Lauren Stratford, The Survivor Who Never Was

A Cautionary Tale for the Ethically Confused

Photo by Tara-mae Miller on Unsplash

Introduction: The Vicious Circularity of a Lying Prophet 

If you know, you know. 

I spent the better part of my fun time this summer talking to people who have worked on issues related to toxic advocacy and advocating for abuse survivors in a complex world. This has been a subject that has intrigued me for most of my adult life, and became particularly raw for me after I found myself investigating the stories behind last year’s summer blockbuster Sound of Freedom. 

Today I want to return to the thorny emotional problems that I think underlie these stories, and why these stories are so emotional and difficult to work out. What happens when someone we perceive to be victimized, or who we perceive to be an ally of the victimized, is caught in a falsehood? Or is suspected of immoral acts? Why is it so hard to accept when someone who we think of as oppressed, or an ally of the oppressed, may have done something wrong? 

This is no idle question. For one thing, the field is made complicated by neurotic perceptions of victimization by people who insist on their marginalized status despite all evidence to the contrary. An obvious recent contender here would be Oklahoma Schools Superintendent Ryan Walters, who has trafficked in his self-branding as a Christian martyr to distract from his political difficulties and his bizarre priorities. But it also may include some complex social news stories where co-founders of large, rapidly growing charities have faced criticism for buying luxury homes, perhaps mismanaging donations, and not working with survivors of racial violence in a way that those survivors experience as helpful. It definitely includes the long track record of Shaun King’s arguably dubious fundraising. You can read more about that here. There’s also the story of Coco Berthmann, who rose to prominence with a dubious story of surviving trafficking, and ultimately flew too close to the sun by pretending to have cancer. There’s also, on a much smaller scale, the truly deranged story of how Sacred Wilderness came to be branded on social media as a dangerous white supremacist organization by two white employees and their apparently dubious understanding of how organizations work. The employees clearly believed they were fighting for justice and freedom for the oppressed, but a third party investigation showed that the reality was much smaller – and pettier. 

I don’t want to paint all people in the field of “embattled justice campaigner” with the same brush — not even the people in the above examples. They’re clearly all very different stories of people impacted by very different problems and not all of them share equal culpability. Some of these people have considerably more claim to marginalization than others. Some have considerably more evidence of good-faith efforts to their name – there’s a big difference between making a mistake and doing something morally wrong. And of course some people in this country are just arrested for charity fraud and are deliberate scammers. But I think the reason why these stories live so large in my head is because they are morally upsetting. They are morally upsetting to people who are deeply aware of structural social evil, who have deep distrust of large and powerful organizations and dominant social narratives, and are highly attuned to the ways in which ordinary people have been damaged by them. These stories disorient us from an ethical point of view.

Most people of goodwill want to be on the side of the victimized and marginalized. We want to support the people who say they are acting on their behalf. When we hear that someone has been through something awful, we want to help them. We want to believe people who say they need help, or they are doing good work. We gravitate towards perceived underdogs and their champions. We want to be among their number. 

So what do we do when they’re wrong? What happens when they make a mistake? What if they make a mistake that doesn’t seem innocent? What do we do when it seems, for all the world, that someone is taking advantage of that impulse within us? What do we do when they lie?

Unfortunately, for some people, the answer to this question “what do we we” os “nothing.” The reaction when someone who is publicly perceived to be doing some kind of good work is caught out in a lie usually goes something like this: 

“But we can’t discredit Betty! She’s doing such important work, and if people think she’s dishonest, then they’ll stop supporting her work!”

“Okay, what is Betty’s important work?”

“Why, telling the truth, of course!” 

What someone is doing or saying is perceived to be useful to a larger, greater movement, with imbues not only the person’s testimony but the person themselves with a sense of earned protection. Yes, perhaps not everything they say or do is morally good, or true, or useful, but the larger message – which can somehow be distinguished from the details of what they say, which are demonstrably false – is morally good, and true, and useful. What does it matter if, say, this person was not actually trafficked by the person she says she was, in the location she says she was, and in the matter she says she was? Or if this person was not involved with a criminal network in the way he says he was, when he says he was? The larger message is what is important. Never mind that all the component parts that make up this larger message are all clearly wrong. The important thing is that the message, when viewed from 40,000 feet, is true. Or at least, we’re pretty sure it is. The details don’t matter. And of course, the person in question is trustworthy. Generally speaking, though. Not in the particulars. 

This applies in virtually any situation in which someone who has been historically perceived as a witness to wrongdoing, and often a victim of it, and certainly a combatant of it, is caught out in a lie. It is much, much harder and slower to admit when a perceived “good guy” has done something wrong. Especially when that person is able to appeal to a story that causes us to empathize with them deeply, or may make us inclined to grade their behavior on a generous curve.

With that in mind, I want to introduce here the cautionary tale of Lauren Stratford. You probably don’t know the name Lauren Stratford, but you probably should. Lauren Stratford was a woman who, in her telling, was the victim of a massive structural evil in the United States: a huge, well-concealed underground network of Satanic cannibals, murderers, and pedophiles. Hundreds flocked to hear her harrowing story, to seek her insight to how these evils could be abated, and to give her money and support. Many people personally housed her in their homes and tried to care for her, especially because her severe trauma made her struggle to function. This became especially severe when Lauren contracted a terminal illness and was wheelchair-bound. Lauren was a light in the darkness, a witness to a great unchecked evil, a person who should be listened to, and a person in need of extreme care. 

There was just one problem. Lauren wasn’t actually terminally ill. And that wasn’t the only thing she was lying about. 

Now: at this point, it’s very common for people to throw a flag and say that false accounts of sexual assault are rare. That’s true, to a point. But it also has little bearing on the importance of this story. “Rare” is not the same thing as “impossible,” and it does nothing at all for the long list of Lauren Stratford’s victims to say that what happened to them was one in a million. So are floods in Asheville, North Carolina, but here we are. Everything I’m about to tell you about Lauren Stratford actually happened. The real people who were really victimized by the Satanic Panic really existed, and were really harmed. This is not an absurd hypothetical. This really happened. It might not happen all the time, but it doesn’t mean it never happened at all, and can never happen again.  

In the first part of this article, I’ll give a quick look at the story of Lauren Stratford, and how we know it was false. In the next sections, I want to look at why Lauren Stratford’s story was believed, why it was popular, and ultimately, why it was dangerous. 

Who is Lauren Stratford?

Lauren Stratford was born Laurel Rose Wilson in Washington in 1941. In her 1988 book Satan’s Underground, she truthfully relates that she was adopted as an infant. Stratford also relates that as a child, she was forced to eat broken glass, saw her mother attack her father, and was frequently sexually abused by her mother and others. She reported her mother sold her to be trafficked for a CSAM production ring, which included images of forced bestiality. Stratford tried repeatedly to tell her story to police officers, pastors, church leaders, and teachers, but she was consistently disbelieved. At age eleven, Stratford went to live with her father, where she became aware that the CSAM ring her mother had sold her to was multi-state. In her father’s custody Stratford met Victor, the leader of the cult and trafficking ring. Victor then became her primary trafficker, branding her on the forehead (at no point did Stratford ever have a visible scar) and forcing her into vicious, degrading acts with his customers. Victor’s empire of drugs, pornography, sex trafficking, and depraved sexual acts eventually bored him, and Victor turned his attention to the burgeoning and lucrative field of Satanism. Victor began forcing Stratford to attend satanic rituals. These rituals included infant sacrifice. Victor also sacrificed three of Stratford’s own children in rituals. After the death of her father, Stratford fled and spent years evading Victor’s minions, who would stop at nothing to silence her. She finally escaped them in 1986.

In 1986 Lauren Stratford reached out to Bob Curie, a parent of one of the “victims” of the McMartin Preschool Trial in Manhattan Beach, CA. She claimed she had inside knowledge of the McMartin family’s participation in satanic ritual abuse because of her time in the cult, as well as knowledge of the Kern County Bakersfield allegations. Through Curie, Stratford met a woman named Johanna Michaelson, who was assisting with the investigation into the McMartin preschool hysteria. Johanna was a counselor and advocate for satanic abuse survivors. Michaelson is still active today but in the 1980s she was a prominent voice attempting to draw attention to the massive perceived problem of organized satanic abuse. With the help of her brother-in-law Hal Lindsay, Michaelson wished to draw attention to the dangers of the occult and warn others about the extreme danger these organizations posed. Michaelson eventually wrote the foreword of Satan’s Underground, endorsed her manuscript to Harvest House, and assisted in the writing of Stratford’s therapy handbook for abuse survivors, I Know You’re Hurting (1989). In 1989, Stratford and Michelle Smith Pozner (author of Michelle Remembers, 1980) appeared on Oprah Winfrey to relate their stories of surviving satanic abuse.

By 1995 Michelle Remembers had already been thoroughly debunked in large part by Nathan Debbie and Michael Snedeker. By 1990, the McMartin trial had concluded with no convictions. And in 1990, Cornerstone Magazine published a thorough debunking of Satan’s Underground by Bob and Gretchen Passantino and Jon Trott. That same year, Stratford’s publisher, Harvest House, ceased publishing the book – though with no confession of wrongdoing 

The Passantinos’ and Trott’s 1990 investigation makes it very clear that, at the time of writing, the authors still believe that satanic ritual abuse is a real and serious problem and that the McMartin children were victimized but were hindered by Stratford’s dubious claims. Per the article: 

“One parent spoke for them all: We’re so afraid that no one will believe our children. If this story were true, it would be invaluable. But we know it’s not, and the only testimony worse for our children than no testimony is a testimony that’s not true.”

We know now, at this late date, that satanic ritual abuse was a moral panic with next to no connection with reality. But while this would take some time to permeate public consciousness, Stratford’s story had apparently undergone little fact-checking, Michaelson already had evidence that Stratford had been lying about her involvement with the McMartin family, and yet Michaelson recommended the book for publishing anyway. (Remember the rule of the vicious circularity of the lying prophet – though the prophet lies in the particulars, they tell the truth in the general, and as a truth-teller they must be believed). 

Stratford’s story was so dramatic, and so extreme, that it strained credulity that there was no corresponding evidence for her story except for her own testimony. Stratford’s own narrative in Satan’s Underground was light on names, dates, and places. Cornerstone was able to speak to people from Stratford’s past, including her mother and sister. No one was able to ever recall seeing Stratford pregnant, much less three times. Stratford’s sister did attest to some level of dysfunction in the home, but categorically denied that her mother would have been involved in pornography. Stratford had a troubled relationship with both parents. At age seventeen Stratford made the first of many false allegations of sexual abuse – this one was against her brother in law. In college she began telling stories of how her mother sex trafficked her, and that a member of the college faculty had sexually abused her. Stratford later admitted she made these stories up to impress people. 

Stratford had a long history of self-harm – she would later say these injuries were caused by her mother, and eventually by Josef Mengele (more on that later), but witnesses said otherwise. She frequently attempted suicide. She lived with a string of families who took pity on her and her horrific past, but these relationships frequently became destructive because of Stradford’s erratic behavior and bottomless need for attention. Stratford faked disabilities. She drove wedges between husbands and wives, and parents and children. She kept people up all night threatening suicide and self-harm. She listened to other people’s traumatic stories and adopted them as her own. She repeatedly tried to insert herself into national news stories and insisted on her centrality to a range of abuse cases. She faked extreme illnesses. She constantly insisted she was being harassed by Satanists. Eventually, after she was discovered as a fraud, Stratford would reinvent herself as Laura Grabowski, and spent several years pretending to be a Holocaust survivor. She reportedly collected funds from the World Jewish Restitution Organization for needy Holocaust survivors. She died in 2002 at age 60.

There was never any evidence, aside from Stratford’s own testimony, that anything she ever said about herself was true. She was clearly a very troubled person, though we should note that her lies were, in fact, quite rational and self-interested. Stratford wanted to be the center of attention. She wanted to be loved, supported, and cared for. She wanted to be important. And she got all those things by stringing together a complex set of lies, which were mostly discounted until she was able to find an unusually vulnerable and credulous audience.

So how did this happen? Why was Stratford believed? 

Why Was Lauren Stratford’s Story Believable? 

A major part of why Stratford’s story was believable was because of an extant plausibility structure: a national audience of people who were terrified of satanic ritual abuse and believed it posed a major risk to children. This was a story that was repeated in Christian and secular media, in women’s magazines, on talk shows, on prime time, and from pulpits. The idea that ritual abuse could happen to any child – but particularly the ones who went to daycare – was a prevalent cultural anxiety, culminating in 12,000 unsubstantiated accusations, mostly of women who worked in childcare. 

The origins of this fear are not entirely fraudulent. Sexual abuse is a real thing. It’s not primarily committed by women, and it’s not primarily committed by strangers, but it does happen. Stratford was operating in a system where sexual abuse of children had only been recently understood, and there was a desperate desire to correct the mistakes of the past. For the first time in history, mental health professionals and children’s advocates were coming to understand that sexual abuse of children did happen, that it was common, that it was historically underreported, and that children needed to be believed and listened to when they disclosed these stories.

Unfortunately, much of this newfound attention on child abuse centered not on the family and other places where sexual abuse is prevalent, but on new sites of American moral panic and anxiety: daycare centers, and organized networks of full-time child abusers. This might seem ridiculous, but if you read about the McMartin story (which is documented extensively in Richard Beck’s We Believe the Children and David Frankfurter’s Evil Incarnate, which puts this story in conversation with other witch panics) you’ll see that moral freelancers and public experts crop up again and again in the story. Stories about satanic ritual abuse became believable because of the credibility that other credible people gave them – whether these were psychiatrists, therapists, police departments, and self-styled occult experts like Mike Warnke (who Cornerstone would also go on to debunk).

Stratford was no different. Johanna Michaelson used her considerable reach and clout to provide connections to Stratford, and to secure her a publishing contract. These people were in turn propped up by other ministry leaders, like Hal Lindsay, and had secular support and credibility in the media through local news and even national figures like Oprah Winfrey. Credible people make incredible claims credible by lending their own credibility to them. You might not trust Lauren Stratford on a first pass, but if all these people around her believe her – surely someone’s done the necessary fact checking to see if her story was true. After all, all these people wouldn’t believe her for no reason. Right?

While at least some of the people who believed and defended Stratford were obvious charlatans, not all of them were. In fact, arguably most weren’t. Many were people who sincerely believed that satanic ritual abuse was a real danger, that kids were being harmed, that the danger needed to be exposed, and that Stratford deserved justice. Many other people also simply had a sincere desire to help one troubled woman. When you read Stratford’s story it becomes incredibly clear that not everyone who helped Stratford did so from a place of self interest. Many did so entirely out of a desire to be a person who believes victims, to prevent the next abuse, and just to help one poor woman who needs someone to care for her. Many did so at tremendous personal cost to themselves. These people weren’t stupid, and they weren’t selfish, and they weren’t evil. Their only mistake was trusting the wrong person.

This story is also quite similar to the story of Coco Berthmann, who also depended on the charity of others to get by and on the credibility of other individuals (particularly Elizabeth Smart) to spread their story and find new supporters. Again, these people weren’t stupid, selfish, or evil. They wanted to help the wrong person. They got burned.

Why Was Lauren Stratford’s Story Popular?

Stratford was capitalizing on a highly public and distressing subject in American life in the 1980s: child abuse, specifically in its ritualistic forms in daycare centers. The public was newly attuned to fears of child abuse, and specifically eager to hear from someone who could shed light on the ways in which this massive institutional cover-up might impact their own children. Stratford was able to speak into a space where she was the crusader, and the moral truth-teller, against this growing evil. She had the information that could put a stop to it. She was worth listening to. The desire to see justice done and for evil to be stopped made the public vulnerable to Stratford. 

Stratford specifically targeted Christians who were particularly concerned about ritualistic child abuse, and she was also able to manipulate her story to appeal to specific Christian concerns. The satanic ritual abuse scare was always tied up in fears of daycares, and therefore of working mothers – both of which were particular concerns of the developing Moral Majority movement. But Stratford also was able to appeal to a growing Protestant pro-life movement by telling graphic stories of infanticide and abortion. Again, the comparison with Coco Berthmann is helpful here, who made dramatic inroads with her anti-trafficking stories among the LDS population and whose story also featured a gory back-alley abortion story.

Stratford’s targeting of Christians wasn’t just good for building a credulous audience. It also helped secure the attention of people who were particularly likely to open their homes and wallets to her. Stratford churned through a slate of supporters, hosts, and round-the-clock “parents” who were deeply enmeshed with her and tried to provide for her ever-expanding list of emotional needs. Some families who supported Stratford came to realize that something was seriously wrong with her story – for instance, Stratford would appear with an injury that she claimed was given to her by her mother, only to later reveal she had done it to herself. But in an environment of constant crisis and chaos – which Stratford produced – it was hard for people to pick out the truth from the lies. 

Stratford also connected with the experiences of people who had lost loved ones to common serious, heartrending diseases. Stratford pretended to have terminal illnesses (implied to be cancer, but it’s not clear what she was “dying” of when police interviewed her) and other chronic conditions. Coco Berthmann was convicted for doing the same thing.

It’s easy to simply say that these people are very troubled and mentally ill, and this is the root of their patterns of lies. But there’s also a great deal of evidence of manipulation here. Stratford knew who she needed to target to build her audience. She knew which stories would get her attention and support. She targeted people based on their concerns and their experiences. One could argue that Stratford was a successful fraud because she was very good at telling people what they wanted to hear. Because of this, I think it’s hard to write of Stratford’s story as simply a story of mental illness run amok. Stratford was able to do an incredible amount of harm with the tools available to her. And she did it for her own benefit. 

Why Was Lauren Stratford Dangerous? 

Stratford lent credibility to a movement that was correct in the generals (child abuse is real and rampant) and tragically wrong in the particulars (it is centralized, and there is a silver bullet that can take it down). In its wake, this movement led to hundreds of false accusations, many false convictions, and many false imprisonments. This insistence on a centralized child-abusing-network that can be solved through a single silver bullet is one that persists to this day. This is most dramatically demonstrated by the Q-Anon panic, but you can probably think of others. People like Stratford misdirected real energy, real resources, and real organizing actions towards ultimately useless ends. She, and others like her, absorbed efforts and attention that could have gone to actual abuse prevention efforts and redirected them towards what was ultimately a unicorn hunt. Stratford’s story was heartrending, attention-getting, action-demanding, and false. Many, many people insisted that, even if Stratford lied sometimes, she deserved to be followed and listened to. All of them were proved wrong. Stratford saved no children. Her efforts were ultimately oriented towards no positive good besides herself. 

The legacy of Stratford’s work, and others like her, has not been positive. People sat in jail for literal decades over this. The epistemological damage has been catastrophic – the legacy of a massive underground cult that commits all abuse is still with us, and even resurfaced in the false conviction of Amanda Knox in 2007. Of course, highly publicized falsehoods that are believed and acted upon without corroborating evidence ultimately hurt the credibility of all survivors and actions taken on their behalf. While many students and campus administrators were ready to act to prevent campus rape after the publication of Rolling Stone’s bombshell article “A Rape on Campus” in 2014, such efforts became difficult to defend or support once the real story came out. Prosecution of sexual violence against both adults and children often hangs on the testimony of the survivor – physical evidence is recovered in less than five percent of cases. With every highly public lie from a person who wants to be known as an advocate, that testimony gets less and less valuable. It becomes even less valuable with every person who bolsters the lie – either by failing to evaluate the evidence or by discounting it entirely.

At the individual level, Lauren Stratford personally preyed on and harmed people who believed her story and wanted to assist her. Eventually, she would up the ante by fraudulently identifying with an embattled and persecuted racial and religious minority – Polish Jews who suffered genocide during the Holocaust. People wanted to help a young woman who had had such serious disadvantages in life, who had no family to fall back on, and was struggling so much with needs beyond the average woman of her age. 

I won’t deny that Stratford did have some serious medical needs that, at the time she was alive, were probably poorly understood and difficult to treat – in particular, adoption trauma. Of course, the hideous irony is that after cycling through several people who poured bottomless financial and emotional resources into Stratford, it becomes more and more difficult to argue that Stratford was “disadvantaged” at all, and may actually have had resources that most survivors of sexual abuse or racial violence can only dream of. Only the most marketable of abuse survivors are able to secure free housing, affordable education, and a bottomless rotating cast of allies and supporters. If such a person can’t turn this set of resources into a more stable foundation other than “the foundation from which the next crop of saps are targeted and recruited,” it becomes increasingly difficult to argue such a person is limited by social and cultural structures. 

Of course, the story that often presents itself in a story like Stratford’s is this: was anything she said true? Was there a kernel of truth to what she said? It would be overreaching to say Lauren Stratford was not a victim of child abuse or sexual violence. Much of her life is lost to us and it’s possible that she was the victim of some kind of crime that can’t be easily corroborated (though we should note that her siblings did not agree about the child abuse in the home – reading between the lines they seemed to suggest some other level of dysfunction that Cornerstone didn’t press into). However, even if we were to suppose that, hypothetically, Stratford was a victim of childhood sexual abuse, this would neither explain nor excuse Stratford’s actions. As many as 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 6 boys is sexually abused before the age of 18. But one woman out of every four is not a pathological liar, and one man of every six does not steal from Holocaust survivors. Lots of people survive childhood sexual abuse and go on to understand the difference between right and wrong, and fantasy and reality. And, of course, even if Stratford was a victim of some unknown, unconvicted crime, that in no way excuses her choice to accuse Virginia McMartin of crimes she didn’t commit, nor of her choice to pretend to be a Holocaust survivor. Surviving a wrong does not entitle you to commit more wrongs. 

In the most charitable reading, Stratford was simply too mentally ill to understand her choices, why they were wrong, and what she was doing to people. In such a reading, we could perhaps not blame Stratford for what she did. That’s certainly possible. But again, the question of blame is ultimately not the core problem of Stratford’s story. It’s not blame, it’s belief. It’s trust. Whether or not Stratford should be blamed for what she did, she should certainly never have been believed so easily that publication of her story proceeded with so little caution. She certainly should have been treated as though she decisively lost the right to be believed without investigation after the first obvious fabrications were made public – which she didn’t lose, seeing as she was still publishing on her experience as an abuse survivor in 1993. She absolutely should not have been treated as an authority on any of the subjects on which she had built her platform and clearly misrepresented. But she was, and continued to be until her reinvention as a Holocaust survivor.

What we can say about Stratford, and others like her, is this: a movement founded on falsehoods and unreliable narrators is not likely to produce positive ends. It does not matter how sorry we might feel for her. It does not matter how much attention she can secure. It does not matter how many important people have allied with her. True change cannot be built on falsehoods, and people who try to do so create more victims, not fewer. The McMartin Preschool Trial did not just create victims who were falsely imprisoned and accused of crimes they did not commit. The interrogation strategies used on the children were themselves traumatic – Stratford and others like her caused more abuse of children, not less. The logic that ends can justify means when it comes to exposing abuse rarely holds water. Stratford’s story is as much a caution today as it was twenty-five years ago. Some things don’t change. 

This in no way suggests that we should ignore or discount people when they say they are victims of some kind of injustice or crime. Far from it. All claims of abuse, harm, wrongdoing, violence, and so on should be taken seriously. They should be taken as seriously as any other claim a person makes about themselves, and in a matter that is appropriate for the hearer. Friends should support friends who say they were harmed. Therapists should support clients. Journalists should investigate and corroborate stories. Police should collect and investigate evidence. Prosecutors should charge people credibly abused of crimes. Colleges, churches, and schools should evaluate their processes in line with evidence to prevent further harm. Not all claims can be corroborated enough to end in prosecution, let alone conviction. That doesn’t mean it was a lie. Not all claims can be corroborated enough that they should be reported about. That also doesn’t mean it was a lie – it’s just good ethical practice to be cautious. And, if it turns out that there is credible evidence that a person is not only telling a falsehood but using that falsehood to benefit themselves at the expense of others, the process of repeating and believing the story should end immediately and be corrected, so that more harm is not perpetrated.

Stratford’s story is important for those of us today still navigating the muddy waters of wanting to change institutions, wanting to bring about justice, and wanting to be on the side of the oppressed. Discernment is still a necessary tool for those of us whose eyes have been opened to extreme structural evils in society. Awareness and “boosting” is simply not enough. It’s not even necessarily helpful. It can be emotionally rewarding to simply attach ourselves to people who seem as though they are doing good work, who support a narrative that it feels good to believe, who vilify people we don’t like, and who promise a simple solution if we only trust in them and treat them as authorities. But look at the consequences. 

Action and activism requires more than simply handing our trust over to individuals who say they are doing the work, and enjoying the vicarious experience of believing they’re making a difference and telling the truth. We can’t just exchange credulity for credulity. We have to weigh claims and proposed solutions, and act deliberately in response to them. Some people don’t deserve your trust. Some people don’t deserve your attention. Some don’t deserve your support. It is within all our best interests – but especially those of us who are most concerned with justice and healing – to know the difference between the people we should attend to, and the ones we shouldn’t.