Salem on the Olympic Peninsula: Spectral Evidence in the Witch-Trial of Julie Jaman
Salem on the Olympic Peninsula: Spectral Evidence in the Witch-Trial of Julie Jaman
Performative trauma, misogyny, and history
Matthew Hopkins saw demons. His very first affidavit against Elizabeth Clarke attests that she summoned her “imps,” which then appeared one after another as spectral figures of two dogs, a polecat, and a tiny black incubus.
Nor was that the end of the strange sightings he reported. Walking home after this interview, Hopkins wrote that his own dog “suddenly gave a jumpe, and ran as shee had been in a full course after an Hare;”
And that when this Informant made haste to see what his Greyhound so eagerly pursued, He espied a white thing about the bignesse of a [kitten] danced about the said Greyhound and by all likelihood bit off a piece of the flesh of the shoulder of the Greyhound, for the Greyhound came shrieking and crying to this Informant with a piece of fleshe torn from her shoulder.
Hopkins seems to have encountered many cat-demons. Later, in his own yard with the dog, he “espied a black thing, proportioned like a Cat, onely it was thrice as big, sitting on a strawberry-bed, and fixing the eyes on this Informant.”
Executing an acrobatic, catlike maneuver, the obviously-this-was-a-cat dodged the dog and ran past Hopkins “to a great Gate, which was underset with a pair of Timbrell Strings, and did throw the said Gate wide open, and then vanished.”
Spectral eyewitness evidence allowed Hopkins to torture 80 year-old Elizabeth Clark by denying her sleep for days until she confessed. She was hanged as a witch.
The year was 1645. England was in political turmoil, cacophonous with an ideological language of conflict, deranged by Puritan ideas about the magical nature of evil. Witch trials crossed the Atlantic, where they blended with African and Native American ideas of supernatural evil in the New World, most famously in Salem, Massachusetts.
Those disgraceful events led Cotton Mather to finally ban spectral evidence from courtrooms and close the special court in 1693. Since that moment, all evidence presented in American courtrooms has been “maleficium.” This term refers to evidence which can be produced in court for direct examination.
In the court of public opinion, however, spectral evidence remains a key tool for the persecution of modern-day witches.
Consider the case of 80 year-old Julie Jaman. As regular readers will recall, the resident of Port Townsend, Washington was banned from her city pool after objecting to a man in the shower area while she was naked.
Jaman was also concerned that Clementine Adams, a man, was supervising “four or five” small girls as they stripped their swimsuits off to pee.
“Do you have a penis?” She asked.
“None of your business,” Adams replied.
“You need to get out of here,” Jaman said.
Minutes later, a young female employee named Rowen DeLuna was calling the police to arrest her. DeLuna accused Jaman of “discrimination” for objecting to a man in the shower while she was naked.
It was only when Julie Jaman got home and talked to the regional YMCA director on the phone that she learned the staff had put words in her mouth: “You are going to use your penis to fuck those little girls.”
“I am an 80 year-old woman and I do not talk like that,” Julie insists. In retrospect, she says “there was something amiss in the integrity of the staff.” No charges have been filed against her.
Jaman and several supporters spoke at the city council meeting the following Monday. Although a few supporters of Clementine were on hand to accuse the witch and her friends of smearing all transgender people everywhere as pedophiles, neither Jaman nor anyone speaking in her support ever actually said that.
Some people did note that overturning normal safeguards will invite predators and pedophiles, which is entirely true (see: Catholic priest scandals, Southern Baptist Church scandals, Warren Jeffs scandals, ad nauseum). But no one ever actually accused “the transgenders” of being predatory as a class.
In fact, here is the full video of that public comment period. The charge of “transphobia” against Julie Jaman is founded on spectral evidence. Watch and listen for yourself:
Mayor David J. Faber was very cordial in his closing remarks to the 1 August comment period, praising everyone who had spoken on both sides of the issue. He did not complain about anyone “being labeled pedophiles and rapists repeatedly & loudly in council Chambers.”
But three weeks later, he remembered things quite differently. Through the magic of selective memory, Mayor Faber heard a cat hiss, thought about it, and decided it must have been the whisper of an imp.
When — not if — the blinkered policies of gender gibberish result in seven-figure lawsuits over inevitable safeguarding failures, the Mr. Fabers of the world will just pretend that no one ever warned them it was possible for men to abuse the open access they gave to unaltered males claiming magic inner gendered essences that remain undetectable by modern science, and that these magic genders do not in fact make their penises female, as by transubstantiation.
It was not enough that the YMCA, which operates the pool, permanently banned Julie Jaman. It was not enough to malign her as a “transphobe.” They had to make sure she knew how evil she was and that everyone else knew. She had to be shunned.
Mayor Faber holds direct responsibility for the events that transpired last Monday when Julie Jaman, Amy Sousa, and a small group of supporters, mostly older women, were physically attacked by an angry mob for the crime of “hurting transgender people.”
No one can ever quite explain the precise mechanism by which Julie Jaman objecting to a man in the shower, or supervising small girls as they pee, injures transgender people as a whole.
How does denying a special group of men a newly-minted “human right” to be present around naked females of all ages figure as harm, exactly?
Harm to feelings? So what? Are Julie Jaman’s feelings less important because she is old, or because they are inconvenient to this special new sacred caste of males?
We are told not to call it grooming. Indeed, we can be banned from Twitter for calling it “grooming.” The word itself is now a slur, and also bad juju, because saying it out loud three times in the mirror summons the devil of discrimination.
The words “stochastic terrorism” get bandied about in this context sometimes, too. This term is wholly meaningless with regard to gender identity issues, an imputation of magical guilt.
We are supposed to believe the words “Do you have a penis?” …”you need to get out of here” are black magic that caused Clementine Adams spectral harm.
Deemed a witch, Julie Jaman deserved silencing and assault with the magistrate’s blessing. To that end, Port Townsend Police Chief Tom Olson stood aside last Monday, watching and doing nothing as a large crowd of angry men kettled and assaulted a much smaller group, mostly women in their 70s and 80s, against a brick wall.
It took at least three 911 calls to shame him into action:
This exercise in public shaming was followed by performative trauma, the keynote of witch-prosecutions with spectral evidence. Someone must speak of the demonic harms inflicted on them by the accused by uttering magic words.
During the solemn ceremonies which took place inside the council chambers just after that violent scene on 15 August, only supporters of Clementine and the city’s proclamation of solidarity with transgender politics were able to speak.
As always in witch-trials, children were the star witnesses. One young man described the devastation experienced by a “trans friend” made to use the boys locker room, because that child is definitely the very first boy in the history of the planet to feel uncomfortable changing with other boys for high school PE, so the obvious solution is to make him into a problem for women and girls.
This young man also repeated accusations against Julie Jaman’s character — talking points that first surfaced in this Post Millennial article on the Julie Jaman story. Typo original, boldface mine:
In an email from the YMCA’s Marketing and Communications Manager, they said that Jaman was not permanently suspended for this incident alone, but rather due to "repeatedly violating the Olympic Peninsula YMCA code of conduct, specifically, using disrespectful words or gestures towards YMCA staff or others; and abusive, harassing and/or obscene language or gestures towards YMCA staff or others."
The manager said that the facility has experiences past issues, but that the incident in the changing room was "unforgivable and extremely harmful."
Get that? Julie Jaman cannot be forgiven because Clementine has been wounded so deeply by mean words (“Do you have a penis?…You need to get out of here”). Her past behavior supposedly justifies this precipitous decision.
The Olympic Peninsula YMCA began this character assassination campaign as soon as we broke the story here at The Distance. A week later, the Port Townsend city website officially charged Julie Jaman with making “discriminatory and derogatory comments toward” YMCA personnel prior to this incident. The charge has been amplified by outlets more interested in politics than truth.
Just one little problem: it’s a lie.
Like the words that Rowen DeLuna projected onto Julie Jaman, “you are going to use your penis to fuck those little girls,” and the imaginary bigoted remarks about transgender people that were never really made, this narrative of past malfeasance is a baseless smear from reactionary minds at the Y.
And thanks to Washington state sunshine laws, that truth will be exposed to the world soon enough.
Children bearing witness and speaking in tongues is an all-American prophetic tradition. These forms of display have always been weaponized against old, annoying, or inconvenient women. Any word they say is held against them as a hex, and the fury of the people is further proof of their guilt.
At her examination, Salem witchcraft suspect Martha Cory complained about the obvious abuses of the court, telling the judges that “we must not believe these distracted children.” But the court was eager to let the farce continue. “You charge these children with distraction,” the magistrates retorted. “It is a note of distraction when persons vary in a minute, but these fix upon you, this is not the manner of distraction.”
Deny, attack, reverse victim and offender: DARVO is as old as time. A moral panic over the tender, gendered, eggshell feelings of “trans kids” enables adult men to abuse an old woman and get away with it. None of this is new. Misogyny is as old as the hills. It’s not “the right side of history,” it is history.
Children are innocent. They hold special, esoteric truths available only to the innocent. American culture now extends childhood well into adulthood for these purposes. Young people are presumed innocent when they put words in the mouths of old women, even when it results in a lynch mob.
Men drove the girls’ obsessive rumination and bizarre behavior in Salem. Judge John Hathorne clearly manipulated the girls’ performance. Hathorne warned his star witnesses that if they lied, they were murderers themselves, which had the perverse effect of redoubling their perjury. As the stakes rose, so did their acts of self-harm and attention-seeking. The young accusers writhed in apparent agony, bit themselves hard enough to leave marks, stuck themselves with hidden pins and bit their tongues until they bled.
Altogether, 19 people were hanged on the basis of their spectral evidence. One man was crushed to death; others died in jail.
Critcism began with the executions. Boston Baptist William Milborne petitioned the House of Burgesses against allowing spectral evidence. “Several persons of good fame and of unspotted reputation stand committed to several gaols …upon bare specter Testimonies,” he complained.
While Milborne did not question the girls’ claims to see invisible beings, he pointed out that logically, the devil has power to appear in the likeness of anyone, and thus implicate innocent people. The rationale of the court was fundamentally flawed, even when examined on its own merits.
Samuel Willard echoed Milborne as he challenged spectral evidence from the pulpit. “I do assert that the devil may represent an innocent, nay a godly person, doing a bad act,” he said, and “perswade the person afflicted that it is done by the person thus represented.”
Right on cue, “one of the Accusers cried out publickly of Mr. Willard, Minister in Boston, as afflicting of her” too, a critic of witch-trials noted.
Chief Magistrate William Stoughton dismissed these concerns. Spectral evidence was not incidental to his courtroom, but central to his “investigative” process. This was clearest in the trial of Rebecca Nurse.
After the jury returned a verdict of not guilty, the girls began to perform their “trauma” at the hands of invisible spirits upon a signal from Stoughton. He implored the jurors to reconsider, returning them to their chamber. After further deliberations, they got the message and convicted Nurse, who died on the noose.
Among her accusers was Ann Putnam. She swore in court that the ghosts of six children had appeared before her to accuse Rebecca Towne Nurse of killing them through witchcraft. The Nurse case holds a particularly apt lesson for Port Townsend, as the Putnams had a longstanding property dispute with the Towne family.
No matter what they lack in other resources, small towns everywhere have one primary item of value to their political economy: real estate.
As we reported when we broke this story at The Distance, Julie Jaman is “a pillar of the community.” A daughter of the 1960s, she has taken part in the environmental, peace, feminist, and justice activism of her time. Nor has she ever tired of holding her community leaders accountable.
In 2019, Jaman led community opposition to a development effort aimed at replacing the city pool with a new facility built on what is presently a coastal wetland. Not only was the taxpayer supposed to pay $24 million for this extravagance, it would compete with established local private gymnasiums.
The Olympic Peninsula YMCA was very excited about this project, posting a description on their website:
We are planning a new indoor recreational and wellness center including a 25-yard competitive length pool to be built together with public and private funding operated by the Olympic Peninsula YMCA.
To date, no maleficium evidence has been presented that Julie Jaman holds a longstanding grudge against anyone. Many parties have demanded such evidence from the city, which is required by state law to respond.
For now, the only maleficium evidence of any potential grudge belongs to the YMCA, and perhaps the city, against Julie Jaman.
It is not clear yet just what role John Mauro, the manager of Port Townsend, plays in this drama, but he appears to have a history of fabrication. If the city fathers have conspired to cut an 80 year-old woman off from a public benefit, and then set a mob on her in the street, all on the basis of imaginary past malfeasance, in order to push a reprehensible policy put in place by gender identity activists, there will be civil rights hell to pay. Someone will burn for it, but not Julie Jaman.