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A note to listeners. This story contains sensitive content including sexual abuse, child murder,

and dark spiritual themes.

It may not be suitable for all listeners. Hey, everyone. Before we jump into this bonus episode and introduce our guests, we wanted to offer some context.

I'm Mike Kaspur. And I'm Rebecca Sebastian. Devil in the Deep Blue Sea told a big story about the satanic panic of the 1980s and 90s.

And in some episodes, particularly episodes 2 through 4, we dealt with sensitive topics.

Stories like the McMartin preschool case, satanic ritual abuse, and the story of Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder, who co-authored the book Michelle remembers. That book is

largely credited with triggering the satanic panic when it came out in 1980. In it, Pazder claimed

to have helped Michelle recover childhood memories of satanic ritual abuse through controversial

and largely discredited therapy techniques. Yes, and we received feedback from listeners, some of whom felt that in our effort to spotlight

bad investigative work and discredited claims of sexual ritual abuse, that we may have

unintentionally downplayed the reality of abuse and the complexity of memory.

Right, and that was never our intention. We also wanted to be clear

that we know the evil of abuse, systemic and personal, happens. And we want to support the

healing of every victim and survivor. What we are trying to do is call out how abuse allegations

and investigations are handled and mishandled, not question whether or not

abuse happens. A case and point for this is that we spent a lot of time on the show talking

about the epidemic of sexual abuse inside evangelical churches, particularly inside the SBC. We know

all too well that abuse happens. Our concern was to highlight the fact that when we embrace a kind of mythology of abuse,

...