The 2001 Satanic Panic-themed TV Movie Just Ask My Children Now Feels Oddly Timely, Even Prescient
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I grew up in the 1980s, during the height of the Satanic Panic. I came of age at a time when a fever spread across the land that devil-worshipping cults lurked inside every daycare or preschool.
There was a cultural component to this widespread delusion as well, a fierce if incoherent conviction that Satan was receiving crucial daily assistance in seducing God’s children into doing his bidding through subliminal messages in children’s programming, cartoons like He-Man promoting occultism and rock and roll lyrics that evangelized on behalf of Satanism and encouraged impressionable youngsters to commit suicide.
The Satanic Panic was of course what Donald Trump would refer to as a hoax that ended up destroying the lives of children and families in the name of saving them.
In the past decade or so the Satanic Panic has been rebooted largely for Hillary Clinton’s sake. The Satanic Panic roared obnoxiously back to life as “Pizzagate”, a bizarre and clearly false conspiracy theory that top Democrats were operating a Satanic pedophile ring out of the basement of a pizzeria that nonetheless attracted a lot of believers.
One gentleman believed so strongly that horrible things were happening at Comet Ping Pong Pizza, the eatery at the center of the conspiracy theory, that he came there with a gun so that he could free all the child sex slaves imprisoned there.
Pizzagate inevitably led to Q, which upped the crazy considerably (no small feat considering how nuts Pizzagate already was) by introducing Adrenochrome addiction, cloning and, perhaps most ridiculously, the idea that Donald Trump is fighting a righteous one-man war against the evil Satanic pedophile cannibals who rule the world and that is why he is depicted in the media as being sometimes less than honest or noble.
Q has lost steam over the years yet a disturbingly high percentage of the right genuinely seems to genuinely believe that Hollywood and the Democratic Party are filled with murderous kiddy diddlers protected by money and power.
Just Ask My Children is a 2001 television movie about a family destroyed by false accusations of child sexual abuse that opens in the early 1980s and ends about a decade later. Yet it nevertheless feels ripped from today’s headlines as well as yesterday’s.
The television movie, which is based on a true story, begins, poignantly, in a place of happiness and contentment. It’s an impossibly idyllic Garden of Eden just waiting for a snake, an apple, and a dramatic fall from grace.
Brenda Kniffen (Virginia Madsen) is an adoring wife and mother who dotes on her beloved sons Brian and Brandon and her husband Scott (Jeffrey Nordling). Life is good until a custody dispute in one of their friend’s families leads to the couple being accused of sexual crimes and transgressions that would horrify Caligula.
A wannabe do-gooder at the prosecutor’s office who ends up doing quite badly tells a colleague that the nice couple at the center of the film are guilty of, among other transgressions,
“orgies, being hung from hooks and beaten, being sold in motels, made to watch snuff films and perform in front of cameras.”
When a contemporary points out that some of the accusations seem a little unlikely the woman responds with a terse, “You think these kids could make this up?”
As readers of this site are well aware I am, like everyone else in the world, a true crime podcast junkie. So I know all too well that children most assuredly do say things that are not true for any number of extremely valid reasons.
For starters, children are suggestible. If you tell them something enough times and with enough force then they are liable to believe it no matter how ridiculous it might seem. Forget child molestation; if police officers really wanted to, they could probably convince small children that their parents are actually aliens or spies. They are, after all, inclined to believe what authority figures tell them, particularly if those authority figures wear a badge.
Children have an innate fear and respect for authority figures and no authority figure is scarier or more intimidating than a cop grilling you for hours about horrible sexual abuse you very well could not have actually experienced.
What kid wants to be interrogated by the cops in a police station? They’re liable to do anything to end the trauma, even if that means making false accusations or false confessions. Kids also do not understand the world or the legal system the way adults do and consequently are prone to thinking that if they just tell police officers what they want to hear then they’ll get to go home with their parents and the crisis will be over.
All of that is at play in Just Ask My Children. The police and the prosectors operate under the assumption that the Kniffens have committed literally the worst possible transgressions imaginable and that if their children fervently deny that any abuse took place it’s because they’re terrified of retribution from parents who raped them.
They aren’t trying to find the truth. They feel they know what they see as the incontrovertible truth of the Kniffens subjecting their children to the sexual torments of the damned and aggressively seek out evidence to support that assertion and only that assertion.
The Kniffens soon find themselves in a Kafkaesque nightmare. Their children are taken from them. They’re accused of the worst crime most folks can imagine, a transgression so vile that in prison murderers and rapists feel a need to punish them for being bad people.
The prosecutors are boobs and in the wrong but they’re not operating out of malice as much as ignorance and arrogance. They aren’t out to frame the Kniffens. They genuinely think that they’re part of a child sex trafficking and pornography ring and that they are doing the world a tremendous service in locking them up for good.
I went into this project a fan of Virginia Madsen. This journey has made me a super fan. If a movie gives the Academy Award nominee ANYTHING to work with she absolutely crushes it.
Madsen’s part in Just Ask My Children is a meal of a role she hungrily devours. It’s impossible not to feel for this good, good woman and loving mother as her charmed life goes flamboyantly to hell and she’s faced with the prospect of dying alone and broken in prison, and then having to be buried in an unmarked grave so that folks who would urinate on in disgust to express their understandable contempt for pedophiles won’t be able to find it.
As the father of two boys I couldn’t help but relate to Just Ask My Children. I could not imagine the horror of having your children torn away from you and being wrongly vilified as a kiddy diddler.
Halfway through Just Ask My Children the Kniffens are sentenced to jail for over two hundred years. Two hundred years! That’s a long time. By year 175 I’m guessing they’re going to feel pretty stir crazy.
At that point Just Ask My Children turns into a prison movie as the couple fights for their lives with the assistance of a hard-nosed private detective and lawyers representing other parents wrongly accused in the Satanic Panic of the nineteen eighties.
Style and plot wise Just Ask My Children is nothing special. It’s a standard issue message movie about the dangers of getting swept up in conspiratorial thinking whose message is sadly timely today.
A movie like Just Ask My Children doesn’t need to be artful to be effective. The subject matter is inherently dramatic and compelling in a way that shamelessly but successfully manipulates out emotions, particularly the ones involving children and miscarriages of justice.
I suspect that I connected with Just Ask My Children in a way I would not if I were not a parent myself but everyone should be able to put themselves in the Kniffens’ place and thank God that it did not happen to them.
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