Dorothy Rabinowitz is identified in the excerpts only as a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. She is not a guest on any of the episodes surveyed; she enters the program as a subject of discussion by Bob Zadek and his guests, cited for her journalism on two separate matters.
The Keith Sampson case at IUPUI
The first appearance concerns a 2008 case at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis, described by Harvey Silverglate, chairman and founder of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Silverglate recounts that Keith Sampson, a student employee on the janitorial staff earning his tuition through janitorial work, was sitting during a break reading a book titled Notre Dame vs. The Clan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan. Because the cover carried a picture of a Klan member in full regalia, Sampson was brought up on charges of harassing the black members of the janitorial staff, the cover having been viewed as threatening. Silverglate states that the charge was disguised as racial harassment rather than the reading itself, and that Sampson was convicted Is Your Alma Mater a Soviet Gulag? (2011).
According to Silverglate, FIRE obtained the story, and Rabinowitz wrote a complete column about it in the Journal in July of 2008. When the resulting pressure took effect — phone calls and letters from alumni and reporters — the university backed down, acquitted Sampson after having convicted him, and publicly apologized to FIRE, saying it would not happen again. Silverglate adds that the university made a public apology but never actually apologized to the student, and that the win came only because the case received national press Is Your Alma Mater a Soviet Gulag? (2011).
Bob Zadek frames the episode around the question of whether listeners’ alma maters sit on the good or bad side of the free speech issue, directing them to thefire.org, where FIRE rates campuses with red, green and yellow lights according to the restrictiveness of their speech codes. Silverglate says many people use the ratings as a guide for giving and for deciding where to send their children. Zadek urges withholding alumni donations until FIRE certifies a school’s record Is Your Alma Mater a Soviet Gulag? (2011).
The same episode also covers a case at St. Augustine’s College involving a student named Roman Caple, who posted a negative comment on the university’s public Facebook page about the administration’s handling of a tornado. Zadek describes the offense as “negative social media exchange” and says Caple was made to turn over his cap and gown to the security office and was barred from graduating publicly with his colleagues. Silverglate argues the administration was looking to deprive the public of knowledge about how it failed in dealing with the tornado’s impact. Rabinowitz is not mentioned in connection with that case Is Your Alma Mater a Soviet Gulag? (2011).
The satanic daycare panic
Rabinowitz’s second appearance comes in two 2022 episodes featuring Cathy Reisenwitz, both concerned with moral panics and the criminalization of sex work. In each, Zadek invokes the 1990s fear that nursery schools and daycare centers were engaging in satanic practices and permanently harming young children. He states that Rabinowitz wrote passionately about that subject for a decade in the Wall Street Journal, and that families were put in prison for very long periods under the flimsiest of evidence that they were engaging in satanic practices, before the panic disappeared from the earth. He compares it to Salem, Massachusetts, saying superstition drives policy, harms innocent lives, and then goes away, leaving destroyed lives in its wake “I’m From the Government and I’m Here to Help” - Cathy Reisenwitz (2022).
Reisenwitz responds that moral panics never go away but rebrand, and that the sex trafficking moral panic is a rebranding of the satanic panic of the 1990s. She concedes that sexual abuse of minors is rampant in the United States but argues the vast majority occurs at the hands of family members, and after that coaches, pastors, teachers and others close to children with authority over them. She states there are no confirmed instances of ritualistic satanic sexual abuse in daycares, and that the panic scapegoated daycare operators amid fear of women entering the workforce en masse The War on Sex (2022).
Reisenwitz further argues that sex trafficking is real and horrible but not a problem in the United States on the scale widely claimed, does not fit the definitions being used, and will not be solved by stigmatization and criminalization, which only make it worse. She says the evidence indicates the most efficacious way to reduce human trafficking is to decriminalize sex work, provide material support, and streamline immigration. She notes domestic violence is common and that people abuse workers with shaky immigration statuses, citing misuse of H-1B1 visa holders at Amazon, and says instances of coercion into sex work do not resemble the moral panic’s image of strangers abducting women from parking lots The War on Sex (2022).
Zadek’s own framing in the earlier episode describes the sequence as a non-problem fixed by a statute that is a far greater problem than the non-existent problem it targeted, making life more dangerous for sex workers who seek only a voluntary, mutually beneficial, uncoerced exchange among consenting adults “I’m From the Government and I’m Here to Help” - Cathy Reisenwitz (2022).
Across episodes
Rabinowitz is invoked in two distinct contexts separated by roughly eleven years of broadcast: the 2011 episode on campus free speech, where Silverglate credits her July 2008 Wall Street Journal column with helping reverse Keith Sampson’s disciplinary conviction, and the two 2022 episodes with Cathy Reisenwitz, where Zadek cites her decade of writing on the satanic daycare panic as a parallel to the sex trafficking moral panic. The excerpts show no development in how Rabinowitz is treated; in both she functions as a journalist whose sustained press attention is credited with exposing an institutional or prosecutorial overreach, and no excerpt has her speaking in her own voice.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts supply no biographical information about Rabinowitz beyond her Wall Street Journal affiliation: no title, no beat, no career history, no other publications, and no date of birth or education. They do not quote her directly, describe her arguments in her own words, or name any of her books or awards. Nothing in the sources indicates whether she ever appeared as a guest on the program, and the excerpts contain no discussion of her views beyond the two subjects for which Zadek and Silverglate cite her.