The dangers of child abuse hysteria

Documentary filmmakers Dana Nachman and Don Hardy are drawn to miscarriage-of-justice stories -- their past television work includes a look at the Japanese American internment during World War II. Yet Nachman and Hardy longed to find a modern tale of a misguided prosecution that was unfolding in front of their eyes and cameras, rather than one they had to piece together from the past.

Then, four years ago, they met John Stoll, and “Witch Hunt” came to life.

In 2004, Stoll was appealing his conviction for child molestation, having been tried and jailed with a number of unrelated Bakersfield parents in a wave of sexual abuse prosecutions in the mid-1980s.

Convicted following incriminating testimony from their own children, Stoll and the other area moms and dads had been sentenced to between 40 years and life in prison; Stoll already had been behind bars for two decades as he struggled to clear his name. But the convictions were tainted by prosecutorial problems that included coached witnesses and the possible suppression of evidence.

Much of the national media’s focus on tainted child molestation legal actions has focused on the McMartin preschool case in Manhattan Beach, a six-year legal odyssey in the late 1980s that produced no convictions but did spark hysteria about child abuse and second thoughts about such prosecutions.

The Bakersfield trials at the center of “Witch Hunt,” showing Sunday and Monday at the AFI Fest, unfolded around the same time. Although journalist Edward Humes’ 2003 book, “Mean Justice,:NEW:0671034278:7.99” looked at the Bakersfield cases, the trials didn’t generate anything close to the McMartin coverage -- or the same degree of critical postmortems. “This was a blip on the radar,” Nachman says. “There were very few checks and balances in town.”

Nachman and Hardy believed the prosecutions deserved a closer look and made them the subject of their first film. “If you are ever going to take a chance with a story,” Hardy says, “this seemed to be the one.”

In addition to interviewing Stoll, the filmmakers tracked down other area parents who had been sent to prison for similar purported crimes: Jeff Modahl, Marcella and Rick Pitts, and Brenda and Scott Kniffen. The filmmakers also sat down with many of the children who had testified against their parents, almost all of whom have since recanted and said they were coached into what to say.

“Witch Hunt,” narrated by Sean Penn, is hardly an impartial look at how Kern County Dist. Atty. Ed Jagels tried to balance his duty to protect children from sexual predators against the rights of the accused. Instead, it’s a denunciation of Jagels (who declined to be interviewed by the filmmakers and did not respond to a request to comment for this article) and the damage his tough-on-crime tactics left behind.

Now that all of the film’s wrongly convicted parents are free, some of them plan to come to (and speak after) the film’s Los Angeles screenings, as when “Witch Hunt” premiered earlier this year at the Toronto International Film Festival.

“I had always thought that only guilty people go to prison,” Hardy says. “I don’t think that anymore.”

But Stoll’s son, Jed, has yet to reunite with his father. “That’s our biggest hope,” Nachman says. “That Jed and John could be reconciled.”

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john.horn@latimes.com