Gerald A. "Tooky" Amirault (born March 1, 1954) was convicted in 1986 of molesting and raping eight children at the Fells Acres Day Care Center in Malden, Massachusetts, run by his family. He and his family deny the charges, which supporters regard as a conspicuous example of day care sex abuse hysteria.
He and his wife Patricia, a schoolteacher whom he married in 1977, have three children: Gerrilyn, Katie, and P.J.
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Writer Dorothy Rabinowitz, a member of the Editorial Board of The Wall Street Journal, asserts that Amirault was railroaded. Rabinowitz was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2001,[1] partly for her coverage of the case.[2] The case was also the major topic of her book about miscarriages of justice, No Crueler Tyrannies (ISBN 0743228340).
Testimony in the cases included stories of Amirault dressed as a clown and raping children with knives, and ritual slaughter of animals. It relied heavily on testimony from young children extracted through long sessions with therapists. Among the accusations were that, in the words of Rabinowitz, Gerald
had plunged a wide-blade butcher knife into the rectum of a 4-year-old boy, which he then had trouble removing. When a teacher in the school saw him in action with the knife, she asked him what he was doing, and then told him not to do it again, a child said. On this testimony, Gerald was convicted of a rape which had, miraculously, left no mark or other injury.
The Amiraults insist they were victims of the day care sex abuse hysteria that swept the US in the 1980s.
In 2002, then-Acting Governor of Massachusetts Jane Swift refused to commute Amirault's sentence, despite a unanimous vote in favor of his release by the state's parole board. Amirault's case had previously been upheld by the Massachusetts Supreme Court.[3] Martha Coakley, then Middlesex district attorney and subsequently State Attorney General, lobbied Swift to keep him in prison[4][5] and Swift denied Amirault's clemency.[6]
Amirault was released from the Bay State Correctional Center on April 30, 2004, 18 years after his conviction.[7][8] His sister and mother, Cheryl Amirault LeFave and Violet Amirault, were convicted of related charges in a separate trial, and both released from prison in 1995.
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