“Poison”: Amazon Prime Video has its “SanPa” (but the podcast is something else)

It was October 2014 when Pablo Trincia he understood that he would have to take a step back to regain the enthusiasm and hunger for truth that he felt he had long ago lost. As he tells in his book Poison. A true story, published by Einaudi, Trincia at the time was in Monrovia, Liberia, to create a service of Hyenas dedicated to the Ebola contagion in North Africa. The point of no return for him was when, faced with the scene of the little body of a grandson torn from his grandfather, with all his personal effects and the keyboard of the bed stacked outside the house to be burned to ward off contamination, Trincia writes of not having experienced the slightest emotion if not the urge to go to lunch.

Realizing that he had developed a cynicism and indifference that were not his own was the first step to start from scratch to make sense of his life as a man and as a reporter. The project of Poison, the podcast published on the website of Republic in the autumn of 2017 and created together with my colleague Alessia Rafanelli, started from here: from the desire to devote himself to a story and to live it in a visceral way, hoping to regain the affection for what he was doing and that the exposure of Hyenas he had, in part, anesthetized him.

The success of that investigation dedicated to the so-called Devils of the lower Modena area, a series of alleged cases of pedophilia and Satanism which, between 1997 and 1998, led toremoval of 16 children from their families, was so sensational as to awaken the interest of public opinion and television talk shows on a legal matter still considered very obscure and crooked today and to push Fremantle to create, in 2018, a docu-series that arrives today on Amazon Prime Video, after about two years of work interrupted due to the pandemic in the lower Modena area. In the days when the production, written and directed by Hugo Berkeley and produced by Ettore Paternò, is came alive, it exploded the Bibbiano case, and everyone started wondering if Trincia had seen us for a long time or if his was the classic stroke of luck that touches people who are in the right place at the right time. The possible similarities between the case of the Devils and Bibbiano are addressed in the docu-series Poison in the last two episodes, the most beautiful, those who try to tell us something more about the reaction of the inhabitants of Mirandola, Finale Emilia and Massa Finalese after the release of the Trincia podcast and, above all, the version of all those people who have chosen to speak only in one second moment, distancing oneself from what the journalist said.

HISTORY
But let’s rewind the tape. The docu-series Poison, in the first three episodes, tries to reconstruct what happened in the summer of 1997, when a child Trincia calls Dario (the invented names have been chosen to protect the identity of the children involved) alerts the social services about various harassment suffered by his family confessing that his father used to take it to cemeteries to follow satanic rites together with other families and other children. The confession starts a series of connections that lead other infants to talk and tell very similar stories, suggesting that in the three municipalities of the lower Modena area there was a real sect of satanists who, in addition to practicing child abuse, was engaged in rituals involving the killing of newborns, the exhumation of bodies from coffins, the blood of cats made to drink by the little ones and other similar atrocities. The immediate reaction of the social services was to remove all the injured parties involved in the affair – on which the medical experts had ascertained the signs of abuse – from their families to reassign them to others. At this point, however, the first doubts begin to arise: was there really a network of pedophilia and satanism? Did the social workers really do their jobs well, or was there something else involved?

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE PODCAST AND THE DOCU-SERIE
In the podcast of Poison, Trincia’s thesis is quite clear: following the intervention of various experts on the subject, for him it was a dramatic episode of collective suggestion which has led children to tell untrue stories and psychologists and social workers not to follow clear lines in speeches and interrogations. We therefore speak of a sort of unconscious manipulation linked to fear inherited from cases of collective suggestion which, especially in the United States, had brought the accusation of Satanism to completely innocent people. Despite Trincia’s work in reporting the judicial documents and collecting the testimonies of parents who found themselves serving very long sentences without ever having the opportunity to see their children again, the doubts are many, and certainly the docu-series he has no intention of clarifying them. If the podcast, especially in the last episode published in 2018, supported a certain version of the facts, the Poison of Prime Video seeks above all the path of neutrality, offering the opportunity to speak also to all the people who harshly criticize the work and the narration carried out by Trincia. Berkeley’s work, in this sense, surpasses the podcast and offers, in a very clean way, the dualism between guilty and innocent, between angry parents who denounce a corrupt and sick system and professionals, such as the psychologist Valeria Donati, who in the podcast almost played the role of the deus ex machina of the whole operation of removing children from their families, who believe in their good faith.

IS POISON THE NEW SANPA?
Especially following closely the story of Federico Scotta, the father who, in those years, was estranged from his three children (two already born, 3 years old and 6 months old, and one just born) serving an 11-year prison sentence but always proclaiming himself innocent; and of Lorena Morselli, the mother from whom the authorities snatched her four children in 1998 by accusing her of Satanism and pedophilia and forcing her to move to France to give birth to her fifth child for fear that the social workers would take him away, the docu-series Poison try to put the pieces together to allow the audience to hear both bells and to get an idea of ​​a story on which, probably, the mystery will always hover. Although the historical reconstruction of the first three episodes is much more confusing than that of the podcast (more accurate and coherent), the merit is precisely to give everyone a voice, including children (now adults) who claim abuses and cemetery rituals occurred (their collective, Voices Voices, on Facebook provides all the details on possible inaccuracies reported by Trincia). In short, with this operation that delves into an unusual and decidedly turbid story, seeking a balance between procedural truths and personal beliefs and enriching everything with archive footage that, unfortunately, we could only imagine in the podcast, Amazon Prime Video secures a product like the SanPa di Netflix. Certain that the docu-series too Poison it will reopen a door that, if we think about it, may never close completely.