Behind the Venomous Witches of 'Pizzagate'

In the 1980s, Americans were persecuted, prosecuted and jailed on charges of committing horrible crimes against children. The details were often fantastical. Children were raped with knives in Massachusetts, yet somehow their wounds went unnoticed by doting parents. In suburban New Jersey, parents came and went to drop off or pick up children at day care without ever once walking in on the factory-scale abuse that, later, some came to fervently believe had been perpetrated there.

Like the 17th-century New England witch trials to which these cases were ultimately compared (tragically too late for some), these were instances in which the familiar and mundane were transformed into the diabolical and grotesque. Lives were ruined in the most spectacular fashion.