Death of a Satanic Panicker

April 13, 2024 10:32 AM

"I began to add a few things up and realized there was no way I could come from a little town in Iowa, be eating 2,000 people a year, and nobody said anything about it," said one of Bennett Braun's patients, later in life. Braun, a psychiatrist specializing in repressed memories, was a leading figure in the Satanic Panic of the 80s and 90s, and now he is dead (NYT obit; archive link here).
posted by mittens (58 comments total)

What a tremendous fuckin fraud.
posted by saladin at 10:52 AM on April 13 [8 favorites]

What a terrific month for shitty people dying. It's great.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 10:53 AM on April 13 [15 favorites]

*
posted by Two unicycles and some duct tape at 10:58 AM on April 13

*
posted by biogeo at 11:03 AM on April 13

I saw somebody on social media say that it looks as though millennials have put an end to the social convention of not speaking ill of the dead. I concur with that, and with the person's approval of the change. As someone who was playing D&D during the height of the Panic, I can say based on firsthand experience that Bennett Braun created a lot of pointless misery by catering to reactionary paranoids and made money doing it. I'm glad he's dead and I'm only sorry it took so long.
posted by Ipsifendus at 11:06 AM on April 13 [26 favorites]

In addition to the national satanic panic, my town had the burden of being the home of Ricky "Say You Love Satan" Kasso. Fuck this dude, glad he's gone.
posted by grumpybear69 at 11:07 AM on April 13

(Probably worth noting every once in a while for folks who are new or just missed it: in obituary threads on MeFi it is common to post a "." as a sign of respect, a moment of silence. It's less common but standard to post an "*" as a sign you think this person was an asshole, a la Kurt Vonnegut. This guy was definitely an asshole.)
posted by biogeo at 11:08 AM on April 13 [27 favorites]

If the legacy of the Millennial generation is that we loved avocado toast and made it okay to call dead assholes assholes, I'm pretty happy with that.
posted by biogeo at 11:09 AM on April 13 [40 favorites]

Do they have to create a special hell for this guy?
posted by Jacen at 11:16 AM on April 13 [4 favorites]

That NYT link makes it pretty clear he continued to malpractice after he got out of the Satanism business. Warehousing people and drugging them to the gills, mostly women. What a career.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 11:23 AM on April 13 [9 favorites]

Yeah, he lost his license, moved to a different state where he continued his fuckery, got sued again, lost his license AGAIN, and then finally died.
posted by Spike Glee at 11:28 AM on April 13 [3 favorites]

⛧
posted by majick at 11:32 AM on April 13 [56 favorites]

Do they have to create a special hell for this guy?

If there’s any justice, he got a special imaginary hell with a special imaginary devil. But, this time, he can’t drag anyone else in there with him.
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:53 AM on April 13 [8 favorites]

What a poison to modern society he tried to spread. And succeeded. The rejections of rationalism and extolling of superstition during the late 20th century have much to thank for the efforts of this man. And that poison pollutes our world even today. Fuck this guy.
posted by 2N2222 at 12:01 PM on April 13 [5 favorites]

*
posted by Ickster at 12:02 PM on April 13

In this case, Hell itself would be the "Ironic Punishments Division"
posted by whuppy at 12:15 PM on April 13 [5 favorites]

"I began to add a few things up and realized there was no way I could come from a little town in Iowa, be eating 2,000 people a year, and nobody said anything about it,"


Not with that attitude.
posted by Naberius at 12:18 PM on April 13 [40 favorites]

It's hard to believe, but I'm here to tell you, the satanic panic is a real thing that really happened. lots of people's lives were ruined.

Podcasting revolutionary Sarah Marshall kicked off the you're wrong about cast with this, where she holds expertise.

Could you believe your neighbor's 10yo was literally killing and eating infants? People wrongly did. Cops did. Judges did. Newspapers did. Elected officials did.

Real witchunts get started in modern times and the human wreckage they leave is heartbreaking.

The Q freaks are gonna take themselves too seriously one day, and things are gonna get out of hand. Pay attention, and crush it.
posted by j_curiouser at 12:19 PM on April 13 [25 favorites]

One day? People were already getting hurt years ago.
posted by GenjiandProust at 12:21 PM on April 13 [7 favorites]

I was going to rant about how stupid and destructive the Satanic panic was, but wanted to share these horrific bits from TFA:

Dr. Braun’s inpatient unit at Rush became a magnet for referrals and a warehouse for patients, some of whom he kept medicated and under supervision for years...

Dr. Braun and Dr. Sachs sent Mrs. Burgus and her children to a mental health facility in Houston, where they were held apart for nearly three years with minimal contact with the outside world...Dr. Braun kept other patients under similar conditions at Rush or elsewhere.

He persuaded one woman to have an abortion because, he convinced her, she was the product of ritualistic incest; he persuaded another to undergo tubal ligation to prevent having more children within her supposed cult.

What a monster.
posted by doctornemo at 12:29 PM on April 13 [16 favorites]

We can differ. The delusions are the same flavor, but the degree of cultural acceptance is quite different. I haven't heard of anyone yet imprisoned by the justice system for adrenochrome harvesting.
posted by j_curiouser at 12:42 PM on April 13 [1 favorite]

Is there one guy responsible for the child trafficking panic? Can we do him next?
posted by amanda at 12:43 PM on April 13 [2 favorites]

Ron Watkins
posted by j_curiouser at 12:44 PM on April 13 [1 favorite]

Tommy Tuberville, US Senator from Alabama, declared the Democrats were a Satanic cult in a recent tweet. (Link doesn't go to X.)
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 12:50 PM on April 13 [7 favorites]

as a sign you think this person was an asshole, a la Kurt Vonnegut.

Just to make it perfectly clear, Kurt Vonnegut was no asshole. But he did suggest the asterisk (*) as the sign of the asshole. ~

So it goes...
posted by chavenet at 1:29 PM on April 13 [19 favorites]

Astounding that the worst thing that ever happened to this guy was losing his license. Does this level of malpractice not rise to criminal? What would if not drugging and imprisoning people?
posted by TurnKey at 1:34 PM on April 13 [3 favorites]

* ass-to-risk
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 1:34 PM on April 13 [5 favorites]

One of the lessons we should take from the Panic, and from ensuing political events, is that extraordinary popular delusions and crowd madness are not extraordinary in the least, nor even a little obsolete.

When I was a young nerd I was really interested in nuclear weapons. I became pretty expert about the open-source knowledge of the technologies, both of the warheads and their delivery platforms. I had a pretty good grasp of the counts for the deployed arsenals and what was publicly known about the strategies for how they might be used. Also I was conversant with late Imperial Russian history and the history of the USSR, particularly its diplomatic relations with the US. I was not a Cold Warrior (at one point I had some ambitions to be paid for my opinions about why the Cold Warriors were wrong but that did not sell) but pretty much took it for granted that things were the way they were.

I feel pretty certain that if humanity manages to accumulate even another hundred years of history, the whole Cold Ware era will be seen as a kind of worldwide apocalyptic hallucination. The eventuality that the US constantly prepared for (basically a re-run of Pearl Harbor, only with Warsaw Pact armored divisions overruning Germany instead of Japanese planes bombing a Navy base) never had any possibility of happening. The Soviet reaction... one can grant the Soviets some scope for righteous overreaction to the constant American escalations in the arms race. But they did not have to replicate all of the American errors. MacNamara was just as right for them as he was for us, and if they had just built a few hundred, or even a thousand, reliable single-warhead ICBMs and declared victory, they would have been the winners in fact.

Nothing either side did in that whole decades-long hemorrhage of treasure and sacrifice of opportunity all over the world made any sense at all from any remotely objective viewpoint. This is the norm, now that the world is too complicated for most people to understand.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 1:59 PM on April 13 [20 favorites]

One person who deserves such a star is Oprah Winfrey. Remember her role in all the day care child sex abuse scandals she enabled?

The McMartin day care case, for example.

Oprah was once cited as a person most likely to go to Heaven when she died. The Buckeys spent years in jail, as did Kelly Michaels in the Wee Care case. Oprah has earned her own circle in Hell for what she did to them.
posted by y2karl at 2:10 PM on April 13 [21 favorites]

A dear friend of mine got caught up in this panic as a psychiatric patient of a doctor in another state. In my opinion the therapy and treatments she was subjected to caused an immense amount of harm that persists to this day. So yeah, fuck this guy.
posted by Tuba Toothpaste at 2:28 PM on April 13 [7 favorites]

P.T. Barnum had it right a long time ago.
posted by Czjewel at 2:31 PM on April 13 [1 favorite]

I've noticed that the anti-trans panic - especially the "dangerous to children" stuff - really heated up right around the time that the Southern Baptist sexual abuse scandals were coming out a couple of years ago.

Makes me wonder what they were trying to divert attention away from with the Satanic Panic.
posted by clawsoon at 2:39 PM on April 13 [19 favorites]

P.T. Barnum said any number of things. Which one did you have in mind?
posted by y2karl at 2:41 PM on April 13

I saw somebody on social media say that it looks as though millennials have put an end to the social convention of not speaking ill of the dead.

Well, "speaking ill of the dead" started to be a Thing with the deaths of some notable monsters (Nixon, Thatcher, etc); but it REALLY got rolling around 2007, when (...decidedly non-millennial...) Fox News decided to invent ways to piss on the memory of the sainted Kurt Vonnegut.

I think that after that, the gloves came off.
posted by AsYouKnow Bob at 2:46 PM on April 13 [1 favorite]

Or, Czjewel, did you have H.L. Mencken in mind regarding how No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of thr American people. Which Mencken never said so directly but nevertheless obviously thought as much.
posted by y2karl at 2:54 PM on April 13

y2 Karl, no, but I like that quote. Never heard it before I don't believe.
posted by Czjewel at 3:23 PM on April 13

y2karl. I was referring to the famous "sucker" quote. I'm aware not everyone agrees that he ever said it, but I've believed it for so long now that it really doesn't matter who really said it.
posted by Czjewel at 3:39 PM on April 13 [3 favorites]

Makes me wonder what they were trying to divert attention away from with the Satanic Panic.

I had not thought of that, but the timing is right, plus Desantis’ need to separate himself from Trump.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:13 PM on April 13 [2 favorites]

Makes me wonder what they were trying to divert attention away from with the Satanic Panic.

"Normal" people committing child abuse, probably.
posted by clew at 4:25 PM on April 13 [13 favorites]

I’d like to think I never heard of this shitheel before, but back around 1983 the sister of one of my D&D buddies gave me a pamphlet called A Position Paper On Fantasy Role Playing Games and it seems likely the “findings” of this malignant joker would be quoted in it.
posted by house-goblin at 4:36 PM on April 13 [1 favorite]

They were trying to convince people that women needed to be home with children rather than having a life outside the family structure.
posted by zenzenobia at 4:38 PM on April 13 [4 favorites]

Satanic pandered, am I right?

Every accusation from the Right is a confession.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:39 PM on April 13 [3 favorites]

I had to research that sucker born every minute quote.

Very interesting story.
posted by y2karl at 4:40 PM on April 13 [1 favorite]

zenzenobia: They were trying to convince people that women needed to be home with children rather than having a life outside the family structure.

Good point. Do I remember correctly that most of the satanic stuff was supposedly happening in daycares? So really a daycare panic?
posted by clawsoon at 8:20 PM on April 13 [1 favorite]

ctrl-F "people georg"
sighs
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 4:39 AM on April 14 [6 favorites]

The Satanic Panic, the daycare workers - all these false abuses of child abuse are so horrific on multiple levels. They ruin the lives of the people accused, there is trauma inflicted on the kids being convinced these things happened to them (and the kids' family members).

But then this also acts to cover up and distract from actual cases of child sexual abuse. It makes it easier for people not to believe children who were actually abused. Repressed memories can happen in cases of trauma. But they should never be "discovered" by a therapist or someone else actively trying to "uncover" them.

Ugh, everything about this makes me sick. Fuck this guy. I'm glad he's gone. I wish more had been done to hold him accountable while he was still alive.
posted by litera scripta manet at 5:36 AM on April 14 [5 favorites]

If the legacy of the Millennial generation is that we loved avocado toast and made it okay to call dead assholes assholes, I'm pretty happy with that.

Gen X should be so lucky.
posted by box at 6:34 AM on April 14 [5 favorites]

*

Even though I have always been fascinated by this story, doing independent papers in school and all, the daycare panic did not really come home to me until I happened to move to Malden, Mass., for a while. Malden had Fells Acres, the site of one of the biggest miscarriages of justice. I didn't meet anyone affected or hear local stories, but I did work with systems adjacent to what happened.

And it just ... I can't imagine getting up in that profoundly ordinary, dull suburb, with its plain low buildings and Orange Line stop, and deciding to believe in secret crimes involving evil clowns* and magic wands. But I have to imagine it because, if it could happen there -- a place otherwise drained of imagination -- it could happen anywhere. And, with Q, it has. The only difference so far is that Q-related conspiracy theories have not yet managed to harness the judicial system. But "yet" is a slender reed.

----
* It occurs to me that Stephen King grew up in Malden for a while, but leave aside.
posted by Countess Elena at 7:22 AM on April 14 [3 favorites]

Do they have to create a special hell for this guy?

nah just send him to one of Ed Greenwood's

*, don't let the door hit ya
posted by taquito sunrise at 7:51 AM on April 14

Gen X should be so lucky.

Resented other generations and perfected sarcasm, how's that sound?
posted by biogeo at 8:30 AM on April 14 [2 favorites]

Not speaking ill of the dead is for social situations. When you are personally engaged with other people. And even that goes out the window for villains. For them, you can sing a song and ring bells.
posted by Lesser Shrew at 10:01 AM on April 14 [2 favorites]

I noticed the anti-trans panic heated up right around the time the Harry Potter is leading kids to hell died down.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 12:19 PM on April 14

I'm fairly sure just based on my upbrining that I'd have tended towards the lefter and less social conformist end of things, but being a kid who had discovered the joys of D&D and then running into the satanic panic assholes trying to claim it was evil DEFINITELY pushed me more that direction.
posted by sotonohito at 12:30 PM on April 14 [2 favorites]

I noticed the anti-trans panic heated up right around the time the Harry Potter is leading kids to hell died down.

In the late 2000s?
posted by Selena777 at 1:17 PM on April 14 [1 favorite]

I saw somebody on social media say that it looks as though millennials have put an end to the social convention of not speaking ill of the dead. I concur with that, and with the person's approval of the change.
posted by Ipsifendus

I am a tail end boomer, and have always concurred with Voltaire that to the dead we owe only the truth.

If you were a malignant turd in life, then so you remain in death.
posted by Pouteria at 10:25 PM on April 14 [2 favorites]

And even that goes out the window for villains. For them, you can sing a song and ring bells.

And even open up dance halls atop their burial plots after their untimely passing.
posted by y2karl at 6:42 PM on April 15

Rereading this post today has brought up old memories of a woman I met at a temp job in the 1980s and then ran into now and then over the years. She started seeing a therapist who convinced her that her father had molested her as a young child and that she had repressed the memories of it. She broke off contact with her father and I can't remember if she had ever reconnected with him. She did quit seeing her therapist and recanted. But the last time I ran into her, she was hearing voices -- she told me that her coworkers were whispering the most vile awful things about her over the public address speakers at her office. I tried reasoning with her but to no avail. It was so sad. And that was the last time I saw her. I never bought repressed memories -- for most everyone I know wished and wishes they could erase the memories of the awful things that actually did happen to them which they can never forget. This Be the Verse by Philip Larkin always comes to mind.
posted by y2karl at 9:14 PM on April 15

*
posted by rhiannonstone at 10:24 PM on April 15