Exactly. What was scary about the Satanic Panic was not that there were people like this guy connecting D&D to human sacrifice but that a lot of these absurd claims went mainstream beyond their initial fringe Christian audience.
You could read books like 1980’s “Michelle Remembers” which purported to be a true account of a woman’s participation in a Satanic cult when she was 5 years old (which she then supposedly repressed but was able to recover a book length treatment of ritual rapes and human sacrifices thanks to recovered memory therapy).
Book was obvious nonsense, but was passed off as if it were straightforward nonfiction by the popular press and mainstream television shows such as Oprah Winfrey’s talk show. The prosecutors in the McMartin preschool case used “Michelle Remembers” as a model for the claims in that case and the author worked as a consultant on that and other Satanic abuse cases.
