Bennett Brown, a Chicago psychiatrist whose diagnoses of repressed memories involving horrific abuse by devil worshipers helped spark what became known as the “satanic panic” of the 1980s and ’90s, died March 20 in Lauderhill, Florida, north of Miami. It was 83.
Jane Brown, one of his ex-wives, said death, in hospital, was from complications of a fall. Dr. Braun lived in Butte, Mont., but had gone to Lauderhill on vacation.
Dr. Braun rose to fame in the early 1980s as an expert on two of the most popular and controversial areas of psychiatric treatment: repressed memories and multiple personality disorder, now known as dissociative identity disorder.
He claimed he could help patients uncover memories of childhood trauma—the existence of which, others said, was responsible for splitting a person’s self into multiple separate personalities.
He created a unit dedicated to dissociative disorders at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago (now Rush University Medical Center). became a frequently quoted media expert. and helped found what is now the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation, a professional organization with more than 2,000 members today.
From this huge platform Dr. Brown published his most explosive findings: that in dozens of cases, his patients discovered memories of being tortured by satanic cults and, in some cases, of participating in the torture themselves.
He was not the only psychiatrist to make such a claim, and his alleged revelations led to a growing national panic.
The 1980s saw a dramatic increase in the number of people, children and adults, claiming to have been abused by devil worshippers. It began in 1980 with the book “Michelle Remembers,” by a Canadian woman who said she had recovered memories of ritual abuse, and grew after allegations of abuse at day care centers in California and North Carolina.
Elements of pop culture, such as heavy metal music and the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, were used as alleged entry points for cult activity.
Such stories were fodder for craven popular television formats, including talk shows like “Geraldo” and news magazines like “Dateline,” which aired segments promoting such claims uncritically.
The psychiatric profession bore some responsibility for the growing panic, with respected researchers such as Dr. Brown to give him a glow of authority. He and others conducted seminars and distributed research papers. they gave the phenomenon a quasi-medical acronym, SRA, for satanic ritual abuse.
Dr. Braun’s inpatient unit at Rush became a magnet for referrals and a warehouse for patients, some of whom he kept for years under medication and supervision.
Among them was a woman from Iowa named Patricia Burgess. After interviewing her, Dr. Braun and his colleague, Roberta Sachs, claimed that she was not only a victim of satanic ritual abuse, but was herself the “high priestess” of a cult that had raped, tortured and cannibalized thousands of children. including her two young sons.
Dr. Braun and Dr. Sachs sent Mrs. Burgus and her children to a mental health facility in Houston, where they were kept apart for nearly three years with little contact with the outside world.
By then heavily medicated Mrs Burgess had believed doctors, telling them she remembered torches, live burials and eating the body parts of up to 2,000 people a year. After her parents served her husband a loaf of bread, she had him examine it for human tissue. The tests came back negative, but Dr. Brown was not convinced.
Dr. Braun kept other patients under similar conditions at Rush or elsewhere. He persuaded a woman to have an abortion because, he convinced her, it was the product of ritual incest. convinced another to undergo tubal ligation to prevent her alleged cult from having more children.
The satanic panic began to fade in the early 1990s. 1992 FBI investigation It found no evidence of coordinated cult activity in the United States, and a 1994 report by the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect reviewed more than 12,000 allegations of satanic ritual abuse and found that not a single one was brought under control.
“The biggest thing was the lack of corroborating evidence,” Kenneth Lanning, a retired FBI agent who wrote the 1992 report, said in a telephone interview. “It’s the type of crime where evidence would have been left.”
Many people drifted away from their former enthusiasms. in 1995, Geraldo Rivera apologized for his cover-up episode. However, even in 1998, “Dateline” ran one episode on NBC which claims to show widespread satanic activity in Mississippi.
Mrs. Burgus sued Rush, Dr. Braun and her insurance company over allegations that he and Dr. Sachs had implanted false memories in her head. These settled out of court in 1997 for $10.6 million.
“I started adding a few things and realized there was no way I could come from a small town in Iowa, eat 2,000 people a year and nobody said anything about it,” Mrs. Burgess told The Chicago Tribune in 1997.
A year later, the unit of Dr. Braun in Rush closed and the Illinois Board of Medical Licensing opened an investigation into his practices. In 1999, he received a two-year license suspension — although he did not admit wrongdoing.
Bennett George Braun was born on August 7, 1940 in Chicago to Thelma (Gimbel) and Milton Braun, a professor of orthodontics at Loyola University. He graduated from Tulane University with a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1963 and earned a master’s degree in the same subject in 1964. He received his medical degree from the University of Illinois in 1968.
Dr. Brown was married three times. His marriages to Renate Deutsch and Mrs. Braun both ended in divorce. His third, to Joanne Arriola, resulted in her death. He is survived by five children and five grandchildren.
After temporarily losing his medical license in Illinois, Dr. Brown moved to Montana, where he obtained a new license in that state and opened a private practice.
But in 2019, one of his patients, Ciara Rehbein, sued him for overprescribing drugs that left her with a permanent tic on her face. He also filed a complaint against the Montana Board of Medical Examiners for allowing him a license despite knowing his past.
Dr. Brown lost his license to practice medicine in Montana in 2020.