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Notes -
It's not. If I remember correctly, recovered memory doesn't feature in the actual book at all, and at least a quick search on "recovered" prompted no hits. Satanic ritual abuse doesn't really feature either, other than Chait stating that most notable cases actually don't involve ritual abuse or actual allegations of ritual abuse at all, though in some cases there were allegations that media represented as ritual abuse allegations even though they were about something else. The book is about American cases, I don't know how the British examples relate to that.
He also doesn't claim, of course, that all the claimed day care abuse cases were valid and doesn't make final claims even to the ones that he investigates. Like I said, it's been some time since I read the book, but the argument is that the most notable American cases had at least some concrete evidence that abuse had happened (ie. physical evidence and non-coaxed, non-fantastical child testimonies that were consistent with physical evidence) and that even in the most controversial one, McMartin case, even though most defendants were almost certainly not guilty and the case got out of hand with the tunnel allegations etc., the specific case against Ray Buckey was much stronger than commonly now understood and thus the entire case cannot be simply be seen as a "witch-hunt", ie. the implication being that everything was concoted out of thin air and resulting solely from a moral panic.
Cheit's specific point is that he's of course not claiming guilt on parties that are currently innocent in the eyes of the law (ie. like the McMartin defendants) but rather stating that there were credible reasons why jurors might have considered them guilty, and that particularly many of the "lesser" cases outside of McMartin, where the courts issued guilty verdicts and have upheld them, are based on very solid evidence but have still been mentioned in books like Satan's Silence as examples of a national witch-hunt based on nothing.
I still get the strong impression that Cheit was trying to defend the reality of sex abuse cases, because of course they do happen, but was strongly motivated by "I am a survivor of child sex abuse and now with the backlash against the Satanic Panic a lot of people are doubting all allegations of child sex abuse, and I'm going to go to the other side of 'well some of the Satanic Panic cases were true!' in order to make sure allegations are taken seriously".
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