Conspiracy Of Silence

The Franklin child abuse allegations refers to allegations of a child prostitution ring serving high level U.S. politicians. "Franklin" refers to the Franklin Community Federal Credit Union, a Nebraska financial institution. The relationship with Franklin was indirect via charges of involvement by a former Franklin officer, Lawrence E. King, in the alleged child sex ring.

The allegations of the child sex ring made national news on June 29, 1989 when the front page of the Washington Times bore the headline Homosexual Prostitution Inquiry ensnares VIPs with Reagan, Bush. The Washington Times article by journalists Paul M. Rodriguez and George Archibald alleged that key officials of the Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations were connected to an elaborate Washington, D.C male prostitution ring, and reported that two of these prostitutes even entered the White House late at night. The allegations included, among other things, "abduction and use of minors for sexual perversion."

In July, 1990, a county grand jury in Nebraska's Douglas County concluded that the charges were a "carefully crafted hoax", although they failed to identify the perpetrators of said hoax.conspiracy theories regarding a coverup of the original allegations persist to the present day. Various

Key persons named in the allegations were Craig J. Spence, a Washington, D.C.-based Republican lobbyist who committed suicide in 1989, and Lawrence King, who was eventually convicted of embezzling thirty-eight million dollars as manager of the Franklin Community Federal Credit Union in Nebraska. King had been one of the Republican party's rising stars, performing the national anthem at the 1984 and 1988 Republican National Conventions. According to the December 18, 1988 New York Times, unidentified people present at a closed meeting reported that Nebraska State Senator Ernie Chambers said he had heard credible reports of "boys and girls, some of them from foster homes, who had been transported around the country by airplane to provide sexual favors, for which they were rewarded."

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Unaired investigative program about the case

In 1993 the British-based TV station, Yorkshire Television, sent a team to Nebraska to launch its own investigation of the Franklin case. Yorkshire had a contract with the Discovery Channel to produce a documentary on the case for American television. The documentary, titled Conspiracy of Silence, was to air nation-wide on the Discovery Channel on May 3, 1994. It appeared in TV Guide and in newspaper listings, however, it was never broadcast. Conspiracy of Silence, which is available for viewing on the Internet, claims influential members of Congress applied pressure to stop the documentary from airing and to destroy of all its copies in exchange for reimbursing The Discovery Channel and Yorkshire Television the $250,000-400,000 production costs. The Internet reincarnation of this film has the rough, unfinished look of a documentary missing some portions of video, which is consistent with the story told by former Nebraska state senator John DeCamp that the footage of this film appeared on his doorstep a year after it was supposedly destroyed.