Kelly Michaels

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  www.pedophileophobia.com/day_care_sexual_abuse_hysteria - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 3/22/2008    Last Visited: 3/22/2008  

  In 1985, Kelly Michaels, a former teacher at the Wee Care Day Nursery in Maplewood, N.J., was accused of a staggering array of abuses: assaulting children in a tractor; spreading peanut butter on their genitals and licking it off; raping them with knives, forks and Lego blocks.As Rabinowitz recounts, one child testified that Michaels had turned him into a mouse while he was in an airplane on the way to visit his grandmother.In closing arguments, prosecutors compared Michaels to Hitler; she was sentenced to 47 years in prison. ^ New York Times; April 23, 1992; Day-Care Owner Is Convicted of Child Molesting.

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  www.guidemag.com/magcontent/invokemagcontent.cfm?ID=E0B - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 12/1/1999    Last Visited: 8/26/2008  

  The 1988 conviction of Kelly Michaels, a Maplewood, New Jersey daycare worker who was in a lesbian relationship at the time of her arrest, was also abetted by homophobic insinuations.During their successful campaign to free her after she had served five years in prison, however, some of Michaels's supporters swept the inconvenient fact of her bisexuality under the rug, portraying her as a model of heterosexual respectability.Baran's openness about his identity makes such a portrayal impossible.
  
  Gay activists who might in another context have been inspired by Baran's insistence on living his life as an out gay man have shunned him, as they tend to shun anyone tainted by accusations of child molestation.The gay community has expended far more energy dissociating itself from such people and reciting the gay-people-are-not-after-your-children mantra than it has spent looking at ways in which homophobia and sexphobia have warped our justice system.

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  A Darkness in Massachusetts - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 1/30/1995    Last Visited: 1/6/2002  

  Among them was that of day- care worker Kelly Michaels, reported on these pages.But the prime child abuse extravaganza -- and the one the Amirault prosecutors clearly took for their model -- was the now notorious McMartin Preschool case in California, involving alleged abusers Ray Buckey and his mother, sixtyish administrator Peggy McMartin Buckey.
  
  True, there was a certain inimitable grandeur to the McMartin epic, involving as it did claims of abuse in underground tunnels, of molestation in hot air balloons, and similar marvels.As recently as three years ago die-hard believers among the plaintiff parents were still to be found at the school site, faithfully conducting their searches for the underground tunnels.
  
  That the wave of spectacular child-abuse trials emerged in the '80s was no accident.
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  Kelly Michaels, too, now has her freedom -- but for the Amiraults, a far grimmer story from the outset, prospects remain bleak.

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  BOOKVIEWS: June 2004 - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 6/1/2004    Last Visited: 5/18/2009  

  I am particularly aware of this as one of the most famous cases occurred in my hometown in New Jersey where a day care worker, Kelly Michaels, was falsely charged with 280 counts of sexually abusing nursery school children and imprisoned for five years before being clearing of all the charges.

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  COSA Newsletter October 1995 - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 1/1/2001    Last Visited: 7/30/2003  

  After 2 years of indictment and a 10 month, highly publicized trial, Kelly Michaels was convicted of the most bizarre and horrendous accounts of child molestation of children at the Wee Care Nursery-School where she worked in New Jersey.She spent 5 years in prison until an Appellate Court overturned her conviction in 1993.

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  Child Abuse Accusations,Prevention,Child Abuse in... - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 12/11/2003    Last Visited: 1/8/2004  

  That was the issue in case of Kelly Michaels, a New Jersey day care worker convicted of molesting dozens of children.Michaels spent five yea! rs in prison before an appellate court overturned the conviction, finding investigators had improperly influenced the children.

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  Child Abuse Accusations,Prevention,Child Abuse in... - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 12/11/2003    Last Visited: 2/17/2004  

  That was the issue in case of Kelly Michaels, a New Jersey day care worker convicted of molesting dozens of children.Michaels spent five years in prison before an appellate court overturned the conviction, finding investigators had improperly influenced the children.

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  Child Care Center In at Bud Cramer's Diet Resources - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 6/7/2005    Last Visited: 11/12/2006  

  Ordeal by trial - case of New Jersey day care center worker Kelly Michaels and the problem of false charges against alleConvicted child molester Kelly Michaels has been released after serving five years in prison.A state appellate court ruled that she was denied a fair trial.

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  Fantastic tales of sexual abuse: a history - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 5/4/2001    Last Visited: 11/14/2001  

  One of the worst stories is that of Kelly Michaels.Ceci and Bruck devote special attention to the questioning of children in the Michaels case.Freshly graduated from a small Catholic college near Pittsburgh , Michaels was arrested in 1986 , charged with sexually abusing dozens of children at the Wee Care daycare center in New Jersey.After a lengthy jury trial , Michaels was sentenced to forty-seven years in prison.Ceci and Bruck filed an amicus brief in her appeal.Signed by forty-six child psychologists , the brief argued that testimony had been elicited from children in a shocking manner by frightening and bullying them and through sexually explicit interviewing.
  
  It is worth noting that in the Michaels case , as in the other daycare cases , the improbability of the entire scenario disturbed not judge , jury , or media.Michaels was accused of raping almost all the children in the daycare center with knives , forks , spoons , Lego blocks -all during regular school hours for a period of seven months.Audiotapes of the children's original testimony showed that some children testified their parents were present during these goings-on.One child asserted that the head teacher had walked in as Kelly was penetrating the children with assorted utensils , took the silverware , and put it in her briefcase.The prosecution disposed of such inconvenient testimony by explaining that these were rescue fantasies..
  
  No member of the staff at Wee Care had noticed anything amiss in all those months and no child had complained to his parents.So , while , in his summing up , Judge William Harth adjured the jury to use your common sense , neither he nor the jury showed much of that vital commodity.Michaels had been imprisoned for five years before the appeals court threw out her conviction on the grounds that the children's testimony had been tainted by improper interviewing techniques.
  
  As for the women with repressed memories who cut themselves off from their parents , even going so far as to sue them in civil or criminal court , many have recanted their accusations or reestablished ties without saying they were wrong.Many families remain permanently estranged.Many of the women convicted in the daycare or sex ring cases have by now been released ( the men are another story ).But the lives of all those involved were shattered , and it is hard to put Humpty Dumpty together again.

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  IPT Journal - "Investigations and Interviews in Cases... - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 12/1/1995    Last Visited: 5/21/2009  

  This furnished the pivot of the reversal of Kelly Michaels's conviction (McGough, 1995).
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  All your friends that I mentioned before were telling us that Kelly, the teacher we are talking about, was doing something they didn't like very much. She was bothering them in kind of a private way and they were all pretty brave and they told us everything, and we were wondering if you could help us out too, doing the same thing.
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  Several highly publicized convictions, including Kelly Michaels, Edenton (Little Rascals), and Bakersfield, have been overturned, at least partially because of the coercive and suggestive interviews.

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