Child “Sexual Assault” Frame-Up

San Antonio Four: Latina Lesbians Exonerated

After 22 years of torture at the hands of the American “justice” system, the San Antonio Four have finally been exonerated. In 1994, Elizabeth Ramirez, Anna Vasquez, Cassandra Rivera and Kristie Mayhugh were falsely accused of molesting two young nieces of Ramirez. The four Latina lesbians, close friends who were in their early 20s at the time of the trials, were all wrongfully convicted of aggravated sexual assault without a shred of real evidence. Ramirez, branded the “ringleader,” was tried in 1997 and sentenced to 37 and a half years in prison. The other three were tried together in 1998 and given 15-year terms. The driving force of the frame-up was overt anti-gay bigotry reinforced with heavy doses of lurid “Satanic Panic” in the media and in the courtroom. The case is powerfully depicted in the documentary, Southwest of Salem, which premiered last year at New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival.

Throughout their ordeal, the San Antonio Four steadfastly maintained their innocence. They refused plea bargains that would have reduced their sentences, and in prison, they declined early release on parole as it would have required them to admit guilt. The women continued their fight after they were released, and finally, last November, all four were vindicated by a Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruling that cleared their names. That court characterized the original allegations, which caused these courageous women to languish behind bars for an average of 14 years, as “fantastical.”

In the original trials, the prosecution drew an explicit link between homosexuality and child abuse and “Satanic rituals.” Claiming that Ramirez had “sacrificed” her nieces on the “altar of lust,” the prosecution told the jury that being a lesbian was consistent with abusing girls (Rolling Stone, 13 October 2016). To further fuel the anti-sex hysteria, the court brought in Dr. Nancy Kellogg as an “expert” witness. Kellogg, who claimed to have “evaluated” more than 10,000 children for abuse, is now known to have presented bogus medical testimony about what the sexual organs of little girls should look like. After examining the genitals of Ramirez’s nieces, Kellogg retailed this junk science to the Texas jury, claiming there was evidence of “painful trauma” and “penetration” by “some object.” As an explanation for the alleged crimes—described in sensationalist detail—Kellogg suggested they were due to devil worship. Tabloid headlines like “Kids in Satanic Sex Horror” flooded the local press.

The San Antonio witchhunt has been referred to as the last chapter of the “Satanic sex ring” panic of the mid 1980s and the early ’90s. Hundreds of innocent people were imprisoned for supposedly raping, sodomizing and torturing children. During these trials, tales of sexual abuse were bound up with accounts of naked dancing, ritual animal sacrifice, cannibalism and the drinking of blood. No shred of physical evidence of such activities was ever found, and children as young as two years old were treated as unimpeachable witnesses.

The “abuse” mania—and its associated claims of Satanism, normally the preserve of the far-out religious fringe—became a stock feature at conferences of social workers, doctors and therapists. Part of turning these professionals into adjuncts of a massive apparatus of investigators and “experts” determined to discover abuse was the 1974 Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, sponsored by Democrat Walter Mondale. The Act mandated mental health professionals, teachers and social workers to look for abuse of children and report suspicions to the police.

Many of those framed up were employees of day care centers. The crusade was a demented reflection of an ideological campaign that “good” mothers should give up their jobs and stay at home with their kids rather than subjecting them to the supposed dangers of childcare centers. For their part, the bourgeois feminists recycled the scare campaign, headlining a cover story in Ms. magazine in 1993: “Believe It! Cult Ritual Abuse Exists.”

This state-sponsored frenzy, which peaked at the height of right-wing reaction under Ronald Reagan, is chillingly documented in Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt (1995) written by Michael Snedeker and Debbie Nathan. (We reviewed the book in “Satan, the State and Anti-Sex Hysteria,” Women and Revolution No. 45, Winter-Spring 1996.) The underlying purpose of such witchhunts, which manipulate fear and bolster racial and sexual prejudices, is to strengthen the powers of the capitalist state to regiment society. Stoking panic also serves to divert attention from the real brutality of life in this twisted, bigoted and racist country. While Democratic and Republican politicians prate on about “protecting our children,” the U.S. imperialists bomb children halfway around the world and cause millions in this country to go hungry.

Exposing the Frame-up

The authors of Satan’s Silence helped bring the gross frame-up of the San Antonio Four to light. It was their organization, the National Center for Reason and Justice (NCRJ), that took up the case in 2008 and enlisted the help of the Innocence Project of Texas in 2010. The NCRJ sent trial transcripts to documentary filmmaker Deborah Esquenazi who went on to make Southwest of Salem, which in turn galvanized support for the women nationwide.

The compelling film exposes the false evidence and anti-gay rhetoric used to railroad the four women, using clips from interviews going back to the arrests and Esquenazi’s own interviews with them and their family members, as well as home movies, TV news and court footage. The documentary gives a glimpse of the lives of these working-class Latinas who were not long out of high school. Anna Vasquez, who was working at a fast food restaurant, had started college but had to drop out because it cost too much. Two of the women had young children at the time they were imprisoned.

Southwest of Salem also shows the 2012 recantation of one of the alleged abuse victims, Stephanie Limon, now a young adult. Admitting to having been pressured by her father and grandmother to invent the accusations, Limon recounts repeatedly telling government inquisitors, “nothing happened,” but they kept saying: “You know something happened.” When she came forward years later to tell the truth, she had to fight to maintain custody of her own children.

The title of Esquenazi’s documentary aptly invokes the Salem, Massachusetts, witch trials of 1692. Hundreds were prosecuted and dozens executed, victims of Puritan hysteria. More than 250 years later, another American witchhunt was waged, the Cold War McCarthyism of the 1950s. The “Red Scare” aimed to criminalize membership in the Communist Party and break its ties to the labor movement through firings, prosecutions and blacklisting. Communist teachers were special targets, lest they corrupt little children with their fiendish opinions. The anti-Communist purges were accompanied by a “Lavender Scare” that drove thousands of suspected “homosexuals or other sex perverts” from government jobs and the military with the claim that gays and lesbians had a “corrosive” influence on fellow employees.

The civil rights movement broke up the stultifying anti-Communist social climate of the 1950s. The tumultuous struggles of the 1960s, especially the fight for black equality and the Vietnam antiwar movement, achieved some democratic gains for black people and women—including the end of Jim Crow segregation and the 1973 legalization of abortion.

But as long as the capitalist system remains in place, even the most minimal rights achieved for working people, women and minorities can be rolled back, as the onslaught against abortion and voting rights demonstrates. The 1980s were marked by a concerted drive to reverse the gains of the civil rights era, including increasing the presence of religion in public life and other efforts to impose social conformity. In our 1996 Women and Revolution article on the “Satanic ritual abuse” panic, we wrote how the anti-sex witchhunt “encompassed anti-gay bigotry, censorship of art shows and rock lyrics, ‘kiddie porn’ prosecutions, banning of distribution of condoms and other forms of birth control to teens, the bombing of abortion clinics and the jailing of ‘deviants’.” We also noted that many feminists had scandalously allied with the Christian right and signed on as adjuncts to the government’s “morals” police. The same goes for today. Feminists, who seek to give bourgeois and petty-bourgeois women a chance to compete in the male club of power and privilege, are in bed with the state in crusades against pornography, prostitution and youth sexuality.

In recent years anti-sex bigots have focused on an alleged rash of “sexual predators” lurking on the internet supposedly to target children. Untold thousands have been victimized just for viewing porn or communicating with others in the privacy of their own homes, as well as for engaging in consensual sex with minors—none of which would be crimes in a rational society. Across the U.S., there are now 850,000 people on sex offender registries. Anna Vasquez recounts in Southwest of Salem that because she refused to attend classes for sex offenders while in prison, she was punished with solitary confinement. A scene in the film illustrates the intrusive regulations that make normal life impossible for someone on a sex offender registry: prohibited from going past schools or parks, Anna is shown carefully reviewing the one permitted route she could take to the grocery store.

The San Antonio Four endured terrible hardship and deserve every penny they can wrest from the state. But nothing can replace the years stolen from these women, framed up because they were openly gay, working-class Latinas without connections. The American capitalist legal system is designed to provide justice for the rich and powerful, not working people and minorities.

Anti-sex bigotry and vicious state repression will persist as long as the system of capitalism, based on private property and production for profit, survives. Sexist stereotyping and attitudes flow from women’s subjugation in the patriarchal family, which, together with religion, serves as a key prop of the capitalist system. The family instills subservience to authority and promotes a puritanical morality against anything that deviates from the monogamous family ideal—from premarital sex to gay sex. The oppression of women can only be ended through socialist revolution.