This violates Wikipedia rules around autobiography but, in this case, the editors have accepted his claim that the Presidio scandal was the result of "conspiracy theorists" and "hysteria". Anybody who is familiar with the case knows that this is far from the truth. The serious harms inflicted upon the children at Presidio were documented by Ehrensaft in this journal article.
I've recently been passed some of the child interview transcripts from the case, in which children as young as nine indicate that members of their family were involved in a ritually abusive group with Aquino at the centre. The interviewers questions are open-ended and exploratory, with the children very specific about the incidences of abuse, including places, abusers, smells and sounds.
I recently found an interesting blog entry from one of the lawyers in the case, reproduced here. He was responding to an attack on Janet Reno for prosecuting the Country Walk ritual abuse case:
I represented some clients, pro bono, in a lawsuit against the federal government over sexual abuse at an Army day care center. The facts in the case were very disturbing, and we did not raise the satanic allegations, of which there was considerable factual support. As an example, the chief suspect was a founder of a Satanic cult; many children at the day care center tested positive for chlamydia; and my client accurately described, without prompting from the federal agents, a very peculiarly designed room where the alleged ritual abuse occurred. The Army kicked out of the service the alleged mastermind, based on this evidence, but no criminal prosecutions went forward, after the federal judge ruled that the children were too young to testify competently.
During the case, I talked to a personal injury attorney in Chicago (who was jewish, if it matters) who had sued the Army over a similar case in Illinois. He told me that his client (a very young child of 4) had spontaneously told them the greek or aramaic name of a something that is identified as a servant of satan in medieval texts, as someone he had met. The child's family had no idea what this "name" meant. The attorney told me he kept the "satan" stuff out of his lawsuit, and recovered a very mediocre amount following a bench trial in federal court.
Our clients were examined by a psychiatrist for the Boston child courts, who told us there was no question they had been sexually abused. We also had extensive evidence, developed by the Army CID, that they and many other children had been abused (I can't disclose this evidence, due to terms in the settlement). During that case, I also came across an attorney in the far north of California, who had filed a similar ritual abuse lawsuit against the military and who had been abducted by people wearing masks after she filed her suit and threatened with death if she did not drop the case. I also interviewed a former MP from the military base where my clients had allegedly been abused. This ex-MP told me that, after he began investigating the existence of a satanic cult at this base, suddenly experienced several very unusual acts of apparent retaliation (he was called out to a live ammunition combat exercise, ordered to bunk with 2 people whom he had previously arrested, and then denied re-enlistment on the grounds that he was 2 pounds overweight).
Also, I tried to talk to a former Satanic cult member who had filed suit against the founder, and she refused to talk to me (she was hardly a shrinking violet; she was a professional private investigator at one of the largest investigation firms in the US).
I found the case I worked on very weird. I should note that I am a liberal agnostic who had previously defended a school district in a lawsuit filed by evangelical Christians alleging that the school district's curriculum violated the Establishment Clause by promoting the religions of Wicca or Neopaganism (see Brown v. Woodland Jt Unified School District, 9th Cir.). So, my own experience taught me not to prejudge all of these cases as absurd, as you apparently have.
There is a rising tide of historical revisionism around the ritual abuse cases of the 1980s, as the details of the cases are lost amidst a false consensus about "moral panic" and "hysteria" - fed by the perpetrators themselves, who, like Aquino, are still active in controlling the manner in which these cases are represented online.