What the record shows, what it doesn’t

What the record supports: a substantial and well-documented social phenomenon of moral panic in the United States and Canada between roughly 1980 and 1995, with traceable origins in late-1970s recovered-memory therapeutic orthodoxy and the 1980 publication of Michelle Remembers; criminal prosecutions in characteristic shape across dozens of cases; an FBI institutional position rejecting the existence of an organised satanic-cult network; an eventual reversal of the bulk of the panic-era convictions through state appellate courts and post-conviction relief; and a professional shift in clinical psychology away from recovered-memory orthodoxy.

What the record does not support: an organised national network of satanic abusers; a programmatic infiltration of day-care centres by religious Satanists; or a connection between the alleged conspiracy and any contemporary organisation operating under Satanic imagery. Individual case merits vary; the consensus on the phenomenon as a whole has not.