What It's Like to Be Falsely Branded a Satanic Child Molester
By Chase Madar
Elizabeth Ramirez, Kristie Mayhugh, Anna Vasquez, and Cassandra Rivera. All photos courtesy Deborah S Esquenazi Productions, LLC
This is the hell that was dealt out to a few dozen Americans in the great Satanic sexual abuse panic that burned its way across the nation in the 1980s and 90s. Rumors and media fervor, followed by wild and often impossible accusations from little children, methodically coaxed out by bogus experts, sent childcare employees and others to prison all over the United States. From the McMartin family's preschool in Los Angeles—the longest criminal trial in US history at the time, which ended with nearly all charges dropped—to the saga of the Amirault family's day-care center in Malden, Massachusetts, where prosecutors said about 40 kids were "tied to trees, sexually penetrated with knives, and tortured by a 'bad clown' in a "secret room,'" it was a dark time.
Often these sex panics were spiked with homophobia. Take the
persecution of Bernard Baran, a young daycare worker who had just come out to
his western Massachusetts community when he was accused by a homophobic family of raping their child. (He spent 21 years in prison before being released and eventually exonerated.) Or Kelly Michaels, sentenced
to 47 years on 115 counts against 20 children at a day-care center in Maplewood,
New Jersey. According to Michaels, when police entered the apartment she shared with another woman and saw
just one bed, she knew she was in trouble.
Anti-gay bigotry also fueled the preposterous case against Elizabeth
Ramirez, Kristie Mayhugh, Cassandra Rivera, and Anna Vasquez, four women barely
out of their teens—lesbians and Latinas, two of them mothers of young children. They were arrested in 1994 on what became satanic child sex abuse charges in San Antonio,
Texas, a town that was homophobic even by south Texas in the 1990s standards. And as
in previous instances of lesbians and gay men accused of satanic child abuse, critics say established LGBT advocacy groups left them hanging. As
the San Antonio Four's current lawyer, Mike Ware, told me, "Truthfully back
then, most of the [LGBT] groups were so marginalized themselves, at least in
San Antonio and that area, they were reluctant to get involved in any kind of
alleged sex crime."
The accusers were Liz Ramirez's two nieces, age seven and
nine. Their stories, like those of many children in these cases, were
inconsistent and all over the place. The girls had reportedly
made similar accusations against another person while staying with their mother
two years earlier while their father was suing for custody. On top of that, Liz
Ramirez claims she had spurned the advances of the children's father years before. (He denies this.) None of
the backstory was admitted as evidence
in the trial, and one of the two accusers has since recanted her story.
Attorney Mike Ware of the Texas Innocence Project appearing in court on behalf of the San Antonio Four
What gave the four defendants the final shove into prison
was junk science. An expert medical witness, Dr. Nancy Kellogg, testified
that photographs of the two little girls' hymens showed clear signs of trauma—a
claim that more recent medical research has since demolished (leading Dr. Kellogg
to recant
her testimony). When a new "junk science" law
came into effect in Texas in September 2013, allowing prisoners to challenge dodgy
expert testimony, the release of three of the women—Anna Vasquez had already been
paroled out—followed a few weeks later.
Last Wednesday, I met the San Antonio Four while they were
in New York for the Tribeca Film Festival premiere
of a new documentary, Southwest
of Salem, about their long struggle. At an event sponsored by the National Center for Reason and Justice, an advocacy
group for people accused of sex panic charges, and held at the Lower East Side
bookstore Bluestockings, the four strong women spoke to a standing-room-only
audience that sobbed and laughed with them.
They told stories of lives not destroyed but
seriously derailed. Ramirez and Rivera were separated from their young
children. Kristie Mayhugh had been enrolled in the prestigious veterinary program at
Texas A&M but is currently earning a living in an automotive plant—"a different line of work,"as she dryly puts it.
Throughout the ordeal, the four have never turned on one another. "I felt so bad to be responsible for what happened—I'm very grateful to
have friends who didn't hold anything against me," Ramirez told the audience
between sobs. The prosecution tried her separately from the other three, trying
to cast her as the ring leader in a courtroom proceeding soaked through with
homophobia and medieval weirdness. "The prosecutor tried to picture me like I
was sacrificing this girl," she said. "He tried to paint me as this person who got in
trouble all the time, was a satanist who was abusing these kids, who were my
own flesh and blood!"
Despite the hideous injustice the four have survived, they are
somehow able to look back at some moments with a piquant sense of humor. They shared
a big laugh with the Bluestockings audience at how their defense attorney
tried, unsuccessfully, to neutralize the courtroom homophobia by insisting they—and especially Vasquez and Mayhugh, who do not fall firmly on
the femme side of the dial—wear flouncy dresses and lots of makeup to their
trial. "And you can see in the movie how ridiculous we look," Mayhugh noted
with a deadpan smile. "Remember how I did your hair?" chimed in Rivera.
Now their convictions have been vacated, but they have not been formally exonerated. Ware, who is also the
executive director of the Innocence Project of Texas, voiced optimism qualified by the fact that the state of Texas has
a financial incentive to not
exonerate, given that it must pay out to each exoneree a sum of $80,000 per year
spent in prison. And the legal standard to be met for proving innocence—because
on this side of the looking glass it is innocence and not guilt that must be
proved—is a high one. As Ware told the audience at Bluestockings, "It's very
difficult to prove that something never happened."
Anna Vasquez in prison
Before the panel, I was able to squeeze in a few questions to get a sense of their personal experiences behind the court documents and headlines. Convicted child predators are, in pop culture anyway, targets for constant abuse inside prisons. Did their fellow prisoners believe their claims of innocence? "Yes, actually they did," Vasquez told me. "According to them, I did not fit the profile." Kristie Mayhugh likewise spoke of her former prison mates without bitterness. "You build a relationship with the people you're in with, almost like family," she said.
I also asked Vasquez about any reprisals she faced for refusing enrollment in a sex-offender treatment program while in prison, a defiant assertion of her innocence."I did face heavy repercussions. They took away my privileges—commissary privileges. They took away my contact visits with my family, and I was only able to see my mom, through a glass," she said. "And when I was on parole, I was put on a sex-offender registry, and they wanted me take sex-offender therapy, but I was able to prove through a series of tests that I didn't fit the category. And I got off the registry about a year and a half after my release."
If you're wondering whether the prosecutor, Philip Kazen, saw any consequences for stoking a homophobic sex panic to get his scalps, the answer is no. In fact, Kazen was elected judge after racking up his convictions, is now retired, and will never face any kind of sanction for railroading these four women. And as Mike Ware reminded me, "The DA's office in Bexar County hasn't even agreed yet that my clients are innocent." (Criminal DA Nico LaHood did say in February, "I have some serious reservations about this case, and I don't believe pursuing these cases would be in the interest of justice.")
But Ramirez is rightfully amazed they haven't already been completely exonerated.
"It's the same thing as at
the beginning—how can you convict me of a crime that never happened?" she said. "How can
you not exonerate us? It's been twenty years since 1994, and our story has remained,
and we still remain, the same."
Readers can contact Bexar County Criminal District Attorney Nico LaHood at 210 335 2311 to politely but firmly request a full exoneration.
Follow Chase Madar on Twitter.
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