Michelle Remembers was the first book written on the subject of Satanic ritual abuse and is an important part of the controversies beginning in the 1980s regarding Satanic ritual abuse and repressed memory.
Published as non-fiction in 1977, Michelle Remembers became an international sensation, achieving bestseller status and arguably doing more than any other publication to incite the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s, a twentieth-century witchhunt in which a great many people faced trial and even imprisonment for crimes they did not commit: in many cases, for crimes that did not even happen. The popularity of the book was such that the Vatican launched an official investigation, and Hollywood studios approached the authors about movie rights. Those authors-- Michelle Smith, the self-proclaimed former object of the cult’s attention, and Lawrence Pazder, her therapist-- responded enthusiastically.
The story, in fact, prompted multiple investigations. The various findings should have calmed