CHRONICLE OF A WITCH HUNT

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

Mass paranoia flourished in this country long before it dressed up in camouflage and stockpiled assault weapons. During the 1980s, hysteria lived in comfortable homes with jungle gyms out back and family vans parked in front. In a number of highly publicized cases-in places such as Maplewood, New Jersey; Edenton, North Carolina; Chicago; and Los Angeles-hordes of parents accused nursery-school and day-care-center workers of sexually abusing children. Spurred by public outrage, prosecutors charged staff members with horrific crimes, often based solely on the claims of youngsters whose tales ranged from gropings in the classroom to ritual satanic killings and rides aboard spaceships. Though their reputations were irrevocably damaged, most of the defendants ultimately went free.

Among them were Virginia McMartin, her daughter Peggy and two grown grandchildren, all of whom worked at McMartin's preschool in a Los Angeles suburb, which became the subject of the longest and costliest trial in American history. The case ended in 1990 with no convictions on any of the 65 criminal counts. Now the family's seven-year legal ordeal is the subject of Indictment: The McMartin Trial, a gripping-though excessively pious-TV movie that will make its debut May 20 on hbo. Conceived and scripted by veteran screenwriter Abby Mann (Judgment at Nuremberg, The Atlanta Child Murders) and his wife Myra, the film feverishly aims to convince any doubters that the McMartins were the victims of a terrible injustice.

The drama is based on the trial transcripts and various videotapes as well as extensive interviews, though with an aggressively prodefense point of view. The film begins with the initial allegations leveled against McMartin's pasty-faced grandson Ray Buckey (Henry Thomas) by a mother later diagnosed as schizophrenic. Judy Johnson, portrayed in the film by Roberta Bassin as a dazed freak, insists that Buckey sodomized her 2 1/2-year-old son.

The charge prompts police to send advisory letters to McMartin parents. The Los Angeles district attorney's office then directs several hundred preschoolers to the Children's Institute International, an agency that cares for abused and neglected children, for therapeutic questioning.

There social worker Kee MacFarlane (Lolita Davidovich) gets the kids to claim that they were repeatedly raped, sodomized and forced to witness the slaughter of rabbits and other animals. Like Lael Rubin (Mercedes Ruehl), the lead prosecutor in the McMartin case, MacFarlane is portrayed as a dangerously misguided zealot. During her videotaped interviews (portions of which are excerpted verbatim from the transcripts), children initially deny abuse until MacFarlane goads them with such remarks as "Are you gonna be stupid, or are you gonna be smart and help us out here?"

The biggest villains in the movie, however, are the media, especially local TV newscaster Wayne Satz, who early on reported the ghastliest accusations against the McMartins with sensationalistic relish. From talk-show hosts to newspaper reporters, the media avidly portrayed the McMartins as torturers. Even Ray Buckey's lawyer Danny Davis-played intriguingly by James Woods as part camera-ready opportunist, part righteous upholder of justice-presumed the McMartins guilty at first.

So too did Myra Mann and her husband. "I reacted like everybody else," she says. "I thought, 'God, what people.' They looked rather sleazy. Later on I realized it was because they hadn't slept. They were in terror." The Manns have been obsessed with the case since 1986, taking it as a personal crusade. In fact, they became participants in it. After Glenn Stevens, one of the prosecutors (played in the film by Joe Urla), quit the case because he felt the McMartins were being unfairly targeted, Myra Mann began to tape what would turn out to be 30 hours of interviews with him. She eventually turned over the tapes to the court and was called in to testify about them in a pretrial hearing. She wound up spending every day of the two trials (which spanned three years) in court as an impassioned observer. While they were on the set of the movie last December, the Manns' Los Angeles house mysteriously burned down in what police confirm was arson: the Manns believe it was related to the case.

Indictment has already raised an outcry among children's advocacy groups. In a press release, the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children argues that the film lacks balance and is "dangerous in its potential for fueling unjustified skepticism about the judicial system and about child witnesses." Although apsac executive director Theresa Reid has not seen the film, she has read the script and cites as her main concern "the implication that fantastic elements in a child's account of abuse are evidence that the account is false." Prosecutor Rubin declined an invitation from Time to see a screening of the movie and comment on it.

Indictment is just the latest TV project to offer a revisionist view of the '80s child-abuse frenzy. Robert F. Kelly Jr., former co-owner of the Little Rascals Day Care Center in Edenton, North Carolina, and Dawn Wilson, the center's cook, were granted new trials this month in a sex-abuse case that had landed them lifelong prison sentences. In arguing for the new trial, Kelly's attorney submitted a 1993 Frontline documentary (one of two pbs series aired on the case), which skeptically examined the children's fantastic claims of abuse and uncovered potential juror misconduct.

Prosecutors in North Carolina continue to argue that the guilty verdicts were justified and contend that the Frontline reports were biased. "Generally, movies and docudramas about high-profile cases tend to be prodefense because the defense is where the producers are able to gather most of their information," notes North Carolina attorney general Mike Easley, who will ask the state supreme court to affirm the Little Rascals convictions. "Defense attorneys are much more facile in winning the public-relations aspects of these visible cases."

Possibly true. Some filmmakers on a mission, moreover, can be guilty of bombastic overkill. Indictment begins with an ominous message-"This story happened in America in our times''-and has the sanctimonious tone of people who think they are discovering a horrid injustice for the first time. Indeed, Indictment makes its point far less subtly and effectively than such nonfiction works as The Thin Blue Line or the Frontline documentaries, which examined court cases that had been less thoroughly hashed over than the McMartin case. Still, for all its journalistic pretensions, Indictment is powerful and affecting television.

-Reported by Lisa H. Towle/Raleigh, William Tynan/New York and Tara Weingarten/Los Angeles

With reporting by LISA H. TOWLE/RALEIGH WILLIAM TYNAN/NEW YORK AND TARA WEINGARTEN/LOS ANGELES