. Someone twice fired bullets into Gerald's house, one barely
missing his wife, Patricia, another lodging in the wall a few feet
from their infant son's crib. Violet Amirault's school was closed down
permanently before any of the Amiraults were tried, on the grounds --
according to the official ruling -- that children had been sexually
molested in a magic room.
   One month after the first accusation, a Fells Acres parent put a
lien on all of Violet's property and that of Gerald. To get it lifted,
Violet had to agree to give the parent $50,000 in addition to a nearly
$2 million insurance settlement. The plaintiff families would receive
a collective total of more than $20 million. In addition to money for
their children, parents themselves received settlements to compensate
for what the legal papers typically described as their child's being
"unable to perform his usual duties."
   Still, money had little to do with the passions driving the
plaintiffs. What drove them -- as was true in all other such cases --
was the faith of true believers, instilled by investigators and abuse
"experts." According to this faith, the power of the abusers was
limitless, their cunning unimaginable. So did it become possible to
argue that 19 children could be raped by adults, assaulted with
knives, without injury, without anyone telling or noticing.
   It was in this era of belief that it was possible to develop new
and unique standards of justice such as the one expressed in the
Boston Globe by Fells Acres lead prosecutor Lawrence Hardoon. Should
not society, Mr. Hardoon asked in 1992, be "willing to trade off a
couple of situations that are really unfair, in exchange for being
sure that hundreds of children are protected?"
   Early in the development of the first case (against Gerald), the
prosecution let it be known that it was seeking evidence of child
pornography. Local newspapers all trumpeted the news of 29 photos and
a camera "Seized" -- as the headlines said -- at the day school. The
pictures turned out to be routine -- of birthday parties and such. The
prosecution conducted a fruitless nationwide search for the Amiraults'
alleged pornography. "Just because no evidence of photographs was
found," Mr. Hardoon recently told this page, "doesn't mean that there
were none."
   Gerald's trial by jury was held before Judge Elizabeth Dolan. In
1993, Judge Dolan would preside over another notable Massachusetts
case -- that of 61-year-old Ray and Shirley Souza, whose 24-year-old
daughter had a dream that her parents had raped her as a child. The
mass abuse trials involving nursery schools were now past. The era of
repressed memory syndrome had arrived. The Souzas' pre-school-age
grandchildren testified -- after countless interrogations by
therapists -- that their grandparents had tied them in a cage in the
basement, raped them with feet and elbows and a big machine. Judge
Dolan ruled that the children's testimony was credible and sentenced
the Souzas (who had waived a jury trial) to serve nine to 15 years.
   A few weeks ago, a well-known Boston journalist who had covered
Gerald Amirault's trial called to say that he had been kept awake at
night, eight years ago, by the knowledge that Gerald Amirault was
innocent. He had been a reporter a long time. He knew, said the
caller, the difference between evidence and nonsense, and he knew,
too, that guilty men did not talk as Gerald did.
   Otherwise, eight years ago and today, local journalists held
devoutly to the belief that some terrible crimes must have been
committed at Fells Acres -- if not all that the prosecutors said. It
was difficult, indeed, to grasp that such a case had been built on air
-- and that nothing had happened to the children but the arrival of
the investigators.
   In turn, the psychologists in prison and the parole board had
difficulty grappling with the fact that all the Amiraults continue
affirming their innocence. "Parole denied. Vigorously denies the 
offenses," said the reports of the board members in 1992, when they
concluded that Violet Amirault remained a "risk to the community if
released." "Heinous crimes for which she takes no responsibility,"
said the reports denying Cheryl's parole. (Gerald has not yet come up
for parole.)
   By their failure to confess, former prosecutor Hardoon has charged,
the Amiraults have "compounded the injury" done to the children and
their families.
   Why criminals so depraved and callous as these are supposed to be
would all these years decline to shorten their terms by offering a
confession is not a matter on which the prosecutors offer any
speculations. The Amiraults in turn spend little time thinking about
what they could have by confessing themselves guilty of crimes never
dreamed of. Existence is too much of a daily struggle: but at night
there is time for Violet and Cheryl -- and Gerald, whom they have not
seen these eight years -- to lie in their cells remembering the life
that once was and is no more.
   ---
   Ms. Rabinowitz is an editorial page writer. "A Darkness in
Massachusetts," her earlier report on this case, appeared in the Jan.
30 issue of the Journal.

Letters to the Editor: Child Abuse -- By Interrogation

Jonathan Harris Letter

008  In response to the Feb. 24 Letters to the Editor from Larry Hardoon,
chief prosecutor in the child-abuse trials of the Amiraults (Gerald,
Violet and Cheryl) and Scott Harshbarger, Massachusetts attorney
general:
   Messrs. Hardoon and Harshbarger continue to espouse their mythology
of the Fells Acres investigation. Thousands of pages of trial
transcripts and investigator reports refute their claims of
spontaneous and consistent allegations as well as the fictitious
physical evidence.
   These prosecutors ask us to believe that for two years Violet,
Cheryl and Gerald sadistically abused and terrorized at least 20
children, yet no teacher ever saw a child shy away from them in fear.
   "Trying to convince me my son was molested," is how one mother
describes her encounter with one of Mr. Harshbarger's investigators.
They did this by warning parents not to trust a child's denial of
abuse and pushing a list of sexual abuse symptoms of anxiety such as
changes in appetite, bed wetting and clinginess.
   Messrs. Harshbarger and Hardoon cannot identify a single child
witness who made an accusation without repeated questioning by parents
and investigators, because there are none. The Department of Social
Services reports and the few taped interviews are filled with repeated
denials by the children. Their independent teams extracted accusations
using anatomical dolls and drawings coupled with explicit and
suggestive questions about various sexual acts. One social worker's
mention of "painful prodding"; another's description of an interview
that produced only denials as "unsuccessful"; and a child's complaint,
"All of these questions about school make me sick," illustrate the
prosecution's tactics. The outrageous taped interviews of Mr.
Harshbarger's chief interviewer, Susan Kelley, have already been
documented in this paper.
   The danger of these tactics is no longer matter for speculation. By
using anatomical dolls and only one direct question, Professors
Stephen Ceci and Maggie Bruck and other researchers can cause
preschool children to make false accusations of sexual abuse at an
alarming rate. Their interviewing techniques pale in comparison with
those employed by Ms. Kelley and the other members of Mr.
Harshbarger's teams.
   The claim that the children's stories are consistent is absurd.
They describe a wide variety of forms of physical and sexual abuse --
urine drinking, bondage, animal slaughter, penetration by a range of
objects, a variety of other sexual activities, punching, throwing and
slashing. They accuse the three Amiraults, many of the teachers, other
children, imaginary people, and the famous Star Wars robot R2D2 of
such heinous acts. Many claim their teachers either witnessed the
abuse or took them to the magic room.
   The appearance of common themes, such as the magic room, the secret
room and the clown, obviously originates from the questioning of the
children. Police told parents to ask their children about a magic
room, a secret room and a clown. After I asked only once, my three-
year-old son told me his preschool has a magic room. My questions
about a clown led to later disclosures of imaginary visits and trips
to a local department store with his clown.
   The testimony of pediatric gynecologist Dr. Sara Jean Emans, cited
by Mr. Hardoon, proves only that hysteria has impaired her judgment
and ability to provide reliable medical opinions on child sexual
abuse. Her book's chapter on vulvovaginitis begins by describing it as
a "common" irritation in children caused by poor hygiene. Yet Dr.
Emans testified that it is a significant finding in an exam for sexual
abuse and claimed it is unusual to find three children from the same
school with it. One of these girls had left Fells Acres 18 months
before Dr. Emans diagnosed her with vulvitis, and pediatricians found
no vulvitis in the other two immediately after the school closed,
weeks before Dr. Emans identified this irritation on them.
   This blatant bias should discredit any of Dr. Emans's claims,
including the interpretation of her finding as a small hymnal scar in
one child witness. After a considerable amount of therapy, this girl
claimed that Gerald's big knife got stuck in her so badly she could
not pull it out. Yet immediately after the school closed, her
pediatrician, a former director of a child-abuse unit, could find no
signs of genital penetration. The trial judge found Dr. Emans's
explanation so speculative that she ordered the jury to ignore it.
Since Amirault, more physicians have been able to review such findings
and expose many scars as gross misinterpretations.
   While remaining silent on the science that discredits his tactics,
Mr. Hardoon has the audacity to attack Cheryl and Vi for not
testifying. He neglected to mention that Gerald testified. Of course,
Mr. Hardoon would rather leave the matter open to speculation than
acknowledge that Cheryl and Vi were heavily sedated to deal with the
horror of their family's persecution.
   Much of the responses of Messrs. Hardoon and Harshbarger are best
summarized as "we got away with it." Unfortunately they did, and the
result is that three children grow up seeing their father, their aunt
and their grandmother only behind the prison walls.
   Jonathan G. Harris
   Newton, Mass.
   ---
Stephen Smith Letter
   In her Jan. 30 editorial-page article, "A Darkness in
Massachusetts," Dorothy Rabinowitz's core accusations are that 1) the
interviewers persistently cajoled and pressured children of the Fells
Acres Day School until they extracted from these children false
statements regarding the Amiraults' behavior, and 2) the teachers at
Fells Acres who denied seeing anything wrong at the school were
frightened by threats from the police, who repeatedly accused these
teachers of lying.
   Nowhere in their lengthy rebuttals do Messrs. Hardoon and
Harshbarger specifically deny these accusations. Instead, they suggest
that the charges are false. Mr. Harshbarger states, for example, that
"defense counsel raised every argument that Ms. Rabinowitz made,
including the possibility that the child victims had fabricated,
imagined, or been coached into telling false stories," and goes on to
say these arguments were rejected by two separate juries, two separate
trial judges and three separate appellate judges. These and similar
passages in the rebuttal letters draw attention away from the
interview transcripts and evade the key question: Did the interviewers
induce the children to give false testimony? Decisions by juries and
judges can be no better than the quality of the evidence.
   The weakness of Mr. Harshbarger's defense is also exposed when he
resorts to the old trick of putting words into his accuser's mouth. He
states of Ms. Rabinowitz, "What she is saying is that the American
judicial system cannot handle cases that rest on the testimony of
children." Ridiculous. Her attack is not against testimony from
children. It is against the extraction and attempted extraction of
false testimony, from children and adults, respectively.
   Mr. Hardoon is wrong in claiming an "assertion in the story that
the allegations were developed through one pediatric nurse." What Ms.
Rabinowitz wrote was, "Still, the police investigators' effort to find
abuse testimony pales beside the surreal interrogations conducted by
such as pediatric nurse Susan Kelley, who developed most of the
allegations of abuse" (my italics). Clearly Ms. Rabinowitz referred to
more than one interrogator.
   Messrs. Hardoon and Harshbarger could have given us far less
verbiage and instead a direct response to Ms. Rabinowitz's central
charge. Unless Mr. Harshbarger makes a valid defense, I will fear that
I made a mistake in voting for him.
   Steven D. Smith
   Pittsfield, Mass.
   ---
Mark Pendergrast Letter
   The Fells Acres Day Care case commenced exactly one year after the
McMartin Day Care case in California as a "copy-cat" affair. Violet
Amirault and her two children, Gerald and Cheryl, were found guilty
after the same kind of coercive interviewing techniques as in
McMartin, despite much contradictory and unbelievable testimony and a
complete lack of corroboration evidence. The Amiraults have languished
in jail for more than seven years.
   It is outrageous that Messrs. Harshbarger and Hardoon defend their
witch hunt and repeat the allegations of supposed child pornography --
though no such pictures were ever produced. Mr. Harshbarger wrote that
critical assessments of these cases "would end child sexual-abuse
prosecutions based on child witnesses," and that this is part of some
nefarious "backlash" to "drive child sexual abuse back into the dark
corners of America's conscience." Readers should beware of such
emotional rhetoric. All Ms. Rabinowitz and other responsible critics
are suggesting is that initial interviews of children should always be
videotaped, that corroborating evidence should be important, that
hearsay evidence rules be applied as in other cases, and that children
should not be subjected to repeated, leading questioning and
interviews.
   No one wants to deny or ignore real sexual abuse. In the cases in
question, however, it is quite clear that the children were indeed
abused -- by the interrogators and by the medical examiners, not by
the innocent day-care providers.
   Mark Pendergrast
   Stowe, Vt.

REVIEW & OUTLOOK (Editorial): The Amirault Case

WALL STREET JOURNAL (J) 03/27/95
Copyright (c) 1995 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

008  The story of the Amirault family's prosecution and conviction on
grotesquely fabricated charges of child sex abuse has finally been
revealed. The question now is what Massachusetts Governor William Weld
is going to do about this extraordinary tragedy visited on three
citizens whose misfortune it was to run a nursery school at a time
when it was dangerous to do so.
   Dangerous because when the early `80s era of mass abuse trials and
similar products of out-of-control zealotry came along, child care
workers became prime targets. Any anonymous phone complaint would
suffice to get the bureaucratic machinery, and armies of
investigators, off and rolling.
   In the "investigations" that followed -- and that of the Amiraults'
was a classic example -- the investigators' main concern was figuring
out ways to get the children to say they had been abused. Violet,
Cheryl and Gerald Amirault recall their long and vain effort to get
anyone from the police or the district attorney's office to speak with
them or ask them questions. The Amiraults didn't understand,
apparently, that the authorities were too busy building the case to
entertain any questions.
   Violet Amirault did not know, of course, what the future held when
she set about with no money and two small children to build what would
become, over the next twenty years, the most successful and well
regarded day school in the area. Today, charged with unspeakable acts
of violent sex abuse against preschoolers, Mrs. Amirault and her adult
daughter Cheryl are serving sentences of 8 to 20 years. Mrs.
Amirault's son Gerald received 30 to 40 years.
   When the facts of their situation were disclosed on this page ("A
Darkness in Massachusetts," Jan. 30) the response from Journal readers
was immediate, and overwhelming. Those who wrote or called wanted to
know just two things -- what to do to help the Amiraults and where to
turn to vent their outrage at this prosecution run amok. Among those
calling with offers of pro bono legal aid was New York defense
attorney Daniel Williams. Mr. Williams will shortly be filing a motion
for a new trial for the Amiraults.
   Governor Weld, in the meantime, ought to consider his own role in
the Amirault case. It is for this precise reason that governors are
invested with the power of pardon or commutation. The Massachusetts
governor indeed has very broad powers in this respect. Governor Weld
should now acknowledge the obvious and issue a commutation of the
Amiraults' sentence. This would allow them their freedom while the
legal efforts to clear them make their way through the courts.
   Eight years have already been taken from Violet Amirault, now 71.
Her 41 year old son Gerald, who has much time to serve before he can
be considered for parole, has lost an irretrievable eight years with
his three children, and his wife. Married in her late `20s, and
looking forward to a family of her own before being charged, his
sister Cheryl knows it is highly unlikely she can ever now have a
child.
   All this -- done in the name of justice -- cannot be undone. What
the governor can do is institute steps that would enable the Amiraults
to salvage the lives left to them. The state's own therapists,
(assigned to treat Cheryl and Violet) have now, remarkably enough,
come forward publicly to attest their belief that the women are
innocent. Since the fantastic charges against their patients (cited by
the therapists) are exactly the same as those of which Gerald is
accused, they would no doubt have come to the same conclusion about
him.
   Attorney General L. Scott Harshbarger (whose office prosecuted the
case when he was district attorney) has evidently chosen to keep
maintaining that the Amiraults are guilty because they were found
guilty -- and to avoid talking about the damning evidence showing how
the children's accusatory testimony was extracted. Mr. Harshbarger,
who harbors hopes of being governor will undoubtedly discover that it
is a mistake to dig in early in matters of this kind. There is an
inevitability about the course of tragedies like this one. Once they
come to light, they don't simply pass. Their shadow, indeed, grows
larger with time. The Amirault case has already been taken up in the
Boston Globe, which last week published a long and complete
dismemberment of the prosecution case against the Amiraults.
   In his own testimony asking for the reinstatement of the
Massachusetts death penalty, Governor Weld not long ago offered
assurances that such a penalty would be set aside if it had been
"imposed under the influence of passion and prejudice." The governor
has shown he understands the role passion and prejudice play in a
prosecution. It is now time for him to show he understands that being
a hardliner on crime doesn't mean he can't take steps that would end a
blatant injustice and return all the Amiraults to what is left of
their lives.
   ---
                     Amirault  Fund

   
   By way of response to the many Journal readers who inquired, we can
report that a legal defense fund has been established to aid the
Amiraults.  The trustee, George Stavis, says that all contributions to
the fund are tax deductible, and that checks should be made out to:

   
   The Funding Exchange --
   Due Process Fund.

   
   Address: The Funding Exchange
           Attn: Michael Rogers
           666 Broadway
           New York, N.Y., 10012

Letters to the Editor:

WALL STREET JOURNAL (J) 04/05/95
Copyright (c) 1995 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

008  Your editorials and features on the Amirault case have been a sorely
needed eye-opener to readers and, it is hoped, to political leaders,
on "grotesquely fabricated charges of child sex abuse" ("A Darkness in
Massachusetts," Jan. 30, and "A Darkness in Massachusetts II," March
14, by Dorothy Rabinowitz, and "The Amirault Case," Review & Outlook,
March 27).
   Having heard the stories of more than a thousand fathers over the
past few years in peer support activities as president at the chapter
level and as a member of the State Executive Board of the Fathers'
Rights Association of New York State, I am well aware of the zealotry
of social service agencies, advocates, probation department social
workers and others to conclude and act instantaneously on allegations
against men of child abuse or domestic violence where marriages or
relationships are in extremis and children are at issue.
   Fathers have no meaningful input before they are evicted from their
homes and wrenched from their children by means of "temporary" orders
of protection and exclusion granted in ex parte hearings, which having
been granted, are too risky for judges to overturn. In every other
area of law there is the utmost restraint in the issuance of ex parte
orders; in family courts they are the rule and not the exception. What
happened to the Amiraults occurs every day, all day long in family
courts throughout the country. Fathers emerge from courtrooms in a
state of shock from the alacrity with which they are stripped of their
rights and cleaved from their flesh and blood.
   As in the Amirault case, the "findings" and "evidence" are made to
fit the allegations, and the nature of the alleged nefarious act is so
abhorrent that it in itself proves itself. As well, those who stand
accused bear the impossible burden of proving that they did not commit
alleged acts in a private setting, and since they can't, they are
guilty.
   How, beyond the zealotry, do we come to such a state? The answer
is, whether in the Amirault case or in the case of so many fathers,
that the "system" has everything to lose by not finding abuse and
everything to gain by finding it, i.e., it is safer (politically,
economically and socially, both personally and organizationally) to
find abuse and actually be wrong than not find abuse and be wrong.
There are no losers, unless one counts due process, justice, the
truth, fathers and their children . . . and the Amiraults.
   As we examine the social diseases of our country, and recognize the
dreadful damage to children by father absence, I hope that recognition
will come that much of the problem stems from a system that is too
ready to brand and exclude fathers from being parents to their
children, as it has branded as monsters and so utterly harmed the
Amiraults, with no repercussion for putting zealotry over the truth
and the lives of those accused.
   My check and my empathy are in the mail.
   David L. Landesman
   Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

A Darkness in Massachusetts-III

WALL STREET JOURNAL (J) 05/12/95
Copyright (c) 1995 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

By Dorothy Rabinowitz

  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. In1984, 
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.
   ---
   Ms. Rabinowitz, a Journal editorial page writer, is the author of
two previous articles on the Amirault case.

**********************************************************************

Letters to the Editor: The Amiraults Are Not the Victims

Attorney General Harshbarger's Second Letter

008  It's not surprising that some Wall Street Journal readers have
responded sympathetically to your editorials and editorial-page
articles regarding convicted child-abusers Violet, Cheryl and Gerald
Amirault. After all, if a jury heard only one side of a case -- in
this case, the defense arguments -- one would expect a sympathetic
acquittal.
   Fortunately, two juries of responsible Massachusetts citizens heard
both sides of the Amirault case, as did several judges. All of them
rejected the same exact defense arguments now being revived by your
editorial page. This is only one of a series of facts that has escaped
the one-sided, misleading and selective portrayal of the Amirault case
in two previous editorial-page pieces by Dorothy Rabinowitz and in a
March 27 editorial.
   The only "miscarriage of justice" occurring here is Ms.
Rabinowitz's misguided effort to orchestrate a media campaign that
portrays the Amiraults as "victims" of a "runaway justice system" at
the expense of not only the truth but also at the expense of the
children they abused. It is important that Journal readers know what
has not been listed among her recitation of the so-called "facts" of
this case.
   1. Journal readers are never allowed to hear from the jurors who
weighed all the evidence in the case, including the same defense
arguments Ms. Rabinowitz parrots today, before finding the Amiraults
guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. It is interesting to note that
other, more fair-minded publications such as the Boston Globe and
Boston Herald, have published interviews with jurors who are staunchly
defending the guilty verdicts nearly a decade later.
   2. Journal readers are never presented with the views of the
children and their parents -- the real victims -- who are now being
forced to relive the trauma and pain of a tragedy that was closed
almost a decade ago.
   3. Journal readers are never presented with courtroom transcript
excerpts of the pointed cross-examinations of the child-abuse victims
by the Amiraults' attorneys, three of the most skilled and respected
defense counsel in Massachusetts, who could not persuade jury members
or judges of the Amiraults' supposed innocence.
   4. Journal readers are never enlightened by quotations from the
appellate opinions rejecting the Amiraults' arguments that they were
unjustly convicted. Ms. Rabinowitz quotes only from a dissenting
opinion.
   It is the ultimate irony that the editorial page used this one-
sided presentation on which to base its sanctimonious appeal to
Massachusetts Gov. William Weld to commute the Amiraults' prison
sentences. The essence of your revisionist argument is that if an
allegation of child abuse seems too horrific or far-fetched, then it
can't possibly be true. If that is the guideline prosecutors are
supposed to use in evaluating criminal cases, John Wayne Gacy and Joel
Steinberg would still be on the streets today.
   As for the heavy-handed warning to me that "it is a mistake to dig
in early in matters of this kind," Ms. Rabinowitz and her allies
apparently have underestimated my deep and abiding faith in due
process, the criminal justice system and the rights of crime victims.
   I am proud to "dig in early" on behalf of the children and parents
whose voices the Journal has attempted to smother.
   Scott Harshbarger
   Massachusetts Attorney General
   Boston

George Chapman Singer's Letter

Copyright (c) 1995 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

  In his May 12 Letter to the Editor, Massachusetts Attorney General
Scott Harshbarger makes a compelling defense of the Amirault's
conviction on child-abuse charges. He cites two juries of responsible
citizens, several judges and exhaustive cross examination in open
court as proof that the accused got due process and that justice was
served.
   Had Mr. Harshbarger been around some 300 years ago in a neighboring
community, his argument would have buttressed the conviction of those
unfortunate women who paid the ultimate penalty for provoking public
opinion. Indeed, his distinguished predecessors in Salem, citing the
17th century equivalent of due process, probably went to their graves
serene in their own rectitude.
   Mr. Harshbarger is right. The Amiraults got due process. What they
didn't get was protection from mob hysteria. They were entitled to
that.
   The essence of the revisionist argument dismissed by Mr.
Harshbarger is not, as he states, that "if an allegation of child
abuse seems too horrific or far-fetched, then it can't possibly be
true." We all understand that there are no depths that human depravity
cannot plumb. Rather, it is the piling of Pelion on Ossa into a
mountain of contradictory, illogical and ultimately unbelievable
evidence that is at issue.
   Reasonable men, reviewing evidence in an uncharged atmosphere, may
conclude that like Oliver Stone's conspiracy theory of the Kennedy
assassination, some arguments are so at odds with common sense that
they must be labeled preposterous. That is the only reasonable
conclusion that can be drawn from the record here. The day-care abuse
scandals of the 1980s will be likened by a future generation of
historians to the witch trials of 1691-92.
   What happened at the Fells Acres Day School in 1987 may never be
known. Common sense finds the prosecution version unacceptable. The
Amiraults received due process. They didn't get justice.
   George Chapman Singer
   Burlington, Vt.
   ---

James D. Irvine's Letter

   Mr. Harshbarger's complaint is that of all politically ambitious
fear-mongers: "The jury convicted and that ought to be the end of it."
   Our English Common Law ancestors determined early on, in the days
of Sir Walter Raleigh, the Second Earl of Essex and the Spanish
Inquisition, that when momentous legal decisions were made by
brilliant Law Lords like Francis Bacon, confessions obtained with the
help of the rack, the thumb screw or any other form of torture are
inadmissible because they are simply unreliable. Anyone can be made to
say anything if sufficiently coerced, don't you know.
   It follows, certainly, that testimony procured from children of
tender years who are denied the freedom to go home (kidnapped,
really), badgered relentlessly over a long period of time to tell the
story their captors demand, and then "prepared" to testify, would not
have been admitted in evidence in Elizabethan England, or by that
famous Massachusetts jurist, Oliver Wendell Holmes. But such testimony
is admitted in Massachusetts today. Pity, that. The Commonwealth does
regress.
   A trial judge with any conscience would on his own motion issue a
writ of error Coram Nobis, and order new trials, sans the tainted
testimony.
   James D. Irvine
   Rockford, Mich.
   ---

Sherry Levine's Letter

   Mr. Harshbarger's claim that Dorothy Rabinowitz is really saying
that allegations of child abuse that seem too horrific or far-fetched
can't possibly be true is self-serving. The argument is and should be
that accusations of criminal wrongdoing are never to be assumed true
unless substantiated. In the cases of John Wayne Gacy and Joel
Steinberg there was physical evidence.
   Apparently, Mr. Harshbarger has forgotten the most important tenets
of our justice system. His letter alone is an indictment of the
Massachusetts attorney general's office.
   Sherry Levine
   Huntington Beach, Calif.
   ---

Philip Wood's Letter

   The outrage of comparing, in any way, the John Wayne Gacy and Joel
Steinberg cases with the Amirault case shows what terrible pressure
Mr. Harshbarger must be suffering. He is certainly aware of the
difference between the evidence of 20 or so exhumed corpses in the
Gacy case and the body of a mutilated child in the Steinberg case, as
compared with the fantastic verbiage extracted by psychologists from
uninjured children.
   The essence of the "revisionist argument" in the Amirault case as
it was in the other similar cases already overturned is that "horrific
or far-fetched" allegations of child abuse can be extracted from
uninjured children who can't be held accountable for lies or
fantasies.
   Philip Wood
   President
   Ten Speed Press
   Berkeley, Calif.
   ---

Joel V. Sanders Letter

   I read Scott Harshbarger's letter carefully, looking for some
objective basis for the Amiraults' conviction. I found none -- his
arguments amount to mere assertions. Taking his four points in turn:
1) they are guilty because the jurors thought so (and other newspapers
have defended the guilty verdict!); 2) they are guilty because of the
plaintiffs' allegations; 3) they are guilty because the defense
attorneys lost the case (and the lawyers are skilled and respected!);
4) they are guilty because the verdict was upheld on appeal.
   Question: if such egregious conduct indeed took place, then where
is the evidence?
   Joel V. Sanders
   Montclair, N.J.
   ---

Tim Boman's Letter

   Mr. Harshbarger contends that Dorothy Rabinowitz's campaign to
elicit the truth ignores that the real victims of the case were the
children. Mr. Harshbarger states: "It is important that Journal
readers know what has not been listed among her recitation of the so-
called `facts' of this case." He goes on to summarize four "facts"
which the readers should know, including:
   1. "Journal readers are never allowed to hear from the jurors who
weighed all the evidence. . . ." But no one is alleging that the
jurors made any errors of judgment based on the facts presented to
them. The real issue is whether the children were coached and
interrogated in order to conclude that they were, in fact, victims of
abuse. The real abuse that occurred in this tragic case was the manner
of eliciting the alleged abuse and the extreme coaching of the
children that was done by the Commonwealth.
   2. "Journal readers are never presented with the view of the
children and their parents -- the real victims. . . ." How odd that
the victims were happy children and satisfied parents until the
Amiraults' were arrested, and only then did they learn through months
of coaching and interrogation what the Amiraults had done to the
children.
   3. "Journal readers are never presented with courtroom transcript
excerpts of the pointed cross-examinations of the child-abuse victims.
. . ." But how do the defendants' attorneys undo the brainwashing of
the children and parents which tragically occurred in this case.
   4. "Journal readers are never enlightened by quotations from the
appellate opinions rejecting the Amiraults' arguments. . . ." I have
read these appellate opinions. They fail to adequately address the
real issue of this case -- whether the children were unfairly coached
into believing they were abused.
   Tom Boman
   Glencoe, Mo.
   ---

Lloyd Martinson's Letter

   Mr. Harshbarger's letter paralleled as it was by Dorothy
Rabinowitz's third essay on the Amirault case was an example of blind,
self-serving injustice. In the Amirault case, as in all of the other
such cases of mass child abuse, there is no doubt that the children,
their parents, the reporters and the public fully believed, and
probably still believe, that incredible abuse had taken place. In the
time frame of the trial, we were told that innocent children do not
lie, that they do not possess the devious nature or maturity that
would lead them to tell an untruth. However, nothing was said about a
child's concept of truth and how it is developed.   Subsequent research has shown that young children can easily be
manipulated to fully believe they have experienced imaginary events.
There is also much debate now on the issue of "therapists" implanting
false memories of sexual abuse in adults. Scott Harshbarger refers to
the children's persuasive testimony and the acceptance of it by all
concerned. However, he neglects the complete lack of evidence. There
was no physical evidence, no videotapes, no physical scars, no
impartial witnesses, and of course, no dead bodies. Yet, the mental
scars cruelly implanted in those children and their parents by
interrogators, therapists and prosecutors will remain. And let us not
forget the Amiraults, who are still in jail on the basis of those
scarred and false memories.
   Lloyd W. Martinson
   Haddonfield, N.J.

Justice for the Amiraults

  Yesterday Massachusetts State Judge Robert A. Barton overturned
the convictions of Violet and Cheryl Amirault, accused during the late
1980s day-care craze of preposterous sexual acts with children. Once
again innocent in the eyes of the law after more than eight years
behind bars, 71-year-old Violet Amirault and her daughter Cheryl may
well walk out of prison by the week's end. This is cause for
celebration, both for their sakes and for the sake of anyone concerned
with the health and sanity of the legal system.

   The battle is of course not yet over. Scott L. Harshbarger, the
district attorney who convicted them, is now Attorney General of
Massachusetts. After we called his victory into question, he took to
writing indignant letters to this page, for example comparing the
Amiraults with serial killer John Wayne Gacy Jr., whose bathtub was
packed with bodies. While Justice Barton threw out the 1987 trial,
prosecutors will likely appeal the decision, and then have to decide
whether to seek a new trial. Meanwhile, Gerald Amirault, Violet's son
and father of three, is still in jail after almost 10 years, with a
motion for a new trial pending before the judge who presided over his
conviction.

   Readers of this page are by now acquainted with the facts
surrounding the prosecution and conviction of the Amiraults,
proprietors of the Fells Acres Day School in Malden, Massachusetts.
The case began with a single unsubstantiated phone accusation and
developed in the usual way of the sensational child sex-abuse trials
that made so many prosecutorial careers in the 1980s. The first
charges led to an endlessly multiplying number of ever more bizarre
accusations, extorted from children by insistent investigators and
social workers.

   Violet Amirault, who had worked tirelessly over 20 years and seen
her school become the most prestigious in the area, was accused of
having become, at age 61, a pedophile -- given to raping small
children with "magic wands" and of mutilating bluebirds. Cheryl and
Gerald stood accused of similar grotesque molestation charges
perpetrated in a "magic room." Gerald had allegedly raped a four-year-
old with a large butcher knife; he had somehow been clever enough to
do this without injuring the child or leaving any physical signs.
Indeed, the prosecutors had brought their charges without having a
particle of physical (or any other) evidence of the violent bodily
assaults supposedly committed against the four- and five-year-olds.

   Convicted of these charges on the basis of child testimony and
sentenced to 8 to 20 years, the Amiraults had become eligible for
parole, which was denied because they refused to admit their guilt. At
this point our Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote about their case; through a
fund administered by the New York-based Funding Exchange, readers of
this page paid the legal expenses; they have the right to be gratified
at the result. Attorney Daniel R. Williams, who adopted the case on a
pro bono basis, argued the case for reversal of Violet and
Cheryl's convictions before Judge Barton on August 17, and will seek
their release on their own recognizance tomorrow morning.

   Judge Barton, one of the most respected and seasoned jurists in the
Massachusetts state court system, based his unflinching decision on
what has become a powerful issue in such cases, the defendant's right
to confront the accuser. In 1988 the Supreme Court invoked the
Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment to overturn a case in
which an Iowa law allowed a shield between accusers and the defendant.
Justice Scalia wrote that the right of confrontation has "a lineage
that traces back to the beginnings of Western legal culture" --
because, he continued, it is "always more difficult to tell a lie
about a person `to his face' than `behind his back.' In the former
context, even if the lie is told, it will often be told less
convincingly."

   The Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, even more explicit than
the Sixth Amendment, requires a "face-to-face" confrontation; a 1994
case prohibited special seating arrangements for child witnesses that
circumvent this right. Judge Barton applied this rule to the Amirault
case, finding that they were denied the required ability to see the
children's profiles or watch their lip movements. "The Commonwealth's
entire case depended on the credibility and reliability of the
children witnesses," he wrote. "By appearing to elevate and/or to
protect those children by very special furniture and seating
arrangements, the jury was indirectly instructed to judge the
credibility and demeanor of the children in a different light than
they would a mature witness."

   The prosecutors will undoubtedly claim that Violet and Cheryl were
freed on a "technicality." But Judge Barton was clearly aware of the
acute relevance of confrontation when such bizarre claims are offered.
It would not have been easy, as Violet Amirault said, for those same
child witnesses she cared for every day to meet her eyes when making
such claims.

   As we said a few months back, what was done to the Amiraults -- in
the name of "justice" -- cannot be undone. We can nevertheless rejoice
that the beginning of the end of their nightmare seems to have
arrived. They join Donna Hubbard of Bakersfield, California (whose
100-year sentence was just reversed); Robert Kelly of Edenton, North
Carolina (whose twelve consecutive life terms were just reversed);
Margaret Kelly Michaels, and numerous others. In the original day-care
case, concerning the McMartin School in Manhattan Beach, California,
Ray Buckey and mother Peggy served eight years in jail even though
they were not convicted in either of two trials.

   Yet it is also true that across this land, dozens of citizens
remain imprisoned on the basis of precisely the same kinds of
testimony that cost the Amiraults and others so many years of their
lives. They were convicted during the great contagion of child-abuse
prosecutions that swept the country beginning in the mid-1980s. That
contagion was abetted by the 1979 Mondale Act, which provided for
heavily increased funding for investigators of child sex abuse;
federal money inevitably produced a cottage industry of investigations
and cases. By now, the public and juries are beginning to see how the
child-interrogation techniques of zealous investigators can lead a
four- or five-year-old to say anything the investigators want.

   This is scarcely to say that child abuse does not exist; clearly it
is a serious problem in many troubled homes. Even in the day-care
cases someone may somewhere be guilty. Many children and parents
clearly do believe their accusations -- in our view themselves victims
of a judicial fad that had incredible power.

   Yet the good news is that the great mass-abuse cases of the '80s
are being overturned one by one, which is to say that legal standards
such as confrontation are being rediscovered and reapplied where they
are sorely needed. Judge Barton's decision has now, we expect, begun
the undoing of the Amirault case -- a legal horror that should rank
with the most famous for which Massachusetts is known.