You may not have heard the name Dr. Bennett Braun before. I have. In fact, I have had multiple Google Alerts set up for his name for years now. The first time it ever paid off was this weekend, when the news broke that he had died on March 20 of this year, at the age of 83.
Dr. Braun was one of the psychiatrists who fueled the Satanic Panic — probably more than any other, as his position at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago gave him a certain amount of legitimacy that others lacked. Enough legitimacy, even, to go on glamorous speaking engagements with Gloria Steinem. Women came to see him for things like anxiety and depression, and he drugged them, hypnotized them, and convinced them that they had, without their own knowledge, been living these double lives as members of these evil Satanic cults that went back generations in their families. He convinced them that not only had they suffered horrific abuses, but that they had inflicted this abuse on others, including their own children.
Unfortunately, the only serious consequence that he ever suffered was a lawsuit and losing his license in Illinois, and having to move to Montana to continue his practice (though he did lose his license there in 2020). He never apologized, he never really had any kind of public reckoning, he just kind of disappeared, becoming a minor character in some summations of the Satanic panic. He probably had a very nice life. He probably never really had to consider that he did anything wrong. No one ever got in his face and demanded to know why he did what he did to these women and their families.
His most famous victim was Pat Burgus, a woman he dragged around to various news programs and talk shows in the late 1980s as both a victim of Satanic Ritual Abuse and the high priestess of the Satanic cult she was supposedly raised in. She was, of course, entirely unaware of this, as the terrible abuse she suffered as a child caused her to develop multiple personality disorder.
Except it didn’t.
Now, Burgus was aware that she did not actually have multiple personalities that she actually switched in and out of — she knew that when she went on these shows and changed voices and said she had other names that it wasn’t real. But she said Bennett, who had her on an absurd cocktail of drugs, pressured her to tell him stories of things that didn’t happen, pressured her to come up with other personalities and then believed in them himself. She said they even practiced her “shifts” into other personalities, so that they would look right for the media.
“I believed that I was a Satanic high priestess, that I was controlling a Satanic cult in a nine state region. I took it deadly serious,” Burgus told PBS’s “Frontline.” “I think all reality and fantasy just blended together. I was drugged, I was hypnotized and I was mentally ill.”
It sounds silly now, but my God, can you imagine what it would be like to actually have believed that? To be in that head space? To make yourself vulnerable and seek out help after a three year depression, as Burgus did, only to be manipulated by someone like Bennett Braun? The cruelty is unbelievable, and particularly galling when you consider that Braun got so much attention and near-celebrity status for all of this.
By the way — much of this was not done on an outpatient basis. Braun had whole families admitted to Rush, including children, so that they could be properly studied and unbrainwashed or what have you. Also because he was very concerned that the families could still unknowingly be in these cults.
He did the same thing to Mary Shanley. Even worse, once Shanley realized she was being manipulated and that none of this was true and left Braun’s care — her whole family stayed, fully believing that they had repressed memories of her abusing them in Satanic rituals.
I am angry that Bennett Braun died without ever having been held accountable for what he did to these women or having to explain why. That he was allowed to just kind of disappear from public view after he was sued. I think part of the reason we are dealing with a resurgence of the Satanic Panic (not that it ever really ended) is that it just kind of fizzled out without there really being any kind of reckoning for those who caused it, without them even really being publicly acknowledged as villains or it being firmly established that what they did was wrong. That it was evil.
I think this is partly because people were embarrassed to have fallen for the hysteria and wanted to just pretend it never happened. This is quite possibly why so many innocent people were incarcerated for decades after the 1992 FBI Report on Satanic Ritual Abuse determined that it was not a thing. If you don’t admit a mistake, it’s really hard to correct for it.
Since Braun died, however, I’ve seen a lot more people talking about him than I’ve ever seen before, more people aware of what he did, which I think is good news. The more people know about what he did, the more people hear about stories like Pat Burgus’s, the harder it makes it for anyone else to take advantage of people in that way.
Do me a favor, okay? Watch this episode of “Frontline” about Braun and what he and his associate Roberta Sachs (who is still alive to be properly shamed, mind you) did to these women. He deserves to be remembered.
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