[From CounterPunch, April 30, 1997. Published by Alexander Cockburn and Ken Silverstein.]

Pulitzer Faker?

by Alexander Cockburn

Toting the Pulitzer prize for commentary this year is Eileen McNamara of the Boston Globe, among whose less appetizing obsessions is the belief that many of the poor wretches swept up in the Satanic abuse hysteria have indeed been guilty of monstrous crimes and richly deserve their decades in prison. Targets of rabid abuse by McNamara include the Amirault family, three victims of a particularly ghastly Salem-type lynch proceeding in New England.

Back on January 14 of this year the Justice Committee, based in San Diego, held a reprise of the famous 1697 Day of Contrition, when the original Salem witch-hunters, including one of the judges, openly demonstrated their remorse for what they had done three years earlier. The reprise last January was attended by many victims of the Satanic abuse trials of the 1980's and early 1990's, including Kelly Michaels and the Buckeys, all of whom spent years in prison before being vindicated.

The next day a McNamara column appeared in the Globe, datelined Salem, referring in its opening sentence to "a conference here" and berating those attending the Day of Contrition for blindness towards the realities of child abuse. Through she was clearly claiming that she had attended the conference McNamara made no mention of who was there and who had spoken. She quoted no one by name and indeed included only one blind quote of a generic nature. But there weren't many people at the meeting and none of them encountered McNamara. Buttressing the possibility that McNamara faked her presence was the fact that she said the location of the proceedings was the Peabody-Essex Institute. And indeed the conference's advance schedule had stated as much -- but at the last minute the Institute withdrew its' invitation and the proceeding took place at the Hawthorne Hotel.

Had McNamara been interested in doing anything other than a hit job, she would have gone to the Hawthorne Hotel and there met Violet Amirault, now 71, under 100 pounds and unlikely to survive a return to prison that will come soon unless Gov. Wi11iam Weld issues a commutation or pardon (an intervention made less likely by McNamara's disgusting polemics).

In an April 9 column McNamara denounced rallies in support of the Amiraults as being staged [by people] who never attended the trials or read the transcripts" -- a straightforward lie by the Pulitzer winner. McNamara failed to return our call.