Fact Check: Exposing Geraldo Riveras Exposing Satans Underground Part 8

We're back after a brief break to go further into my exposé on Geraldo Rivera's exposé on the "Satanic Underground". If you are just joining us, you've got one hell of a homework assignment ahead of you. As many of you know, I haven't left my house since I started this series of articles. My only company is my cat Mister Matches. Strange things have been happening since the cat has come to live with me. Today, I woke up and found Mister Matches sleeping next to a freshly killed bird.

The cat has never been outside! (Also, totally not Photoshopped)

I have had this strange feeling of some kind of presence in my home. I've spent hours a day peering deeply at Dokken records, as though I am trying to find some hidden message there.

What does it mean??

Still, I soldier on. When we last left Geraldo Rivera, he had just finished grilling Michael Aquino, the High Priest of the Church of Set, regarding allegations of child abuse. Not getting the scandalous story he was hoping for, Geraldo decided to kick things up a notch. He warns the viewing audience that if they have let their children watch up to this point to stop now. Dear reader, I hope you have your favorite dipping sauce ready because we're going to be choking down some real bullshit here.

But For Serious: If you get triggered by rape and child molestation, you might want to skip this entire article.

The Curious Case of Kaleb Kellum

How Geraldo Tells It:

Kaleb Kellum is a child from Gretna, Louisianna, who Geraldo claims was a victim of Satanic Ritual Abuse. This is evident, apparently, by the fact that the kid draws a bunch of really fucked up pictures. While he may be lacking in composition, his drawings include babies getting thrown against walls, ghosts and skeletons, and people peeing on each other.

This is why they don't have Dead Baby Jokes in Pictionary.

At one point, Kaleb says that he was taken to a caboose where his abusers used something called "Spains" that they put in his butt. He claims that his father did it to him and "Ow, did it hurt!". According to a medical report from the Brown-McHardy Clinic, the boy was repeatedly abused due to old scars from anal fissures. Geraldo then takes it to Kaleb's mother, Sanda, who accuses her ex-husband David of being a high priest in a Satanic Cult. Geraldo makes a point of saying that David has never been formally charged, and has since gone into hiding.

When you look up "Golden Showers" at the US Patent Office, it includes this picture.

What's Really Going On:

Details on this one are a little hard to come by. However, on your right is a segment of Bill Elder's Journal from 1988 on Satanism. It features a segment about the Kellum family. The only "evidence" that Sandra Kellum has that her husband was a "Satanist" is a doodle on a newspaper ad for Gerber Baby Food, where the iconic baby has horns and a beard doodled on it. Outside of this, the stories of her son, Kaleb, and his drawings apparently tell the story.

However, if you watch carefully, Kaleb is clearly being coached by his mother. The story he tells is rehearsed and unemotional. This was fairly common during the "Satanic Panic" where children are coached by parents, law enforcement officers, and therapists to say all manner of horrible things. A child, wanting to please these authority figures would eventually parrot what was being told and then they would go off and tell all sorts of wild stories because they received positive reinforcement from these figures. If you actually take a closer look at Kaleb's childhood drawings, you can tell that these are nonsensical and imaginative drawings of a child.

A tap dancing skeleton and a Pac-Man Ghost are more "Halloween Art Project" than "Proof of Satanic Abuse"

This went to a grand jury in Lafayette, LA, and Sandra Kellum's claims were dismissed. In the Geraldo special, the segment about the Kellum family uses quick editing, where you only hear the child's responses. We have no idea what the child was being asked, or if his mother was in the room coaching him along. We are also only shown part of the doctor's report.

Which if anything, shows that these physicians were probably jumping to one huge conclusion. Also, you'd have to be a pretty shitty doctor if you don't know that anal fissures in children are actually quite common, and are the result of constipation. Other causes include having extreme diarrhea, or childbirth. Sexual penetration is a less common cause. When you've got a rip in your ass-meat, you also shit blood. If this child was being abused for six years, as his mother claims, that kid would have been shitting blood a lot. Also, anal fissures are not exactly something a kid can hide. Even if his father was threatening the boy to keep him quiet, you'd have to be a very unobservant parent not to notice that your kid is pooping blood.

Apparently, signs of ritualistic abuse include the awareness of the human rights violations in communist China.

What's Kaleb Kellum up to these days? Well, when he's not trying to get a ghost hunting show off the ground, investigating vampires, he's writing Creepypasta stories and writing his own biography on IMDB. What's clear here is he's trying to make a living off the supernatural, and it seems unlikely he'd give an actual truthful account of what happened.

Satanism in Sunny California

Coming this fall: Office Sloth-Man. He's half-man, half-sloth, and he works in an office!

How Geraldo Tells It:

Geraldo next interviews an unidentified woman who claims that her husband abused their daughter in Satanic rituals. This included claims that the father wore a severed baby's foot around his neck, made his daughter drink blood, and then had her molested by a group of people.

Then there's the "Smith" family (not their real names, obvies) who claim their 10-year-old son was abused by a trusted minister who, allegedly, was a super-secret Satanist.

How It Really Went Down:

Well, the first case is nearly impossible to find any details on. It doesn't help that the woman being interviewed isn't named. The second case, well, if you look up stories about ministers who molested children in the late 80's in the Los Angeles area, there is an entire website for victims of abuse by priests dating as far back as 1936 to 2016, and those are the ones that have been reported .

Just because your local minister decided to use his penis to destroy the innocence of a child, doesn't make them a Satanist. If anything, this speaks more of an issue with the Catholic church than anything else. I wouldn't be surprised that it was easier to spin this into the Satanic Abuse narrative to avoid any sort of crisis of faith in these people. If you've got that much conviction it's easy to presume that some outside force is making your Minister diddle kids than accepting the fact that human beings can be monsters all on their own.

Satanic Abuse From Coast to Coast!

How Geraldo Tells It:

In a series of clips, Geraldo narrates that reports of Satanic Ritual Abuse have been happening all over the country. However, they only reference two: Maplewood, New Jersey; El Paso, Texas.

Pro-Tip: Maybe don't grin like a ghoul at children describing alleged abuse.

Don't Panic!:

So you've got 50 states in the union, and only three states have these abuse cases? That's not exactly a nationwide epidemic. Let's take a look at his two examples.

The first one is the Wee Care Nursery School in Maplewood, New Jersey . In 1985, Margaret Kelly Michaels was accused of abusing a whopping 51 children. Accusations included using rectal thermometers during nap time, playing naked Duck, Duck, Goose, and singing Jingle Bells naked. At the time, Michaels was sentenced to 47 years in prison. However, Margaret won an appeal in 1994, the judges overturning the conviction because... wait for it... improper interviewing techniques that actually implanted false memories. Here's the other thing, there were no accusations of Satanism involved!

The El Paso, Texas story is likely the case of the Dan and Fran Keller, who ran a private daycare center. They went to trial in the 1990s and were found guilty. They spent two decades in prison before the conviction was overturned and they were released in 2013!!

A Frightened Town Meets the Satanic Underground

How Geraldo Tells It:

The song and is similar here. This time it's in Omaha, Nebraska. Geraldo interviews a bunch of anonymous children who claim that they were born into a Satanic Cult and abused until they were taken away and put into foster care. It then cuts to two women in particular: Kathleen Sorenson, the adopted mother of the ritually abused children, and another woman named Suzanne Strieff whose child was also, apparently ritually abused. In the case of Strieff, she states that her child was urinated and shat upon while Sorenson tells lurid tales of her adopted children committing murder. We then cut to Sandee and Larry Polsley. Sandee goes on about how her 2-year-old child was made to hold a gun to the head of another child and pull the trigger.

Geraldo then goes on to say that the "trouble" about reporting a story like this is because it's so "outrageous". He says that this gathering has formed a group called "Believe the Children". The purpose of the group was to make believe the stories told by their children. Their reasoning is that these stories they hear are too widespread and too "consistent" not to be true.

Believe In Yourself and You Too Can Be a Victim!

We'll get back to "Believe the Children" in a moment, let's focus on the people above. First, you've got Kathleen Sorenson and Suzanne Strieff. The pair were the faces of the Salina Coalition for the Prevention of Child Abuse.

Kathleen Sorenson's adopted children, Nelly and Kimberly Patterson fled their former foster parents, the Webbs. Lo and behold, she went to every form of media to proclaim that her adopted children were ritually abused. Her story is somehow tied into the bat-shit-insane Franklin child abuse cover-up. She has her own chapter in John DeChamp's book "The Franklin Cover-Up", which alleges that the highest forms of government are involved in a pedophile ring that is also a Satanic cult. To its believers, they believe that people were killed in order to cover it up and hush things up. Kathleen fits into this conspiracy because she died in a car accident in 1989. According to former FBI Agent, Ted Gunderson, the accident was an intentional murder-suicide having to do with some kind of Satanic ritual. We'll get to Gunderson later.

According to DeChamp, the "Satanic connection" was that driver and her husband had prior arrest records for animal abuse. Except, he's got it wrong . The driver (Tina Townsend) was the only adult in the car, the other passenger being her one-month-old daughter. Here's a snippet of an article about Townsend's trial.

Before cell phones, babies were the most common cause of distracted driving. Drive safe,leave your baby at home!

The other thing about all the accusations that Sorenson made or associated with come from John DeChamp's book. The book is rife with uncited sources, anonymous sources, and hearsay.

Then we have Suzanne Strieff.... Well other than her work with "Believe the Children", there's nothing about her and the apparent abuse that her child suffered in Chicago. I searched the Chicago Tribune website which has an archive dating back 1849. There are many references to child abuse accusations for the era, but without more information, it's hard to pin down what she is referring to. However, you would figure if she was involved in such accusations, her name would be in the newspaper. However, there is no trace of her name in the Chicago Tribune prior to her joining the Believe the Children Foundation.

Likewise, there is nothing on the Polsley's that can be verified or fact-checked. So going forward, let's lump them all in with the rest of the "Believe the Children" organization. Investigations found zero evidence that would support any of their claims.

Back in the studio…

Geraldo then addresses the parents involved in the McMartin Preschool Scandal, the most high profile daycare abuse trial of the time. I'm going to break down. The guy below is the person who acted as a spokesperson for the group and he had some interesting statements to make why he thinks this was all having to do with a Satanic cult.

You can almost see the nonsense flying out of the mouth of this moron.

.“Well, the easiest reason to that question, Geraldo, is that the children started talking. They started talking about robes and candles. They described an Episcopal church, and once they started narrowing that down, you’d see that it had to be Satanic.”

Robes, candles and an Episopal church. I think you're describing an Anglican church and not a Satanic Cult, you fucking moron.

“It’s very important in Satanic religions to have a priest, because they truly do believe in power. The only difference between Catholicism and the Episcopal religion uh, is almost done. They both use wine, they both use bread, and so on.”

Actually, a priest is not important in a Satanic religion at all. As far as the Church of Satan is concerned, someone who is named high priest or priestess is just an administrator. They don't do anything more sinister than paper pushing in other words. Like everyone else, he's mixing up the Christian idea of what a Satanist is, instead of what the organized religion does. Also, this putz really has something against Anglicans if he's lumping them with Satanists.

As for the wine and bread thing.... There's nothing sinister about that because basically every religion that has borrowed from Paganism (such as Christianity) all use wine and bread for communion.

“The truth about Satanism is that they truly use blood, and they mix it with urine. Then they also use the real meat, the real flesh, and this is what makes Satanism true. ”

True how? True to who? You're not stating any kind of facts here pal, you're just saying shit and accepting its true without actually doing any sort of research. I've read through the Satanic Bible a fair number of times. Their rituals and spells are downright silly in my mind. They involve gongs, naked women, and masturbation, burning rose petals and other sorts of nerdy crap. They certainly don't drink blood, let alone blood with pee in it (or pee with blood in it if you're a glass-half-empty kind of person). Also, define what you mean by "real meat", are you talking about actual meat, or are you talking about human flesh? "real meat, real flesh" means they go for organic not cannibalism. His argument has the same logic as a child saying the Easter Bunny is real when his only evidence is store-bought chocolate eggs.

He then goes on to say that Manhattan Beach, California is the child molestation capital on this side of Detroit (he doesn't want to pick on Detroit though!!) claiming that a third of children in this community have been molested and a number of pre-schools had been shut down.

Here's Where Shit Gets Wacky

The McMartin trial ran from 1988 to 1990. It all starts with a child having painful shits. Instead of the more practical reasons -- the kid is constipated -- people accused Peggy McMartin of abusing the children at her pre-school. Kids claimed that there were witches who could fly, underground torture tunnels, hot air balloon rides, and other elaborate and detailed goings-on that were more and more outrageous. These Believe the Children idiots bought the stories.

Eager to collar themselves a Satanic child abuser, the police looked into the allegations. Including digging around for the secret tunnels under the pre-school.

Careful there Steve, there may be blood drinking witches playing "Naked Movie Star" down there!

When shown pictures of possible suspects, some of the children pointed out this man as a suspect:

Colonel James Braddock was quickly ruled out as he was a Prisoner of War in

Vietnam at the time. The perfect alibi.

Yes, it was a picture of Chuck Norris, and the first Chuck Norris facts included carwash orgies and flushing children down toilets. In what I can believe is one of histori’s biggest missed opportunities, they never called Norris to testify and prove his innocence. Since the accusations were made in 1983, all he would have had to do was screen the film Lone Wolf McQuade. However, Kris Kristofferson, who was originally intended for the lead role in Lone Wolf, was interestingly unaccounted for in 1983. At least, according to his IMDB profile. It seems like someone missed a potential angle on this parade of nonsense.

When We Come Back

Okay, we're done with the worst-of-the-worst in this special, go and take a cold shower, you earned it.

Next time, Geraldo decides to play Secret Satan, by gifting us with allegedly Satanic crimes. Also, watch him recycle footage of his Charles Manson interview.