Michelle Remembers (1980)

Michelle Remembers is a 1980 book co-written by Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and his psychiatric patient (and eventual wife) Michelle Smith. A best-seller, Michelle Remembers relied on the discredited practice of recovered-memory therapy to make sweeping, lurid claims about Satanic ritual abuse involving Smith, which contributed to the rise of the Satanic panic in the 1980s. While the book presents its claims as fact, and was extensively marketed on that basis at the time, no evidence was provided; all investigations into the book failed to corroborate any of its claims, with investigators describing its content as being primarily based on elements of pop culture and fiction that were popular at the time when it was written.

Background

Pazder was inspired to write the book after seeing the 1976 film adaptation of Sybil about a woman with multiple personality disorder (now called dissociative identity disorder). He pointed out to his then-wife he had a patient "just like" Sybil, and Michelle Remembers chronicles Pazder's therapy during the late 1970s with his long-time patient Smith. In 1973, Pazder first started treating Smith at his private psychiatric practice in Victoria, British Columbia. In 1976, when Pazder was treating Smith for depression (related to her having had a miscarriage) and multiple personality disorder, Smith confided she felt that she had something important to tell him, but could not remember what it was. Soon thereafter, Pazder and Smith had a session where Smith purportedly screamed for 25 minutes non-stop and eventually started speaking in the voice of a five-year-old. According to Pazder, during the next 14 months he spent more than 600 hours using hypnosis to help Smith recover seeming memories of Satanic ritual abuse that occurred when she was five years old in 1954 and 1955 at the hands of her mother and others, all of whom Smith said were members of a "satanic cult" in Victoria.

Summary

The book chronicles therapy sessions between Pazder and Smith and alleged recovered memories of satanic rituals she claims she was forced to attend. Pazder stated that Smith was abused by the "Church of Satan," purportedly a worldwide organization predating the Christian church. The first alleged ritual attended by Smith occurred in 1954 when she was five years old, with the final one an 81-day ritual in 1955, that supposedly summoned Satan himself and involved the intervention of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and Michael the Archangel, who removed the scars received by Smith throughout the year of abuse and blocked memories of the events "until the time was right". The book claims that during the rites, Smith was allegedly tortured, locked in cages, sexually assaulted, forced to participate in various rituals, witnessed several human sacrifices, and was rubbed with the blood and body parts of various sacrificed infants and adults.

After Smith had seemingly recovered her memories, she and Pazder consulted with various church authorities, eventually traveling to the Vatican.

Publication history

Michelle Remembers was first publicized with articles in People magazine and the National Enquirer. During 1980, Pazder and Smith toured the United States to promote the book. Ultimately a publishing success, the book earned Pazder and Smith a $100,000 hard-cover advance, $242,000 for paperback rights, royalties, and a potential movie deal.

In 1989, almost 10 years after the publication of Michelle Remembers, Oprah Winfrey featured Smith as a guest on her show alongside Laurel Rose Willson, author of the equally fictitious Satanic ritual abuse survival memoir Satan's Underground, which was published using the pseudonym Lauren Stratford. Both women's experiences were presented by Winfrey as incontrovertible fact, and not once did she question the authenticity of any claim in either book.

Investigation and debunking

Pazder was a credentialed psychiatrist and fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, and the book states that its source materials (therapy tapes) were scrutinized. However, the accuracy of the allegations in Michelle Remembers was questioned soon after the book was published. After the book's publication, Pazder withdrew his assertion that it was the Church of Satan that had abused Smith when Anton LaVey (who founded the church years after the alleged events of Michelle Remembers) threatened to sue for libel.

In an October 27, 1980 article in the magazine Maclean's, Paul Grescoe interviewed Smith's father, Jack Proby, who denied the allegations against Smith's mother, Virginia (who died in 1964), and claimed he could refute all the allegations in the book. Grescoe also noted that the book failed to make any mention of Smith's two sisters, Charyl (younger) and Tertia (older), or that Pazder and Smith (both Catholics) had divorced their spouses and married each other. The book also fails to mention any police investigations or any attempt Pazder made to involve the police in verifying any of the book's accusations.

However, in a September 30, 1990 article in London England's Sunday Mail, "Michelle Remembers: The Debunking of a Myth / Why the original “ritual abuse” victim may have suffered only from her childhood fantasies," Proby confirmed that a tragic car accident did indeed happen even though it went unreported: "What I do recall was us once coming across a fatal crash in our car. We saw two cars smashed together, and a woman lying in the road bleeding to death. Her intestines were hanging out, and it was a horrible sight. Michelle started to scream, and we could not stop her for ages."