![]() ![]() ![]() “Certainly, investigators found the children’s (apparently) independent testimony on this point strong evidence for Michaels’ guilt,” says Ellis. The truth was that the entire story was coaxed into the minds of impressionable preschoolers by the detectives who interviewed them. Her case became a cause celebre in New York, with a number of activists and legal volunteers alleging that she’d been the victim of a witch hunt.įive years later, the Supreme Court of New Jersey decided as much and Michaels was exonerated. “Among other things, it was notorious that Michaels was a lesbian, and this fact made the children’s claims of sex-related abuse more credible to parents and prosecutors,” says Ellis. In August 1988, Michaels was sentenced to 47 years in prison, with no possibility of parole for the first 14 years. Michaels had been accused of molesting and sexually abusing preschoolers, “often by forcing them to lick peanut butter off her privates, or, alternatively, by smearing peanut butter on their bodies and licking them,” Ellis tells me. ![]() “I noted the similarity of the central motif to the alleged crime committed by Kelly Michaels, a teacher/teacher’s aide at Wee Care Day Nursery ,” says Bill Ellis, professor emeritus of English and American Studies at Penn State University, when I reach out to him to ask about the continued prevalence of the urban legend. Alternatively, when the rumor is just that - a rumor - but the subject is a nursery school teacher, it can quickly turn into a living nightmare.Ĭase in point: In 1985, a version of the peanut butter story scurried its way into a nursery school in Maplewood, New Jersey. As to the legality of said act, Klee notes that, while “bestiality laws vary widely by state (still a-okay in Kentucky and New Mexico!) … that won’t necessarily get you off the hook for ‘Peanut Butter Kisses.’ … In California, for example, the penal code forbids sexual abuse of animals, or ‘sexually assaulting an animal for the purpose of arousing or gratifying your sexual desire,’ noting that ‘the conduct doesn’t have to be forced or violent.’ The crime is punishable by a $1,000 fine and up to six months in jail.”Īll of this is to say that clearly, in a real-life scenario where a dog, peanut butter and a person’s genitals are involved in some sort of sexual act, a crime has been committed in the eyes of the law. ![]() It’s reared its head in pop culture as well: In 2018, my colleague Miles Klee reported that HBO execs had cut a similar scene from the final episode of the first season of Sex and the City - in the scene, a golden retriever is caught “going down” on a guy who continuously demands blow jobs from one of the show’s main characters. In junior high I let my dog lick my penis and now I can’t stop thinking about my dog when I’m getting a blow job from confession Based on the number of Reddit threads that refer to some variation of a scenario in which a person’s pet is lured into licking their genitals by way of a healthy smear of peanut butter, awareness of this rumor seems to be a rite of passage. You’ve no doubt heard some form of this rumor too, probably directed at some hapless individual in your hometown or school. Expectedly, the rumor spread like a virus, seeping through the various cliques until it found its way back to its ostensible source. There was me, repeating the story back to myself in secret - partly aroused, partly ashamed, but mostly just befuddled in disbelief. The rumor about the girl in my school who smeared peanut butter on her vagina and waited for her dog to lick it off was told to me, a fifth grader at the turn of the millennium, standing in the breezeway among a huddled group of three boys. ![]()
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