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The Independent UK
The Independent UK
National
Sheila Flynn

Recovered memories, a lurid memoir and global fear of the devil: The true story behind the 1980s Satanic panic

SXSW

For a time, they were everywhere – a Canadian psychiatrist and his soft-spoken patient, unassuming harbingers of doom at the hands of the devil. Larry Pazder and Michelle Smith exploded onto talk shows and into headlines after the 1980 publication of the co-written memoir Michelle Remembers, detailing the patient’s “recovered” recollections through therapy about childhood torture inflicted by a Satanic cult.

“Basically, what I remember was a 14-month period of my life at age five where I was given to a group of people whom at first I wasn’t aware of what they were doing, other than, to a child, they were adults doing things that I couldn’t understand and that frightened me,” Ms Smith said in one television interview. “They sacrificed animals and they used fetuses of babies in their ceremonies,” she told a different outlet.

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