How I missed the 1995 HBO film “Indictment: the McMartin Trial” for almost 30 years, I don’t know, but I did. The Oliver Stone produced legal drama about the insane events surrounding what turned out to be the start of a nation-wide freak-out over supposed Satan worship and widespread child abuse at day-care centers is unusually accurate for a docudrama. For this reason it is also infuriating. How could this have happened even once?

In August of 1983, the mother of a 2-year-old boy phoned the Manhattan Beach (California) Police Dept. claiming that her son had been sexually abused at the family-run McMartin Pre-School. That accusation prompted a series of sensational and inflammatory reports from an unscrupulous broadcast journalist (or “journalist,” for short) at WABC-TV. It also prompted the police to contact other parents with children at the school to ask if their children had been molested. Those children were, in turn, interviewed by a crusading social worker named Kee MacFarlane, who used controversial techniques to persuade the young children that they had seen and experienced terrible things, escalating from sexual abuse to having to witness ritual rapes and human sacrifices. (This was one of the seminal cases in the psychiatry profession’s “implanted memories” scandal.)

A crusading district attorney seeking re-election and his self-righteous deputy DA were convinced beyond reason that everything the children said was true, so their office filed hundreds of molestation claims against the McMartin family and three teachers at the school. None of the seven defendants were convicted, but the case lasted seven years until all charges were dropped in 1990. It is still the longest and most expensive series of criminal trials in American history.

But as the film makes clear, there was no credible evidence of any crimes. The mother who triggered the whole thing was an alcoholic paranoid schizophrenic (that fact wasn’t revealed to the McMartins’ defense lawyer until late in the case) who died before the first trial. The videotapes of MacFarlane’s interviews with the alleged victims (the film uses many of the actual videos) showed blatant manipulation. The prosecution had nothing but the videos, rumors and circumstantial evidence: it thought it had a devastating jailhouse snitch who testified that one of the defendants had admitted molesting the children, but that star witness turned out to be a serial perjurer who admitted himself under cross-examination that he had no credibility. The reporter, Wayne Satz, pushing the alleged abuse and Satanism scandal was secretly having an affair with Kee MacFarlane.

Thus the answer to the question “How could this happen?” is what the answer often is: chaos and bad moral luck. An unstable mother, an unethical reporter, unethical prosecutors, an incompetent social worker and a lying witness all ended up in the same place at the same time, and a series of judges lacked the integrity and courage to throw the case out of court. The consequences of this “perfect storm” of unethical professionals, in addition to the expense, public anxiety, and the case serving as a catalyst for copycat prosecution from coast to coast, was that seven innocent people had their reputations, livelihood and lives savaged.

What disturbed me particularly is that it became clear that little has changed. Watching the prosecutors in the case being portrayed as determined to destroy the McMartins even in the absence of sufficient evidence, and especially when it was revealed that the manipulative social worker and the crusading journalist were sexually involved, made me think of the Trump prosecutions. “Save the children from these monsters!” has been replaced with “Save democracy from this monster!,” but the fanaticism and the willingness to accept unethical standards in the interest of “the greater good” are otherwise similar. It is clear that if the fear is sufficient, the alleged villains are considered sufficiently vile, and pubic hysteria sufficiently intense, the justice system is still capable of sacrificing due process and equal treatment under the law.

The Derek Chauvin prosecution is another recent example. I find this depressing and frightening.

“Indictment” was co-written by the late Abby Mann, who also wrote the teleplay, stage play and screenplay for “Judgement at Nuremberg.” Reportedly, in answer to a critic’s question about whether the film was “one-sided,” he replied, “What other side is there?”

( As you can see, James Woods played the “bottom-feeder” defense attorney, Danny Davis, who was the best attorney the hated McMartin defendants could get. Woods, who is terrific at such parts, has been blackballed in Hollywood largely because he is an outspoken conservative and Donald Trump supporter.)

[Addendum: WordPress suggested that I tag this post “Michael Jackson.”]