Gloria Steinem’s Ritual Abuse Buddy

A Con Games Column

Bennett Braun, a Chicago psychiatrist whose diagnoses of repressed memories involving horrific abuse by devil worshipers helped to fuel what became known as the “satanic panic” of the 1980s and ’90s, died on March 20 in Lauderhill, Fla., north of Miami. He was 83.

—The New York Times: April 12, 2024

The death of the disgraced recovered memory therapist Bennett “Buddy” Braun in Montana was a reminder one neglects Gloria Steinem’s unquestioning embrace of his most questionable theories of sexual abuse at your own peril.

Braun was the primary popularizer of Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) and Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) in recovered memory therapy in the 1980s and 1990s. For such a complex movement to gather steam it required formidable allies and experts—maybe even icons. For the movement to take hold required a feminist of the gravest gravitas. No matter how improbable or ludicrous her views might be, Gloria Steinem believed everything women (and children) ever said about sexual abuse heretofore repressed. Nowhere would that be more obvious than in the rise and calamitous fall of her good buddy, Buddy Braun.

Steinem, the feminist pioneer, made sure one of the most egregious theories of modern times poisoned the bloodstream of feminism for all time.

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In the 1970s, after the book and television program Sybil—later dismembered by Debbie Nathan in Sybil Exposed—Multiple Personality Disorder diagnoses became commonplace; in the 1980s, MPD and Satanic cults became bloody chum to daytime television talk shows like Phil Donahue, Sally Jesse Raphael, Geraldo Rivera—and, of course, Oprah Winfrey. The MPD eruption led to the suspicion Satanic cults were blazing on a massive, worldwide scale engineered by the devil himself. The Satanic scare in the 1980s cleared the way for the massive recovered memory movement that came next and wrecked tens of thousands of families.

Working for NBC’s Today show in 1986, Gloria Steinem interviewed and immediately fell under the catastrophic influence of Dr. Braun, who believed many of his patients had been members of Satanic cults.

“Furthermore,” writes the journalist Lawrence Wright in his disturbing book Remembering Satan: A Tragic Case of Recovered Memory: “Braun saw a link between multiple-personality disorder and SRA; he believed that of the two hundred thousand Americans that he estimated were suffering from MPD, up to one-fourth could be victims of SRA.”

Wright writes of how The Los Angeles County Commission for Women formed a task force in 1988 and issued a report defining SRA as “a brutal form of abuse of children, adolescents, and adults, consisting of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse, and involving the use of rituals.”  According to the L.A. County Commission for Women:

Ritual abuse is usually carried out by members of a cult. The purpose of the ritual elements of the abuse seems threefold: (1) rituals in some groups are part of a shared belief or worship system into which the victim is being indoctrinated; (2) rituals are used to intimidate victims into silence; (3) ritual elements (e.g., devil worship, animal or human sacrifice) seem so unbelievable to those unfamiliar with these crimes that these elements detract from the credibility of the victims and make prosecution of the crimes very difficult.

Almost half of social workers in a California poll, according to Wright’s reporting, “accepted the idea that SRA involved a national conspiracy of multigenerational abusers and baby-killers and that many of these people were prominent in their communities and appeared to live completely exemplary lives.”

Even worse: “A majority of those polled believed that victims of such extreme abuse were likely to have repressed the memories of it and that (contrary to scientific evidence) hypnosis increased the likelihood of accurately recalling what had happened.”

The report went on to say the central feature of ritual abuse is mind control: “The purpose of the mind control is to compel ritual abuse victims to keep the secret of their abuse, to conform to the beliefs and behaviors of the cult, and to become functioning members who serve the cult by carrying out the directives of its leaders without being detected within society at large.”

In a speech in 1988, Steinem’s hero Bennett Braun made the MPD/SRA/recovered memory connection by calling SRA “a national-international type organization that’s got a structure somewhat similar to the communist cell structure, where it goes from… small groups, to local consuls [sic], regional consuls, district consuls, national consuls, and they have meetings at different times.”

Another book fanning the Satanic flames that year was Satan’s Underground, by the pseudonymous Lauren Stratford, a “true” bestselling paperback.

“For many religious believers,” Wright writes, “stories of Satanic-ritual abuse merely confirmed a worldview they already strongly held.”

The October 24, 1988, Geraldo Rivera television show featured “Satanic Breeders: Babies for Sacrifice”—a daytime setup for a prime-time Satanic television event the next night. On October 25, the Ingram family of Olympia, Washington, watched “Devil Worship: Exposing Satan’s Underground,” the prime-time Geraldo special on NBC that became “one of the most widely watched documentaries in television history, although it was only one of many such shows,” according to Wright.

In 1991, according to Making Monsters by Richard Offshe and Ethan Watters, a survey found 12 percent of the clinical members of the American Psychological Association treated patients for Satanic Ritual Abuse—and virtually all the clinical members believed their patients when it came to the devil. But by the end of 1994—the same time the worm was turning on the credulity of recovered memories in general—the FBI’s Kenneth Lanning, Supervisory Special Agent in the Behavioral Science Unit National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, could find no evidence of Satanic Ritual Abuse anywhere in the United States after an exhaustive five-year study:

Until hard evidence is obtained and corroborated, the public should not be frightened into believing that babies are being bred and eaten, that 50,000 missing children are being murdered in human sacrifices, or that Satanists are taking over America’s day care centers or institutions. No one can prove with absolute certainty that such activity has not occurred. The burden of proof, however, as it would be in a criminal prosecution, is on those who claim that it has occurred.

The explanation that the Satanists are too organized and law enforcement is too incompetent only goes so far in explaining the lack of evidence. For at least eight years American law enforcement has been aggressively investigating the allegations of victims of ritual abuse. There is little or no evidence for the portion of their allegations that deals with large-scale baby breeding, human sacrifice, and organized Satanic conspiracies. Now it is up to mental health professionals, not law enforcement, to explain why victims are alleging things that don’t seem to have happened.

 “Even so,” as Nathan and Snedeker write in their book, “during the same year the research findings were publicized, it was possible to go to the juvenile section of the public library in many U.S. cities and find colorfully illustrated copies of Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy: A Child’s Book About Satanic Ritual.

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Gloria Steinem was enthusiastically complicit as the recovered memory movement gathered steam. She continued to advocate for imaginary victims in the infamous McMartin daycare fabrication by contributing financially to a forensic examination of the facility. And Ms. magazine January/February cover story in 1993 validated Satanic Ritual Abuse with the headline: “Believe It! Cult Ritual Abuse Exists: One Woman’s Story.” Under a pseudonym, “Elizabeth S. Rose,” a self-identified SRA survivor, wrote: “People would rather believe that survivors—particularly women survivors—are crazy. This keeps many survivors from coming forward.”

That same year the famous feminist, a Ms.co-founder, took her obsession to HBO for the documentary Multiple Personalities: The Search for Deadly Memories—and the show won an Emmy with Steinem as both a narrator and producer.

Thanks in part to Dr. Bennett Braun, Steinem’s belief in the retrievable edifice of recovered memories was complete.

“I’ve saved until last the most amazing property of the unconscious: its timelessness,” Steinem wrote in her memoir, Revolution From Within: A Book of Self-Esteem. “It is this property that allows us not only to retrieve the past, but to reshape it: to go back to a place of pain or deprivation and alter the way it affects us, a method psychologists call ‘corrective regression.’ Precisely because past emotions and events are stored timelessly, we can enter that realm of the unconscious and reprocess them.”

Steinem used the book’s Acknowledgments to thank her MPD/SRA mentor.

“Many people kept this book in mind and sent ideas…” she wrote, “especially Dr. Bennett Braun, creator of the pioneering Dissociative Disorders Program at Rush Presbyterian Hospital in Chicago.”

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To understand Buddy Braun and the damage done by diagnoses of Multiple Personality Disorder , start with the meatloaf made of human flesh allegedly served to Patricia Burgus by her father.

Burgus believed in her own family’s cannibalism after MPD therapy under the guidance of Gloria Steinem’s guiding light in the firmament of recovered memory and childhood sexual molestation. Under Braun’s treatment, Burgus copped to over 300 different personalities, the sexual abuse of her two sons—and the possibility of eating meatloaf made of homo sapiens.

The doctor’s diagnosis would ultimately cost Braun’s insurers $10.6 million in damages paid to Burgus—and lead the doctor to a life in virtual exile in Butte, Montana, a mountain town far from the glamorous orbit of Gloria Steinem and pliable feminists. Before he was done, Buddy Braun would be ingloriously banished from his medical sinecure of Rush–Presbyte­rian–St. Luke’s Medical Center outside Chicago, the one that produced MPD patients and therapists by the score under his direction.

For six years, starting in 1986, poor Patricia Burgus would undergo treatment in the Rush–Presbyte­rian–St. Luke’s MPD Twilight Zone, where the line between fiction and fact disappeared entirely. Burgus would be known during her two years residence in the clinic as the “Satanic princess”; her children—John and Mikey, 4 and 5 years old at the time—would be treated there for MPD for three years.

In his book Victims of Memory, Mark Pendergrast— a writer exploring recovered memory in multiple books—described Buddy Braun as “not just any psychiatrist.”

He has been the acknowledged leader in the diagnosis of multiple personality in the United States, the expert’s expert. Typical of the cutting-edge MPD gurus, Braun prides himself on his courage and adventurous spirit, testing the frontiers of human experience. He enjoys skydiving, technical rock climbing, scuba diving, and horseback riding. He once tried fire walking. He appears to get a kind of paranoid thrill from his belief in widespread Satanic cults. “About 20 patients have told me they were sent to kill me,” he told one reporter.

In the mid-1980s, according to Making Monsters, Braun became the first to establish an in-patient facility for MDP and other dissociative disorders at Rush in Skokie, Illinois—with twelve beds available. He also became president of the aborning International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality and Dissociation.

“Every MPD patient in the country owes a personal debt of gratitude to Buddy,” said Institute of Pennsylvania Hospital dissociative disorders director Richard Kluft at the time. “All the [MPD treatment] units around the country followed the trails he blazed.”

When Patricia Burgus said she had no memories of sexual abuse as a child, Braun insisted 97 percent of multiples had been abused as children. According to Making Monsters, Burgus remembers: “Braun told her that she may not remember it now and that her memories were likely repressed in her unconscious and would come out during treatment.”

At first Patricia Burgus refused to take Xanax and Inderal, a heart medication not cleared by the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of MPD patients; she finally agreed to take the drugs only after Braun told her compliance would mean more visits with her son already admitted to the hospital. Exposure to other patients acting out the prescribed elements of Satanic Ritual Abuse were a regular feature of her time under treatment. Braun soon asked her if she had eaten the flesh of people and Burgus said: “Yes.”

Braun even brought Patricia Burgus—and her many alters—to his lectures.

In therapy for age-regression therapy—and after three hours in hypnosis—Burgus finally came up with a memory of her father and his co-workers sexually abusing her. Satanic rites were next to arrive in her memories. When Braun would elicit these memories in her room, he would sometimes cry and tell her to stop. Braun also told her he was afraid members of her Satanic cult would try to kill him. More than once Buddy Braun had to leave the room because he told her he was sexually aroused.

“I really trusted him,” Patricia Burgus said.

Like Ellen Bass and Laura Davis in the bestselling The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Sexual Abuse, Braun told Burgus no one believed in the Holocaust at first, either. He testified at a trial in California by insisting: “How many people believed what the Nazis did, or what the Cambodians did? They could smell the burning flesh. People weren’t coming home anymore. But there was terrible denial.”

Braun once again claimed: “We are working with a national-international type organization that’s got a structure somewhat similar to the communist cell structure.”

According to an account of the case in Try To Remember, a book debunking recovered memory by Dr. Paul McHugh, the chief of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins:

As Braun and the staff at Rush incorporated these suggestions into their treatment of her, Burgus eventually produced “memories” of the activities of the Satanic cult right there in Des Moines during her childhood. She claimed to have watched the traditional rituals of the cult—black masses and other ceremonies during which babies were slaughtered and their flesh eaten while older children, including Burgus, were sexually molested. Braun and his staff believed that the cult had powers over Burgus. They told her it could turn her into a “killing machine” responsive to coded messages, such as depicted in Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate. All communications with her family in Iowa were stopped when she received a Valentine card from one of them. The staff told Burgus that the color red in the card (rather common in Valentines) might well be a way that the cult leaders in Iowa were striving to “trigger” her “pre-programmed” murderous impulses. 

Despite a dearth of hard evidence of criminality, Braun called in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI): soon Burgus spun a Satanic conspiracy including AT&T, FTD florists, Hallmark Greeting Cards, the CIA—and the Jerry Lewis telethon for Muscular Dystrophy.

“Months later,” according to the account in Making Monsters, Braun told her “he had narrowly escaped an assassin that the FBI sent his way.”

When Braun brought in a therapist specializing in past lives, Burgus conjured memories of both being Catherine the Great—and dying in a fire as a young British girl. The Rush therapist literally traced her familial trail of sexual abuse back centuries.

After Burgus left Rush and quit Xanax, Inderol, and Halcyon cold turkey, her alters went away. Sayonara to “Cathy,” the control freak not to be confused with Catherine the Great; no more “Garbage” when she felt low self-esteem.

Patricia Burgus no longer believed she was a High Priestess in a Satanic cult—and that’s exactly what she told Braun. Au contraire: Braun said no one else was questioning the Satanic connection, and Burgus had simply assumed the identity of one of her more reasonable alters.

“I told him that was bullshit,” Burgus remembers. “I told him that the problems I had were because of the [Rush] hospital.... I told him he had done a terrible thing to me and my family.”

In 1992, Dr. Bennett G. Braun gave a lecture to the Midwestern Conference on Child Sexual Abuse and Incest promoting his Satanic claims. He told attendees that if you “pull it out of them”—out of patients—Satanic abuses are more likely to be real. He also admitted prescribing anti-anxiety medication, antidepressants, and massive doses of Inderal, the heart medication—prescribing doses of 1600 milligrams when 160 was the norm for treating the heart. He also claimed only about 5 percent of those claiming SRA might be “faking.”

“Satanic abuse is not a modern creation,” he said. “It is as old as time and it is something to be reckoned with. I expect it will be with us forever.”

Braun developed twelve Ps for those involved in Satanic abuse: Pimps, Pushers, Prostitutes, Physicians, Psychiatrists, Psychotherapists, Principals, Pallbearers, Public workers, Police, Politicians, and Priests.

“You have to predispose the nervous system for this sort of behavior,” he said.

Dr. McHugh of Johns Hopkins has a different interpretation of what Dr. Braun wrought at Rush:

Psychiatrists promoting programs for multiple personality disorder and searching for repressed memories of childhood sexual mistreatment found by the late 1990s that their work was proving a tricky sell: the courts rebuked it, health insurance companies withdrew financial backing for the prolonged hospitalizations prescribed, many malpractice insurance policies specifically excluded their hypnotic induction practices, and, with some protagonists speaking of Satanic cults and ritualistic abuse, many in the public saw much of it as fantasy.

“This is a case about gross negligence,” said Thomas Glasgow, who oversaw the Illinois Department of Professional Regulation’s case against Braun. “He misused the course of treatment of multiple-personality disorder the way a surgeon misuses a knife. That is probably the best analogy I can come up with.”

Braun once sent hamburger meat from a Burgus family picnic to be tested for human remains. According to a story in Chicago magazine, though the test was negative, the expert’s expert on Satanic Ritual Abuse would swear to a double-negative in a sworn statement: the negative test did not prove Burgus and her parents were not cannibals.

“[Y]ou don’t have evidence one way or the other,” he swore, “because this may be the sample that didn’t have [human remains].”

Buddy told The New York Times the insurance company settlement with Burgus was a “travesty”: “[Pat Burgus] comes into the hospital doing so bad that she belongs in the hospital and after several serious events in the hospital which I can’t disclose because of patient confidentiality, she was discharged and is doing much better. Where’s the damage?”

In addition to the $10.6 million paid to Burgus—and $7.5 million to another woman harmed by the Rush program—additional damages would be paid by Gloria Steinem’s hero. In 1999, Braun was fined $5,000 and suspended by the State of Illinois for two years followed by a five-year probation period. The twelve-bed Rush clinic was closed. In 2001, the American Psychiatric Association expelled Bennet Braun from membership, “after Dr. Braun was found to have provided incompetent medical treatments unsupported by usual standards of practice; violated ethical boundaries with the patient, including inappropriate sexual behavior and exploitation; and seriously breached patient confidentiality with the media.”

After the fiasco at Rush in Chicago, the high priest of Multiple Personality Disorder and Satanic Ritual Abuse could be found practicing his craft in obscurity out West, with his career described by US News & World Report in toto: “Dr. Bennett Braun is a psychiatrist in Butte, Montana. He received his medical degree from University of Illinois College of Medicine and has been in practice for more than 20 years.”

In Butte, his practice came crashing down again when a patient, Ciara Rehbein, accused him of overprescribing medication that resulted in a facial tic. She argued the Montana Board of Medical Examiners should never have given him a license, and in 2020, Braun lost his license to practice in Montana.

“Clearly,” Steinem writes in Revolution From Within, “the list of human abilities with which this discussion of MPD began is only a hint of the real possibilities. People in different alters can change every body movement, perfect a musical or linguistic talent that is concealed to the host personality, have two or even three menstrual cycles in the same body and handle social and physical tasks of which they literally do not think themselves capable. We need to face one fact squarely. What the future could hold, and what each of us could become, is limited mainly by what we believe.”

Clearly, Gloria Steinem managed to evade any real scrutiny for championing the theories of the once and former Dr. Bennett Braun. Like her buddy, the misinformation she conveyed—the damage she did—is incalculable. Sisterhood really is powerful.