Many's the hour I've lain by my window
And thought of the people who carried the burden
Who marched in the strange fields in search of an answer
And ended their journeys an unwilling hero
-Phil Ochs, “A Toast to Those who are Gone”
Bernard Baran, who died earlier this week, was most definitely an unwilling hero. He was only 49. Officially the cause of death was apparently either a heart attack or stroke (the autopsy wasn’t complete as I was writing this). But really, hate killed him. Anyone who knows his story knows that. And they also know it’s no surprise that it took 30 years for hate to defeat “Bee” Baran. For 22 of those 30 years, he endured a living hell most of us couldn’t imagine in our worst nightmares, and which I doubt too many of us would have survived with our spirits intact.
But he did.
By now, most Americans will be familiar with the daycare ritual abuse witch-hunt of the 1980s. And most of us who have paid any attention to that national embarrassment will recognize that the victims of that disgraceful episode were guilty of nothing more than incredibly bad luck. The Amirault family in Boston, Kelly Michaels in New Jersey, Grant Snowden in Florida, Jesse Friedman in New York…one by one, all have eventually regained their freedom if not their good names, and their cases have become notorious in some circles (as they should be in all circles, of course). Towering above them all is the case that lit the fuse to the nightmare, the McMartin Preschool in Southern California. Tellingly, McMartin never resulted in any convictions, although the defendants spent as many as six years in jail during and before the trial. For a variety of reasons, though, the very first conviction resulting of the craze has been largely forgotten: that of Bernard Baran.
There are a number of reasons why Baran’s case languished in obscurity for years while most of his fellow victims won their freedom; but two reasons stand out above all else: he was gay, and he was poor. The latter meant he couldn’t afford a decent lawyer at any time during his ordeal; the former made him especially vulnerable to far too many people’s willingness to believe he was a pervert.
Those two strikes against him also help explain the remarkable speed with which his life was destroyed following the first accusation. In September 1984, the ritual-abuse witch hunt was arguably at its zenith: McMartin had been in the papers for nearly a year, with polls showing well over 90% of respondents believed the defendants were guilty, while Gerald Amirault was arrested in Malden, Massachusetts on September 5. In Pittsfield at the other end of Massachusetts, Bernard Baran had been employed at the Early Childhood Development Center (ECDC) for about a year and a half. An out of the closet gay man who had dropped out of high school at 16 in 1981 (due in no small part to the constant harassment and bullying he had endured), he liked children and had, by all accounts, done a great job as a teacher’s aide at ECDC.
His case began in a similar manner to most of the others: with a deeply troubled child from an abusive family who was acting out (both while in Baran’s care and that of other teachers). The boy’s mother and stepfather were both abusive and drug-addled. Unsurprisingly, he was a troublemaker at ECDC. In September 1984, his stepfather contacted ECDC to object to having his boy in the care of a homosexual. A few weeks later, he called the police and claimed that his stepson had come home with “blood on or coming out of the end of his penis.” Whether or not this is true is one of many details that are lost to history, since the only adult witnesses were the boy’s extremely untrustworthy (and homophobic) mother and stepfather. They further claimed that they had asked who had hurt him, and the boy answered, “Bernie.” It is, of course, entirely possible that he really did say that, knowing that his parents hated Baran; but it is equally possible that they made the whole story up in order to get Baran fired from ECDC or worse.
Which is just what happened. Baran was arrested on October 6, 1984, after his “victim” had tested positive for gonorrhea. (It is not known with any certainty that the boy did in fact have gonorrhea, as the test used in those days was prone to false positives; in any event, Bernard Baran never had gonorrhea and thus couldn’t have given it to anyone. The boy’s stepfather is a far likelier suspect.) Whereas most of the other cases like his took years to come to trial and the trials themselves often lasted months, Baran’s case was a whirlwind of injustice. Within days, numerous other accusations had cropped up. As with all other cases like Baran’s, the children in question all said nothing inappropriate had happened…until their parents and the investigators got done with them.
By the time his case went to trial in January 1985, he faced twelve charges involving six children. His trial is notable for the open, rank homophobia that was on display from start to finish. (This will come as no surprise to anyone like myself who grew up in New England in that era!) The prosecutor openly used the word “fag,” threatened Baran’s boyfriend with prosecution if he assisted with the defense in any way, and at one point said Baran “could have raped and sodomized and abused those children whenever he felt the primitive urge to satisfy his sexual appetite.” Baran’s own lawyer did a deplorable job, but even a competent lawyer probably couldn’t have saved him. His due process was violated in a number of ways, notably in that he was seated where he could neither face his “accusers” (the children) nor even hear them. In just over three hours, he was convicted of all accounts; subsequently he was sentenced to three consecutive life sentences.
I don’t have the stomach to go into more detail about the trial or what Baran was accused of doing, but this is an excellent summary of it all. What I really wanted to address here is what happened afterward.
The good news – such as it is – is that his conviction was overturned and he was released from prison. The bad news is, that happened in 2006, after Baran had spent over 21 years not only in prison, but at the bottom of the prison food chain. He was beaten and raped countless times, and attempted suicide at least twice. The seeds of his release were sown in 1998 when Debbie Nathan, whose book Satan’s Silence is probably the best account of the ritual abuse witch hunt, brought his case to the attention of some activists in Boston. After visiting Baran in prison and getting to know and love him, they formed a legal defense committee that provided him with competent representation for the first time in his ordeal.
It was around that time that I first heard of Baran, after reading Satan’s Silence. After reading of his case online and contributing to his defense fund, I began following his story as closely as I could from afar (I was overseas for much of the time). Among the things I learned was that, despite the severe injustice he’d been enduring for so many years, he was by all accounts a beautiful person inside and out, who loved life and would never resign himself to his horrible fate. Consider this account from Bob Chatelle, one of Baran’s staunchest advocates during his fight for justice (and a personal hero of mine):
Bee was a delight to visit [in prison]. Once we all got over our initial shyness, we discovered a young man (he’d just turned 32 when I met him) who was not only very bright, but very funny. He was a great story teller, and he would voice not only all of the characters in the story but any animals that were involved. One of my favorites involved the time he surreptitiously fed a tray of meat juices to a vegetarian dog.
Baran reportedly also became a great cook in prison; when he was released, it was said (only quasi-jokingly) that the other inmates would surely miss his cooking. But if he came to terms as best he could with what had happened, he never compromised on his innocence, no matter how dear the price. And it
was dear: at his trial in 1985, his prosecutor – the same one who compared him to a chocoholic in a candy store – offered him only five years in prison if he would plead guilty, but he refused. In a BBC interview shortly before he was finally released, he noted that he could have been a free man sixteen years before, but he’d felt all along that he had to stand up for what was right and true. (That’s a paraphrasal based on my recollection of listening to it in 2006; regrettably, I can’t find the interview anywhere now.) In a documentary of his case made after he was released, Baran said if he had it to do over again, he would still have done the 21 years in prison. When asked why, he answered simply, “Because I’m innocent.”
For my money at least, those are the words of a hero. An unwilling hero for obvious reasons, but nevertheless a hero. Few Americans I know of have been dealt a harsher hand in life than Bernard Baran was, and he did nearly give up under circumstances that surely would have done the same to any of us. But he ultimately stuck to his guns and – after far too long – he won. The victory was short and sweet, for his decades in prison had a tremendous impact on his health and I am convinced that was the indirect cause of his decades-before-its-time death. But still: a corrupt, homophobic “justice” system left Bernard Baran to die in prison, and he didn’t. That is a victory of sorts.
It is my most sincere hope that his family, partner and friends will find comfort in knowing that with the possible exception of Matthew Shepard, no one offers a more unflinching look at the real damage homophobia can do. Now that he’s gone, it’s up to us – you and me – to make sure his story is never forgotten. We can never undo the tragedy that stole most of his life from him, but we can do plenty to make sure it never happens again.
Incidentally, a little something to think about if you live in Massachusetts:
He should have received $500,000 from the state, but Attorney General Martha Coakley had the audacity to try to deny him any compensation. (Coakley is from western Massachusetts and has close ties to the people who railroaded Bee, including her cousin, a Pittsfield detective. Bee was in the process of suing the detective when he committed suicide after he himself was convicted of rape.) Bee eventually collected $400,000.
Bee, by the way, was still fighting Coakley when he died. He’d been told that as part of the settlement his criminal record would be expunged. Coakley refused to go along. If she didn’t have a heart of ice, she could agree to the expungement now that Bee is gone. But I am quite sure she will not.