Satanic Panic Redux

Summary

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The Dream – “Satanic Panic Redux”

Host: Jane Marie
Guest: Sarah Marshall (Host of “You’re Wrong About” and “The Devil You Know”)
Date: April 24, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of The Dream features host Jane Marie in conversation with Sarah Marshall, creator of the new CBC miniseries “The Devil You Know,” which revisits the 1980s and ’90s Satanic Panic in America. Together, they explore the historical roots, media sensationalism, psychological implications, and lingering modern echoes of this moral panic, examining how the myth of satanic conspiracies gripped the public imagination and destroyed lives.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Revisiting the Satanic Panic: Then and Now

• Sarah introduces her new podcast miniseries (02:05): “This is a miniseries that I've made with CBC Podcasts, and it's a total of 16 delicious episodes on the spread of the Satanic Panic and trying to get at what that looked like through individual testimony.”
  • She has researched the Satanic Panic since grad school, noting a shift from viewing it as history to recognizing its echoes in today’s culture.
• Focus on individual experiences and stories: Sarah aims to depict the panic “almost like…an actual disaster” (02:58), highlighting those who were children of people affected by recovered memory therapy, teens profiled as satanists, and other ordinary individuals caught up in hysteria.

Media’s Role in Spreading Panic

• 80s and 90s TV shows’ impact (03:48): Jane recalls sneaking Phil Donahue episodes, noting just how mainstream these satanic themes became.
  • Sarah observes: “Oprah was a big proponent of satanic panic stories in the 80s when she was kind of trying to make her name in daytime tv, as was everybody else... Because, I mean, what could be better in terms of ratings?” (03:48)
• Media segment detour and comedic relief: Jane plays the Down to Earth TV theme song, illustrating the decade’s odd cultural touchstones before returning to serious discussion (06:11–07:29).

The Book That Lit The Fuse: Michelle Remembers

• The 1980 publication “Michelle Remembers” (07:53): Positioned as nonfiction, the book recounted a woman’s “recovered memories” under therapy that her mother handed her to a satanic cult.
  • Police and social workers took the book seriously, shaping institutional approaches to child abuse.
  • Sarah: “It was not fact checked, as are as most nonfiction books aren’t to this day. And it was written with a pretty clear agenda.” (08:55)

Agendas, Psychodrama & Questionable Therapy

• Therapist dynamics and the urge for sensational explanations:
  • Lawrence Pazder (therapist/author) and Michelle (patient/co-author) grew closer during therapy, even beginning a romantic affair.
  • Sarah notes that within their narrative, “they have to be battling Satan himself… you can kind of have an affair with whoever you want as long as you're protecting mankind from Satan.” (11:40)
• Commercial and local effects (12:26): While not a bestseller like Jaws, the book had powerful influence, especially in their Victoria, BC community.

Broader Cultural Context: “Fear of Satan” in Pop Culture

• 1960s–70s trend (13:14): Media from Rosemary’s Baby to the Manson family crimes stoked underlying fears of Satanic influence, blending anxieties about new religious movements, counterculture, and women's liberation.

The Child Abuse Witch-Hunts

• Preschool/daycare cases (19:34): The panic led to national cases such as the McMartin preschool trial—without proper forensic interviewing techniques, children were pressured into sharing increasingly wild tales.
  • “If you think you know what the child is going to say, you can pretty much get them to say it and convince yourself that that wasn't you implanting the idea in their head, that was just them expressing it.” – Sarah (21:24)
• Implausible details treated as evidence: A child mentioning peanut butter in a “ritual” led to frantic connections when peanut butter was later found in the daycare fridge (22:54).
  • “It’s kind of a basic case of blood libel too, right, where if you want to dehumanize people as fast as possible, you accuse them of baby killing and that pretty much gets the job done.” – Sarah (24:13)

The Role of Therapists & “Recovered Memories”

• Therapy’s complicity (25:09): As recovery of “repressed” or “recovered” memories grew in the popular imagination, therapists sometimes encouraged clients to write as alternate personalities or recall “buried” trauma, often leading to false memories.
  • “A big part of the story is women seeking therapy and very sensibly saying, I have an idea of what my issues are ... and therapists being like, no, you don’t. I'm deciding what we’re talking about and I'm going to destroy your life.” – Sarah (28:17)

Lack of Evidence, Persistence of Belief, and Conspiracy Thinking

• Unfounded accusations: Despite widespread investigations and long-running trials, there was no concrete evidence of vast satanic networks or mass child abductions.
  • “At a certain point, you know, you start wondering ... how is Satan able to not leave a shred of physical evidence even one time? ... You kind of have to believe in Satan more than almost any Satanist ever could in order to make the theory work.” – Sarah (29:21)

Those Who Fought Back

• Journalists and investigators (33:11): Debbie Nathan and FBI’s Ken Lanning were among the first to push back against the paranoia.
  • Lanning’s report found no evidence for satanic abuse—paranoia then spread to accuse the FBI itself of collusion.

The Deeper Social Issues Avoided by the Panic

• Sarah connects the panic to broader anxieties about child sexual abuse and the unwillingness to face domestic realities:
  • “[It was] an extremely sustained, increasingly ridiculous effort to avoid the point… The point in the late 70s is like, huh, child abuse is actually pretty rampant and child sexual abuse isn’t… something that you can get a child to forget about and not be traumatized by if you never, ever, ever talk about it and hope that they don’t remember it.” (34:26)

Closing Reflections: Why Does the Panic Endure?

• Modern echoes and enduring appeal (36:34):
  • “I want to stop it from happening so much again, you know, because we have just this kind of... But again, it's like I can't take on Satan. You know, we've been blaming Satan for stuff for hundreds of years.” – Sarah (36:40)
  • She points out how the pattern repeats: accusations of satanism as a tool for violence and exclusion throughout American and colonial history.
• Integrating history: Reporting the podcast changed Sarah’s view:
  • “The more truly amazing people that I got to talk to… the more I was finally able to integrate it into my worldview and to hopefully communicate that it’s just something that happened day by day to people and was extremely confusing to live through until one day you could look back on it and… see the whole sweep.” (39:04)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “It has gone from something that felt kind of inert and a part of history that we hadn't reckoned with yet to a part of the present day that was happening right now, like polio.” – Sarah Marshall (02:15)
• “You don't have to be a supernatural being in order to do that in America. That's kind of the scary part.” – Sarah (11:16)
• On “Michelle Remembers”: “It was written with a pretty clear agenda.” – Sarah (08:55)
• “It’s kind of a basic case of blood libel too, right, where if you want to dehumanize people as fast as possible, you accuse them of baby killing and that pretty much gets the job done.” – Sarah (24:13)
• “You kind of have to believe in Satan more than almost any Satanist ever could in order to make the theory work.” – Sarah (29:21)
• “As complicated as it gets ... what you can boil it down to is this extremely sustained, increasingly ridiculous effort to avoid the point.” – Sarah (34:26)
• “Satan is kind of the great enabler in North American history... If you want to pillage and commit genocide and take people's lands, you can accuse them of being in league with Satan and then you can kill whoever you want.” – Sarah (37:08)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:00–01:39 – Ads & intro (skip)
• 01:39 – Show opens: Jane introduces Sarah and topic.
• 02:05 – Sarah describes new podcast and research goals.
• 03:48–04:44 – Impact of TV media in the 80s/90s & Donahue/Oprah’s role.
• 07:53–09:50 – “Michelle Remembers” and its influence.
• 11:40–13:06 – Affair between author/therapist and patient; local effects in Victoria, BC.
• 13:14–14:30 – Broader “fear of Satan” in American culture.
• 19:23–22:54 – Influence on daycare child abuse trials and flawed investigative techniques.
• 24:54–29:02 – Therapy culture, “recovered memories,” and lack of evidence.
• 33:11–34:26 – Investigators debunking the panic, but conspiracy theories doubling down.
• 34:26–39:04 – Deeper social anxieties; Sarah’s personal reflections.

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Tone & Style Notes

• Wry, sharp, and often darkly humorous, especially from host Jane Marie
• Sarah Marshall balances scholarly insight with personal narrative and pop culture references
• The episode is accessible and deeply empathetic, especially toward those affected by both the original panic and its modern echoes

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Summary

"Satanic Panic Redux" revisits a uniquely American hysteria—one that destroyed reputations, fostered dangerous police practices, and reflected deeper anxieties about family, sexuality, and children’s safety. Jane Marie and Sarah Marshall dissect how this phenomenon was fueled by sensationalist media, questionable therapy practices, and cultural anxieties that still echo today. Through a mix of personal recollection, historical context, and journalistic investigation, the episode draws clear connections between old moral panics and the conspiracy fervor of the present, warning listeners about the perils of mistaking fear-driven fantasy for truth.

Transcript

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[Jane Marie]

Wah ah ah ah ah. I'm Jane Marie, and this is the Nightmare. Happy Halloween, everybody. Today we're gonna talk about some Satan. Sarah Marshall, who you know from your other favorite podcast you're wrong about, has a new show out called the Devil youl Know all about the Satanic panic in the 80s.

[Sarah Marshall]

So this is a miniseries that I've made with CBC Podcasts, and it's a total of 16 delicious episodes on the spread of the Satanic Panic and trying to get at what that looked like through individual testimony. Because I've been researching the Satanic Panic since I was in grad school, and it has gone from something that felt kind of inert and a part of history that we hadn't reckoned with yet to a part of the present day that was happening right now, like polio. And it's been a wild ride. And one of the things that I love that I was able to do on the show is that, you know, researching this topic for such a long time left me with quite a lot of questions, really, about, like, what was it like to be the child of someone who was going through recovered memory therapy and who was consequently really suffering in her day to day life? Or what was it like to be one of the real people who knew the people who became the characters. And Michelle remembers as they were writing this book that helped start the panic. And just these questions about, you know, what was it like to be a teen who was profiled as a Satanist for no particular reason, just because something shocking happened in town and the police had no better ideas. These questions about how to try and observe the satanic panic through the kinds of individual people who are affected by it. Almost like the way I think, in retrospect, you would try and depict an actual disaster. That's kind of one of the things the show is trying to do.

[Jane Marie]

So I was alive this and sneaking episodes of the Phil Donahue show and stuff. So I was very plugged in to what was happening.

[Sarah Marshall]

That was hard news at the time, I know. Seriously. Well, there's this book that comes out in 1980 called Michelle Remembers. And kind of speaking to what you're saying about Donahue, I think there's this thing to growing up in the 80s and 90s where as a child of Oprah and the Oprah's Book Club, you'll kind of believe anything, you know, because Oprah was a big proponent of satanic panic stories in the 80s when she was kind of trying to make her name in daytime tv, as was everybody else, like Donahue and certainly Geraldo and really anyone with a daytime TV presence. And a lot of people trying to get into primetime too, on a national scale, were gravitating towards the satanic panic as a topic because. Because, I mean, what could be better in terms of ratings and getting people to stay on your channel or to stay through commercials?

[Jane Marie]

I have to pause it for a second to say this opening sequence for Phil Donahue's show goes on forever. And all it is is B roll of a plane taking off and then a city skyline with the word Donahue over it. And then it says Donahue. Donahue. Donahue. Donahue. Donahue. And then cuts to the studio. So let's start from the top. Oh, but also, this gives me an opportunity to play a piece of tape that I've been wanting to squeeze into some episode somewhere for years. This has nothing to do with the satanic panic. It has to do with ghosts. I found this while I was googling Kyle Richards acting career. You know, Kyle from the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills? Found it years ago. Show it to my friends show it to my lovers Now I'm showing it to you. This is a TV show in the 80s called down to Earth. And the theme song tells the entire story of the show. You don't even need to watch the show after you listen to the beginning of it. Okay, let's.

[Down to Earth Theme Singer]

Back in the days of Valentino we know a maid name Ethel Ethel was so bright and alive Wackadoo, wackadoo, wackadoo but she was struck down by a trolley Golly said goodbye in 1920 and five toodle o, toodle o Ethel in heaven awaited patiently to earn her wings and be an angel Fancy free 60 years later, the opportunity to help a family came through.

[Sarah Marshall]

Boo boo boo de doo 23 skadoo

[Down to Earth Theme Singer]

back down to earth to teach the Prestons lessons. Richard, lissy, Dwayne and JJ too. Now she must be a 1980s lady. Down to earth it's so angelical. Down to earth, Down. It's quite a spectacle. Down to earth it's just hysterical. She's down to earth. Down to earth. Down to earth.

[Jane Marie]

All right, now, where were we?

[Sarah Marshall]

Is the caller there?

[Jane Marie]

Yes, I'm the caller.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yes, go ahead. I thoroughly believe that these people are

[Jane Marie]

of the devil, of Satan.

[Sarah Marshall]

Do they trouble you? Oh, I think it's a disgrace. Well, what's going to happen? What will happen outside of your baby not being fed while you're talking? You really feel that they are emissaries of the devil, the devil has sent them, Is that it?

[Jane Marie]

I believe that Satan.

[Sarah Marshall]

Okay, I appreciate your call. I thank you. The thing that gave it a lot of credibility was this bestseller that came out in 1980. It was called Michelle Remembers. And it occupied this uncomfortable place in terms of truth or fiction, where it was marketed as nonfiction. It was told as a real story, a real story about this woman who went into therapy and whose therapist regressed her to her childhood. And she realized that her mother had given her to a satanic cult. Basically, what I remembered was a 14 month period of my life at age 5 where I was given to a group of people whom at first I wasn't aware of what they were doing other than to a child. They were adults doing things I couldn't understand. And that frightened me. About three months, three and a half months into the remembering, I realized through the ritual and repetition that these people had, that they were involved in some type of satanic church. And she had witnessed Satan coming back. I don't know if he ever left really. But Satan manifesting and giving his plan for the 70s and 80s. And it was a book that was, you know, treated by notably some police officers and social workers as absolute fact. And it warned that basically, you know, how we just started thinking about child abuse and specifically child sexual abuse as a real problem in society. Well, we really need to be looking out for satanic abuse, so keep your eyes open for that one. And I think that that because this book was treated with such seriousness, which it didn't deserve at all, it was not fact checked, as are as most nonfiction books aren't to this day. And it was written with a pretty clear agenda.

[Jane Marie]

And what was that agenda?

[Sarah Marshall]

Well, we have these two people at its center, Lawrence Pazder and this woman, Michelle, who have been therapist and patient for a while. Michelle comes back into therapy, she's extremely depressed. She's just had a miscarriage. And interestingly, her male therapist perspective is how could she possibly be so upset? And it's like, well, she just had a miscarry. Women don't really need. We don't need a reason that involves the devil and God and a battle for the soul of mankind to be so upset, you know.

[Jane Marie]

Oh, that's what he was trying to suss out. It wasn't just a quality of her like, hmm, I wonder why she's upset. It was like, we're gonna get to the bottom of this. And I bet at the bottom of this,

[Sarah Marshall]

it really didn't take him long to formulate a theory because he puts her in what seems to be a trance like state. There's language that suggests it's hypnosis or something like it, although the book never calls it that, to be clear. And she describes this sort of the. This imagistic scene where there's women and they're lighting candles and they kind of put her on top of a counter and forget her. And from this he deduces that she's recovering memories about witchcraft and her mother being involved in witchcraft. And from this, you know, because again, this is the mid-70s when this therapy begins. So, I mean, the exorcist has just come out. There's a lot of Satan media, and there's a sort of implicit idea for a lot of people that the Manson family were somehow satanic. Which it was true only in the sense that they were overly devoted to a short little guy who had gained the control of some young women. But you don't have to be a supernatural being in order to do that in America. That's kind of the scary part. And so we had these two people who were concocting the story together.

[Jane Marie]

And.

[Sarah Marshall]

And, you know, while doing this therapy, Dr. Pazur and Michelle, at a certain point, begin to have an affair. And it seems like there's this necessary act of moral laundering happening where in order for it to be okay, what they're doing, they have to be battling Satan himself. Because then, you know, you can kind of have an affair with whoever you want as long as you're protecting mankind from Satan. I guess what. This is. I mean, no one ever says this, but this is my analysis. So Larry and Michelle do quite a bit of touring to promote it. They go on local TV stations. So I think that they really put their backs into it. And it's not a huge bestseller. It's not on the level of Jaws, which actually their publisher had worked on previous to this, which to me says a lot about its apparent viability as a commercial venture. But it does become highly successful and influential, and especially in Victoria, which is Victoria, bc, which is where these people live. It's extremely well known, and from what I can tell from having talked to people who grew up there at the time, just kind of created this idea that if your parents didn't keep a closer eye on you, you were going to get nabbed around potentially any corner.

[Jane Marie]

I mean, Victoria is a city, but it's not the biggest city in the world. You know, like how many people were implicated around there.

[Sarah Marshall]

It's a hard city to hide Satanists in, you know, and it did have really an effect on people and created some paranoia and I'm sure created quite a lot of trouble for people that they. They wouldn't have otherwise had. I mean, it is, you know, it's. It's kind of much like Portland historically. It's a city where there is, you know, a higher concentration of druids and sort of Wiccan types and in other places. But they just want to leave pickles out in the moonlight, you know, that's fine. Yeah, that's good for us, really. And then what is interesting is that you can kind of see, looking at 60s and 70s media, that there is a trend toward fear of Satan. Right? We have the Manson family freaking people out. We have Rosemary's Baby and the idea that there's some kind of implicit connection between these two events. And also, like, Rosemary's Baby is a very scary movie. And it's scary because Satan can be scary, but it's mainly scary because men are scary. And marriage is scary and so on. But Satan gets to ride on John Cassavetes coattails.

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[Sarah Marshall]

And I mean, you know, speaking of Donahue and everything, one of the things that occurs to me about this topic and also why I'm drawn to it, is that, you know, I grew up in the 90s watching cable TV specials and I feel like my perspective from that is like I grew up watching Unsolved Mysteries. I'm prepared to believe anything. Like I was watching. I'm watching Unsolved Mysteries again lately and continues to be probably the best TV that you know, anyone ever made in terms of sheer entertainment for lack of budget. And the opening of the one I was just watching is Robert Stack saying these two men got in a Car accident. And afterwards both of them claim to have become clairvoyant. Can a car accident cause clairvoyance? And you're like, absolutely. It can't. But yeah, let's waste 15 minutes. We're at grandma's house. Exactly.

[Jane Marie]

I was just gonna say we didn't have, we didn't have cable, but my grandma was also glued to Court TV in the 90s and that was fun.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. And just the idea that like TV was bringing us closer to the truth, which it was in some ways, and then also just making some boss reenactments of stuff that for sure didn't happen. But yeah, I mean it spread everywhere because we had this general trend towards Satan, fear of Satan in 60s and 70s media. This idea that the Christian right was pushing back with that any alternative culture, especially like witchy stuff or tarot cards or horoscopes or Stevie Nicks records were leading your child directly to Satanism. It wasn't just harmless hippie woo woo stuff. It was a flirtation with the occult that was part of Satan's agenda was the argument. The problem then with looking at alleged preschool abuse cases, which is how this begins to spread around, interestingly, is that no one has really figured out how to forensically question children yet. Like questioning about child sexual abuse is something that police department departments have really just started to bother with. And so there's not a sense of best practices for anything that people are doing. So if you have someone who goes in specifically trained to think there's thousands of undetected Satanists abusing children and I'm going to find some, then what turns out to be the case, and probably anyone who's interacted with young children can guess this is that if you think you know what the child is going to say, you can pretty much get them to say it and convince yourself that that wasn't you implanting the idea in their head, that was just them expressing it. And things got a lot hairier. There's a lot of questioning of children that involves like really pressuring them as if they're co defendants in some kind of an armed robbery case in a way that's very unsavory to read. But basically the McMartin case in Southern California and Manhattan beach becomes national News. And then 8,382, because that's every parent's worst nightmare, that my child is being abused at the daycare center that I'm being guilt tripped for leaving them at. And that costs too much anyway. And that not only are people Incompetent, which I might be afraid of, but they're Satanists. That becomes something that kind of becomes a meme and people keep finding because they keep looking for it. And it was some very aggressive interview tactics where essentially, you know, to build on this idea of interviewing children like co defendants or co conspirators, you would have a child who would be led through a conversation that would kind of change rules as it went. You know, so potentially it would start with asking about this teacher what they may or may not have done, what they're like, and then leading into imaginative play. And then if that imaginative play involving puppets and things like that touches on anything that the person questioning the child has been trained to see as satanic, which if you're trained off of, Michelle remembers, and the kind of later satanic abuse detection materials that police departments around the country are creating.

[Jane Marie]

Like, what kind of stuff?

[Sarah Marshall]

There's a case in New Jersey where a child says that the teacher used peanut butter in a ritual. And then when peanut butter is found in the preschool or in the, in the daycare kitchen, it's treated as a smoking gun kind of a moment because a child mentioned peanut butter and therefore there can't be peanut butter there. Really, you know, dolls, I think, can be implicated because of the idea that they can be used as rich in rituals or to substitute for dead babies. Because the other issue is that unfortunately for all of us, Michelle remembers involves a lot of descriptions of babies being sacrificed as part of satanic rituals. And so one of the boilerplate questions when you're going into questioning in one of these cases, having been trained on this piece of alleged nonfiction, is like, well, these Satanists, they love to get low paying jobs and daycares doing backbreaking work because that's because they need kids for their rituals. They want to have large groups of hard to control preschoolers to carry out their rituals because, I don't know, they need their vitality or something and they just need toddler vibes. It's hard to say why. And you know, it's kind of a basic case of blood libel too, right, where if you want to dehumanize people as fast as possible, you accuse them of baby killing and that pretty much gets the, the job done. But it's also, I mean, the thing about little kids, which I think again, those of us who have like been around little kids, like not even as parents, because like sort of they're around, you know, you, you realize that some number of them, in a very wholesome way, love to get gory, you know, and love to say somewhat distressing things or to observe something normal and talk about it distressingly.

[Jane Marie]

You know, they also like to make a lot of up, and they also like to impress their parents, and they also like to follow the rules when they notice them happening.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right.

[Jane Marie]

I can. There's a bunch of different reasons why little kids would say things like that. Right.

[Sarah Marshall]

And, you know, and you're in a situation where you understand potentially, because it's made very explicit to you that until you say something extreme, you're not going to get out of here, that you get, like, a strong positive reaction when you say something extreme. There's this case further down the line of a woman named Patty Burgess who was institutionalized for her alleged multiple personality disorder. And it was really kind of a breathtaking case of abuse of power by a therapist because she had children, and at least one of them was institutionalized as well. And he was given stickers when he produced stories about what happened in this satanic cult that people were trying to get evidence about from him. And he was just making things up. And one of the things he invented that really shocked the people taking care of him as must as something that had to be true is that when you eviscerate someone, their innards smell bad, which, A, I feel like, you know, we're not giving kids enough credit if we don't think they could guess that. And B, he got that from the Empire Strikes Back, when, of course, we learned that tauntaun smell better on the outside. And then what we start to see is a movement within therapy where you can go in and say, I was watching Donahue I saw about satanic ritual abuse. I'm worried that that happened to me because I'm also being told that, you know, one of the key beliefs of kind of pop psychology at this time is that it's very normal to repress memories and not just to not remember something because it was traumatic, because you dissociated during it, because it's just something that you've actively not remembered, which I think is a very real phenomenon, but that your brain has this fantastic power to be able to protect you by saying, this is too traumatic for the person experiencing it. So I'm just going to put it away in this nice lockbox. And then when you're old enough and mature enough and in a stable enough place to deal with it, then you're going to take it out and you're going to be able to remember everything, and you're going to Be able to practically go back in time and re experience it. You know, that it's statistically not that unusual is kind of the belief at the time to be able to repress large swaths of your life. And there's this idea that in the same way that there are all these Satanists that nobody ever thought to look up before, some therapists at the time seemed to believe that a significant percentage women have multiple personality disorder. And what appears to be true is that there's a certain number of women who can be induced to present multiple personalities, especially if they're encouraged to write journal entries as them and name them and take on different character traits. And so it's not men. No, who cares about men? But it is kind of funny because in terms of the sheer folly of these people when kind of a big part of the story is women seeking therapy and very sensibly saying, I have an idea of what my issues are and I want to talk about them. And therapists being like, no, you don't. I'm deciding what we're talking about and I'm going to destroy your life. It's going to be great. And your insurance is going to pay me so much money because I'm going to keep you under hypnosis for four hours at a time.

[Jane Marie]

Well, I'm just thinking of the lack of evidence for any of it. You know, you hear the trials and stuff, but you don't hear about these huge satanic cabals being swept up.

[Sarah Marshall]

No. And yet we started finding other cabals. You know, in the 90s, we found Waco. It was there. You know, it's.

[Jane Marie]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

When the Branch Davidians set up shop, they leave a pretty sizable footprint. So why are the Satanists invisible the way they are? At a certain point, you know, you start wondering, with all these Satanists operating seemingly constantly and with all. With all these stories of people sacrificing babies, I guess mathematically it stops lining up, right? You're like, where are the babies coming from? How come no one's missing all of these babies? And how is Satan able to not leave a shred of physical evidence even one time? And at a certain point, the only possible answer has to be that the magic of Satan is making all of it make sense. Like you kind of have to believe in Satan more than almost any Satanist ever could in order to make the theory work. In a weird.

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[Jane Marie]

Welcome to Get Real, the show for the reality TV obsessed and stands of the Hulu verse. Find it wherever you get your podcast and stream new episodes. Thursdays on Hulu and Hulu on Disney.

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[Sarah Marshall]

Two of the names that are important and kind of the very first wave of people pushing back against this from any kind of position of authority are Debbie Nathan, who is a journalist who was in Texas at the time, and Ken Lanning, who was working with the FBI and who was an agent tasked with basically trying to check out these stories for a long time and determine if there was any validity to them and who ultimately thought, you know, well, gosh, if there's not a single piece of evidence of any of this ever

[Jane Marie]

occurring

[Sarah Marshall]

that would really suggest that this isn't happening. And so of course, by this, by the time he issued a report stating this, things have become so heated that true believers in the Satanic panic then basically gets turned around and accused him of being in cahoots with the Satanists, which meant that the FBI was as well. So you can't trust the FBI now. And so this is, you know, so by the late 80s, early 90s, you had to be a conspiracy theorist on the level of thinking that, you know, the United States federal government was wrapped up in this as well for the whole thing to continue to make sense. There's something I see in the Satanic panic, boiled down to its essence, that feels like the conspiracy theories of today, not just for the way Satan is involved in them, but because it feels like, you know, as complicated as it gets. And I feel like I've already let us down so many different cul de sacs that, you know, but, but I feel like already at this point, it feels so complicated how this manifested. But I think what you can boil it down to is this extremely sustained, increasingly ridiculous effort to avoid the point, right? Because the point in the late 70s is like, huh, child abuse is actually pretty rampant and child sexual abuse isn't contrary to basically what parents were doing before. Something that you can get a child to forget about and not be traumatized by if you never, ever, ever talk about it and hope that they don't remember it. This is essentially, you know, the best that parents had come up with. And so this idea that sexual abuse is a real endemic problem, that sexual assault is something that everyone socialized as female is experiencing in one way or another, if not directly, then certainly indirectly. And it's sort of through the shared trauma of just growing up in the world. And it feels like there's a moment when we also are being asked to look at the fact that so many women and children are staying in abusive situations because they can't leave, because the nuclear family is being protected at the expense of everything else, and because women aren't able to make it on their own at this point, you know, for very systemic reasons, because they have the same power as wage earners, they don't have the same legal protections, they don't have effective legal protections against domestic abuse and against any man who wants them back, essentially.

[Jane Marie]

How do you feel after reporting this show? Are you feeling the same way? Like, is it. Are you satisfied?

[Sarah Marshall]

Good question. I mean, I feel like I would, I would maybe feel most satisfied if it wasn't happening so much right this second, you know, because it feels like part of me wants to have. And this is tying into the whole satanic panic lore of like getting people to believe something extreme out of the desire to be heroic. But like, I really, I want to stop it from happening so much again, you know, because we have just this kind of. But again, it's like I can't take on Satan. You know, we've been blaming Satan for stuff for hundreds of years. You know, I think the thing too is that Satan is kind of the great enabler in North American history. You know, if you want to pillage and commit genocide and take people's lands, you can accuse them of being in league with Satan and then you can kill whoever you want, you know, Satan, Satan, Satan. Weirdly, I think in terms of how he functions for American history and colonial European history, kind of allows you to commit murder and call it good, you know. And so I think, like, I'm not going to take the ability to say that anything you find threatening is satanic away from people because we've been using Satan for a long time and this is just the latest chapter in that. But I do feel really satisfied in terms of just having been able to talk to the people that I've gotten to talk to and to be able to just hear what it was like for them to be there as this unfolded. Because I think I started approaching this story as a student of history and feeling like it was a chapter of history. And then I think the closer that I got to it and the more truly amazing people that I got to talk to in the course of this, the more I was finally able to integrate it into my worldview and to hopefully communicate. That is just something that happened day by day to people and was extremely confusing to live through until one day you could look back on it and. And see the whole sweep of things. But at the time that it's going on, it's just daily life and everyone is just trying to figure out how to survive within that. Just like today,

[Jane Marie]

You can find the devil, you know, anywhere you listen to audio. The Dream is a production of Little Everywhere. If you have a tip for us, Our number is 323-248-1488. And if you want ad free versions of the show, go to the dream.Supercast.com Foreign.

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