Italian ‘Satanic panic’ case returns to court two decades later

ROME
The Guardian

May 23, 2019

By Angela Giuffrida

Book says officials manipulated children into making abuse claims, leading to convictions, family separations and deaths

In the early hours of 7 July 1997, Federico Scotta and his wife were woken by an incessant ringing of their doorbell. Police had arrived at their home in Mirandola, a town in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region, with a search warrant.

Officers found nothing incriminating, but the couple and their three-year-old daughter and baby son were escorted to the police station. The children were taken away by social workers that day and a few months later a third child was taken from the delivery room. The couple never saw the children again.

The so-called “Satanic panic” phenomenon that had swept through the US and parts of the UK earlier that decade had reached Italy. Scotta and his wife were accused of belonging to a sprawling paedophile network that worshipped the devil and sacrificed children and animals in cemeteries at night.

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