I'm Sorry - An Introduction

Twenty-one years ago, a child then known as Kyle Sapp told police that he had been the victim of sexual abuse at the McMartin Pre-School in Manhattan Beach. Sapp, who attended the preschool from 1979 to 1980, was 8 when he first talked to authorities in 1984. He and hundreds of other South Bay children made allegations against the family who ran McMartin and against the employees who worked there. School administrator Peggy McMartin Buckey, her son Ray, daughter Peggy Ann, mother Virginia McMartin and three female teachers were accused of fondling and raping youngsters over a period of years, and of threatening them with death if they told. The scandal eventually resulted in criminal trials against Ray and his mother. By the time the trials came to an end in 1990—with acquittals and hung juries—"McMartin" was a household word. The case had turned into one of the longest and costliest criminal proceedings in U.S. history.

By the spring of 1984, Kyle and scores of other children were talking about school employees who had drugged them and touched their genitals, made them play sex games in the nude, used them as models in kiddie porn, and forced them to watch pet rabbits, mice and turtles being killed. By the time the trials began more than three years later, many of these children's stories had grown even more bizarre—they now included being taken to local businesses or flown to faraway places to be molested in satanic rituals. Prosecutors feared that their case would be hurt by such testimony, and they dropped many children from the witness list. Others were pulled from the witness list by parents who worried about causing further psychological trauma.

Ultimately, fewer than a dozen children testified at the trials of Ray Buckey and his mother. Kyle was not among them. Earlier, though, he had played an important role in moving the case forward. A police report had noted that his stories of abuse were so detailed and uninhibited that he would make an "exceptional witness." The district attorney's office apparently agreed: Of 360 McMartin students who claimed to have been abused, just 41 were picked to testify at the grand jury and the preliminary hearing. Kyle was one of them.

In the decade and a half since the defendants were set free, research psychologists have shown that it's easy to pressure children to describe bad things that never happened. False memories can feel real, though, not just for preschoolers but for older children as well. But Sapp, now known as Kyle Zirpolo, says he never had false memories: He always knew his stories of abuse were made up. The adults at the McMartin Pre-School "never did anything to me, and I never saw them doing anything," he says today. "I said a lot of things that didn't happen. I lied." Why? Now married and with young children of his own, he feels the need to explain publicly.—D.N.

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Kyle Zirpolo is a 30-year-old former McMartin Pre-School student who now manages a supermarket on California's central coast. Debbie Nathan is a writer in New York and coauthor, with appellate attorney Michael Snedeker, of "Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt." She also is a board member of the National Center for Reason and Justice, a nonprofit group that works to educate the public about people falsely charged with child abuse.