Witch Hunt (2008)

User Rating:

7.9/10   

Directors:

Don Hardy Jr.
Dana Nachman

Writer:

Dana Nachman (writer)

Genre:

Documentary | Crime

Tagline:

Some convictions are criminal

Plot:

The story of several families who have their lives destroyed when their hometown is whipped into a frenzy by allegations of child molestation.

Plot Keywords:

Prison | Civil Rights | Child Molestation | Scandal | 1990s

Cast

Jackie Cummings	...	Herself
Jack Cummings	...	Himself
Brenda Kniffen	...	Herself
Scott Kniffen	...	Himself
Sean Penn	...	Narrator
John Stoll	...	Himself

Runtime:

USA:91 min | USA:91 min (original version)

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color | Color (HDCAM)

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital (Dolby 5.1) | Dolby SR

Quotes:

[first lines]
title cards: There are more than 2 million people in American prisons today. This film is dedicated to the thousands of them who are actually innocent.
Narrator: [narration] The images of your life, picture them, on your refrigerator, in albums, frames. They capture every stage, change, celebration. Without them, how much do you remember? How much do you rely on these photos to remind you of the journey you've taken in life...

Background, please

Although this film is a powerful indictment of legal injustice, and the criminal destruction of families and lives, much of the ground it covers already was examined by a "Dateline" episode in 2004, where the horrendous persecution of John Stoll and the other Bakersfield unfortunates finally was exposed.

It would be better to look back at the genesis of this vast "moral panic" that so gripped us from the 1980s to early '90s - since the Bakersfield case was but one of many. The most famous, at the time, was the McMartin Day School case in Southern California, in which toddler caregivers were accused of satanism and child sexual abuse on "evidence" that was nothing more than fairy tales spun from thin air. Other cases involved dozens if not hundreds of persons, mostly one or two people far from media attention hauled up on the most outrageous of allegations. As noted in the movie, scars and devastation this nonsense left behind is unhealed today.

There is a reason, I think, why the background of this hysteria is so deliberately obscured: The idea of widespread child abuse, which mutated into fantastic, lurid accusations of "satanism" and ritual murder, was fabricated and popularized by radical feminists in the 1970s as a means of attacking "the patriarchy" that dominated Western society from "our house" to Bauhaus to the White House. Popularized via indulgent, even solicitous media and academia, most of the country and the world believed adult males committed child sexual abuse as commonly as they wore shoes. In a reversal of how this trendy bit of ugly slander gained traction through incessant publicity and repetition, its progenitors are protected today. The subject merely has been dropped into the memory hole; as relentlessly presented the crazy charge was then, so energetically ignored the entire episode is today. Gloria Steinem and Ms. magazine? Not a subject for discussion. Robin Morgan? Mustn't be interviewed. You want to hold responsible the counterintuitive authors of this toxic blueprint? What are you - reactionary?

For the victims of this genuine witch hunt in Bakersfield, there is another reason this tragic subject isn't the subject of documentaries, films and television miniseries - and rarely mentioned at all except in courageous films like this one, and that's because the working-class people who spoke in drawls and drove pickup trucks were the victims, not the villains.