People who doubt that the Friedmans were entirely innocent of the charges against them will ask, reasonably enough, why they pleaded guilty to such damaging criminal charges. As Jesse says in an interview, there was no way, on the Long Island of 1988, that he could have gotten a fair trial. (He couldn't have gotten a fair trial anywhere else in the United States either.)

At one point we see a clip from a Larry King interview with Debbie Nathan, one of the first journalists to cast doubt on the veracity of the mass child sexual abuse stories. (Her book, "Satan's Silence," co-authored with Michael Snedeker, is the best account of the phenomenon that's yet been written.) King's first question to Nathan sets the tone. "So all these parents are wacko?" he asks. Certainly some of them were. "Satan's Silence" reported that the woman who first made allegations in the McMartin case had a history of paranoid schizophrenia. Nathan is interviewed in the film, mostly about how she became interested in the Friedman case. Jarecki misses the chance to include the larger context Nathan could provide.

For example, Nathan has made the case that it was no accident the legend of mass child sexual abuse caught fire in the '80s. With Reagan in the White House and the country turning to "traditional values," stories of mass child sexual abuse allowed a focus for national anxieties about mothers who worked outside the home and the changing structure of the family. It's one of the horrible ironies of this whole sorry episode that, as they did during the Meese Commission's anti-porn crackdown, right-wing extremists found common cause with some elements of the feminist movement. Using the dubious notion of "repressed memory," some feminist therapists were able to present a romance of children and women as the victims of mass abuse, of fathers who routinely raped their daughters. In a great Orwellian construction, absence of evidence was taken as proof. (The notorious incest-survivor's handbook "The Courage to Heal" told readers that if they thought they might have been abused they probably were, and that questioning whether you had really been abused was "a misguided attempt to repress the memories again.")

One of the main reasons fantasies of mass child sexual abuse took hold -- our national obsession with the purity of children -- isn't limited solely to the '80s. It was often argued that kids couldn't possibly be making up stories like the ludicrous scenarios held up as fact during the worst of the panic. In fact, kids weren't. As the proceedings of many cases showed, the stories were planted by overzealous cops and prosecutors and investigating psychologists. But the larger implication of that defense was the comforting belief that little kids simply do not have sexual thoughts.

"Capturing the Friedmans"

Directed by Andrew Jarecki

A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran a letter from a reader supporting Wal-Mart's decision to ban FHM, Maxim and Stuff magazines from their stores. The correspondent said that the magazines were dangerous because they were on view to adolescents who were "corruptible innocents." You have to be living pretty far inside a fantasyland to believe that adolescents can be corrupted by photos of starlets in bikinis and lingerie. But if that belief in adolescents as "corruptible innocents" has any currency -- and I think it does -- then you can understand why children would be fantasized and fetishized as wholly pure beings. One of the tragedies of the '80s cases, as Nathan has pointed out, and as scholar Frederick Crews pointed out in his 1994 New York Review of Books article debunking repressed-memory syndrome (reprinted in his book "The Memory Wars"), was that these fantastic, delusional stories drew resources and attention away from actual child abuse cases.

In cases like that of the Friedmans, the uncomfortable fact remains that the real victims were most often the accused. Even in a rare case like the McMartin trial, where the jury rejected the prosecution's case, the defendants had become stigmatized. Many more are still in prison on bogus charges. And then there are the accusers, many of them young children who suffered God knows what trauma by being convinced they'd been subjected to unimaginable abuse so they could be used as tools in phony prosecutions. The sole accuser of the Friedmans whom we see, the one who admits he didn't remember anything until he underwent hypnosis, seems to be a basket case. His "recovered" memory alone accounted for 35 charges against the Friedmans.

"Capturing the Friedmans" is a slice of one of the ugliest chapters in American history, one to which the overworked appellation of "witch hunt" can reasonably be applied. Andrew Jarecki could have done more to lay out the marriage of sexual and religious and social hysteria that made cases like this possible. But he deserves credit for having the guts to say, in this case and in so many like it, who suffered the most.

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