performed by Jon Christensen and Tanya Garcia-Christensen.
performed & filmed by Alan Semerdjian & Friend.
performed by Melanie Hope
performed by Kristen Nelson and Noah Saterstrom
even though you pervert scripture to justify your own earthly desires, Jesus still loves you. He would drag your lying, monied ass out of the temple, for sure. But He’d still love you.
In addition to the fact that not a single child has confirmed any of the allegations against Robert Adams, jurors will be struck by the unwavering support of Adams’ three daughters. Though it will seem “common sense” to the jurors–that Adams is unlikely to have targeted young females in public, at his school, without having [...]
This is not to say that people were not injured [by maleficium]. Clearly, the accused suffered. Most convicted witches lost their lives, and many of them lost their property; others lost their freedom of movement within the community or were forced to leave family and friends to find homes in other colonies. Their families also [...]
John Demos, in The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-Hunting in the Western World, is careful to note, early in the text, that “Witch-hunting, large as it is, belongs to a still more capacious terrain that also includes racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism, as well as pogroms, lynchings, genocide and ethnic cleansing….” [Continue reading "Crimen Magiae: [...]
Discussing Angola in 2006, The National Catholic Reporter writes that accusations of witchcraft and resultant assaults sometimes target “children suffering from diseases such as malaria and AIDS, or street children…. Between 2001 and 2005, 423 children accused of witchcraft sought refuge at the Santa Child Centre run by the Catholic Church in M’banza Congo….” According [...]
some are born to endless night and some are born William Blake
“After 1649, however, local judges in Scotland, Alsace, southwestern Germany, and northern France … regularly allowed the victims of witch accusations to sue their accusers for slander. These local judges were in effect reviving the ancient principal of accusatory legal procedure that held a complainant liable if he was unable to sustain his charge. As [...]
“One of the most terrifying aspects of publishing stories and books is the realization that they are going to be read, and read by strangers. I had never fully realized this before, although I had of course in my imagination dwelt lovingly upon the thought of the millions and millions of people who were going [...]
“spanned a broad range, young and old, male and female. Yet certain demographic categories were disproportionately represented among them. One major subgroup comprised middle-aged women…. Linked by age and sex, such persons were likely to be closely acquainted through all kinds of shared experience: shared work, shared domesticity, shared participation in local trade; shared companionship, [...]
[T]he witch-hunt reached massive dimensions only where the minds of the authorities were obsessed by the central fantasy itself. In the great witch-hunt that fantasy became, as it were, an autonomous force. The law was reshaped to take account of it; in the form of the witches sabbat it became the core of a new [...]
. . . in Occupy news: 1) A thought-provoking, necessary essay by Robert Jensen, professor at the School of Journalism at the University of Texas, Austin: “Occupy demands: Let’s radicalise our analysis.” 2) Meanwhile, in the South of the U.S., Katelyn Ferral and Mark Schultz, at the News & Observer, report “Police arrest Chapel Hill [...]
Defense attorney Linda Parisi continues to wait for evidence to be turned over by Citrus Heights Police, regarding her client Robert Adams, the former Creative Frontiers private school principal who was arrested on September 7, 2011 and charged with six felony counts and one misdemeanor count of child molestation. Adams has already appeared in court [...]
At A.Blog, my friend Jan Clausen is blogging from “Occupy Wall Street” as an activist, lit scholar, poet, social critic, union member . . . I could go on, with the labels, but won’t. Clausen’s writing has spanned numerous genres. In the 1980s, she focused heavily on fiction, publishing a story collection and two novels [...]
Few authors have been as instructive in my current projects than Debbie Nathan, who was the first investigative journalist to have the courage to question the nationwide outbreak of false child abuse cases (ca. 1980-1995) that resulted in hundreds of wrongful convictions, and who later co-authored, with Attorney Michael Snedeker, the most comprehensive contemporary text [...]
CLASSIFIED TO: Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Homeland Security Council RE: SURVEILLANCE OF “VIRTUOUS PAGANS” (ongoing memorandum) Submitted herewith is the running memorandum concerning surveillance of the “Virtuous Pagans.” The new material added to bring this memorandum up to date is divided into two sections, New Intelligence and Intercepted Communications, and is as follows: NEW INTELLIGENCE [...]
I’ve been remiss in re-posting the following. Sorry. I still blame the hurricane. Even for things I should have done prior to the hurricane. At the honorable Bookslut, Micah McCrary reviews Jenny Boully’s not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them. Boully, both a poet and an essayist by experience, knows perfectly [...]
My friend John Philpin, who, when he’s not helping police catch murderers, writes books about murderers, has a new book out. Actually, the book’s official pub date is January 2012 (you can pre-order at Amazon), but, rumor has it, you can obtain an early, discounted copy by ordering directly from the publisher, GenPop Books. I [...]
is now a part of “Defining ‘Reasonable Doubt’: The Alleged Case Against Robert Adams and Creative Frontiers“
This week, faced with the absence of any actual evidence against Amanda Knox or her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, and faced with the increasing likelihood that both will succeed in appealing their wrongful convictions, attorney Carlo Pacelli explained to the court why evidence was unnecessary: the case against Knox is supernatural—not bound by the laws of [...]
At some point, I need to separate this bibliography into genres as well as “recommended” and “the other stuff.” In the meantime, I’ve received some requests recently, for more online info (rather than buying a million books) regarding false child sexual abuse cases. In addition to the recommending reading the cases featured at the National [...]
Troy Davis is on death row in Georgia, facing execution at 7pm tonight, for the 1991 murder of police officer Mark MacPhail. Since Davis’s conviction, however, seven of the nine witnesses who testified against him have recanted. One of the recanting witnesses says another man, Sylvester Coles, has confessed to the crime. Another recanting witness says [...]
- an essay for The Rumpus, regarding a half dozen things or so, including the WM3, the endurance (and ever-changing nature) of the concept of ritual abuse, wrongful convictions concerning horrific charges, and The New 1980s. (Sans the hair–at least for now.) – which spills into, and borrows ideas from, an essay for the blog [...]
is now a part of “Defining ‘Reasonable Doubt’: The Alleged Case Against Robert Adams and Creative Frontiers.”
is now a part of “Defining ‘Reasonable Doubt’: The Alleged Case Against Robert Adams and Creative Frontiers“
All signs indicate that today, 19 August 2011, is a day more than eighteen years in the making. Today, Jason Baldwin, Damien Echols, and Jessie Misskelley will go home, after serving more than eighteen years in prison for crimes they did not commit. Teens when they were convicted, the three men have spent their entire adult [...]
Part One: Immediate Risk On Thursday 14 July 2011, citing an “immediate health and safety risk” to children enrolled at Creative Frontiers School, the State of California Department of Social Services, wrote a letter to parents of Creative Frontiers students, stating that a Temporary Suspension Order was being served at their school. Signed by Kathy [...]
Social service workers–should anyone be unaware–have extraordinarily difficult jobs. Particularly in investigating allegations of child molestation. Their jobs are tougher still, when both the allegations and the investigations begin with, and build upon, circumstances as dubious as those related to Robert Adams and Creative Frontiers School in Citrus Heights, CA. Such cases can prove disastrous, [...]
around the dearth of evidence to support such claims, and the claims-makers (mental health professionals as well as the clients they directed) would learn to drop the “S” in favor of a more court-friendly framework called, simply, “ritual abuse.” The evolution mirrored the process by which the Catholic church, periodically, throughout history, learned to downplay [...]
Just over six months have passed already, since the Ohio Supreme court, in January 2011, citing a technicality, reversed the acquittal of falsely accused and wrongfully convicted Joseph Allen and Nancy Smith, of Lorraine, Ohio. Allen and Smith had already served nearly 15 years for crimes that never occurred. Smith, serving a 30-90 year sentence, [...]
The scene at the Citrus Heights City Council meeting last night, 28 July 2011, ten days after the closure of Creative Frontiers School, was both wrenching and inspiring, as supporters of Robert Adams and CFS packed Council Chambers at the Civic Center, delivering a petition with 280 names, and pleading with authorities to re-open their [...]
[see also: other posts on Creative Frontiers: Issues with Timing and PR (Aug. 14), Supporters Petition City Hall (July 29), and Students Rally to Support CFS (July 25), among others. Also, for context: "The Cost of False Cases of Child Sexual Abuse" and "Believe the Children."] [This is part three of my ongoing coverage of [...]
What follows is the second part of my coverage of what appears to be a textbook case of false allegations of child sexual abuse, presently unfolding against Principal Robert Adams and Creative Frontiers School in Citrus Heights, Sacramento County, CA. In the six days since authorities closed the school on July 18, 2011, students past [...]
Judging by the research of experts in the fields of child sexual abuse, the story unfolding this week, regarding Robert Adams and Family, of Creative Frontiers School, displays numerous red flags of false allegations of child sexual abuse.1 [see also: other posts on Creative Frontiers: Issues with Timing and PR (Aug. 14), Supporters Petition City [...]
has a new context: [link]
“I have quoted many and great names, men of science, men of learning, men of authority, men to whom the world yet looks up with admiration, nay, with reverence and love, inasmuch as to-day it is difficult, wellnigh inconceivable in most cases, for the modern mind to credit the possibility of these dark deeds of [...]
Looking forward to a wide release of Daniel Alexander’s documentary about Bernard Baran, the first childcare worker convicted in the Great Daycare Scare of the 1980s & early 90s. Bernie was freed and exonerated, at last, in 2009. Bernie’s case and Jeremy Barney‘s case share remarkable similarities, none of which I can discuss at the [...]
Qui Transtulit Sustinet : “He Who Transplanted Still Sustains” —Connecticut State Motto Demos on migration to the colonies of the New World: The first of several migration bursts coincided in time (the early 17th century) with the peak of the great European witch craze. Hence the migrants themselves would surely have known witchcraft—and feared witchcraft, [...]
to Historic Litchfield County: The Home of Moderate Conservatism
i was born in the soul of misery and i never had me a name they just gave me a number when i was young got a long line of heartache i carry it well list of lives i’ve broken reach from here to hell and a bad luck wind been blowin’ [...]
of Jeremy Barney‘s wrongful conviction. Now that the book is all but done, this is also the first anniversary that finds me feeling more than just “hopeful” that the whole tragic farce–a farce no less tragic for its being a farce (cf. Vanessa Place, The Guilt Project)–is about to be turned on its head.
also now reside at a new page: [link]
“Spectral evidence in 1692 was evidence that the accused appeared to the persons being tormented in the form of a specter. Sometimes it would take the shape of a bird, or sometimes it would be the specter of the person. But it would not be the actual person who would be accused of hitting or [...]
now reside at a new page: [link]
to a new page, also titled “Believe the Children.”
to a new page, also titled “The Cost of False Cases of Child Sexual Abuse.”
to a new page, also titled “Doubtless Innocent v. Defenseless: Wealth and Historic Witch Trials“
has a “killer” new home
I am grateful, honored, and excited to have contributed an essay to this important anthology: A Megaphone, edited by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young (Chain Links, 2011). My essay is long—6,306 words, to be exact—but here’s a sneak peak at a little paragraph where I list a bunch of people I love: Presently my feminist [...]
will be back. Like a witch hunt.
Author, publisher, and musician duncan b. barlow wrote a thoughtful and expansive review of my recent chapbook, Pluto: Never Forget, over at SeenAllOver.com. Peet’s scientific, linguistic, and cultural intertextuality continually branches out, inside, and around the book. The collection of stories requires the readers to engage themselves, follow trails, research, and enjoy. . . . [...]
to my restatement of the prosecution’s case against Jeremy Barney.
the bibliography for “Jeremy’s book.” And I dedicate said update to Dot Devota.
was eaten by this other post
which is the second installment of The Nines. This one’s called Pluto: Never Forget, and I feel deeply honored to see it published by one of my favorite small presses: Interbirth Books, run by Micah Robbins. Micah made both hardcover and softcover editions, and they are–like every book Micah puts his hands to–exquisite. There are [...]
All content © 2012 by Christian Peet unless otherwise noted.
No part of this website may be reproduced, whole or in part, except by a reviewer or student who wishes to quote brief passages, citing the author and this website.