[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 66 (Monday, May 13, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4981-S4982]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           DOROTHY RABINOWITZ

 Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, on Saturday morning last, Nat 
Hentoff devoted his ever-insightful column to a tribute to Dorothy 
Rabinowitz. Much deserved; beautifully accomplished. I ask that Mr. 
Hentoff's column be printed in the Record.
  The column follows:

                [From the Washington Post, May 11, 1996]

           She Listened to the Children--and Had Some Doubts

                            (By Nat Hentoff)

       I.F. Stone, one of my mentors in this business, used to 
     tell young reporters: ``If you intend to use the First 
     Amendment to change the world, forget it. If you're lucky, 
     you may be able, over time, to make small, incremental 
     changes.''
       Once in a while, however, a journalists does make a big 
     difference, even rescuing innocent people from prison--and 
     changing the way many other journalists cover a particular 
     kind of story.
       For much of the past 10 years, Dorothy Rabinowitz has been 
     rigorously investigating cases of preschool teachers and 
     others around the country who have been convicted of sexual 
     child abuse. She first became involved in the New Jersey 
     sentencing of Kelly Michaels to 47 years in prison on 115 
     counts of bizarrely molesting 20 children from the ages of 3 
     to 5. (One child testified that Michaels had turned her into 
     a mouse. Others said the teacher made them eat a ``cake'' of 
     her feces.)
       The press at the time found the testimony of the accusers 
     entirely convincing, and a Pulitzer Prize winner, Anna 
     Quindlen, then a columnist for the New York Times, urged her 
     readers to ``believe the children.''
       Rabinowitz interviewed everyone she was able to reach, 
     including the furious parents of the allegedly abused 
     children. She also obtained transcripts of the state's 
     ``investigators'' who questioned the children until the kids 
     gave the required answers.
       I also had those transcripts. The manipulation and 
     intimidation of the children was so obvious that if the trail 
     had not been about sexual violations of kids, the charges 
     would have been dismissed. The prosecution did not introduce 
     a single piece of physical evidence to support the charges 
     and the children's stories.
       After five years in prison, Michaels was released because 
     lawyers who had read Dorothy Rabinowitz's investigative 
     pieces volunteered to prove her innocence. By then, most of 
     the press had come to the belated conclusion that somehow an 
     injustice had been done, but there were no apologies.
       Rabinowitz had joined the Wall Street journal by then, 
     writing commentary. But an inveterate reporter, she bases her 
     commentaries on research that comes from legwork.

[[Page S4982]]

       Although she writes on other issues, Rabinowitz continues 
     to confront prosecutors and juries who have convicted 
     defendants accused by children--coached by therapists and law 
     enforcement ``specialists'' in sexual abuse. As Alan Kors, a 
     history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, notes:
       ``What Rabinowitz has disclosed to full public scrutiny and 
     understanding is sadly reminiscent of Europe's witch-craze--a 
     jurisprudence of leading questions, sociopathology, disregard 
     of evidence and logic, and careerism joined to fanaticism.''
       In the Massachusetts Amiraults' case, Rabinowitz's 
     persistent stories finally led to the release from prison of 
     two of the three defendants. She has not given up on the 
     third. In the Boston Globe, critic at large Ed Siegel 
     emphasizes that Rabinowitz was ``the first journalist to 
     provide in-depth reporting on the case'' and ``her series had 
     a ripple effect.'' And Malcolm Gladwell noted in The Post 
     that ``the Amiraults' case became a national cause celebre 
     because of doubts about the veracity of the children's 
     testimony against them.'' Those doubts came largely from 
     stories in the Wall Street Journal.
       A movie could be made about Dorothy Rabinowitz, journeying 
     alone, to the city of Wenatchee in the state of Washington, 
     where many have been charged and imprisoned on the testimony 
     of children in a nightmarish setting that resembled a fusion 
     of the TV series ``Picket Fences'' and a Stephen King novel.
       A local television reporter, Tom Grant, told me he had to 
     fight to get air time to report the story, which he 
     nonetheless did with much courage in a town that had aspects 
     of 17th-century Salem, Mass. This year, Grant received a 
     George Polk Award for local television reporting.
       He says, however, that Wenatchee became a national concern 
     because of Dorothy Rabinowitz. ``Six months after I started 
     on the story,'' he said to me, ``Dorothy came and everything 
     exploded. Then the other media came.''
       Rabinowitz was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 
     commentary this year, but was not considered worthy. Some 
     members of the ultimate Pulitzer Board had been told--as one 
     of them assured Tucker Carlson of the Standard--that she had 
     had no effect on the local situations she wrote about. So 
     much for accuracy of reporting on high.
       In 1965, when the august Pulitzer board overruled a music 
     jury award to Duke Ellington, he said: ``Fate doesn't want me 
     to be too famous too young.'' Ellington easily survived the 
     ignorance of the Pulitzer Board. And Dorothy Rabinowitz also 
     knows she is worth a lot more than one of its prizes.

  (At the request of Mr. Daschle, the following statement was ordered 
to be printed in the Record.)

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