I did quite a bit of research into news coverage of SRA during the late 80s/early 90s, when many psychotherapists of varied stripes all over the academic (Western) world came forward with the stories of their patients and persistent reports of ritual sexual abuse. To the therapists these stories seemed to corroborate one another independently.

I found the recurring name of a Dr. Richard Ofshe. His statements, his authority on the subject, were used and reused to debunk SRA, in particular Recovered-Memory Therapy.

But Richard Ofshe is not even a psychologist. He's a quack sociologist who somehow inserted himself in the Paul Ingram case a.k.a. the Thurston County ritual abuse case. There, he conducted his private little experiment:

Ofshe, during his first day of interrogating Ingram, designed and executed an experiment to confirm his suspicion that Paul was not confessing to crimes he had actually committed (Ofshe & Watters, 1994, p. 172). Ofshe "made a spontaneous decision to run what he later referred to as a 'little experiment' " (Wright, 1993b, p. 66) and introduced a supposedly false allegation into Ingram's interrogation without any advance notification of, or approval from, the detectives interviewing Ingram (N. McClanahan, personal communication, August 19, 1993; Richard Peterson, personal communication, February 1, 1995; Wright, 1993b).

Ofshe fabricated a scenario–that Ingram had forced his son and daughter to have sex together while he watched–and then asked Ingram if he could remember this incident (phase 1 of the experiment). According to Ofshe's description of the experiment (1992), initially Ingram said that he did not remember the incident to which Ofshe referred. Ofshe encouraged Ingram to use the same methods that he had used to remember other alleged incidents before sending him back to his cell. The next day, Ingram told Ofshe that he had some clear memories of making his son and daughter have sex, and he produced a three-page, written confession of the incident. Ofshe then pressured Ingram to renounce the confession (phase 2 of the experiment), which Ingram was unwilling to do.

So this utterly unqualified 'sociologist' conducts an utterly uncontrolled, unscientific, and frankly immoral experiment in a landmark case of RSA, and from then on he is taken as an authority on the subject not just in the US but internationally.

The stench from this particular rabbit hole is only periodically bearable for further digging.

[edit to add, Richard Ofshe is on the Scientific Advisory Board of the FMSF]