Ahem, people, please do NOT quote entire messages before replying. Turn
off your email's damned auto-quote feature, or learn the simple key
commands (in Windows; CTRL+A followed by the delete key) which will
delete the quoted message before you start typing in the message window.

David Ehrenstein wrote:

>I don't think the film came to any conclusion about
>Jesse Friedman -
>
Not exactly, but it left me with the strong impression that he was
completely innocent, and that his dad was probably innocent of molesting
anyone too. I think it's true that there are pedophiles by inclination
who go through their whole lives without molesting anyone.

I agree with you completely about the McMartin case and the case
documented in that New Yorker article, which I read (I think that case
was in Washington state, actually). The therapeutic climate that emerged
a few decades ago resulted in massive cases of the abuse of very young
children BY THERAPISTS, who would take three year olds, whose grasp on
reality is tenuous at best, in inject them with the suggestions that
they had been raped, fondled, abused. It turns out that experiments done
much later with kids of that age show that they are suggestible: a
therapist who asked a kid who had never been to the hospital about his
"operation" would get "no operation" the first time, but on repeated
asking over a period of weeks would get an elaborate story about surgery
for a broken leg or something. And their experimenters were far more
gentle than those insistent therapists, who would keep pressuring kids
who said nothing had happened. The result is that there are hundreds of
teenagers who now think they were abused as toddlers, and many people
(there have been other cases like McMartin) languishing in prison. In
that context I thought this was another such case. But none of this
means that abuse doesn't happen, because it does, and kids in the
"Friedmans" case were older, and while I can't be sure the Times article
convinced me that the film is biased, had an agenda, and probably had
the wrong agenda, which is of course much worse.

- Fred