Save the Children

Since 1977, campaigns have wrapped attacks on gay people, teachers, and political rivals in the language of saving children, so that anyone who objects seems to side with predators. It cost a civil rights law, a seven-year prosecution with no convictions, a rifle fired inside a pizzeria, and hotline time meant for real victims.

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The Carousel

A Rifle, a Pizzeria, and a Cause

At about 3 p.m. on December 4, 2016, a 28-year-old man from Salisbury, North Carolina, walked into Comet Ping Pong, a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C., with a loaded AR-15 rifle across his chest and a loaded revolver on his hip. The customers, the FBI later noted, included children. They ran¹².

He fired the rifle inside, searched for hidden rooms, and found none. Then he walked out with his hands up¹.

Two days earlier, he had texted a friend to ask whether an Army buddy was “down for the cause.” He spelled out the cause: “Raiding a pedo ring, possibly sacraficing [sic] the lives of a few for the lives of many. Standing up against a corrupt system that kidnaps, tortures and rapes babies and children in our own backyard... defending the next generation of kids, our kids”¹.

There was no ring. A man who believed he was saving children had carried a rifle into a restaurant with real children in it. The move behind his story is older than he was, and it has won before.

1977: “Vote for the Human Rights of Your Children”

In January 1977, Dade County, Florida, which includes Miami, passed an ordinance banning discrimination against gay people in housing, employment, and public accommodations. A campaign to repeal it began almost at once and forced a countywide vote on June 7³.

The face of the repeal campaign was Anita Bryant, a singer, former beauty queen, and star of Florida orange juice ads⁴. Her group’s pamphlet lists her as president of Save Our Children, Incorporated⁵.

The ballot question was about jobs and housing. The campaign made it about children. A pro-repeal TV ad showed a San Francisco parade of “men hugging other men, cavorting with little boys,” and closed: “On June 7th, vote for the human rights of your children”³. The pamphlet asked, “Are homosexuals trying to recruit our children?” and told voters, “Vote FOR children’s rights. Vote FOR repeal”⁵.

That renaming was the mechanism. The ordinance said a person could not be fired, evicted, or turned away for being gay. Once repeal meant “children’s rights,” a no vote read as a vote against children.

The charge was recruitment. A campaign newspaper ad, which Bryant reprinted in her 1977 book, argued that “since homosexuals cannot reproduce, they must recruit, must freshen their ranks.” The book puts it more bluntly: “And to freshen their ranks, they must recruit the youth of America”⁶. The night before the vote, Bryant told a national TV audience she took her stand “because this local ordinance would allow flaunting homosexuals to be role models to my four children”³.

The target was the county’s gay and lesbian residents. The audience was parents. The claim had no evidence then and has none now; a 2022 PolitiFact review of the research found none⁷.

On June 7, 1977, repeal won by more than two to one, about 69 percent⁸⁹. Bryant said, “The laws of God and the cultural values of man have been vindicated”⁸. Within a year, voters repealed gay rights ordinances in St. Paul, Minnesota, Wichita, Kansas, and Eugene, Oregon⁹.

Florida’s Legislature went further. It passed a 1977 law that read, “No person eligible to adopt under this statute may adopt if that person is a homosexual”¹⁰. Elaine Bloom, a Miami legislator who helped pass it, said in 2002, “The hysteria of the times led us to do the wrong thing”¹¹. A state appeals court struck the ban down in 2010; one judge wrote that it “was enacted in haste and reaction in 1977”¹⁰.

Dade County showed the frame could win a vote against real people. The next case showed it could put people on trial for crimes no investigator could find.

1983 to 1990: “We Believe the Children”

By the early 1980s, parents were afraid for their children in a new way. The FBI’s Kenneth Lanning later described the missing-children scare: “The American public was led to believe that most of the missing children had been kidnapped by pedophiles”¹².

On August 12, 1983, a mother told police in Manhattan Beach, California, that her toddler had been molested at the McMartin Preschool by Ray Buckey, a 25-year-old teacher. After Buckey’s arrest, Police Chief Harry L. Kuhlmeyer Jr. mailed about 200 families a letter that named him and said: “Please question your child to see if he or she has been a witness to any crime or if he or she has been a victim”¹³¹⁴. The Los Angeles Times later reported that the letter panicked parents¹⁵.

The district attorney’s office asked Children’s Institute International to interview the children. Its therapists interviewed about 400 and, by March 1984, had diagnosed more than 350 as sexually abused¹³¹⁶. They used anatomically correct dolls and puppets, and they told children what other children had already reported¹⁶.

The tapes show what that sounded like. An 8-year-old boy holding an alligator puppet said he did not remember a game other children had described. The interviewer told him, “that’s how we really know you’re smarter than you look. So you better not play dumb, Mr. Alligator.” When he said he had never seen anyone play it, she said, “What good are you? You must be dumb.” A doctor told a 6-year-old girl who kept saying no, “I don’t wanna hear any more no’s”¹⁷.

The stories grew to include secret tunnels and animal sacrifices¹⁶. Parents and an archaeological firm dug for the tunnels and found none. Prosecutors indicted seven people, including the school’s founder, Virginia McMartin, then in her 70s, on 115 counts, later 208. By 1989, the institute had received more than $11 million in government grants¹³.

Doubt became hard to say out loud. Once the cause was believing children, questioning the interviews sounded like calling children liars. After the first verdict, about 500 people marched through Manhattan Beach with signs reading “We believe the children”¹⁶.

Charges against five of the seven were dropped in 1986. Ray Buckey and his mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey, went on trial in 1987¹³. In January 1990, the jury acquitted on 52 counts and deadlocked on 13. The foreperson, Luis Chang, said, “The interview tapes were too biased; too leading”¹⁶. A retrial also deadlocked¹³. Seven years and more than $15 million produced no convictions. Ray Buckey had spent five years in jail¹⁶¹⁵.

Researchers later tested the methods. In a 1998 study, “Thirty-six children interviewed with McMartin techniques made 58% accusations compared with 17% for 30 children interviewed with suggestive questions.” The accusations were false ones, against a classroom visitor¹⁸.

None of this means child abuse was a myth. It is real, and mostly close to home. In police reports from 12 states in 1991 to 1996, 49 percent of the people who sexually assaulted children under 6 were family members and 48 percent were acquaintances. Strangers were 3 percent¹⁹. The panic took a real danger and pointed it at a preschool where investigators never found the evidence.

If the cult was not real, someone with a badge had to say so. In 1992, the FBI did.

1992: The FBI Looks for the Cult

Kenneth Lanning, a supervisory special agent in the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, started out, by his own account, inclined to believe the people describing ritual abuse. His January 1992 guide for investigators concluded: “For at least eight years American law enforcement has been aggressively investigating the allegations of victims of ritual abuse. There is little or no evidence for the portion of their allegations that deals with large-scale baby breeding, human sacrifice, and organized satanic conspiracies”¹².

He added a warning: “Until hard evidence is obtained and corroborated, the public should not be frightened into believing that babies are being bred and eaten, that 50,000 missing children are being murdered in human sacrifices, or that satanists are taking over America’s day care centers or institutions”¹².

At police training seminars, he wrote, separate claims were stitched into a “Big Conspiracy” theory in which satanists had “infiltrated the Department of Justice, the Pentagon, and the White House”¹².

Read today, that line works like a forecast. The next version aimed at a presidential campaign.

2016: “The Intel on This Wasn’t 100 Percent”

In the last weeks of the 2016 presidential race, WikiLeaks published the emails of John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Anonymous posters claimed the emails held code words for child trafficking, and the claims moved from 4chan and Reddit to fake news sites and Twitter²⁰. The supposed headquarters was Comet Ping Pong, whose owner had corresponded with the campaign about a fundraiser². The theory had a name: Pizzagate¹.

The targets were a political opponent, then a neighborhood restaurant and its staff. The audience was anyone who cares about children. Sharing a post about abused children feels like protecting them.

Welch told police he had read the “news” reports online, heard about them from other people and on the radio, and decided to “investigate” on his own¹. He told the Times he listened to Alex Jones². In his own texts, he was not attacking anyone. He was “defending the next generation of kids, our kids”¹.

After his arrest, he told the Times, “The intel on this wasn’t 100 percent,” though he would concede only that there were no children “inside that dwelling”². He pleaded guilty to federal firearms and local assault charges. On June 22, 2017, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson sentenced him to four years: “No matter how well-intentioned, people are not allowed to take matters into their own hands”²¹.

In March 2017, after the restaurant’s owner, James Alefantis, demanded a retraction, Jones apologized and said “neither Mr. Alefantis, nor his restaurant Comet Ping Pong, were involved in any human trafficking”²².

Pizzagate did not end with a guilty plea. Four years later, its story came back bigger, under a friendlier name.

2020: #SaveTheChildren

NBC News described QAnon as a baseless conspiracy theory claiming that Donald Trump is secretly fighting a network of Satanist child abusers in government, entertainment, and media, and noted that the FBI had labeled it a potential domestic terror threat²³. In the summer of 2020, its ideas moved into ordinary feeds under a hashtag almost no one would argue with: #SaveTheChildren²⁴.

In July, an anonymous chatroom user asked, “What if retail giant Wayfair is using pricey storage cabinets to traffic children?” Users matched the names of expensive industrial cabinets to the names of missing children. Wayfair said, “There is, of course, no truth to these claims.” One girl named in the posts had been reported missing briefly in 2019 and found. She posted a video: “Why am I mad? Because I’m not missing”²⁵.

The real charity Save the Children said, “we are not affiliated or associated with any of these campaigns”²⁴. NBC News reported that the child-protection framing gave people an easy entry point into QAnon’s ideas²³.

The cost landed on real victims. On July 20, 2020, Polaris, which runs the National Human Trafficking Hotline, said it had received hundreds of Wayfair reports, none with “any information beyond what has been widely shared online,” and that “the extreme volume of these contacts has made it more difficult for the Trafficking Hotline to provide support and attention to others who are in need of help”²⁶. Polaris spelled out what that meant: “These long waits may literally mean the difference between someone finding the help they need to escape or having to hang up because they can’t get through”²⁷.

The real numbers point away from strangers in vans. Polaris calls kidnapping “the most pervasive myth about human trafficking” and says many survivors were trafficked by romantic partners or family members²⁸. Of the missing-child cases the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children worked in 2025, 92 percent involved children who had run away²⁹. Abductions by anyone outside the family are 1 percent of cases reported to the center³⁰.

By 2022, the accusation no longer needed an anonymous poster or a hashtag. It came from a governor’s press office.

The Pattern

Every case above runs the same play. Take a goal that would be hard to win on its own terms, such as repealing a civil rights law or discrediting a rival campaign. Attach it to the safety of children. Then any objection can be cast as indifference to children, or as cover for the people who hurt them.

It starts with a real fear; child abuse was and is real. It adds a villain who is rare or imaginary but easy to picture: a recruiting stranger, a satanic preschool, a pizzeria cult, a child hidden in a cabinet. It renames the decision, so that repeal becomes “children’s rights.” And it treats doubt as guilt. “Silence is complicity,” Christina Pushaw wrote in 2022³¹. “We believe the children,” the McMartin marchers’ signs said¹⁶.

The people accused pay first: gay residents who lost legal protection, a teacher who spent five years in jail, a restaurant staff that fled a rifle. Then real children pay, because attention and hotline time go to the invented danger instead of the real one, which is usually someone the child already knows¹⁹²⁷. The move works because protecting children is one of the best instincts people have.

The Rerun: “Probably a Groomer”

In 2022, Florida took up House Bill 1557, the Parental Rights in Education bill. Its key sentence reads: “Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards”³². Critics nicknamed it “Don’t Say Gay.” Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed it on March 28³³.

On March 4, 2022, while the bill was pending, the governor’s press secretary, Christina Pushaw, wrote on Twitter: “The bill that liberals inaccurately call ‘Don’t Say Gay’ would be more accurately described as an Anti-Grooming Bill.” Then: “If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children. Silence is complicity. This is how it works, Democrats, and I didn’t make the rules”³¹.

The record: the word “grooming” does not appear in the bill³². The child-abuse researcher David Finkelhor defines grooming as “a set of behaviors and manipulations that adults use to make it easier to introduce and complete sexual interactions” with a child. PolitiFact’s review of the research found that “credible research gives no indication that these behaviors are more often associated with people who identify as LGBTQ”⁷. Finkelhor warned that misusing the word could “do irreparable damage to our conversation and education about child sexual abuse”³⁴.

The word spread. Two advocacy groups, the Center for Countering Digital Hate and the Human Rights Campaign, estimated that Pushaw’s tweet was seen about 2 million times. In the month after the bill passed, they counted an average of 6,607 tweets a day linking LGBTQ people to slurs such as “groomer,” “up 406% from 1,307 the month before”³⁵.

In March 2024, Florida settled a federal lawsuit over the law. The state agreed to tell school districts that the law does not prohibit references to LGBTQ people, couples, or families in literature or classroom discussions, and does not prohibit instruction against bullying. Both sides claimed victory³⁶.

Their Defense

Anita Bryant said she acted from faith and motherhood: “At that time, when I made the decision, it was one decision as a Christian, as a mother, in protection of my children and my love for them and for God and for America”³.

Kee MacFarlane, the lead McMartin interviewer, testified that the abuse had stayed hidden because children suffered from “denial syndrome” or feared that telling would get them or their families killed, and that dolls and puppets helped bring the secrets out¹⁶.

Edgar Maddison Welch said, “I just wanted to do some good and went about it the wrong way”².

The people who called the hotline about Wayfair had the best defense of anyone, and Polaris offered it for them: “We deeply appreciate those members of the public who have contacted the Trafficking Hotline out of heartfelt concern”²⁶. Most people who share these posts are trying to help.

Florida’s officials defended the 2022 law as child protection. Signing it, DeSantis said parents “should be protected from schools using classroom instruction to sexualize their kids as young as 5 years old”³³. After the 2024 settlement, the administration’s general counsel, Ryan Newman, said, “We are victorious, and Florida’s classrooms will remain a safe place under the Parental Rights in Education Act”³⁶. Pushaw’s stated reasoning was in her first tweet: the bill “would be more accurately described as an Anti-Grooming Bill”³¹.

How Not to Fall for It

Ask what the children are supposedly being saved from, then find the actual decision on the table. In 1977 it was a jobs and housing law. In 2022 it was one sentence about classroom instruction. Read that, not the slogan.

Ask how often it actually happens. One terrible case is a story, not a statistic. Strangers were 3 percent of those who sexually assaulted children under 6¹⁹; abductions by nonrelatives are 1 percent of missing-child cases³⁰.

Watch for the rule that doubt equals guilt. “Silence is complicity” and “We believe the children” both make a question sound like a confession. A real child-safety measure can survive questions about whether it works.

Check with the people who do the work. In 1992, the FBI’s own expert said the satanic cult was not there¹². In 2020, the trafficking hotline said the panic was crowding out people who needed help²⁶.

Most children who are sexually abused are abused by someone they know¹⁹. Protecting them starts there.

Sources

1. 1United States v. Edgar Maddison Welch, Criminal Complaint and Affidavit in Support (FBI Special Agent Justin Holgate), Case 1:16-mj-00847. U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, via Wikimedia Commons. 2016-12-12. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_v_Welch_Affidavit_in_Support_of_Cri
2. 2'The intel on this wasn't 100 percent,' says Pizzagate gunman (Adam Goldman, The New York Times). Anchorage Daily News (reprint of The New York Times). 2016-12-08. adn.com/nation-world/2016/12/08/the-intel-on-this-wasnt-100-says-pizza
3. 3The Backlash Against Gay Rights in Florida (1977): The MacNeil/Lehrer Report, June 6, 1977 (clip and transcript). American Archive of Public Broadcasting (Library of Congress and GBH). 1977-06-06. americanarchive.org/primary_source_sets/conservatism/9-507-qn5z60ct7w
4. 4Anita Bryant, a former beauty queen turned anti-gay crusader, dies at 84 (Matt Lavietes and Jillian Eugenios). NBC News. 2025-01-10. nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/anita-bryant-former-beauty-queen-turned-a
5. 5Save our children from homosexuality! (campaign pamphlet, Save Our Children, Inc.). Cornell University Library Human Sexuality Collection, via Wikimedia Commons. 1977. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Save_our_children_from_homosexuality!_
6. 6The Anita Bryant Story: The Survival of Our Nation's Families and the Threat of Militant Homosexuality (Anita Bryant). Fleming H. Revell (Internet Archive lending copy). 1977. archive.org/details/anitabryantstory00anit
7. 7Why it's not 'grooming': What research says about gender and sexuality in schools (Madison Czopek). PolitiFact. 2022-05-11. politifact.com/article/2022/may/11/why-its-not-grooming-what-research-
8. 8Gay rights law repealed 2-1 as Anita triumphs (Associated Press). Associated Press, archived clipping at pridemuseum.plus. 1977-06-08. pridemuseum.plus/search-box/PD77-06-08_1%20Miami%20Gay%20rights%20law%
9. 9List of U.S. ballot initiatives to repeal LGBTQ anti-discrimination laws (citing Williams Institute, Table 15-C). Wikipedia (secondary). 2026. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._ballot_initiatives_to_repeal_LGBTQ_
10. 10Florida Department of Children and Families v. In re Matter of Adoption of X.X.G. and N.R.G., 45 So. 3d 79. Florida Third District Court of Appeal (copy hosted by the International Commission of Jurists). 2010-09-22. icj.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/In-re-Matter-of-Adoption-of-XXG-and
11. 11'We Were Wrong,' Say Former Legislators Who Voted For Florida Gay Adoption Ban Nearly 25 Years Ago. ACLU (press release with ACLU of Florida). 2002-03-07. aclu.org/press-releases/we-were-wrong-say-former-legislators-who-voted
12. 12Investigator's Guide to Allegations of "Ritual" Child Abuse (Kenneth V. Lanning, Supervisory Special Agent, Behavioral Science Unit), NCJ 136592. Federal Bureau of Investigation, via National Criminal Justice Reference Service. 1992-01. ojp.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/136592NCJRS.pdf
13. 13Chronology of the McMartin Preschool Abuse Trials (Douglas O. Linder). Famous Trials, University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. 2026. famous-trials.com/mcmartin/904-chronology
14. 14Letter to McMartin Preschool Parents from Police Chief Harry L. Kuhlmeyer Jr., September 8, 1983. Famous Trials, University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. 1983-09-08. famous-trials.com/mcmartin/901-lettertoparents
15. 15The McMartin Trial: Child-Abuse Case Mishandled From Start, Experts Say (Ted Rohrlich, Los Angeles Times). The Seattle Times archive (reprint of the Los Angeles Times). 1990-01-19. archive.seattletimes.com/archive/19900119/1051633/the-mcmartin-trial--
16. 16The McMartin Preschool Abuse Trial: An Account (Douglas O. Linder). Famous Trials, University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. 2026. famous-trials.com/mcmartin/902-home
17. 17Sample Interviews by Investigators with Former Students of the McMartin Preschool (transcripts of videotaped interviews). Famous Trials, University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. 2026. famous-trials.com/mcmartin/910-sampleinterviews
18. 18More than suggestion: The effect of interviewing techniques from the McMartin Preschool case (Garven, Wood, Malpass, Shaw), Journal of Applied Psychology 83(3), 347 to 359. University of Texas at El Paso ScholarWorks (abstract). 1998. scholarworks.utep.edu/psych_papers/100
19. 19Sexual Assault of Young Children as Reported to Law Enforcement: Victim, Incident, and Offender Characteristics (Howard N. Snyder), NCJ 182990. Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice. 2000-07. bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/saycrle.pdf
20. 20Pizzagate conspiracy theory (citing The New York Times, BuzzFeed News, BBC). Wikipedia (secondary). 2026. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory
21. 21'Pizzagate' shooter sentenced to 4 years in prison, judge describes 'breathtaking' recklessness (Geneva Sands). ABC News. 2017-06-22. abcnews.com/US/pizzagate-shooter-sentenced-years-prison-judge-describe
22. 22Conspiracy Theorist Alex Jones Apologizes For Promoting 'Pizzagate' (James Doubek, NPR). NPR, via KUT. 2017-03-26. kut.org/2017-03-26/conspiracy-theorist-alex-jones-apologizes-for-promo
23. 23QAnon looms behind nationwide rallies and viral #SavetheChildren hashtags (Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins). NBC News. 2020-08-21. nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/qanon-looms-behind-nationwide-rallies-viral
24. 24QAnon, Pizzagate conspiracy theories co-opt #SaveTheChildren (Daniel Funke). PolitiFact. 2020-08-12. politifact.com/article/2020/aug/12/qanon-pizzagate-conspiracy-theories
25. 25Baseless Wayfair child-trafficking theory spreads online (Amanda Seitz and Ali Swenson, Associated Press). Associated Press, via WDIV ClickOnDetroit. 2020-07-16. clickondetroit.com/news/politics/2020/07/16/baseless-wayfair-child-tra
26. 26Polaris Statement on Wayfair Sex Trafficking Claims. Polaris (operator of the U.S. National Human Trafficking Hotline). 2020-07-20. polarisproject.org/press-releases/polaris-statement-on-wayfair-sex-tra
27. 27How Unproven Trafficking Stories Spread Online and Why Stopping Them Matters. Polaris. 2020-07. polarisproject.org/blog/2020/07/how-unproven-trafficking-stories-sprea
28. 28Myths, Facts, and Statistics. Polaris. 2026. polarisproject.org/myths-facts-and-statistics/
29. 29Our Impact (NCMEC data page, 2025 figures). National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. 2026. missingkids.org/footer/media/keyfacts
30. 30Nonfamily Abductions and Attempts. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. 2026. missingkids.org/theissues/nonfamily
31. 31How One Florida Woman With Twitter Problems Plunged Us Into a Nightmarish National Conversation About 'Grooming' (Ben Mathis-Lilley). Slate. 2022-04-21. slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/04/christina-pushaw-ron-desantis-libs
32. 32CS/CS/HB 1557, Engrossed 1 (2022 Legislature), Parental Rights in Education, enrolled text. Florida Senate. 2022-03. flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2022/1557/BillText/er/PDF
33. 33Governor Ron DeSantis Signs Historic Bill to Protect Parental Rights in Education. Executive Office of the Governor of Florida (Wayback Machine copy). 2022-03-28. web.archive.org/web/20220402005342/https://flgov.com/2022/03/28/govern
34. 34Why Misusing 'Groomer' as a Political Smear Is Especially Dangerous (Evie Blad). Education Week. 2022-04-26. edweek.org/leadership/why-misusing-groomer-as-a-political-smear-is-esp
35. 35Digital Hate: Social Media's Role in Amplifying Dangerous Lies About LGBTQ+ People. Center for Countering Digital Hate and Human Rights Campaign (advocacy groups). 2022-08. counterhate.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/CCDH-HRC-Digital-Hate-Repor
36. 36Florida must clarify parental rights law under settlement in 'Don't Say Gay' lawsuit (Andrew Atterbury). Politico (Wayback Machine copy). 2024-03-11. web.archive.org/web/20250814003016/https://www.politico.com/news/2024/

Image Credits

• Save our children from homosexuality! (pamphlet, side 1, left two panels; cropped). Save Our Children, Inc. (unknown designer). 1977. Public domain (PD-no notice: published in the U.S. 1927 to 1977 without a copyright notice), via Wikimedia Commons; original at Cornell University Library. Source
• Save our children from homosexuality! (pamphlet, side 1, incl. outer covers). Save Our Children, Inc. (unknown designer). 1977. Public domain (PD-no notice), via Wikimedia Commons; original at Cornell University Library. Source
• Virginia McMartin at preliminary hearing of McMartin Preschool molestation case, 1984. Mel Melcon, Los Angeles Times. 1984-08-18. CC BY 4.0 (Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive, UCLA Library Special Collections), via Wikimedia Commons; credit Mel Melcon, Los Angeles Times, UCLA Library. Source
• Investigator's Guide to Allegations of "Ritual" Child Abuse, page 40 (excerpt). Kenneth V. Lanning, Federal Bureau of Investigation. 1992-01. Public domain (work of the U.S. federal government); scan from NCJRS, NCJ 136592. Source
• United States v. Welch, Affidavit in Support of Criminal Complaint, page 5 (header and paragraph 14; excerpt). Justin Holgate, Special Agent, FBI; U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. 2016-12-12. Public domain (work of the U.S. federal government), via Wikimedia Commons. Source
• Comet Ping Pong Pizzagate 2016 01. Farragutful. 2016-12-11. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; credit Farragutful. Source