When US Department of Energy official Sam Brinton was fired in December 2022 following felony charges for repeatedly stealing people’s luggage at airports, including from Tanzanian fashion designer Asya Khamsin, it wasn’t the first time they’d made headlines. Back in February, Yahoo Lifestyle published a profile on Brinton, citing that Sam “Uses the pronouns they and them, and may be the first openly gender-fluid person in federal government leadership.” That same month, socially conservative outlets went to town after photos surfaced showing that Brinton was into BDSM and “puppy play.” But the Sam Brinton saga is about more than kleptomania, pronouns, and kinks. Brinton’s public persona is built on their assertion of having undergone brutal conversion therapy as a youth, a narrative that has come into question thanks to a recent exposé written by conversion therapy expert and LGBT activist Wayne Bessen. These revelations have done more than simply cast doubt on Brinton’s origin story — they show the dangerous illiberalism of blindly believing self-described victims, especially when such belief bestows social and professional capital, and thus, power.

Brinton has claimed at various points — including during a speech in November 2014 to the United Nations’ Convention Against Torture — that they were the victim of a particularly barbaric and cruel form of conversion therapy. The claims involved literal torture (e.g. blocks of ice, hot coils, and needles inserted into the fingertips; all paired with erotic gay imagery, designed to create a mental association between homosexual behaviors and pain). As gruesome as it gets. But as a 30-year expert in this field, Wayne Besen noticed problems with Brinton’s story. For one, virtually none of their allegations were verifiable. Brinton also couldn’t remember the name of the “therapist” in question (while remembering many other details), and seemingly has no desire to seek justice against their tormenter. And yet, apart from the scant amount of good follow-up coverage, the media and advocacy groups have remained largely silent on this story, which is noteworthy since many of them went out of their way to embrace and publicize Brinton’s claims of victimhood at face value.

In this respect, the Sam Brinton affair isn’t so much unique as it is emblematic of a persistent pattern, especially in the realm of “progressive” politics. Over and over, unsubstantiated sensationalist stories that confirm all the right narratives are blindly believed, despite the truth turning out to be far more complicated. The Duke LaCrosse scandal; Rolling Stone’s fraudulent “A Rape on Campus”; the “Mattress Girl” incident at Columbia University; the pillorying of Nicholas Sandmann and the Covington Catholic students; the Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax; and the now-plainly justified shooting of Jacob Blake — to name a few. To understand how this keeps happening, the tale of Paul Ingram is instructive.

“County GOP leader faces sex-assault charge,” read the 1988 headline in Washington state’s The Olympian. This story came from the confessions offered up by one Paul Ingram that he had not only repeatedly molested and raped both of his daughters, but had also committed acts of Satanic ritual abuse upon them, involving, among other things, the sacrificial slaying of 25 newborns. Ingram was the chief civil deputy of the sheriff’s department, Republican Party Chairman of Thurston County, and a devout member of a local Pentecostal church, making his alleged actions all the more scandalous. Ingram, in part under the influence of the Pentecostal belief of Satanic forces, was unwilling to believe that his daughters might be lying or misremembering when they made these shocking allegations against him. He was therefore unwilling to trust the fact that he had no memory of perpetrating such heinous crimes and offered mealy-mouthed confessions throughout his interrogations, punctuated by the occasional appeals to God for salvation.

As it turned out, Ingram was no infanticidal, devil-worshipping child-rapist — he had committed none of the crimes for which he was accused (including a second similar accusation from one of his sons in 1996). Rather, he had a case of false memory syndrome, which often comes about as a consequence of recovered memory therapy. In psychology, recovered memory therapy, where a therapist suggests bogus memories to a patient which are then presented as having been previously repressed due to trauma, has long since been discredited, and for good reason. It was an integral component of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and early 90s, a moral panic consisting of over 12,000 baseless claims of Satanic ritual abuse, many of which were entirely dependent upon “recovered memories.”

By the time Paul Ingram had confessed to his nonexistent crimes, the pump had been primed throughout American culture to be particularly afraid of Satanic cults and their evil ways, especially in highly religious communities. It’s unsurprising that Ingram — a pious man if there ever was one — was so willing to accept his daughters’ (and later his son’s) testimony against him. This credulity was exploited by the then-popular notion of recovered memory to create a very real case of false memory syndrome. In the end, even when presented with accumulated evidence that the story was false, Paul Ingram refused to believe he was innocent and, tragically, pled guilty in 1989 and was sentenced to twenty years in prison, though he was eventually released in 2003.

Cases like Paul Ingram and many others during the Satanic Panic were about more than fraudulent psychological concepts like recovered memories and the obvious miscarriages of justice that occurred. It’s the blind credulity experienced by nearly everyone involved that the word of supposed victims was inherently sacrosanct, however serious the allegations. Such absolute faith in the word of accusers often makes a farce of “innocent until proven guilty.” The wilfully blind acceptance of accusations — even against yourself — isn’t a mark of compassion for victims; it erodes the legal bedrock of liberal society. And that is what brings us back to Sam Brinton because this phenomenon has only gotten worse. Whereas people relied on junk evidence during the Satanic Panic, now, even the pretense of evidence is increasingly jettisoned, since the need for evidence implies that the word of the victim is insufficient on its own.

Whether Brinton was motivated by sincere delusion or sought to score oppression points doesn’t really matter. The blind acceptance and fawning coverage of Brinton’s inconsistent and uncorroborated story reveal the true illiberal rot that has been plaguing left-of-center spaces for a long time, in which someone’s status as a “victim” boosts their ascent up the social and professional ladder. You may — as Brinton does — possess real skills and credentials related to your profession, but if you can demonstrate your victimhood, that often gives you a leg up over the competition.

Contrast of “Satanic Panic” headlines from the 1980s with today’s “Grooming” panic.

To anyone who’s been paying attention over the past decade, it shouldn’t be surprising that this kind of hyperbolic “trauma” discourse has gained so much purchase. As far back as 2015, commentators and academics were already noticing that we in the West were shifting away from a dignity-based culture; one that sees people as individuals with inherent value and which is informed by liberal values like fairness, due process, reason, and proportionality. Instead, we are moving toward a victimhood-based culture “Characterized by concern with status and sensitivity to slight combined with a heavy reliance on third parties”, to quote sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning. A culture in which “Victimization [is] a way of attracting sympathy, so rather than emphasize either their strength or inner worth, the aggrieved emphasize their oppression and social marginalization.”

What results from all this is a perverse social (and often financial) incentive to frequently and loudly demonstrate that you are a victim. Had Sam Brinton not been granted platforms by credulous LGBT organizations and the United Nations, they may very well not have become a high-ranking official at the Department of Energy. After all, the greatest weapon of victimhood culture is that it paints anyone who expresses even an ounce of skepticism as victim-blaming pond scum, hardly better than the alleged perpetrator themselves. Without their victimhood narrative, Sam Brinton would in all likelihood simply be just another queer person. But when a hyper-competitive society lauds and rewards people’s woes and traumas almost as much as their actual achievements, we’re going to do what humans always have and pad our résumés.

The tale of Sam Brinton shows just how blinding illiberal identity politics can be. The Biden administration was desperate to give off the impression of being socially progressive, and Brinton seemed to check all the right boxes. They ended up checking all the wrong boxes for the hard right, who have now latched onto this case as further evidence, in their minds, of duplicitous, deviant “groomers” lurking among LGBT people. We need to strike a better balance as a society. Everyone deserves respect, compassion, and dignity. Every accuser must be taken seriously, every victim must be given the support they need, and every accused must be given a fair hearing with due process and without the presumption of guilt. There is a long and tragic history of many kinds of victims being disbelieved, disregarded, and swept under the rug. Correcting that historical injustice is vital. Replacing it with a new set of injustices fueled by blind faith, incentivized dishonesty, and the decay of liberal norms, however, comes with more baggage than Sam Brinton could ever steal.

Published Dec 29, 2022
Updated Feb 27, 2023