Margaret Kelly Michaels was a young drama student who moved to Northern New Jersey to be near the New York theater scene. She taught nursery school in Maplewood, NJ for 9 months. She spent 6 years in jail before her conviction of 115 ridiculous counts of sexual and physical ritual abuse was overturned.
This case has been good for the publishing industry. Two books have already been published: "Nap Time" by Lisa Manshel and "Not My Child" by Patricia Crowley(pub. Avon Books, 1990). Both are pro prosecution and Crowley is the pseudonym of one of the accusing parents (her role in the case is clear in the book). The former book has more information about the case, the latter gives the parents' view. Crowley, a professional journalist, of course did extensive research for her book. The most damming evidence from Michaels' past she found was that Michaels was depressed in her last year in college and took photographs of a toilet as part of an art class.
If you can picture a method of torturing children, it was probably included in the accusation against Michaels. Some of the acts she was accused of: playing "Jingle Bells" while naked, arranging pileup games where children piled up naked on top of each other, creating other naked children games such as "butts and penises", coating herself and the children with excrement, making children eat excrement and drink urine, sticking knives, forks, spoons, and Lego blocks into various orifices, molesting children in a tractor, forcing children to have sex with each other, performing oral sex on children, making children perform oral sex on her, teaching children to abuse others, coating genitals and other body parts with peanut butter and making children lick it off, showing children a bloody tampon. The children's stories were remarkably consistent -- every "communicating" child claiming to be penetrated stated that an object went in an orifice. Children who disclosed no abuse were deemed "non-communicating".
The case began when a few days after Kelly left Wee Care for another center, a boy during his doctors visit said "My teacher does this to me at nap time" just before a doctor inserted a thermometer. Crowley's book reveals that for the past several months the boy's family was having marital problems so severe that the father spent some nights away from home. The child had become aggressive and appeared to crave attention. He frequently made statements like "I'm warm. Should I have my temperature taken?" Of course Crowley interprets this as a subtle disclosure of abuse rather than a cry for attention.
The prosecution presented extensive hearsay testimony of parents recalling symptoms that their children exhibited during and after Kelly's employment at Wee Care. This testimony was generally based on parents recalling the events after at least a year later than they are alleged to have occurred. In at least one instance a parent testified that the apparent abuse destroyed a marriage.
The prosecution's chief expert witness was Eileen Treacy, a fringe psychologist with neither a license, MD, or PhD. Her testimony conveyed to the jury that scientific evidence indicates that the children's symptoms were caused by sexual abuse, even though most psychologists and psychiatrists would disagree strongly with drawing such a conclusion.
The defense attempted to rebut this evidence with testimony from several experts including Prof. David Brodzinsky, the head of Rutgers psychology department. Brodzinsky testified that the psychological community did not accept "Child Sex Abuse Syndrome" as a means of diagnosing sexual abuse. He presented his the results of a survey he carried out on parents observations of their preschool children's behavior. The survey showed that many of the Wee Care children's symptoms were reported at severe levels by most of the survey's respondents. The prosecutions attack of the survey (as reported in Crowley's book)-- that the professor was remiss in not informing the parents that he was doing the survey for the purpose of Michaels' trial.
Furthermore the defense was not allowed to have its expert examine the children until after Michaels was convicted and the insurance company insisted on such examinations before any settlement. Before the trial parents had insisted that such interviews would be too traumatic to their children.The judge also banned defense expert psychiatric testimony that Michaels did not come close to fitting well-known profiles of sadomasochistic child molesters.
The apex of this trial was the defendant's performance of "Jingle Bells" on an electronic keyboard at the request of Prosecutor Goldberg during the cross examination (see "Nap Time"). Of course the defense objected that this was grandstanding, but the prosecution considered the quality of her performance evidence that she exaggerated her musical abilities on her resume. Thus the judge briefly converted the courtroom into a concert hall. The prosecutor began his closing arguments with the folk song "Both Sides Now" in the rebuttal, to demonstrate that Michaels' writing these lyrics in her rollbook proved her mental instability.
On March 11, an New Jersey Appellate Court (264 N. J. Super. 579, 625 A.2d 489 (1993)) stated that "Behavioral indicators of child sexual abuse may be helpful but are rarely conclusive. Contrary to the belief of the trial judge, no amount of cross examination could have undone the harm caused by Treacy's purported validations. The defendant's convictions were obtained by the use of expert testimony which should have been excluded. The impact of the error was so overwhelming as to require reversal."
The appellate court also maintained that the judges handling of the children's televised testimony conveyed to the jury that the judge believed the children and that an acquittal would be "personally offending the judge," although they did not agree that the procedure of allowing the children to avoid in court testimony violated the confrontation clause of the Constitution. The appellate judges observed "... the children manifested virtually no reticence or emotion when speaking of the defendant or the alleged acts of abuse... Having been visited by the prosecutor's staff the night before their testimony in almost every instance, their testimony appeared well prepared, rote, and detached."
The court opinion also discusses the considerable amount of literature on the suggestibility of children and the importance of scientifically proper interviewing procedure. The justices note many violations of the guidelines published in "The Manual of the National Center for the Prosecution of Child Abuse." They state "Unfortunately, the initial interview of the children in this case were not recorded. We do not have any reason to believe, however, that they were any less offensive than the subsequent interviews."
Michaels plans to publicize her ordeal and has written articles in The National Review (inset to "Trial by Therapy") and Ms. Magazine ("I Am Not a Monster", Nov. 1993). The Essex County Prosecutor finally dropped the charges in this case, but only after the NJ state supreme court blasted the prosecutions interviews of the children. This is probably the first case in which a high court barred testimony because the children's memories were tainted by improper interviewing.