Gloria Steinem died on September 2, at age 92. As any upstanding citizen would, I made sure to promptly click over to the New York Times to read her mammoth obituary in quiet, somber remembrance. Like many NYT obituaries of prominent individuals, this one clearly had been written to near-completion well before her death. Even in the universe of prewritten NYT obits, however, you could tell Steinem’s was of especially high priority. Because to the NYT, this wasn’t just any run-of-the-mill “prominent individual” — indeed, an adjective of far awesomer proportions would surely be needed to describe her. Perhaps like “towering,” or “trail-blazing.” Certainly, this obituary was one that would’ve gone through round after round of careful tweaking and polishing, to make doubly certain its final form properly captures the life, achievements, and legacy of a figure so venerated (by the NYT). Steinem was also a resident of the Upper East Side for decades, an affluent and well-connected cultural liberal, and a stalwart partisan supporter of the Democratic Party. So, basically a dead-center bullseye to the NYT’s core demographic. But above all else, of course, she was the “Personification of the Women’s Movement,” as the obituary’s final headline boldly proclaimed. One could scarcely imagine the NYT bestowing a more sacredly honorific title to anyone, for any reason. No doubt this made ensuring the grandeur of the eternal tribute all the more vital.
As the obituary opens, we learn that Steinem “wrestled with a lack of self-esteem,” notwithstanding the steady confidence she always exuded in her passion for barrier-breaking activism; she was also “insecure about her looks.” Thus we are already invited to understand Steinem as a complicated, multi-dimensional figure, who defied any simple synopsis. She was able to conquer these surprising yet humanizing self-esteem issues, we’re told, with her courageously soul-baring 1992 book, “Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem.” If one surveys the contemporary reactions to this book, interestingly enough, one will find it was widely derided, and sometimes outright mocked, by the mainstream reviewing press. Even the NYT bemoaned Steinem’s newfound emphasis on “personal change” as signifying her displacement of concrete political reform with “self-help” mumbo-jumbo. The book’s recommendation is that women should set about bettering themselves and their collective condition through individual self-improvement exercises, such as yoga breathing and painting. The NYT reviewer speculates a crass financial motive might be behind it, noting the book was likely to accelerate an already-worrisome trend of “women’s sections shrinking in bookstores” — while the bulging “recovery/self-help” sections are “pushed ever closer to the cash register.” The clear implication was that Steinem had merely seized a tempting cash-grab opportunity, and shamelessly so, since it entailed hawking gobbledygook “healing elixirs” to the pliable female masses, in a gimmick this (female) reviewer pilloried as having “the taste of failure.”
But if the book was really just a cynical ploy for money, one would have to concede it was a huge, smashing success. “Revolution from Within” clocked in as number-one hardcover nonfiction title of February 1992, according to Publishers Weekly, and remained atop the NYT best-seller chart until the following September; the mass-market reading public was clearly not deterred by the scorn uniformly heaped on the book by disgruntled (and mostly female) reviewers, in almost every high-profile media property. Newsweek, for instance, carried on the theme of inferring that Steinem must’ve just wanted a quick payday. “Self-help books sell like crazy, especially among women,” the reviewer wrote, “and Steinem’s has everything: goddesses, guided meditation, directions on how to find the child within, dream diaries and droplets of wisdom from a range of sources including the Gnostic Gospels and Koko, the talking gorilla.”
Wow — this book sounds really dumb!
You might think, then, that some appreciable accounting of Steinem’s widely-ridiculed pivot to bullshit psycho-babble would make an appearance in her big authoritative NYT obituary. But it only gets the most passing of mentions, and mainly in reference to the “disappointment” the book was vaguely said to have engendered among a certain segment of Steinem’s “natural allies.” Nothing about her slide into woo-woo blather is extrapolated as grounds for reasonable skepticism of her larger body of work, or her overall political project. Instead, we get a succession of formulaic sops to her tenacious leadership of “the movement” — of “women,” that is — and how, against all odds, she became this history-making icon who refused to ever relent, even in the face of adversity, and even though “the movement” she led was “repeatedly declared passé” during her lifetime.
“Nevertheless, she persisted,” obituarist Katharine Q. Seelye proclaims, totally unironically. I would have loved to bear witness to the editorial process whereby it was determined that inclusion of this cute little slogan, in the NYT’s own voice, was entirely journalistically apt. If asked, I probably would’ve advised that in lieu of such witless cliches, the NYT might instead use the space to memorialize, for posterity’s sake, that Steinem received a whopping $700,000 advance from Little, Brown (in 1987 dollars) for her “self-help” slop manifesto. (Would be around $2.1 million today.) What inferences might be drawn from this, with respect to how Steinem went about monetizing her vaunted status as Nation’s Top Woman Activist? Certain inferences might not be the most flattering, and thus naturally would have no place in an obituary of such importance. Surely, now is not the time to give anybody the idea that it might be sensible to view the “legacy” of this individual with just a tad more critical detachment.
Recognizing the inappropriateness of any rudely skeptical inquiry, we instead get the expected helping of laudatory bromides: while it’s true that women have made real progress in the past several decades, thanks in no small part to the tireless efforts / visionary leadership of Steinem, and all the nebulous “change” she inspired, it is nonetheless equally true that there is still so much work yet to be done. Because as Katharine Q. Seelye reminds us, “anti-female bias remains entrenched” — even in the year 2026. Curiously, this is stated as though objective conclusory fact, and the nature of these alleged “anti-female biases” is not elaborated with any precision. It might’ve just been meant as a figure of speech — one which any right-minded reader would naturally intuit as spiritually true. From there, they would go on to surmise how deeply necessary it must be for the NGO / grant-making / corporate philanthropic PR apparatus that blossomed around Steinem to carry on with its invaluable, irreplaceable “work” — even if only for nostalgia’s sake. The reader is left guessing what specific “work” of Steinem’s led to which specific improvements in the wellbeing of half the human population, and the smattering of examples that do get cited can sometimes have a bit of an awkward twist. We’re informed that one of Steinem’s most storied claims to activist fame is that in the 1960s, she “marched with Cesar Chavez, the head of the United Farm Workers.” For many years, this was a perfectly pleasing bullet-point on her resume — that is, “until reports emerged in 2026 [in the New York Times, of course] that he had sexually abused girls and women.” Womp womp.
But all that stuff is child’s play (pun intended) compared to the obituary’s most glaring omission: the no-joke, not-even-funny-anymore foray Steinem once made into hyper-depraved theories of “Satanic ritual sex abuse” — the hysteria around which had gripped the nation in the 1980s and 1990s, and which Steinem was instrumental in popularizing/validating, as it coincided with her own highly profitable pop-psychology endeavors. Indeed, the strikingly central role she played in fomenting this nutcase hysteria should have alone been enough to make the tone of any eventual obituary at least 85% condemnatory.
For instance: Did you know that Gloria Steinem was one of America’s foremost proponents of the “Satanic child sex abuse” hoax — which wrought such utter devastation, and on such an epic scale? By subjecting hundreds of innocent people to false prosecution for the most grotesque imaginable claims of child sex torture? With many of these wrongfully condemned made to languish in prison for decades? And countless more informally accused, with similarly catastrophic consequences? Families torn apart, reputations torched, small mom-and-pop businesses bankrupted, communities devolved into absurd paranoia and mob reprisal — all cheered on by Steinem, in conjunction with the standard array of credulous and lazy media, unscrupulous lawyers, NGO activists, over-zealous prosecutors, lowest-common-denominator politicians, fake “experts” of various stripes, and so on. Yes, that’s right: to a strangely under-acknowledged extent, it was none other than the dearly-departed Steinem who personally riled up this wholesale lunacy, using her “Number One Feminist” credentials to give it an air of legitimacy within sections of respectable liberal opinion.
Her contribution was quite significant, as mass hysterias are most potent and enduring when they achieve a critical mass of diverse ideological backers, to avoid being pigeonholed as the peculiar obsession of any one political or cultural faction. So there was Gloria Steinem, right in the mix, alongside fearful Christian Conservatives and “tough-on-crime” lobbyists, instructing the broad public that “belief” in the hidden omni-presence of demonic child rape rings was of such profound importance not just for elements of society that might be anathema to NYT readers, but for the hallowed “women’s movement” as well. To the right-wing religious zealots, Satanic sex predation manifesting most visibly at public child-care facilities was supposed to be emblematic of the decline in traditional family structures, and how this invariably leads to horrific moral debasement. For the cops and prosecutors, it showed far more taxpayer funds needed to pour into their coffers, so they could vigorously perform their most solemn duty — “Protecting the Children” from vile new threats in this ever-dangerous world. And for Steinem, it was part and parcel of women’s liberation: child sex abuse flowed ineluctably from the terrors of male supremacy, and so by recognizing the staggering prevalence of coordinated child sex abuse networks, the oppressive hold of men over the social order could be dislodged. Which would intrinsically benefit the collective interests of women. This was the logic by which “Satanic Panic” could be embraced so fulsomely by Steinem, as the latest strategy to keep the momentum going from the 1960s-era “movement” she pioneered, well into the 1990s. Steinem once proposed that if the 60s had been the era of “exploring Outer Space,” the 90s were set to be “the era of Inner Space,” with women harnessing the power of their “mind body connection” to access memories that had otherwise been lost in their subconscious, regarding ritualized rape atrocities.
In addition to setting forth this quasi-theoretical framework for “Satanic Panic” writ large, Steinem also played a direct role in what became the most notoriously well-known fiasco of the entire saga: the “McMartin pre-school” travesty. Her role remains curiously under-appreciated. You almost certainly won’t be reading about it in any of the gauzy homages that have littered the NYT and similar precincts since her death. But let it be known: when deluded angry mobs in Manhattan Beach, California insisted on ransacking an abandoned pre-school to search for the underground child sex torture tunnels they were sure must exist, this was in no small part the handiwork of Ms. Movement Leader herself. Little children had been coaxed by egregious adult interlopers into imagining and semi-articulating their purported victimization in these subterranean sex chambers, which unleashed a surreally protracted nightmare that destroyed lives, squandered public resources, and reverberated across the entire country. Similar debacles were replicated everywhere you looked in Anytown USA.
In that best-selling opus “Revolution from Within,” published right at the apex of the deranged McMartin frenzy, Steinem denounced those who had “refused to believe children” telling these “stories” of bizarre sex crime — whether “extremes of sadism,” or the newly-understood scourge of “so-called ritual or cult abuse.” Finding such “stories” facially implausible was no longer any excuse for a conscientious adult. Steinem made these confident pronouncements as though an enormous body of evidence had just emerged confirming the unassailable reality of demon rape gangs, hidden where you’d least suspect them, as reported by pre-schoolers. (Who’d been induced to relay these “stories,” of course, by morally-panicked adults galvanized by the likes of Steinem.) She gave particular credence to increasingly common rumors of “torture and killing of animals to frighten children into silence” — an exact trope that figured heavily in the McMartin mania. When the formative “allegations” in that case first surfaced in 1984, Eyewitness News of Los Angeles led its evening broadcast with a mortifying news bulletin: as many as 60 children, aged roughly two to five, had notified authorities that they’d been “keeping a grotesque secret,” and day after day were being “sexually abused and made to appear in pornographic films while in the preschool’s care.” This included “being forced to witness the mutilation and killing of animals” to terrorize them into silence. Or in other words: precisely the sort of hallucinatory tale that Steinem would later celebrate in her 1992 best-seller was finally being “believed” and acted upon — even as she cautioned, of course, that there was still much work to be done in terms of her belief-maximizing agenda. However, these once “incredible”-seeming crimes being recognized by “authorities who are now beginning to believe children” was hailed as a major stride forward for the women’s empowerment “movement.”
“We’re not letting go because we want the children to be believed,” a father of one McMartin pre-schooler told the Los Angeles Times in April 1990. Groups of parents had organized yet another “archeological dig” to search for the underground sex torture chambers their children had purportedly identified. Not only were these addled parents echoing Gloria Steinem’s rhetoric nearly verbatim, they were being funded by her. Yep: according to the after-action report produced by lead “archaeological investigator” E. Gary Stickel, the crazed communal digging adventure was made possible thanks to a “generous donation from Gloria Steinem.” (Precise amount unknown, but matched by an excitable group called “Mothers Against Sexual Abuse.”) As the Steinem-subsidized search heated up, an LA Times journalist paid a visit one day and observed hordes of parents “digging frantically.”
A previous “dig” had been attempted in 1985, when a group of rogue parents showed up with a backhoe and began scouring for animal sacrifice remains, on the basis of testimony their five-and-six-year-olds were interrogated into providing. The effort quickly ballooned into a full archeological excavation, sponsored by the Los Angeles County prosecutor’s office. Much to everyone’s shock and dismay, however, no sex torture chambers were uncovered. Certain factions of locals remained unpersuaded, though, and refused to budge from their conviction that the toddlers’ imaginations had represented the absolute truth, after elaborate fantasies were cajoled out of them by crank government-subsidized therapists and others. Consternation mounted, and by 1990, an even more audacious “archeological investigation” was prepared. Intended as far more comprehensive than the prior haphazard attempt in 1985, the plan this time was to penetrate the concrete floor of the school itself, and excavate all that lie beneath, in one last climactic search for the mythical sex torture evidence. Claims of unclear origin had long circulated that McMartin staff systematically slaughtered the children’s beloved class pets right in front of their eyes (rabbits, birds, cats) to frighten them into submission, as a warning that they’d better not tell anyone about the secret trapdoors in their classrooms that led to the underground molestation bunkers.
What makes Steinem’s role in this lunacy all the more striking: 1990 was relatively late in the lifespan of the whole ritualized sex abuse craze. Plenty of people had figured out by then that they might’ve gotten a bit carried away at the height of the freakout, after so many sensational tales of Satanic sex crime had not been borne out by evidence. With the McMartin case in particular, skepticism had grown as the related criminal prosecutions dragged on for seven years — with no proof ever emerging of the wild headline claims that initially got everyone so worked up. By the time Steinem wrote her check for the secondary “archeological dig,” the trial of two supposed ringleaders of this demonic sex abuse syndicate, preschool proprietors Peggy and Ray Buckey, bloated into the longest and most expensive criminal proceeding in the history of the United States. In January 1990, Peggy was finally found Not Guilty on all counts, following years of shambolic legal torment. Ray was also found Not Guilty on nearly all counts, but the jury deadlocked on a handful of others, so the damned thing still wasn’t officially over yet. Even though the outlandish maximalist fantasies that had animated such fury in the mid-1980s had mostly died down. But this apparently did nothing to dissuade Gloria Steinem, nor quell her enthusiasm for the April 1990 search, nor stymie her subsequent endorsement of “ritual/cult abuse” in the 1992 chart-topping book. After all, “believing the children” was a principle she dare not compromise. She thus aligned not with casual low-information “ritual abuse” believers who might’ve read a supermarket tabloid or watched a daytime TV show, but with the hardest-core faction of radicalized “activist” dead-enders.
The “dig” concluded in May 1990, and alas, no child sex torture tunnels were discovered, which must’ve been upsetting to Gloria. By July, all remaining charges against Ray were dismissed, and the legal agony was finally over. No one was ever convicted of anything in the whole freakish disaster, nor was any serious evidence of any child sex torture chambers ever yielded. It wasn’t like this outcome should’ve been hard to foresee by anyone who took the time to study the case rationally. But again Gloria Steinem raised her fist in defiance. The “scientific report” she funded for the failed archeological excavation of a pre-school in Southern California was published in 1993. Also in 1993, the famed proprietary magazine she founded, still near the peak of its circulation, published this:
So… here we have what appears to be a McMartin-aged child, caught in a disturbing serpent abuse vortex, with Satan and/or his top demon lieutenants thrashing off to the side, their menacing tongues pointed in the child’s direction. This cover art was deemed to be of such lasting cultural value that the original print was preserved in the Library of Congress, bearing the caption: “Anita Kunz’s compelling cover design references the magazine’s harrowing article on ritual child abuse perpetrated by a satanic cult. By making a frightened naturalistic child the focal point in a nightmarish red and green color scheme, Kunz dramatizes the vulnerability of children to horrific danger posed by such groups.”
WTF? Gee, thanks Gloria!
The article itself is credited to someone writing under a pseudonym, who for all we know could’ve been Steinem herself. “Elizabeth S. Rose” is claimed to be “a free-lance writer currently working on a novel about ritual abuse. She lives with her husband in the southeastern United States.” Whoever this person is, “she” starts off by announcing she was once “involved in a generational satanic cult and had been ritually abused in that cult setting.” After struggling through an exceedingly unclear definition of what “ritual abuse” even is, the author then drops a real whopper: “I personally witnessed the murders of two children, one of whom was my baby sister. These deaths were a direct result of satanic ritual sacrifices.”
It apparently never occurred to Gloria Steinem or her Ms. Magazine cohort that these child and baby murders could theoretically be investigated by the relevant authorities, and the sadistic culprits prosecuted, if the events described really took place, and the writer really was a first-hand witness to the crimes. Or maybe this thought did occur to them, and they decided to cover their tracks by making the article elusively “anonymous,” to avoid getting caught up in any bothersome legal technicalities, while still peddling the rancid hysteria they wanted to peddle.
The writer claims her “otherwise ordinary middle-class family” participated in a secret Satanic cult; they would travel every Saturday night to a cabin in the woods for unholy ritual gatherings. She says her “most intense involvement” in these activities occurred when she was “four to five years old,” and she is able to recount remarkably vivid, sophisticated memories from such a tender young age. “Numerous sermons were devoted to woman’s place in Satan’s world,” she says. “We were told that because Eve had accepted the fruit from the serpent, women were inherently more wicked and evil than men, and so more capable of carrying out Satan’s work.”
Shortly after her “induction” to the cult at age four, the author claims she was forced to watch her newborn baby sister be savagely decapitated. “The sacrifice was followed by a communion ritual, during which human flesh and blood were consumed.” She claims she tried to alert her Vietnam Vet father about what was going on, but he dismissed her, assuming it was just her four-year-old imagination running amok. So she did not speak of these cult experiences for the next 25 years, until approximately age 30. An informed reader might surmise that what we’re dealing with here is a classic case of “recovered memory” syndrome, where adults suddenly claim to have unearthed extreme, florid sex abuse memories suppressed from early childhood — a trend all the rage in the early 90s, thanks to the advocacy of figures like Steinem. (It’s even making a comeback today, with “Epstein Survivors” also claiming to have exhumed long-lost memories of sex crimes many years or decades after the fact. And wait till you hear about the March 2026 “dig” of the former Zorro Ranch in New Mexico…)
The author writes: “Dissassociation [sic] and repression of memories make disclosure very difficult. The victim may not have conscious awareness that abuse took place. If memories do emerge years later, descriptions of the rituals are so bizarre that they are often discounted as untrue.”
Ding ding ding. (Maybe they were “discounted as untrue” for good reason?)
To rewind for just a moment…
Three years before the publication of this gruesome Ms. Magazine cover story, and days before all remaining McMartin charges were finally dismissed, Steinem appeared at a banquet in Minneapolis honoring some type of “women’s business development” non-profit thing. She was still busily promoting her “self-esteem” doctrine from “Revolution from Within,” which had just spent fourteen weeks at #1 on the NYT best-seller list. Likely brimming with even more self-esteem than usual thanks to this revenue influx, Steinem told the assembled women that they too should cultivate the kind of self-esteem she had, so they can equip themselves with the mental tools to successfully “rebel” against male-dominated power structures. She also took the opportunity to expound on her child and woman-belief theories, with a focus on new discoveries she’d recently made about the nature of memory.
She declared that one way to achieve this self-esteem revolution was for women who suffered “abuse or neglect” in childhood — or even “any kind of restriction” — to realize that “we can go back to the broken place and re-parent ourselves. We can go back to the child we used to be. Literally by re-visiting that child. By thinking through meditation or whatever process we wish to call it, of a time — anytime that we remember when that child was in need. Going back to that place as an adult. And sitting down next to the child. And waiting for the child to talk to us. And beginning to have a dialogue with that child.”
Through this unspecified “process,” Steinem says, “the most extreme cases of sexual abuse in childhood” can be pried out from the psyche’s deepest recesses. It may cause the woman “incredible torture and pain,” but this is necessary for the healing process — even if you don’t know what you’re supposed to be healing from yet. Do you currently lack any conscious recollection of early-childhood ritual sex abuse? Don’t worry, ladies: Steinem assures us that both children and adults often block the abuse completely out of their minds, by “creating people to whom this isn’t happening.” That is, they create multiple personalities — and no one personality need have any innate connection to the other, which enables the person to proceed through life for years or even decades entirely oblivious to the abuse their alternate-personalities suffered. (In 1993, Steinem narrated and was credited with providing the “idea” for a fever-dream HBO “documentary” entitled Multiple Personality Disorder: The Search for Deadly Memories, in which several people claim to have endured horrific child sex abuse, and constructed entirely new “personalities” so they could contract amnesia and forget about it.)
“The unconscious is timeless,” Steinem told the women who’d gathered for the business development function. “One can enter the timeless unconscious.” Through interior journeys such as these, Steinem reported, “sometimes marks of physical abuse return when the person returns to the persona of the child who has experienced the abuse, and welts and bruises re-appear on the body.” For example, “the mark of a hand slap” can re-appear on the body quite quickly, but then disappear altogether “after the person has changed to another personality.”
By this radically expanded conception of the unconscious mind, Steinem announced we are only just beginning to comprehend (circa 1990) the “vast numbers” of child sex abuse victims who’d been going about their lives completely unaware they’d been abused, until they encounter the long-repressed truth using these revolutionary self-actualization techniques. And things do appear to be getting better, she says, because the same people who might have once found such notions non-believable have been increasingly persuaded to “trust the stories of children” (like the McMartin pre-schoolers) — and even adults who claim to have only remembered “the covered-up abuse of their childhood” perhaps 20, 40, or even 50 years later. Thanks to these amazing breakthroughs, the true scale of the “vast numbers” of child sex abuse victims is finally being made plain.
“Each of us is a microcosm of the universe with all the same forces that exist in the universe,” Steinem declared. It’s unclear if a puff of purple smoke suddenly appeared as she made this statement. Or if a winged unicorn flew past the stage.
Back to the Ms. Magazine horror show of 1993…
As we read on, we glean some insight into what distinguished the “ritual abuse” fixations of Steinem and friends from other proponents of these theories elsewhere on the political spectrum. Though allied with religious zealots on the reality of rampant ritual child sex abuse, Steinem took a more “secularized” interpretation of its meaning and root causes. This can be seen in a summarizing statement by the article’s anonymous author, who proclaims:
The truth is that ritual abuse exists. It is hideous and devastating. It does not exist because some evil force is trying to gain control of the world. It exists because violence is perpetrated against women and children, and then passed on to the next generation. Ritual abuse is at the extreme end of a continuum of abuse. Generations of abusive behavior cannot be overcome simply by throwing a few perpetrators in jail. Society must take on the responsibility of finding a way to eradicate all kinds of abuse.
Which is to say: this systematic child sex torture was not the result of actual “Satan,” nor any other wicked supernatural force, but the intractable subjugation of women vis-a-vis men — a dynamic that also destined children to be brutally subjugated, although the causal chain linking these outcomes is not made entirely clear. Regardless, as ever, the ultimate villain and culprit is “male domination” — perhaps what one might call a kind of “Secular Satan” for this milieu. And only by equalizing gender relations more broadly could “Satanic” abuse ever be realistically curtailed. No specific remedies are offered for preventing “ritual abuse” as such. Which seems a bit odd, since the abuse the author describes is so distinctively monstrous, one would think that with some normal empirical investigation, measures could be devised to disrupt those particular monstrosities. But the aim of peddling this stuff to the Ms. Magazine readership was obviously never to get bogged down in excessively tangible details, as those might eventually be subject to corroborative evaluation, which could complicate the ideological ambitions of secular “ritual abuse” theorists. Locating the genesis of her claimed abuse in some “generational” trauma cult dynasty, passed down from one generation to the next in total secrecy, and totally invisible to outsiders, underscores the futility of even trying to empirically verify the claims; indeed, they’ve been crafted to expressly preclude this, with Ms. Magazine all on board. So the message of Steinem & Co. was that no one should trouble themselves with attempting to confirm any of the following:
My mother and my best friend were both raped as part of fertility rituals. The victim was strapped to the altar table in front of a ritual gathering and systematically gang-raped while the fertility rites were chanted. The purpose was to impregnate the victim. The resulting fetus was sometimes used in ritual sacrifice. Other sexual abuse includes the raping of young girls or infants. Both girls and boys may be sodomized or penetrated with symbolic objects, such as a crucifix, or with weapons. There can also be forced sexual contact with infants, animals, or dead bodies.
The unknown author leaves ambiguous whether she claims to have been personally sexually victimized by this heinous cult. Another strategic editorial decision, it would seem, to reduce any unwanted liabilities, legally or otherwise. (You can read the entire article here, if you really want — a copy was submitted to the Montana House of Representatives for some reason.)
After guiding us through this carnival of horrors from a standpoint of affected expertise, the ghoulish article finally concludes with a stirring call to action — this time conveyed in the institutional voice (i.e., Steinem) of the magazine itself: “If we want to stop ritual abuse, the first step is to believe these brutal crimes occur.” Seems sort of odd, don’t you think, that if Steinem and colleagues really wanted to establish the unimpeachable believability of these sickening abuse stories, they would give the all-important assignment to a mysteriously anonymized “novelist” — rather than, say, a competent journalist who could theoretically examine the issue with just a tad more factual rigor, and without hiding behind a silly pseudonym. It shouldn’t have been too difficult of a task, presumably, if the indisputable truth-value of these “beliefs” had already been so conclusively settled. In hindsight though, one can’t help but sympathize with the difficulties Steinem & Co. must have encountered, since the entire freakish narrative they were desperate to peddle turned out to be a giant hoax.
Astonishingly enough, Steinem never seems to have been chastened by any of this. She remained resolutely dedicated to the underlying cause for decades. I can find no instance of her expressing one hint of regret, or even being politely questioned on the matter, in the endless parade of interviews she gave to adulating journalists, celebrities, and activists. One early public-facing skeptic of “Satanic ritual abuse,” clinical psychologist Richard Noll, recalled being confronted at a conference by Steinem in 1990; she implored him to cease his unhelpfully skeptical ways. As late as 2017, she was still confidently reciting the same old mantras recycled from the McMartin days, like “Believe the children!” (direct quote), which she still took to go conceptually hand-in-hand with her overriding mantra: “Believe the women!” The occasion for Steinem to once again blurt out these banalities was the onset of peak #MeToo, when her wise counsel was sought by the younger women staff at Ms. Magazine, eagerly requesting her prognosis of that burgeoning “movement.”
Steinem also seems to have had zero remorse for championing a person named Bennett Braun, whose quack theories on “multiple personality disorder” and “recovered memory” she imbibed and repackaged for a mass audience in speeches, TV specials, and her best-selling “Revolution from Within” slop manifesto. “Many people kept this book in mind and sent ideas,” Steinem writes in the Acknowledgements section, “and others gave me access to new worlds that enriched it, especially Dr. Bennett Braun.” A decade later, Braun had his medical license suspended in Illinois, and agreed to a $10.6 million civil settlement with an Iowa housewife named Patricia Burgus, who had accused him of using his demented “therapy” methods to convince her “she possessed 300 personalities, ate meatloaf made of human flesh, and served as high priestess of a Satanic cult.” (The particular cult of which she’d been made to believe she was “high priestess” was said to have raped, tortured, and cannibalized thousands of children, including her own two young sons.)
By the time of Braun’s own death in 2024, he was being unreservedly excoriated in every major newspaper obituary as someone who “inflamed a Satanic Panic,” due to his outsized role promoting kook concepts that manipulated so many mentally disturbed people into confabulating fake sex abuse tales. Bennett Braun, Psychiatrist Who Fueled ‘Satanic Panic,’ Dies at 83, reads the headline of his decidedly unflattering NYT obituary. But no mention is made of the pivotal boost he received from Steinem. (Nor is Braun mentioned anywhere in her obituary.) If the central fact of Braun’s life by 2024 was that he “fueled” and “inflamed” the mass hysteria a few decades prior, there’s no reason this shouldn’t also be a central fact of Steinem’s life too — her platform was many orders of magnitude bigger than Braun’s could ever have been on its own, and it was through her that his insidious theories were disseminated to a mass audience (mostly women) under the guise of fostering “self-esteem,” and undertaking “a revolution from within.”
Did anyone ever bother to ask Steinem about the gigantic 1994 study conducted by the administration of her cherished Bill Clinton, which examined over 12,000 accusations of ritual sex abuse throughout the United States, and found not a single one — yes, zero — that could be credibly authenticated? (Presumably this would include the bone-chilling infant sacrifice scenes gorily chronicled in the 1993 Ms. Magazine article?) Steinem has featured in a constant barrage of reverential streaming service “documentaries” over just the past few years: Apple TV+, Dear…: Gloria Steinem (2020). Netflix, Live to Lead, “Gloria Steinem” (2022). HBO, Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print (2025). And so on. Netflix had a brand new one up and ready to go literally within hours of her death. For this aspect of her “life’s work” to never come up at all in any of it is truly insane. Especially since she always seemed to find the time to comment on slightly less pressing matters, such as her opinion that “young girls” nowadays are performing too much oral sex on their boyfriends: “I always say to them, what are YOU getting out of it? Hello?” Apparently, this was considered of far greater import than getting a response to critics like journalist Alexander Cockburn, who wrote in 1999:
In the coalition powering the satanic abuse persecutions feminists constituted a powerful component, most conspicuously in the form of Gloria Steinem and Ms. Magazine. How did feminism, a movement that grew out of the radical passions of the 1960s, navigate itself into this demonic alliance? Charges of perverse abuse of children seemed an inviting line of attack in the larger onslaught on patriarchy, sexual violence and harassment. Social workers and therapists — many of them feminists — became the investigators and effective prosecutors.
Somewhere along the way, a core tenet of Steinem’s widely-celebrated theory of female empowerment became the demand for reflexive “belief” — and not just in the “abuse” claims any woman might conceivably make, including via “recovered memory” extraction, but any claims that might ever be made by pre-school aged children! It’s almost too crazy to “believe” this actually happened. None of it was the children’s fault, of course — four-year-olds like to play “make believe,” have imaginary friends, etc., because it’s totally normal behavior at that stage of cognitive development! But so too can they be convinced of almost anything — even by fellow children, and ESPECIALLY by adults in positions of perceived authority. Those adults deserve blame for the ensuing destruction, aspects of which seem to be making a disturbing resurgence today. However, a large share of any blame allocation should be specially reserved for prominent figures who enjoy huge influential platforms, whether by merit or not, and for some ungodly reason decided to embark on a fanatical crusade to amplify, legitimize, and “believe” these twisted fantasies — the rest of society be damned. That’s Gloria Steinem.
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Amazing. The "satanic panic" and the various other stories and claims of ritual child abuse etc has been of interest, peripherally, to me for about twenty years. Of all the things I've read I have never come across this information. Thank you for researching and writing this.
This is Tracey being very good.