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The documentary "Witch Hunt" on MSNBC

When I was in high school, our history teacher organized a trip to Salem, MA. We visited the Counting House and the House of the Seven Gables that figured in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s magnificent novels; both locations brought literature alive to a book junkie like me.

We also stopped at the Salem Witch Museum, a somewhat cheesy attraction with exhibits about the 1692 witch trials that killed 19 of the accused in the gallows or under pressing stones. Religious hysteria, a land dispute gone wrong, bored girls and the stifling atmosphere of a town where everyone had to conform led to the accusations, trials and deaths that Arthur Miller brought to vivid life in The Crucible.

Many of those that weren’t hanged or who didn’t suffocate to death under stones pressed upon their chests also paid a heavy price.  I never forgot the story of Dorothy Good, who was chained in a dark prison with her mother for nine months. Dorothy was five years old when she went to prison. Years later, her father asked for assistance caring for her in her teen years because her time in jail had left her mentally ill.

Arthur Miller’s play found parallels between the Salem witch trials and the McCarthy era in the 1950s when those accused of Communist sympathies lost their careers or their reputations. We would like to imagine that our society will never see the likes of the 1692 witch trials or the 1950s House Un-American Activities Committee, the hammer that Joseph McCarthy used to batter his opponents.

Witch hunts are not the stuff of ancient history, though. MSNBC aired a gripping two-hour documentary on April 12 that told the unbelievable story of innocent people accused of unspeakable acts–without proof and without recourse to anyone who would listen. Witch Hunt focuses on events at Bakersfield, CA in the early 1980s when an overzealous district attorney and badly trained police investigators and social workers embarked on a reckless crusade against child sexual abuse.

(MSNBC will also air Witch Hunt at 3 p.m. on Sunday, April 26, according to the filmmakers’ blog. The documentary’s executive producer and narrator is actor Sean Penn. For a trailer and more information about the film, click here.)

Witch Hunt follows several people who were accused of abusing their own children as part of eight sex rings. Medical exams and evidence on hand could have confirmed that nothing had happened, but the task at hand by the politically ambitious district attorney was to gain convictions so that he could look tough on crime.

Children who are now adults recalled how police and social workers took advantage of their innocence to ask for confirmation that their own parents had raped them or used them in satanic rituals. (California was also the site of the infamous McMartin preschool sex scandal that resulted in more innocent people losing their freedom and dignity to baseless accusations.)

The stories of the 46 people victimized by the events in Witch Hunt are chilling. Innocent people spent years or even two decades in San Quentin, one of the worst prisons in the country, after they were convicted. They had to fear hardened criminals whose code makes them particularly vicious against those jailed for crimes against children.

The victims of the Bakersfield witch hunts suffered the humiliation of being wrongfully accused of the most heinous crimes against their own children–by their own children. Their losses were compounded by knowing that words put in their children’s mouths were used to convict them.

The central character in Witch Hunt is a feisty little man named John Stoll, who was convicted in 1985 of abusing his own son and some of the boys whom he allowed to use his pool. The documentary shows his release from prison in 2004 at the age of 61. The Innocence Project secured his release.

The most frightening aspect of Witch Hunt is that Ed Jagels, the district attorney who presided over this travesty of justice in the 1980s, is still in power in Kern County, CA.

Witch Hunt is a gripping documentary about a time when the imagined sexual abuse of children took the place of accusations of witchcraft or Communism to poison a community that fell under the wicked spell of a figure in power who played upon their worst fears.

The reputation of the Salem elders who hanged innocent people and of McCarthy’s henchmen left a dark blot on our history pages. It’s a shame that the modern equivalents of McCarthy are still overseeing justice in Bakersfield, CA.