The Satanic Panic of 1990s Italy
Forget the witch hunt of Salem. Some Italian families never saw their kids again.
It has been long observed that whatever trends start in the U.S. eventually wend their way to Italy, in most instances within 10-20 years. Case in point: SUVs. That craze began in the late nineties in the U.S. Here in Italy, SUVs are now dominating car sales, despite gas shortages and the prospect of having to navigate a welter of medieval villages that were never designed to accommodate hulking metal horses.
One of the most unfortunate trends that managed to transmigrate from the U.S. was a form of mass hysteria called Satanic panic, an erroneous belief that children are being subjected to organized ritualistic abuse. In the U.S., there are over 12,000 unsubstantiated cases where a person or group of people are accused of performing Satanic rituals involving children, blood sacrifice, occult practices, pedophilia, and sexual orgies.
QAnon is the heir apparent to Satanic panic, sharing as it does many of its hallmarks: organized ritual, children, horrific abuse. Only instead of the devil, QAnon adherents believe that liberal Hollywood actors, Democratic “elites,” and most especially Hillary Clinton are sifting children for a hormone that makes them high.
So, again, same story, same level of crazy, different Satan.
In Michelle Remembers, written by Michelle Smith and her psychiatrist husband Lawrence Pazder in 1980, and now widely discredited, it was alleged that as a child, Michelle had been the victim of lurid sexual abuse linked to Satanic ritual. Through a process called recovered memory therapy, also widely discredited, Pazder elicited these memories from his wife and then wrote a book about them. The book failed to corroborate any of its claims, but that didn’t stop it from laying the groundwork for nationwide mass hysteria, culminating in the McMartin preschool trial in 1983.
A woman named Judy Johnson had accused McMartin preschool teacher Ray Buckey of sodomizing her son. Because of her accusations, police investigators sent out a highly problematic letter to the preschool’s parents, stating that their children might have been abused and directing them to ask their children about “oral sex, fondling of genitals, buttock or chest area, and sodomy.”
They lit a powder keg.
All the McMartins were absolved of wrongdoing, which is a strong testament to the power of a fair trial, but the case lasted over seven years and cost 15 million dollars. Ray Buckey spent five years in jail without being convicted of any crime.
None of this had an effect on crazed parents who actually dug underneath the McMartin preschool looking for tunnels in which the alleged abuse took place. They organized rallies and appeared on television, sobbing about the atrocities committed against their children in the name of Satan. Over 100 other preschools were accused of hiding their own Satanic pedophile rings.
The media went wild. In May, 1985, the news program “20/20” did a piece on Satan worship, giving spine-chilling accounts of ritual mutilation of animals, rock music associated with devil worship, and backward messages in pop songs that were intended to lead impressionable youth astray. Vice Presidential wife Tipper Gore was the apotheosis of that hysteria, agitating for the placement of warning labels on popular music.
The McMartins’ lives were ruined. And the children who had been coerced into giving testimony that they saw witches fly or travel by hot-air balloon, that there were orgies at car washes and airports, were left traumatized. Kee MacFarlane and her team of psychiatric investigators were not licensed to conduct pediatric interviews, but that, too, was ignored, as was the fact that Judy Johnson, who made the first allegations, was a diagnosed paranoid psychotic who died of alcoholism a few years later.
As history has shown us again and again, mass hysteria, once set into motion, is a tide that cannot be stemmed by any amount of reason, fact or logic.
And that’s what happened in the early hours of July 7, 1997, in Mirandola, a small village in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region. Police arrived at the house of Federico Scotta and his wife, armed with a search warrant.
The police found no evidence that the Scottas sacrificed children or animals in a graveyard at night, but that didn’t stop them from taking the couple’s three-year-old daughter and infant son. A few months later when Scotta’s wife gave birth to a third child, it too was taken, right from the delivery room.
The Scottas never saw their children again.
At 5AM on November 12, 1998, in nearby Massa Finalese, near Modena, Lorena Morselli, a kindergarten teacher and mother of four, answered insistent knocking at the door. Seven policemen were there to serve her with a search warrant. They rifled through all her belongings, confiscating videotapes of baptisms and holy communions, and then delivered the final coup de grace: an emergency protection order alleging that Lorena Morselli and her husband, Delfino Covezzi were part of that same group of pedophiles who ritually abused children at a cemetery at night. Their four children were immediately removed from their custody and taken to an unknown location
Lorena rushed to her mother’s house only to find the adoring nonna in near collapse. The police had ransacked her home, too, arresting her husband and two of Lorena’s brothers. All had been accused of molesting children.
That was the last Lorena and her husband would ever see their four children.
The panic began in 1997 when “Fabrizio” Galliera (name changed to protect his then-minor status) was removed from his home by Italy’s Child Protective Services and placed with a family that could better provide for him. Fabrizio visited his biological parents occasionally, but spent most of his time with his foster parents.
Fabrizio told his foster mother that his brother “Marco” played “tricks under the sheets” on him and his sister. With justifiable concern, the woman took Fabrizio to a child psychologist named Valeria Donati. The name means “gifts” in Italian, which is a study in irony since it was, indeed, “gifts” that Valeria gave. With Valeria as his avid stenographer, Fabrizio recited more disturbing details about his family, eventually leading to their arrest.
The authorities believed they’d found a ring of Satanic pedophiles and lost no time separating children from their parents—16 in all. A poor single mother, Francesca Ederoclite, killed herself in abject despair in 1997. Six people were sentenced, including Federico Scotta, who ended up serving eight years in jail but a lifetime of revulsion in the court of public opinion as one of “the devils of Lower Modena.”
From other children, too, came stories of abuse, including nighttime rituals in cemeteries where children were forced to burn crosses and murder cats. Adults in black cloaks stuffed them inside coffins, serially murdering other children, and then dumping them into the river.
Suspicion and paranoia tore the region apart. Lifelong neighbors and friends were afraid to let their children play at other people’s houses.
The investigation led to the arrest of Giorgio Govoni, a greatly beloved local priest. Despite tossing his home for child pornography, which was never discovered, they did find on Father Govoni’s computer that he’d searched for “little girl,” “hard,” and “friends of children.”
Just last week, I did a search for “little girl.” I was looking for art work to use in an article I was writing.
After discovering that the prosecutors wanted to put him in jail for fourteen years, Father Govoni dropped dead of a heart attack in his lawyer’s office.
More than twenty years later, Federico Scotta went to trial at an appeals court after an investigation by intrepid author and journalist, Pablo Trincia, brought forward enough evidence to acquit him. According to Trincia, whose book Veleno (poison) makes a very compelling argument, all the children were coerced into giving false testimony.
“His [Fabrizio’s] background was troubled,” Trincia reported to The Guardian. “Years later it was discovered that the names he was coming up with were names of his schoolmates, so he was mixing things up. But the psychologist and Modena prosecutor believed there must be a pedophile ring.”
Just like with the McMartin case, the evidence in Modena was circumstantial. No bodies of murdered children had been found. There was no evidence of animal sacrifice or fires lit in the cemetery. Even clinical reports written by the examining gynecologist were challenged by other experts. There were no witnesses.
Not surprisingly, none of the Modena trials managed to prove that satanic rituals had actually taken place.
Lorena Morselli and Delfino Covezzi’s trials dragged on the longest. A mere handful of months before being found innocent, Covezzi died of a heart attack.
Lorena Morselli told a Vice reporter, “It's not just my husband who’s dead. There is a trail of blood. There are broken families, there is so much pain.”
Lest we think ourselves immune to senseless crackpottery, I am again reminded that in 2016, an armed QAnon conspiracist named Edgar Welch stormed Comet Ping Pong, a pizza joint in Washington, D.C. in an effort to stop a child sex-trafficking ring headed by Hillary Clinton.
Unfortunately, Satanic panic is still an ever-present danger. And as lovely as it is to delude ourselves into thinking we’ve learned our lesson, we haven’t.
As has been said before here at Cappuccino:
Copyright © 2022 Stacey Eskelin
What are your thoughts? I’d love to hear them. There’s a space for them below.
This is part of the reason I have no used for religion. It's so easy- TOO easy- to weaponize the ignorant and the easily manipulable in the service of an evil agenda. In my book, I wrote a chapter about the Jewish blood libel. It's sad how easily something can go from being merely ridiculous to becoming virulent and deadly.
Heartbreaking. Sometimes I really think humans shouldn’t survive (apart from the fact that we’re doing our best not to, what with our treatment of the planet). So many so-messed-up people.