Geraldo Rivera investigates allegations of a widespread Satanic underground in the United States. He talks to investigators and looks at occult crimes and ritual murders that have been committed, and also speaks to self-identified Satanists who deny that Satanism is a dangerous religion.<br /><br />Geraldo Rivera (born Gerald Riviera; July 4, 1943) is an American journalist, attorney, author, political commentator, and former television host. He hosted the tabloid talk show Geraldo from 1987 to 1998. He gained publicity with the live 1986 TV special The Mystery of Al Capone's Vaults. Rivera hosted the news magazine program Geraldo at Large, hosts the occasional broadcast of Geraldo Rivera Reports (in lieu of hosting At Large), and appears regularly on Fox News programs such as The Five. Rivera was born at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City, New York, the son of Lillian (née Friedman; October 16, 1924 – June 3, 2018) and Cruz "Allen" Rivera (October 1, 1915 – November 1987), a restaurant worker and cab driver respectively. He has Puerto Rican ancestry through his father. His mother was Jewish, while his father was Catholic. Rivera was raised "mostly Jewish" and had a bar mitzvah ceremony. He grew up in Brooklyn and West Babylon, New York, where he attended West Babylon High School. Rivera's family was sometimes subjected to prejudice and racism, and his mother took to spelling their surname as "Riviera".<br /><br />On April 21, 1986, Rivera hosted The Mystery of Al Capone's Vaults. The special broadcast was billed as the unearthing of mobster Al Capone's secret vaults, located under the old Lexington Hotel in Chicago. Millions of people watched the 2-hour show, which ultimately did not uncover any valuables from beneath the hotel. In 1987, Rivera began producing and hosting the daytime talk show Geraldo, which ran for 11 years. The show featured controversial guests and theatricality, which led to the characterization of his show as "Trash TV" by Newsweek and two United States senators. A tabloid talk show is a subgenre of the talk show genre that emphasizes controversial and sensationalistic topical subject matter. The subgenre originated in the United States and achieved peak viewership from the mid-1980s through the end of the 1990s. Airing mostly during the day and distributed mostly through television syndication, tabloid talk shows originated in the 1960s and early 1970s with series hosted by Joe Pyne, Les Crane, and Phil Donahue; the format was popularized by personal confession-filled The Oprah Winfrey Show, which debuted nationally in 1986. The subgenre is sometimes described in pejorative slang as "trash TV", particularly when the show hosts appear to design their shows to create controversy or confrontation. One of the earliest of the post-Oprah shows was Geraldo, which was oriented toward controversial guests and theatricality. <br /><br />The Satanic panic is a moral panic consisting of over 12,000 unsubstantiated cases of Satanic ritual abuse (SRA, sometimes known as ritual abuse, ritualistic abuse, organized abuse, or sadistic ritual abuse) starting in the United States in the 1980s, spreading throughout many parts of the world by the late 1990s, and persisting today. Initial interest arose via the publicity campaign for Pazder's 1980 book Michelle Remembers, and it was sustained and popularized throughout the decade by coverage of the McMartin preschool trial. Testimonials, symptom lists, rumors, and techniques to investigate or uncover memories of SRA were disseminated through professional, popular, and religious conferences, as well as through talk shows, sustaining and further spreading the moral panic throughout the United States and beyond. Of the more than 12,000 documented accusations nationwide, investigating police were not able to substantiate any allegations of organized cult abuse.