xxi behavior, and even of one’s own experience, can be cloaked by a trick of the unconscious mind, which draws a certain amnesia over a painful past.”24 In No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusations, False Witness and Other Terrors of Our Times, journalist Dorothy Rabinowitz focuses primarily on the case against Gerald Amirault and his family. The book was based on a series of Rabinowitz’s articles initially published in The Wall Street Journal, for which she eventually won a Pulitzer Prize. It laments that in the late 1990s, the “Supreme Judicial Court” in Massachusetts, where the Amiraults’ resided and had run Fells Acres, “continued to find no miscarriage of justice.”25 These works provide detailed accounts of case participants and a chronology of events, collectively mounting a compelling challenge to guilty verdicts. Journalist Debbie Nathan and lawyer Michael Snedecker offer the most comprehensive overview of the satanic panic in Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt, first published in 1995. The book centers on McMartin but delves into several other substantial cases that influenced, and coincided with, Ray Buckey’s arrest. In an attempt to understand their cause, Nathan and Snedecker briefly cite the role of media sources, particularly books, but also news programs and tabloid television.26 They likewise look at issues of gender and social class, providing an essential foundational text for this dissertation. This work also contributes to a growing number of important studies on moral panics in the United States, many of which mention the satanic panic as only one of dozens of unwarranted hysterical episodes over sexual behavior, and issues of 24 Wright, Satan, 199-200. 25 Rabinowitz, Tyrannies, 210. 26 Nathan and Michael Snedecker, Silence, 4, 234, 242, 113. .