I can't get out. I came home and called to arrange a ride and I'll try to get to the DMV again next week.
The heat in L.A. today is so overwhelming, when you go from here to Sunset Boulevard there is no break, no shade, just endless concrete and asphalt. These surroundings totally absorb and emanate even more heat, it's the height of the day and the sun beams down relentlessly. I tried to find shade beside a 90 foot tall palm tree, squeezing myself into the inches of shade you can find on a Sunset Boulevard sidewalk.
It's way past 90 degrees in the sun today, November 30th. And BeliefNet released a story today on how bogus all those left wing scientists are who say the earth is warming up. No one in L.A. doubts global warming is taking place. No one in L.A. has worn a sweater in two years.
I hobble back home, the sun's reflection on the ground burning my skin, get in the house, and realize I have one place I'm happy, in this little cavern with the phone, computer, video and TV, I can reach out to anyone and never leave the house again. I could be in a space station and no better equipped.
Meantime, the whole experience, just walking half block to Sunset Boulevard and back, put so much pain all over me, the legs, everyplace that emanates from the spine, I can't do anything but take to my... spaceship, this place in space I occupy while surviving in a hostile environment ... Space Ship Dining Room, East Hollywood, 2009.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Sunset Boulevard, continued
.
Sunset Boulevard 2
Have to go to the DMV today, it’s December almost and I still haven’t renewed my driver’s license that expired in August. As a result I can’t take an Amtrak trip or check into a hotel, no way to make any kind of a fast getaway, although I wonder. If you take the city buses and just keep transferring going north, is it possible to go all the way from L.A. to San Francisco without having to show ID. . .
I know this is another sign of madness, or should I say, of me being functionally insane, or just barely. I'm okay as long as I never leave the house, which means a mandatory thing like keeping my state ID current, has become something monstrous. It means I’ll have to go several blocks on Sunset Boulevard, may even have to walk from here all the way to Vine, then down to Cole and Willoughby, to the same DMV office I’ve been going to since the 1980s. It should feel like a comfortable experience, it’s just getting there that is for me a problem.
I can’t explain, yet feel like I have to explain, it’s like an electromagnet field, this force that wants to keep me in the house. Some of it is genuine fear, as this neighborhood has some Dark crevices.
Some of it is irrational. I have to renew my driver's license. So going to wear my hunter’s vest and hiking shoes, walk like a mountain climber on level ground, carry my camera, pull it from my waist like a gun if I need to …
Yes, an outing as mundane as going to the DMV takes strategy and planning for me. Early in the morning used to be best time to get out, but somewhere in L.A. these days, in the early hours of the morning, they are burning some hellaciously poisonous chemicals and pouring the smoke into the air. It’s likely that in the last 10 years of Republicans running things corporations have gotten permits that say it’s okay to burn this stuff at 4 or 5 in the morning. When Democrats run things, they have to stop burning the chemicals into the air. But things haven’t quite ironed out since Obama took office, so these chemical corporations have permits to burn this stuff, apparently in the early morning hours. Reason being hardly anyone is out during early morning hours. Same thing happened to the air in L.A. back when we had Ford and then Bush 1 as presidents. The air in L.A. got un-breathable under them as well.
So in the early morning hours, the time you’d think the air would be cleanest in the city, instead you go outside and inhale and your lungs give a small collapse, you double over, try to find escape from the poison, try to inhale and instead choke more, try to find a place in the area around you where your lungs can find air. If you're close enough to your front door you can re-enter your home and real fast close the door and usually can get a deep breath again once you're inside the door.
Last time we lived in environmentally unregulated L.A. in the 1980s the air got so bad you could actually see atoms popping and recombining in the haze that was always in front of you. It was strange because also during that time, you could hear dial tones in the air. I was also pregnant and then post-partum during that period…
Daughter did not get pregnant last month, thank god, and strangely enough, even though my kicking her boyfriend Mortimer out of the house after Thanksgiving caused a stir between Lizzie and me (neighbors once again banging on the walls), when she returned home from work the next day, she had a serene smile on her face, and announced to me her new plans for her future with new found strength. And didn't even mention Mortimer.
This has happened before. My daughter has the same strange attractiveness my sister had, and when it was my sister, it was hell for me, always being the chubby freckled off kilter version of the beautiful sister in the background. But as a mom, I'm proud to see it in Lizzie, but also concerned. It’s a power some women just have, they have the right combination of everything at a time that is perfect for that combination of everything… And when Lizzie shows the slightest interest in a boy, he becomes obsessed. Her phone is always ringing, they show up at our door, banging, begging me to tell them where she is, they spend their last dime on her. It’s a curse almost to be that beautiful and attractive, even my sister had problems because of it, back in the early 1960s.
In around 1962, on a family vacation to San Francisco, when I was still the dumpy junior high girl and my sister was wowing everyone at San Marino high school, we stayed at the Fairmont hotel. No it was called “The Top of the Mark” at the time because that's the way my dad liked to vacation, the best hotels, room service. In the weeks beforehand, he said it about a hundred times, “We're going to stay at the Top of the Mark hotel, and you know why they call it that? Because it sits at the top of the highest hill in San Francisco.”
Okay that night in our hotel room we dressed up to go to the hotel dining room, where folk singer Jimmy Rogers was appearing that weekend. Or maybe it was a month-long engagement, whatever, but folk singers were the new Dean Martin’s in the early 1960s, for a short blip these acoustic guitar playing guys who sang left wing workers’ rights and humanistic songs were not part of the counter culture, but part of the mainstream. Enough for Jimmy Rogers to be appearing at the Top of the Mark Hotel dining room that weekend.
I think we even wore gloves. In those days a shopping trip with my mother would be a trip to Bullock’s or Robinson’s in Pasadena, stores with valet parking. I miss those days, I miss my dad’s money. People wonder how Lizzie and me could be so poor with all this San Marino San Francisco Paris stuff in my background. Well, it’s because someone embezzled my dad’s money in the last years of his life when he was blind… I know. Sometimes my life is too poor pitiful pearl for people to believe, but that's part of our story. I wasn’t supposed to be poor, but when I went to get my inheritance after my dad died in 1997, the money just wasn’t there, and the woman who we all know now stole the money, she too was long gone. My mom thought that upon my father’s death she was now a millionaire on her own when my dad died, and when she found out it was more like $80 thousand dollars left in the bank, it caused her to have a kind of psychiatrically caused stroke, she just closed her mouth and shut down and stayed unmoving the next five years until she died in a sick bed, in San Francisco, in my sister’s studio. I honestly think my mom thought that embezzler was going to share the money with her when my dad died, and yes, he died under questionable circumstances. My mom didn't realize she too was being embezzled and hoodwinked and conned and now she was an old lady in her eighties and broke. Worse yet, the address where all this embezzlement and suspected murder happened was San Clemente, California. So when I did go to the police, when they found out it was only $1.5 million dollars that was missing, and a man over age 90 who died strangely, the police lost interest. I mean in San Clemente, families embezzle from each other to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, our puny little misdemeanor one point five million didn't matter to the San Clemente Police Department. One Orange County sheriff put as much time into it as he could, told me he believed me that the crimes did happen, but as is so often the case in life in America, the criminals went on to live their lives unfettered. Except the woman who embezzled from my father was then embezzled from herself by her own son. She ended up dying in a welfare hospital in Las Vegas, no one at her side…
So I'm not used to being poor. I grew up rich, always had my dad's money to fall back on, he'd always come through with a check if I needed help. After he died and his money disappeared, I held things together as best I could after all that happened and my daughter and we left Orange County, moved to L.A..
"That's where people who are running away from their families go, they run away to Hollywood,” I said to my daughter as we drove one last time out of San Clemente. “And I promise you, Lizzie, we will never step foot in Orange County again.”
She made me make that promise. She hated Orange County more than I did.
We drove to L.A. and never looked back, got a luxe apartment on Franklin in Hollywood by paying a year's rent in advance, just about all that was left of my inheritance, and I held things together pretty good here in Hollywood, in fact started doing the work I still do today, transcribing for documentaries. That job became transcribing for reality TV shows and the amount of work grew.
It's a job I could do from home, so I could be a Stepford Single Mom. Then in late 2003, I just kind of caved.
The real reason we became homeless in late 2003 was not that we didn't pay our rent, or that we were making too much noise, it was because the landlord wanted us out so he could raise the rent on a rent controlled unit, and I didn't have any fight left in me. What the landlady did was totally illegal, all I had to do was call Legal Aide or the Housing Authority, and my daughter and I could have kept our apartment on Franklin, up above the Kodak theater, in a cleaner less intimidating part of town.
I'm not used to being poor, so I thought when we became homeless that there would be a safety net there, the welfare department that we all hear is so benevolent that thousands of people live luxurious lives on its benefits. Guess what, most that stuff only exists on paper.
And there is a Church pedophile priest tie-in here.
It was at that time, in the months that we were falling through the cracks and becoming homeless, that the Los Angeles Archdiocese suddenly was in touch with me, their Victim Assistance Nun came to our homeless hotel and walked me around the block, interviewing me, I thought she was there to help us stop being homeless, instead she asked me all about Father Horne and what happened to me as a child in Chicago in the early 1950s.
Still I thought the Catholic Church would help us out from our homeless state, I mean they own all this property around L.A., much of it condos and apartments. Rumor was they had townhouses in Westwood for homeless people. So I called the nun who was supposed to be helping us out, on one of the more chaotic mornings, and told her, my daughter the night before had to give up her laptop to a guy in order to keep him from raping her. "We are in serious bad shape here," I said, "and if the archdiocese could just help us get into a home again, one of those condos in Westwood."
They didn't help, in fact, I don't think that nun even returned that call.
It's strange now I look back, how was it that the nun from Victims Assistance came to interview me, there, when we were living in one of those weekly rent homeless hotels. I cannot remember how that original contact got made.
Then Sister Sheila didn't even call me back about my daughter’s near rape and all the rest of our vexing situation.
However, she did call the Chicago Archdiocese, who then, unbeknownst to me, started the clock ticking on Illinois’ screwy statute of limitations. As a result, during the chaotic two years that my daughter and I lived in our car, or in motels when we had enough cash, then in a homeless shelter, then in a "transitional" shelter, and finally getting into an apartment, this one, in a seedy part of town- in that period of time by Illinois law, I was supposed to be contacting a lawyer in Chicago and arranging a lawsuit. If I didn't file within two years of the time I contacted the archdiocese, I was disqualified or something like that.
And my two years started to run the day Sister Sheila came to visit us at the Homeless Hotel.
During that two years we didn't even have a phone number, or a street address, or any way for a lawyer’s office to return my calls. And the L.A. Archdiocese made sure we didn't get any help with housing when we needed it.
It’s all very strange. I cannot for the life of me remember how that nun from the L.A. Archdiocese became part of our lives right then, at that time that we were homeless, not in the five previous years when we had an apartment, nor ever in the following four years that we've now been in an apartment with a phone number and an address. The Illinois archdiocese through the L.A. Archdiocese ran the clock during the same time that they were letting my daughter and me fall through the cracks so we had no way to carry out any kind of legal matter, I couldn't even set up a job interview.
When we did get into an apartment and right away contacted the Chicago Archdiocese to start some kind of claim, or ask for help, I was still so stupid and naïve I was still going to the Church for help in 2005. And the woman in the Chicago Archdiocese victims assistance office said to me, “You should have followed up back in 2003, now it’s too late.”
That's one of many reasons I didn't get a settlement when so many other victims did. I think the church did everything it could to keep survivors from being able to come forward, in our case even intervening and obstructing our efforts to get off the streets, a 15 year old girl and her sick mom homeless right in front of them, victims of their priests, and the Church looked the other way.
The Church uses every technique it can to keep from having to shell out one more settlement dollar on us opportunistic money grubbing adult victims of pedophile priests.
********************
A good two months of the period we were homeless were spent in waiting rooms in the offices of a long list of L.A. non profits, organizations that are set up to help homeless people. The closest we came to shelter was the hours we would sit in their waiting rooms, after six months, my daughter and I were still living out of our car.
One of those waiting rooms where we never got help was at the Salvation Army, the golden doorway to those Catholic Church owned townhouses that were rumored to be somewhere around Westwood. The guy never showed up when I had appointments to connect with those Catholic townhouses, I went there twice, with appointments, and sat in the waiting room. I’d get paranoid and say, why is it he doesn't show up when it’s me he has an appointment with, but the few other people waiting there said, no, he never shows up, you have to just keep coming back, and keep hopeful. Never lose the faith.
I still kept us on or near Sunset Boulevard.
When we were homeless I hanged onto the boulevard like it was the only connection to anything stable in my life, driving endlessly up and down its blocks looking for that room for rent sign cheap that would end this experience.
In fact, I’ll hang onto Sunset Boulevard while the earth quakes and L.A. takes on new shapes and forms in the next hundred years, I’ll still be there, holding onto the tail of Sunset Boulevard, riding the waves…
(I'm drifting in my life right now, feel like exiting but really have no other place to go, I'm pissed, tired of the topic of pedophile priests, pissed that any attempts to really network in the victim community just … )
Stop. Leave that frustration for the SNARL fiction piece.
******
Okay, the family was on vacation in San Francisco, and we're dressing for dinner, I think my sister mom and me were are even wearing gloves.
Patricia had her natural blond hair pulled back into a French twist, very chic in circa 1962 when we were staying at the Top of the Mark hotel on a family vacation. My sister Patricia, Patsy at the time, was wearing a modest form fitting dress as was popular in those years, she likely was even wearing a girdle because as far as I remember, girdles, and things that pulled you in tight and perfectly formed were a regular part of a female’s wardrobe in the fifties and sixties. Women didn't push themselves to perfection in gyms, they just pulled on a girdle under their dress and got pretty much the same result.
Most women did not take off those dresses and girdles in front of their man no matter how long they were dating, until they were married, still in the 1960s.
In Texas the women stayed tightened up fast in girdles all the way into the 1980s.
Even me, a chubby 12 year old, I too was probably cinched, though wearing a more childish dress, maybe a ruffled sleeve, gathered at the top, a little cumber bun at the waist, and my 11-12 year old body cinched into an oddly wide hourglass shape by a girdle under the little girl dress, though chubby junior high school girl was still the first impression one would have upon looking at me. This was not a period of great looks for me, but in all my life, I never attained the heights of beauty that my sister attained. In college a few years after this incident in San Francisco, they made her homecoming princess when she wasn’t even running for the position, people just wrote in her name on the ballots, because she was so stunningly beautiful. And that was at UC Santa Barbara. My sister Patricia was this incredibly beautiful female all her life. And now my daughter seems to have inherited the same power.
That night, the family all dressed, my mother always tres chic in some suit or dress she had just bought and one of those hats with a little dotted veil over the eyes, tres perfect, dad in a suit, we went down to have dinner in the cocktail lounge restaurant dinner show place, and somehow, I don't know what it was my sister did. I'm pretty sure we were all sitting at our table watching the show or maybe it was between sets, when a note came out to our table asking my sister to meet the folk singing mainline entertainer Mr. Jimmy Rogers backstage.
Now when Jimmy Rogers came out on the stage, maybe that is when he got a glimpse of my sister, or maybe it was earlier. Maybe he had a place backstage where he peaked out at the audience before the show. Looking back on it now, to this day, I can't figure it out, but Jimmy Rogers apparently saw my sister in the audience and was struck, enamored, willing to commit adultery, or have a private late night supper as it was called back then, with my maybe 16 year old sister, she may have even been younger.
Somehow he saw her and got stunned, so there was a note delivered to our table that Jimmy Rogers would like the pleasure of my sister’s company for supper after the show.
Now I don't remember everything about how the family responded, the waiter probly allowed me to have alcohol, as they did in a city like San Francisco if someone like my dad slipped them a big enough tip. But I do know there was a lot of discussion around the table, and voices got raised, and in the end Patsy said angrily, absorbing all the power and having the deciding voice: No, I'm not going to go backstage and meet that old man, and that's that.
I think my dad wanted her to go meet Jimmy Rogers for supper, I think he argued with her about it, my dad not being able to see why she wouldn't see this is a wonderful opportunity.
********
Like the date with an old man my dad set me up for when I was maybe 14
Hmm, just now in this lame brain beat up head of mine I jumped directly from that incident with my sister and Jimmy Rogers to the time when I was in high school, early years of high school not driving yet, and I had a date with this man, a grown up mature adult man, who was still cute and kind of frail, looked a lot like the guy who played the sidekick in the Man from UNCLE, a cute guy a girl would want to date, but definitely an older man and I was maybe 14-15.
Strangest thing about this date was I think my dad knew the guy before hand, it was like, I remember being picked up at home by the man from Uncle sidekick, and it seems like in a normal family, the father would protest at such an old guy taking out his 14-15 year old daughter, but instead my dad was okay with it, waving us goodbye as the man from Uncle’s sidekick and I walked out and got into his car.
The plan for date I had with this old man when I was 14 was to go to the drive in movies. Down near El Monte, or Monrovia, there was a drive in. We saw "Inside Daisy Clover" and I really wanted to watch the movie, but this man had his hands all over me, in fact at one point he was trying and trying to get me to have an orgasm. I was so young, I didn't even know what an orgasm was, or what he was doing, I just knew there was some place beyond the point where he had me, and he kept saying, “Just let go, let it happen,” but I didn't know how to let go, so instead he just kept fingering me and fingering me, and I ended up missing the end of "Inside Daisy Clover," never got to see the end of the movie until VCR’s were invented 20 years later.
That date was so strange, with that older man, who looked a lot like David McCallum, that's his name, the actor who was on The Man from Uncle and now is on one of the CSI shows as an old man. My date brought me home and my father was, strangely, waiting up for us, and talked to the man I had the date with, as I went off to my room alone.
And what does any of this have to do with pedophile priests raping children?
Well, I'm pretty sure my dad had more than a just good friends or penitent-to-priest relationship with Father Horne back in Bartlett in the 1940s-1950s. I think my dad and Father Horne may have known each other in Chicago before they both moved out to Bartlett in 1949 when Horne became founder of St. Peter Damian Church, and my dad changed from criminal to corporate law, while flipping real estate.
In 1949, the same year that my family moved from Chicago to 20 acres on U.S. 20 on the outskirts of Bartlett, my dad was lead usher at St. Peter Damian Church and Father Horne was this brilliant charismatic handsome new pastor.
And during this time my dad had a second address in Bartlett, a second house in Bartlett, I found that out when I was there in the summer of 2008.
No one I’ve talked to on the phone from my family knows the reason for my dad to have a second house in Bartlett or even knew that he had it, one cousin remembers him commuting to Chicago every day for work. But still I found a second address listed as being owned by my dad when we were in Bartlett in the 1950s.
In 2008, I went to this mysterious address, it was a house with a large front porch and an American flag flying. All I could do when I got to the address was stand outside the house, staring at it. There was like an electromagnetic field keeping me from going up and knocking on the door, I just stood there frozen.
I need to go back to Bartlett and find out more so bad.
I want to go back to Bartlett, do some more digging on my story, so bad.
And yet here I am having trouble getting to the DMV to renew my license, and without an ID I can’t even get on a Greyhound.
***********
Wrote about the experience with Sister Sheila in L.A. and the Archdiocese obstructing us from getting help when we were homeless and should have been working on our lawsuit here at City of Angels 4:
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Blatant lies in LA Times opinion piece by Archdiocese Victims' coordinator. I know, because they involve my case.
By Kay Ebeling
I HAVE TO SAY THIS. Sister Sheila McNiff was directly involved in my case for a few hours in 2003, the same Sister Sheila McNiff who wrote an opinion piece published in the LA Times December 18th praising the church for having obviously solved its pedophile priest problems way back in the 1980s and here’s a chart to prove it.
Sunset Boulevard 2
Have to go to the DMV today, it’s December almost and I still haven’t renewed my driver’s license that expired in August. As a result I can’t take an Amtrak trip or check into a hotel, no way to make any kind of a fast getaway, although I wonder. If you take the city buses and just keep transferring going north, is it possible to go all the way from L.A. to San Francisco without having to show ID. . .
I know this is another sign of madness, or should I say, of me being functionally insane, or just barely. I'm okay as long as I never leave the house, which means a mandatory thing like keeping my state ID current, has become something monstrous. It means I’ll have to go several blocks on Sunset Boulevard, may even have to walk from here all the way to Vine, then down to Cole and Willoughby, to the same DMV office I’ve been going to since the 1980s. It should feel like a comfortable experience, it’s just getting there that is for me a problem.
I can’t explain, yet feel like I have to explain, it’s like an electromagnet field, this force that wants to keep me in the house. Some of it is genuine fear, as this neighborhood has some Dark crevices.
Some of it is irrational. I have to renew my driver's license. So going to wear my hunter’s vest and hiking shoes, walk like a mountain climber on level ground, carry my camera, pull it from my waist like a gun if I need to …
Yes, an outing as mundane as going to the DMV takes strategy and planning for me. Early in the morning used to be best time to get out, but somewhere in L.A. these days, in the early hours of the morning, they are burning some hellaciously poisonous chemicals and pouring the smoke into the air. It’s likely that in the last 10 years of Republicans running things corporations have gotten permits that say it’s okay to burn this stuff at 4 or 5 in the morning. When Democrats run things, they have to stop burning the chemicals into the air. But things haven’t quite ironed out since Obama took office, so these chemical corporations have permits to burn this stuff, apparently in the early morning hours. Reason being hardly anyone is out during early morning hours. Same thing happened to the air in L.A. back when we had Ford and then Bush 1 as presidents. The air in L.A. got un-breathable under them as well.
So in the early morning hours, the time you’d think the air would be cleanest in the city, instead you go outside and inhale and your lungs give a small collapse, you double over, try to find escape from the poison, try to inhale and instead choke more, try to find a place in the area around you where your lungs can find air. If you're close enough to your front door you can re-enter your home and real fast close the door and usually can get a deep breath again once you're inside the door.
Last time we lived in environmentally unregulated L.A. in the 1980s the air got so bad you could actually see atoms popping and recombining in the haze that was always in front of you. It was strange because also during that time, you could hear dial tones in the air. I was also pregnant and then post-partum during that period…
Daughter did not get pregnant last month, thank god, and strangely enough, even though my kicking her boyfriend Mortimer out of the house after Thanksgiving caused a stir between Lizzie and me (neighbors once again banging on the walls), when she returned home from work the next day, she had a serene smile on her face, and announced to me her new plans for her future with new found strength. And didn't even mention Mortimer.
This has happened before. My daughter has the same strange attractiveness my sister had, and when it was my sister, it was hell for me, always being the chubby freckled off kilter version of the beautiful sister in the background. But as a mom, I'm proud to see it in Lizzie, but also concerned. It’s a power some women just have, they have the right combination of everything at a time that is perfect for that combination of everything… And when Lizzie shows the slightest interest in a boy, he becomes obsessed. Her phone is always ringing, they show up at our door, banging, begging me to tell them where she is, they spend their last dime on her. It’s a curse almost to be that beautiful and attractive, even my sister had problems because of it, back in the early 1960s.
In around 1962, on a family vacation to San Francisco, when I was still the dumpy junior high girl and my sister was wowing everyone at San Marino high school, we stayed at the Fairmont hotel. No it was called “The Top of the Mark” at the time because that's the way my dad liked to vacation, the best hotels, room service. In the weeks beforehand, he said it about a hundred times, “We're going to stay at the Top of the Mark hotel, and you know why they call it that? Because it sits at the top of the highest hill in San Francisco.”
Okay that night in our hotel room we dressed up to go to the hotel dining room, where folk singer Jimmy Rogers was appearing that weekend. Or maybe it was a month-long engagement, whatever, but folk singers were the new Dean Martin’s in the early 1960s, for a short blip these acoustic guitar playing guys who sang left wing workers’ rights and humanistic songs were not part of the counter culture, but part of the mainstream. Enough for Jimmy Rogers to be appearing at the Top of the Mark Hotel dining room that weekend.
I think we even wore gloves. In those days a shopping trip with my mother would be a trip to Bullock’s or Robinson’s in Pasadena, stores with valet parking. I miss those days, I miss my dad’s money. People wonder how Lizzie and me could be so poor with all this San Marino San Francisco Paris stuff in my background. Well, it’s because someone embezzled my dad’s money in the last years of his life when he was blind… I know. Sometimes my life is too poor pitiful pearl for people to believe, but that's part of our story. I wasn’t supposed to be poor, but when I went to get my inheritance after my dad died in 1997, the money just wasn’t there, and the woman who we all know now stole the money, she too was long gone. My mom thought that upon my father’s death she was now a millionaire on her own when my dad died, and when she found out it was more like $80 thousand dollars left in the bank, it caused her to have a kind of psychiatrically caused stroke, she just closed her mouth and shut down and stayed unmoving the next five years until she died in a sick bed, in San Francisco, in my sister’s studio. I honestly think my mom thought that embezzler was going to share the money with her when my dad died, and yes, he died under questionable circumstances. My mom didn't realize she too was being embezzled and hoodwinked and conned and now she was an old lady in her eighties and broke. Worse yet, the address where all this embezzlement and suspected murder happened was San Clemente, California. So when I did go to the police, when they found out it was only $1.5 million dollars that was missing, and a man over age 90 who died strangely, the police lost interest. I mean in San Clemente, families embezzle from each other to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, our puny little misdemeanor one point five million didn't matter to the San Clemente Police Department. One Orange County sheriff put as much time into it as he could, told me he believed me that the crimes did happen, but as is so often the case in life in America, the criminals went on to live their lives unfettered. Except the woman who embezzled from my father was then embezzled from herself by her own son. She ended up dying in a welfare hospital in Las Vegas, no one at her side…
So I'm not used to being poor. I grew up rich, always had my dad's money to fall back on, he'd always come through with a check if I needed help. After he died and his money disappeared, I held things together as best I could after all that happened and my daughter and we left Orange County, moved to L.A..
"That's where people who are running away from their families go, they run away to Hollywood,” I said to my daughter as we drove one last time out of San Clemente. “And I promise you, Lizzie, we will never step foot in Orange County again.”
She made me make that promise. She hated Orange County more than I did.
We drove to L.A. and never looked back, got a luxe apartment on Franklin in Hollywood by paying a year's rent in advance, just about all that was left of my inheritance, and I held things together pretty good here in Hollywood, in fact started doing the work I still do today, transcribing for documentaries. That job became transcribing for reality TV shows and the amount of work grew.
It's a job I could do from home, so I could be a Stepford Single Mom. Then in late 2003, I just kind of caved.
The real reason we became homeless in late 2003 was not that we didn't pay our rent, or that we were making too much noise, it was because the landlord wanted us out so he could raise the rent on a rent controlled unit, and I didn't have any fight left in me. What the landlady did was totally illegal, all I had to do was call Legal Aide or the Housing Authority, and my daughter and I could have kept our apartment on Franklin, up above the Kodak theater, in a cleaner less intimidating part of town.
I'm not used to being poor, so I thought when we became homeless that there would be a safety net there, the welfare department that we all hear is so benevolent that thousands of people live luxurious lives on its benefits. Guess what, most that stuff only exists on paper.
And there is a Church pedophile priest tie-in here.
It was at that time, in the months that we were falling through the cracks and becoming homeless, that the Los Angeles Archdiocese suddenly was in touch with me, their Victim Assistance Nun came to our homeless hotel and walked me around the block, interviewing me, I thought she was there to help us stop being homeless, instead she asked me all about Father Horne and what happened to me as a child in Chicago in the early 1950s.
Still I thought the Catholic Church would help us out from our homeless state, I mean they own all this property around L.A., much of it condos and apartments. Rumor was they had townhouses in Westwood for homeless people. So I called the nun who was supposed to be helping us out, on one of the more chaotic mornings, and told her, my daughter the night before had to give up her laptop to a guy in order to keep him from raping her. "We are in serious bad shape here," I said, "and if the archdiocese could just help us get into a home again, one of those condos in Westwood."
They didn't help, in fact, I don't think that nun even returned that call.
It's strange now I look back, how was it that the nun from Victims Assistance came to interview me, there, when we were living in one of those weekly rent homeless hotels. I cannot remember how that original contact got made.
Then Sister Sheila didn't even call me back about my daughter’s near rape and all the rest of our vexing situation.
However, she did call the Chicago Archdiocese, who then, unbeknownst to me, started the clock ticking on Illinois’ screwy statute of limitations. As a result, during the chaotic two years that my daughter and I lived in our car, or in motels when we had enough cash, then in a homeless shelter, then in a "transitional" shelter, and finally getting into an apartment, this one, in a seedy part of town- in that period of time by Illinois law, I was supposed to be contacting a lawyer in Chicago and arranging a lawsuit. If I didn't file within two years of the time I contacted the archdiocese, I was disqualified or something like that.
And my two years started to run the day Sister Sheila came to visit us at the Homeless Hotel.
During that two years we didn't even have a phone number, or a street address, or any way for a lawyer’s office to return my calls. And the L.A. Archdiocese made sure we didn't get any help with housing when we needed it.
It’s all very strange. I cannot for the life of me remember how that nun from the L.A. Archdiocese became part of our lives right then, at that time that we were homeless, not in the five previous years when we had an apartment, nor ever in the following four years that we've now been in an apartment with a phone number and an address. The Illinois archdiocese through the L.A. Archdiocese ran the clock during the same time that they were letting my daughter and me fall through the cracks so we had no way to carry out any kind of legal matter, I couldn't even set up a job interview.
When we did get into an apartment and right away contacted the Chicago Archdiocese to start some kind of claim, or ask for help, I was still so stupid and naïve I was still going to the Church for help in 2005. And the woman in the Chicago Archdiocese victims assistance office said to me, “You should have followed up back in 2003, now it’s too late.”
That's one of many reasons I didn't get a settlement when so many other victims did. I think the church did everything it could to keep survivors from being able to come forward, in our case even intervening and obstructing our efforts to get off the streets, a 15 year old girl and her sick mom homeless right in front of them, victims of their priests, and the Church looked the other way.
The Church uses every technique it can to keep from having to shell out one more settlement dollar on us opportunistic money grubbing adult victims of pedophile priests.
********************
A good two months of the period we were homeless were spent in waiting rooms in the offices of a long list of L.A. non profits, organizations that are set up to help homeless people. The closest we came to shelter was the hours we would sit in their waiting rooms, after six months, my daughter and I were still living out of our car.
One of those waiting rooms where we never got help was at the Salvation Army, the golden doorway to those Catholic Church owned townhouses that were rumored to be somewhere around Westwood. The guy never showed up when I had appointments to connect with those Catholic townhouses, I went there twice, with appointments, and sat in the waiting room. I’d get paranoid and say, why is it he doesn't show up when it’s me he has an appointment with, but the few other people waiting there said, no, he never shows up, you have to just keep coming back, and keep hopeful. Never lose the faith.
I still kept us on or near Sunset Boulevard.
When we were homeless I hanged onto the boulevard like it was the only connection to anything stable in my life, driving endlessly up and down its blocks looking for that room for rent sign cheap that would end this experience.
In fact, I’ll hang onto Sunset Boulevard while the earth quakes and L.A. takes on new shapes and forms in the next hundred years, I’ll still be there, holding onto the tail of Sunset Boulevard, riding the waves…
(I'm drifting in my life right now, feel like exiting but really have no other place to go, I'm pissed, tired of the topic of pedophile priests, pissed that any attempts to really network in the victim community just … )
Stop. Leave that frustration for the SNARL fiction piece.
******
Okay, the family was on vacation in San Francisco, and we're dressing for dinner, I think my sister mom and me were are even wearing gloves.
Patricia had her natural blond hair pulled back into a French twist, very chic in circa 1962 when we were staying at the Top of the Mark hotel on a family vacation. My sister Patricia, Patsy at the time, was wearing a modest form fitting dress as was popular in those years, she likely was even wearing a girdle because as far as I remember, girdles, and things that pulled you in tight and perfectly formed were a regular part of a female’s wardrobe in the fifties and sixties. Women didn't push themselves to perfection in gyms, they just pulled on a girdle under their dress and got pretty much the same result.
Most women did not take off those dresses and girdles in front of their man no matter how long they were dating, until they were married, still in the 1960s.
In Texas the women stayed tightened up fast in girdles all the way into the 1980s.
Even me, a chubby 12 year old, I too was probably cinched, though wearing a more childish dress, maybe a ruffled sleeve, gathered at the top, a little cumber bun at the waist, and my 11-12 year old body cinched into an oddly wide hourglass shape by a girdle under the little girl dress, though chubby junior high school girl was still the first impression one would have upon looking at me. This was not a period of great looks for me, but in all my life, I never attained the heights of beauty that my sister attained. In college a few years after this incident in San Francisco, they made her homecoming princess when she wasn’t even running for the position, people just wrote in her name on the ballots, because she was so stunningly beautiful. And that was at UC Santa Barbara. My sister Patricia was this incredibly beautiful female all her life. And now my daughter seems to have inherited the same power.
That night, the family all dressed, my mother always tres chic in some suit or dress she had just bought and one of those hats with a little dotted veil over the eyes, tres perfect, dad in a suit, we went down to have dinner in the cocktail lounge restaurant dinner show place, and somehow, I don't know what it was my sister did. I'm pretty sure we were all sitting at our table watching the show or maybe it was between sets, when a note came out to our table asking my sister to meet the folk singing mainline entertainer Mr. Jimmy Rogers backstage.
Now when Jimmy Rogers came out on the stage, maybe that is when he got a glimpse of my sister, or maybe it was earlier. Maybe he had a place backstage where he peaked out at the audience before the show. Looking back on it now, to this day, I can't figure it out, but Jimmy Rogers apparently saw my sister in the audience and was struck, enamored, willing to commit adultery, or have a private late night supper as it was called back then, with my maybe 16 year old sister, she may have even been younger.
Somehow he saw her and got stunned, so there was a note delivered to our table that Jimmy Rogers would like the pleasure of my sister’s company for supper after the show.
Now I don't remember everything about how the family responded, the waiter probly allowed me to have alcohol, as they did in a city like San Francisco if someone like my dad slipped them a big enough tip. But I do know there was a lot of discussion around the table, and voices got raised, and in the end Patsy said angrily, absorbing all the power and having the deciding voice: No, I'm not going to go backstage and meet that old man, and that's that.
I think my dad wanted her to go meet Jimmy Rogers for supper, I think he argued with her about it, my dad not being able to see why she wouldn't see this is a wonderful opportunity.
********
Like the date with an old man my dad set me up for when I was maybe 14
Hmm, just now in this lame brain beat up head of mine I jumped directly from that incident with my sister and Jimmy Rogers to the time when I was in high school, early years of high school not driving yet, and I had a date with this man, a grown up mature adult man, who was still cute and kind of frail, looked a lot like the guy who played the sidekick in the Man from UNCLE, a cute guy a girl would want to date, but definitely an older man and I was maybe 14-15.
Strangest thing about this date was I think my dad knew the guy before hand, it was like, I remember being picked up at home by the man from Uncle sidekick, and it seems like in a normal family, the father would protest at such an old guy taking out his 14-15 year old daughter, but instead my dad was okay with it, waving us goodbye as the man from Uncle’s sidekick and I walked out and got into his car.
The plan for date I had with this old man when I was 14 was to go to the drive in movies. Down near El Monte, or Monrovia, there was a drive in. We saw "Inside Daisy Clover" and I really wanted to watch the movie, but this man had his hands all over me, in fact at one point he was trying and trying to get me to have an orgasm. I was so young, I didn't even know what an orgasm was, or what he was doing, I just knew there was some place beyond the point where he had me, and he kept saying, “Just let go, let it happen,” but I didn't know how to let go, so instead he just kept fingering me and fingering me, and I ended up missing the end of "Inside Daisy Clover," never got to see the end of the movie until VCR’s were invented 20 years later.
That date was so strange, with that older man, who looked a lot like David McCallum, that's his name, the actor who was on The Man from Uncle and now is on one of the CSI shows as an old man. My date brought me home and my father was, strangely, waiting up for us, and talked to the man I had the date with, as I went off to my room alone.
And what does any of this have to do with pedophile priests raping children?
Well, I'm pretty sure my dad had more than a just good friends or penitent-to-priest relationship with Father Horne back in Bartlett in the 1940s-1950s. I think my dad and Father Horne may have known each other in Chicago before they both moved out to Bartlett in 1949 when Horne became founder of St. Peter Damian Church, and my dad changed from criminal to corporate law, while flipping real estate.
In 1949, the same year that my family moved from Chicago to 20 acres on U.S. 20 on the outskirts of Bartlett, my dad was lead usher at St. Peter Damian Church and Father Horne was this brilliant charismatic handsome new pastor.
And during this time my dad had a second address in Bartlett, a second house in Bartlett, I found that out when I was there in the summer of 2008.
No one I’ve talked to on the phone from my family knows the reason for my dad to have a second house in Bartlett or even knew that he had it, one cousin remembers him commuting to Chicago every day for work. But still I found a second address listed as being owned by my dad when we were in Bartlett in the 1950s.
In 2008, I went to this mysterious address, it was a house with a large front porch and an American flag flying. All I could do when I got to the address was stand outside the house, staring at it. There was like an electromagnetic field keeping me from going up and knocking on the door, I just stood there frozen.
I need to go back to Bartlett and find out more so bad.
I want to go back to Bartlett, do some more digging on my story, so bad.
And yet here I am having trouble getting to the DMV to renew my license, and without an ID I can’t even get on a Greyhound.
***********
Wrote about the experience with Sister Sheila in L.A. and the Archdiocese obstructing us from getting help when we were homeless and should have been working on our lawsuit here at City of Angels 4:
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Blatant lies in LA Times opinion piece by Archdiocese Victims' coordinator. I know, because they involve my case.
By Kay Ebeling
I HAVE TO SAY THIS. Sister Sheila McNiff was directly involved in my case for a few hours in 2003, the same Sister Sheila McNiff who wrote an opinion piece published in the LA Times December 18th praising the church for having obviously solved its pedophile priest problems way back in the 1980s and here’s a chart to prove it.
Friday, November 27, 2009
*****
(Fiction in Editing phases, SNARL's backstory)
BLANCHE wanted so much to be a nun, except the part about being celibate. She revered the church but also had that glow of sexual attraction you find in pedophile priest sex crime victims, the overproduction of pherenomes that seems to plague us. So even as Blanche studied social work at a Catholic college, then labored for almost no pay in a Chicago Archdiocese charity, she always dressed and looked like a nun. Still she managed to acto out sexually.
Like a lot of pedo-priest victims, Blanche had a confused reverence for her religion at the same time as she wanted to make love to the priests and other men who were at the top of the religion.
Then at one point Blanche had a spiritual awakening. Suddenly she made the connection. She reconciled her sexual attraction to the priests with whom she worked to incidents that happened when she was a pre-teen girl, molested by a priest in rural Pennsylvania.
It was early 1980s when Blanche realized the reason she was so promiscuous with certain men was the molestation by that priest at age 10-11 or so.
Now in her late twenties, she realized that the experience as a young girl with that priest now was driving her sexual confusion.
Since she was working at a Catholic Charity, Blanche went to a bishop she knew thruogh her job, to talk about this reconciliation slash spiritual awakening she was having. She spilled out her soul to the bishop in a sort of private Confession, then a few days later, found herself being called in to interview with several other bishops.
Then they offered her a wonderful job opportunity.
It seems you are not the only one, they tell her. There are likely a few hundred more like you, people who we call "survivors' who realize in adulthood that pedophile Catholic priests raped them as children.
Blanche had no idea there were so many. But go on, she says.
The bishops tell her she has a wonderful opportunity here to work for social justice for the victims and still protect the good of the Church. They explained to Blanche that the bishops would form a support organization for the individuals around the country who were molested by Catholic priests as children, the few who would likely come forward in the next few years.
And SNARL was born.
And it rocked along for about five years, growing faster than the bihops thought it would.
Because people were finding each other on the Internet.
So in about 1995, the bishops realized that even though they were running SNARL from the top, they could no longer keep the total message about Catholic priest sex crimes under control. They could no longer keep the crime victims under control.
"This new thing out of California, the internet," grumbled the bishops. "They're finding each other in spite of what we do to stop it, especially in San Francisco.
"We've got to do something more," said the bishops.
Worse yet, One of the crime victims who was also a priest had started a genuine grass roots group for the victims, and he was using this new internet, plus making savvy use of other news media. The bishops saw victims were gaining strength through their numbers, exactly what the bishops were trying to stop.
While Blanche is off studying Theology and taking seminars, plus organizing an annual conference, a full time job in itself, she's assured that Darrel Clockwork is running the support organization for priest crime victims like, well, clockwork. Blanche has said in public that she is the founder and creator of SNARL so many times now, she's come to believe it herself.
Her replacement, the director of SNARL Darrel Clockwork from St. Louis, also uses a hypnotizing technique to do his deeds. His main strategy is to pick out select individuals from the survivors who show up at local SNARL events. He runs all the background checks he needs to do to know which persons should be encouraged, which newcomers should be shown the door.
He's good at what he does. Clockwork speaks in a low soft gentle melodic voice, usually over the phone sometimes in person, to his select few. Clockwork has been known to fly in to town on a moment's notice, to see these select few survivors. His phone bills show numerous calls between them, several times a day Clockwork talks to survivors he's picked, in that low melodic soft voice, that a listener soon craves to hear again. They crave his phone calls, become almost addicted. Clockwork talks to his select few several times a day.
Soon those select survivors are only saying what Darrel Clockwork says to say and only doing what Darrell Clockwork says to do, and if the select one is also a SNARL regional leader, they will forward all information that comes from local crime victims to Clockwork, agreeing to not contact any of the new SNARL contacts on their own.
"It's how we've always done it, so how we are going to continue to do it," Clockwork repeats.
Clockwork will decide who gets called back.
.
If regional leaders (Clockwork's select) ask questions about this Modus Operandi, SNARL in the form of Darrel or Blanche, assures them, always conveying the same message: "This is the way we've always done it so this is the way we are going to continue to do it." Any time a regional leader suggests a new strategy or project, the answer from SNARL is, "We don't do that."
If regional leaders continue to ask questions, SNARL surreptitiously removes them from the select group of regional leaders, and often cuts them off completely.
No one wants to be cut off from the Bliss they feel they get from being in the presence of Blanche and Darrel.
***
BACK TO REAL LIFE, no more fiction for now
***
My daughter has a new boyfriend who I do not trust. The way she met him was strange, he has money coming from some unexplainable place. He's filling her head with ideas that inevitably cause her and I to argue: she's becoming an Ayn Rand fan, which is alright, but she's also has the DVR set to record every right wing show she can find, a new direction in her life since this fellow I do not trust came into her life.
Yesterday, Thanksgiving, I was gone a few hours, and the two of them and another of her friends ended up spending time on my bed, because my office-bedroom is very close to the kitchen (the dining room in our one-bedroom apartment). When I woke up the phone was disconnected, and when I used the phone which is part of the bed-office, it was making a clicking sound.
A new more invasive sounds of people tapping the phone, sounds that were not there before my daughter's current boyfriend was sitting on my bed, while my daughter and her friend often were off in the kitchen basting the turkey, preparing salad...
This boyfriend she's brought home is hostile, he glares at me, snarls when he should be smiling. Plus he is turning my daughter against me. He is a fundamentalist Christian political right winger, the broke homeless guy I described earlier, who reads books by Ron Paul in the tent where he sleeps nights, under a building in the Culver City part of town.
With his chin jutted out he narrates his extreme right wing ideology to everyone he meets, and now wonders why he can't get a career going in the film business, or at least that is the story he has my daughter believing.
I think the Catholic Church planted him in her life to get to me. And he's such a whore, he is even having sex with my daughter to get to me.
He is from Virginia, says his father does something vague in the Navy.
I won't leave the house until she gets him out of here.
*******
As to the phone being tapped, oh well, another tap on the phone. After I'd been doing City of Angels a year or so I started hearing noises on the phone. Whenever I say certain key words- Sodomized, Archbishop, Mahony, the Vatican- I hear this sort of wave, swoosh sound on the phone.
A lot of felonies get described on my phone when I'm interviewing pedophile priest sex crime victims around the country.
I just hope one of the parties tapping the phone is the U.S. Department of Justice. As long as I know everything I am doing is legal and justified, I don't care who is tapping my phone. If it is private eyes hired by the Catholic Church, I just hope that after they hear what survivors tell me on the phone, they will start wanting to work on our side and turn on the Church.
Oh and another note, after seeing the performance of WikiLeaks yesterday, remember , City of Angels is here all the time for anyone inside the Church who wants to leak documents, without the paragraphs redacted.
***********
Friday after Thanksgiving:
I finally got Mortimer out of the house. Daughter now sizzling angry, will probly be screaming mad when she returns, so I have to remember to just stay quiet.
I had to get Mortimer out of our house. I really suspect this guy, I think he was using Lizzie to get into our house and look for stuff. If nothing else, I have no respect for him. Anyone who can plop down in our house, three nights, and never think to offer some help, with ANYTHING. You can throw your eye in any corner or wall of the house and see we need muscle, we need a strong arm to push this thing and replace that thing, our home is ramshackle right now. Lizzie put up the curtain rods, my arms don't have the strength. As a result the curtain rod is part held up with tacks, part just tied to the window stands. So the rod sways across the window and the curtains hang slipshod and unevenly.
Anyone walking in the door can see five places where these females obviously need a man's help in their house.
And Mortimer lies in my daughter's bed, for 3 days. During that time my daughter and I both got up and went to work, at great difficulty because it's a holiday and we'd rather be laid back, anyone would. And Mortimer for 3 days never gets out of my daughter's bed.
Except once.
I'm at my computer working and mysteriously Mortimer walks by, his head not even turning to me, just walks by, then he's out the front door and down the stairs, and even Lizzie doesn't know where he just went. I jut hope he's not coming back, but his mountain bike is still parked against the couch.
I continue at the comptuer, then think to go down and get the mail. Outside, down the stairs, I approach the mailbox which is by the front entrance, and I hear two men speaking in low voices. They have eye contact with me, I see it's Mortimer and a white guy. Suddenly the tone of their voices changes. They're suddenly discussing movie making and writers' strikes, loudly.
I get my mail, return to our apartment, Mortimer follows way too close behind me on the stairs, but I'm still trying to be polite to this latest in a long string of boys my daughter has brought home. It's hard too because I can see that this one is even lying about his age. She's 21 and he's got to be at least 30, though Liz said, "I think he's 26, 27," one day concerned because he had told her he was even younger than that.
This is the Broke Right Winger I mentioned earlier who is filling my daughter with Glenn Beck talking points, a development that has caused great rancor in our little two-person family the last few weeks. I mean she enthusiastically said to me, "I'm getting you Sarah Palin's book for Christmas."
Still I try to stay off the topic of politics, while getting him to leave my home.
"He's a grown man," I finally get through to Lizzie, "I'm not going to have him wandering around the house while you are at work and I'm asleep. I'll be sleeping with one eye open."
"Mom, how can you be so mean, it's late, how can he get all the way to Culver City?"
Earlier she explained to me that Mortimer the right winger does not even believe in transit, so he only rides his bike, does not believe in ANYTHING that is supported through mandatory things like the 1.5 percent sales tax I think it is we pay to keep transit going in L.A.
The self made man, too proud to ride transit, thinks nothing of leeching off the sick old lady and her beautiful young daughter for three days.
I have to defend my right to privacy to my daughter:
"You've known him 3 weeks, you don't even know his age for sure, or how to spell his name." What I don't say is, I don't trust this guy.
He finally gets up and leaves, she goes too, but I know she's on her way to work, she'll return in the morning with tales of product stocking overnight in this super store where she works.
He rides his bicycle all the way to Culver City. Maybe he'll figure it out that people in the big city use public transit and it doesn't make us all socialists.
He has been filling my daughter's head with all this Objectivist Ayn Rand stuff, while at the same time he is able to lie in a girl's bed for three days while both she and her sick mother get up and go to work two times? And it doesn't dawn on him to ask, is there something I can do to help out? Would Howard Roark be in my kitchen helping himself to leftovers and waking me up? Would Ayn Rand let someone wait on her for 3 days while she lied in bed totally healthy, just chillin'?
And who was the guy Mortimer was talking to down on the street? In this neighborhood, a white guy, English speaking and looking well fed and educated just happens to walk by when Mortimer is outside and Mortimer just happens to know him?
There are almost no English speaking people in this entire neighborhood, except the crack heads and guys in the halfway houses just out of prison. No one comes into this neighborhood unless they have to.
Who was Mortimer really?
Is the Church really even willing to use my daughter's over dependence and neediness around men to get inside this house and find stuff? Plant bugs?
Will I ever be able to trust anybody?
(Fiction in Editing phases, SNARL's backstory)
BLANCHE wanted so much to be a nun, except the part about being celibate. She revered the church but also had that glow of sexual attraction you find in pedophile priest sex crime victims, the overproduction of pherenomes that seems to plague us. So even as Blanche studied social work at a Catholic college, then labored for almost no pay in a Chicago Archdiocese charity, she always dressed and looked like a nun. Still she managed to acto out sexually.
Like a lot of pedo-priest victims, Blanche had a confused reverence for her religion at the same time as she wanted to make love to the priests and other men who were at the top of the religion.
Then at one point Blanche had a spiritual awakening. Suddenly she made the connection. She reconciled her sexual attraction to the priests with whom she worked to incidents that happened when she was a pre-teen girl, molested by a priest in rural Pennsylvania.
It was early 1980s when Blanche realized the reason she was so promiscuous with certain men was the molestation by that priest at age 10-11 or so.
Now in her late twenties, she realized that the experience as a young girl with that priest now was driving her sexual confusion.
Since she was working at a Catholic Charity, Blanche went to a bishop she knew thruogh her job, to talk about this reconciliation slash spiritual awakening she was having. She spilled out her soul to the bishop in a sort of private Confession, then a few days later, found herself being called in to interview with several other bishops.
Then they offered her a wonderful job opportunity.
It seems you are not the only one, they tell her. There are likely a few hundred more like you, people who we call "survivors' who realize in adulthood that pedophile Catholic priests raped them as children.
Blanche had no idea there were so many. But go on, she says.
The bishops tell her she has a wonderful opportunity here to work for social justice for the victims and still protect the good of the Church. They explained to Blanche that the bishops would form a support organization for the individuals around the country who were molested by Catholic priests as children, the few who would likely come forward in the next few years.
And SNARL was born.
And it rocked along for about five years, growing faster than the bihops thought it would.
Because people were finding each other on the Internet.
So in about 1995, the bishops realized that even though they were running SNARL from the top, they could no longer keep the total message about Catholic priest sex crimes under control. They could no longer keep the crime victims under control.
"This new thing out of California, the internet," grumbled the bishops. "They're finding each other in spite of what we do to stop it, especially in San Francisco.
"We've got to do something more," said the bishops.
Worse yet, One of the crime victims who was also a priest had started a genuine grass roots group for the victims, and he was using this new internet, plus making savvy use of other news media. The bishops saw victims were gaining strength through their numbers, exactly what the bishops were trying to stop.
"We gotta put someone stronger in there running SNARL," said the bishops.
"Yeah but what about Blanche, she's not going to want to step aside."
Suddenly Blanche got busy elsewhere. She began law school, followed by graduate school, plus her new work for SNARL kept her traveling overseas.
San Francisco SNARL members in 1995 when I was one of them were stunned and surprised. This announcement just came from St. Louis instead of Chicago, saying that this guy no one knew, Darren Clockwork, was now the new president of SNARL.
"Who is he?" was the word going around SF SNARL meetings. Word was he came from a PR firm. "Who put him in charge?" people asked at San Francisco SNARL meetings.
Then one by one, each member of San Francisco SNARL suddenly had disrupting events in their home or work lives, and it suddenly became impossible for them to continue to do advocacy work with SNARL anymore.
Suddenly, the young priest who was running the genuine grass roots group for victims became ill and died, when he had been healthy and thriving just weeks earlier. All the files from that grassroots group were inexplicably stolen in a breaking and entering that took place while victims were mourning at his wake.
Meanwhile Blanche went on to earn two PhDs, in Social Work and Theology, on top of her law degree. There was always enough money to pay her school fees.
Her study of theology took her on voyages to the Near and Far East, also paid for by the bishops. They told her it was training she needed in order to continue her work. Blanche developed an inner peace, knowing that everything she was doing would in the end save the Church.
Meanwhile the new man who the Bishops had installed, Darrel Clockwork, was at the helm of SNARL.
Blanche soon learned to channel her confused sexual-religious ideas into a new level of strength, combining ancient Eastern and modern New Age techniques. Her body stayed perfect and thin, her skin stayed young. She was deeply tanned though her home address is in the Midwest.
When Blanche made a press appearance, her unique combination of spiritual eminence and public speaking skills played out as a hypnotic charisma.
Blanche is much like Anna on the TV show V, a Sci Fi series currently running on ABC. Blanche's face shines down on the "survivor community" she helped create through SNARL. Blanche has a stunning hypnotizing effect and whoever hears her follows her.
An critical element from the very beginning of the bishops' plan was this kind of crowd control, this numbed brain blind following.
"Hey, most these victims are also Catholics," the bishops laughed. "It'll be easy to get them to latch onto a messiah-like figure they get dependent on. Just make sure she looks good on camera."
Laughter rolled through the bishops' planning meeting.
The bishops conjured up this whole plan back around 1984 or 85.
While Blanche is off studying Theology and taking seminars, plus organizing an annual conference, a full time job in itself, she's assured that Darrel Clockwork is running the support organization for priest crime victims like, well, clockwork. Blanche has said in public that she is the founder and creator of SNARL so many times now, she's come to believe it herself.
Her replacement, the director of SNARL Darrel Clockwork from St. Louis, also uses a hypnotizing technique to do his deeds. His main strategy is to pick out select individuals from the survivors who show up at local SNARL events. He runs all the background checks he needs to do to know which persons should be encouraged, which newcomers should be shown the door.
He's good at what he does. Clockwork speaks in a low soft gentle melodic voice, usually over the phone sometimes in person, to his select few. Clockwork has been known to fly in to town on a moment's notice, to see these select few survivors. His phone bills show numerous calls between them, several times a day Clockwork talks to survivors he's picked, in that low melodic soft voice, that a listener soon craves to hear again. They crave his phone calls, become almost addicted. Clockwork talks to his select few several times a day.
Soon those select survivors are only saying what Darrel Clockwork says to say and only doing what Darrell Clockwork says to do, and if the select one is also a SNARL regional leader, they will forward all information that comes from local crime victims to Clockwork, agreeing to not contact any of the new SNARL contacts on their own.
"It's how we've always done it, so how we are going to continue to do it," Clockwork repeats.
Clockwork will decide who gets called back.
.
If regional leaders (Clockwork's select) ask questions about this Modus Operandi, SNARL in the form of Darrel or Blanche, assures them, always conveying the same message: "This is the way we've always done it so this is the way we are going to continue to do it." Any time a regional leader suggests a new strategy or project, the answer from SNARL is, "We don't do that."
If regional leaders continue to ask questions, SNARL surreptitiously removes them from the select group of regional leaders, and often cuts them off completely.
No one wants to be cut off from the Bliss they feel they get from being in the presence of Blanche and Darrel.
***
BACK TO REAL LIFE, no more fiction for now
***
My daughter has a new boyfriend who I do not trust. The way she met him was strange, he has money coming from some unexplainable place. He's filling her head with ideas that inevitably cause her and I to argue: she's becoming an Ayn Rand fan, which is alright, but she's also has the DVR set to record every right wing show she can find, a new direction in her life since this fellow I do not trust came into her life.
Yesterday, Thanksgiving, I was gone a few hours, and the two of them and another of her friends ended up spending time on my bed, because my office-bedroom is very close to the kitchen (the dining room in our one-bedroom apartment). When I woke up the phone was disconnected, and when I used the phone which is part of the bed-office, it was making a clicking sound.
A new more invasive sounds of people tapping the phone, sounds that were not there before my daughter's current boyfriend was sitting on my bed, while my daughter and her friend often were off in the kitchen basting the turkey, preparing salad...
This boyfriend she's brought home is hostile, he glares at me, snarls when he should be smiling. Plus he is turning my daughter against me. He is a fundamentalist Christian political right winger, the broke homeless guy I described earlier, who reads books by Ron Paul in the tent where he sleeps nights, under a building in the Culver City part of town.
With his chin jutted out he narrates his extreme right wing ideology to everyone he meets, and now wonders why he can't get a career going in the film business, or at least that is the story he has my daughter believing.
I think the Catholic Church planted him in her life to get to me. And he's such a whore, he is even having sex with my daughter to get to me.
He is from Virginia, says his father does something vague in the Navy.
I won't leave the house until she gets him out of here.
*******
As to the phone being tapped, oh well, another tap on the phone. After I'd been doing City of Angels a year or so I started hearing noises on the phone. Whenever I say certain key words- Sodomized, Archbishop, Mahony, the Vatican- I hear this sort of wave, swoosh sound on the phone.
A lot of felonies get described on my phone when I'm interviewing pedophile priest sex crime victims around the country.
I just hope one of the parties tapping the phone is the U.S. Department of Justice. As long as I know everything I am doing is legal and justified, I don't care who is tapping my phone. If it is private eyes hired by the Catholic Church, I just hope that after they hear what survivors tell me on the phone, they will start wanting to work on our side and turn on the Church.
Oh and another note, after seeing the performance of WikiLeaks yesterday, remember , City of Angels is here all the time for anyone inside the Church who wants to leak documents, without the paragraphs redacted.
***********
Friday after Thanksgiving:
I finally got Mortimer out of the house. Daughter now sizzling angry, will probly be screaming mad when she returns, so I have to remember to just stay quiet.
I had to get Mortimer out of our house. I really suspect this guy, I think he was using Lizzie to get into our house and look for stuff. If nothing else, I have no respect for him. Anyone who can plop down in our house, three nights, and never think to offer some help, with ANYTHING. You can throw your eye in any corner or wall of the house and see we need muscle, we need a strong arm to push this thing and replace that thing, our home is ramshackle right now. Lizzie put up the curtain rods, my arms don't have the strength. As a result the curtain rod is part held up with tacks, part just tied to the window stands. So the rod sways across the window and the curtains hang slipshod and unevenly.
Anyone walking in the door can see five places where these females obviously need a man's help in their house.
And Mortimer lies in my daughter's bed, for 3 days. During that time my daughter and I both got up and went to work, at great difficulty because it's a holiday and we'd rather be laid back, anyone would. And Mortimer for 3 days never gets out of my daughter's bed.
Except once.
I'm at my computer working and mysteriously Mortimer walks by, his head not even turning to me, just walks by, then he's out the front door and down the stairs, and even Lizzie doesn't know where he just went. I jut hope he's not coming back, but his mountain bike is still parked against the couch.
I continue at the comptuer, then think to go down and get the mail. Outside, down the stairs, I approach the mailbox which is by the front entrance, and I hear two men speaking in low voices. They have eye contact with me, I see it's Mortimer and a white guy. Suddenly the tone of their voices changes. They're suddenly discussing movie making and writers' strikes, loudly.
I get my mail, return to our apartment, Mortimer follows way too close behind me on the stairs, but I'm still trying to be polite to this latest in a long string of boys my daughter has brought home. It's hard too because I can see that this one is even lying about his age. She's 21 and he's got to be at least 30, though Liz said, "I think he's 26, 27," one day concerned because he had told her he was even younger than that.
This is the Broke Right Winger I mentioned earlier who is filling my daughter with Glenn Beck talking points, a development that has caused great rancor in our little two-person family the last few weeks. I mean she enthusiastically said to me, "I'm getting you Sarah Palin's book for Christmas."
Still I try to stay off the topic of politics, while getting him to leave my home.
"He's a grown man," I finally get through to Lizzie, "I'm not going to have him wandering around the house while you are at work and I'm asleep. I'll be sleeping with one eye open."
"Mom, how can you be so mean, it's late, how can he get all the way to Culver City?"
Earlier she explained to me that Mortimer the right winger does not even believe in transit, so he only rides his bike, does not believe in ANYTHING that is supported through mandatory things like the 1.5 percent sales tax I think it is we pay to keep transit going in L.A.
The self made man, too proud to ride transit, thinks nothing of leeching off the sick old lady and her beautiful young daughter for three days.
I have to defend my right to privacy to my daughter:
"You've known him 3 weeks, you don't even know his age for sure, or how to spell his name." What I don't say is, I don't trust this guy.
He finally gets up and leaves, she goes too, but I know she's on her way to work, she'll return in the morning with tales of product stocking overnight in this super store where she works.
He rides his bicycle all the way to Culver City. Maybe he'll figure it out that people in the big city use public transit and it doesn't make us all socialists.
He has been filling my daughter's head with all this Objectivist Ayn Rand stuff, while at the same time he is able to lie in a girl's bed for three days while both she and her sick mother get up and go to work two times? And it doesn't dawn on him to ask, is there something I can do to help out? Would Howard Roark be in my kitchen helping himself to leftovers and waking me up? Would Ayn Rand let someone wait on her for 3 days while she lied in bed totally healthy, just chillin'?
And who was the guy Mortimer was talking to down on the street? In this neighborhood, a white guy, English speaking and looking well fed and educated just happens to walk by when Mortimer is outside and Mortimer just happens to know him?
There are almost no English speaking people in this entire neighborhood, except the crack heads and guys in the halfway houses just out of prison. No one comes into this neighborhood unless they have to.
Who was Mortimer really?
Is the Church really even willing to use my daughter's over dependence and neediness around men to get inside this house and find stuff? Plant bugs?
Will I ever be able to trust anybody?
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
(Continuing in editing phases. If you've read this before, read it again, it's probly different, still a work in progress.)
I read a description in the news of one of the few women who got away from Anthony Sowell, in whose Cleveland, Ohio, home 11 dead female bodies were found last week. This is the way people treat whores, why I'm glad I managed to make it to age 61, in spite of the surroundings I'm living in now, for now.
I obsess these days about sex crimes, especially child sex crimes, but also crimes that happen to whores and crack addicts, as there but for fortune go I. In fact, I'm amazed I am even alive.
My daughter was describing in tears to me this morning Shaniya Davis' body "was just dumped by the highway" when they found it in North Carolina.
"Dumped," I said, and kind of drifted.
"Dumped."
They do kill children after they've sexualized them, often. Especially when there is film of the crimes, as there was in my case. I know someone tried to kill me right around the time I was babbling to everyone what Father Horne did to me.
I remember it plainly, it comes up often.
I was riding in the back of a dump truck, preschool age or maybe six. We got to the dump outside Bartlett, Illinois. In the the payload area of the dump truck was little girl me riding happy as can be. After the driver stops the truck, he starts the dump mechanism, and the payload starts to angle up. I'm falling out.
I get to the top, hang on, screaming, "Hey, I'm in here, stop the dump, stop dumping the truck."
I can see through the back window into the cabin of the truck. The man driving stares straight forward stiff, unmoving, acting as if he does not hear me calling out, but he has to.
"Hey, I'm in here! Stop dumping the truck, stop dumping the truck!"
The driver just looks straight ahead but there's a reaction, like he makes his body stiff so he cannot turn his neck. As I go into the memory and elaborate on it, imaginary or not, he turns his head just enough for me to see it's my own father's face, but I refuse to let that image continue.
I landed DUMP on the ground, at the dump, outside Bartlett, Illinois, circa 1954.
Everyone thought I was dead.
The way I know more about this incident than most from pre-age six is my Aunt Irene a few weeks, months, years (?) later told me about it.
The Ebeling family is gathered at dinner for some special occasion around a dining room table, aunts uncles cousins along with dad mom and sisters.
Aunt Irene, still a little Irish brogue, says in her high piercing voice, "And what about the time little Kathy died and came back to life."
The room got quiet. Silent. Tension.
She said to me, "Do you remember that? The time you came back to life?"
I say, huh? I don't remember, I don't know.
My Aunt Irene was a bit of a rebel, grown up Irish in Chicago, always had a look on her face that said, You're not going to get away with that with me. No one was going to tell her not to keep talking. Her posture is, "I got this much out of my mouth, I'm going to go ahead and say the rest."
She said, "You mean you don't remember? You were riding in the back of the dump truck, he gets to the dump yard, forgets you're back there, and what a miracle. You don't remember? You were dumped out on the ground, and you landed so hard, afterwards you just lay there not moving. Everybody thought you were dead. People were coming from all around the dump, everybody thought you were dead.
Then Up with a start like you'd been struck by the Holy Jesus himself, you popped up onto your feet and started running around like a chicken with its head chopped off.
Tense laughter releases the grip around the table, and we all finish dinner.
From then on, every now and then someone in the family would bring it up again, the time in Bartlett when little Kathy died and came back to life after being dumped out from a dump truck at the Bartlett dump. "Then she was running around and around like a chicken with her head chopped off."
****************
This morning my daughter Lizzie was forlorn saying, "The way that poor little Shaniya was just dumped."
And I was right back at the Bartlett Illinois Dump in 1954.
That's PTSD.
1954, we would have been building the house in the town of Bartlett that we moved to from "the woods," the 20 acres my dad bought in 1949 and sold, flipped in 1953, on U.S. 20, on the road to Elgin.
At that time U.S. 20 was a major highway. Now it's a forgotten connecting road going through endless suburbs, a lot of gang activity. My dad was smarter than average, and like me, could see the future by looking very carefully at the present and the past.
When we were building the house in Bartlett, there would have been lots of reasons to drive out to the dump, and no laws against kids riding in the back of an open dump truck back then.
Although these fellows don't follow laws that much anyway.
************
Whoever masterminded the sexual molestation and photographing of my sister and me age 4 to 7 that somehow involved Father Thomas Barry Horne and my father had to get rid of me. My sister became quiet and calculating, but I was acting out loudly.
Babbling.
No older than six, after incidents with Father Horne, I had taken a group of kids into a treehouse in a backyard on Hickory Street in Bartlett to show them what Father Horne had showed me.
Come on, kids, it's fun, and it makes you feel SO GOOD!!!
Then there was the incident with the construction paper Thanksgiving turkeys, me gluing on feathers, that got me thrown out of Brownies. I cannot no matter how I try remember what it is I did or said.
I was babbling. Always babbling.
(Maybe the same babbling that wakes me up at three AM or soon after every morning to this day.)
*************
It just makes sense to the pedophiles.
These phreaks often feel they need to destroy, murder, mutilate beyond recognition, the children they've raped, especially ones where they can't hide the evidence, too much vaginal tearing, too much talking.
Even forty years later, we might talk.
So I guess, I should be grateful I'm still alive today. I just kept living through attempts by others and myself to kill me, all the way to 1988.
****************
I escaped from that house in Paris where two guys were about to sell me to the two Arab men in the living room. Doubt I'd have lived too long after going away with them.
This entry is not fiction, though some posts here at City of Angels 2 are made up. I mark it clearly if it's fiction.
For some reason, after all that, I'm still alive today, writing this...
******************
Back to Anthony Sowell and the 11 dead female bodies at his Cleveland, Ohio, home, the victim who got away said no one would call 911 for her. Then Sowell walked up and made a joke about her and her near naked bruised bleeding body. From the news at Cleveland dot com this morning:
Been there, done that, the aftermath, when consensual sex suddently turns violent and you run out screaming Help and there are people everywhere, but they just laugh at you. It happened to me on the chi-chi streets of West Hollywood...
Nobody cares about a whore.
********************
I just walked by my daughter's door, it was part open so I peeked in to say hello.
She squints at me and sits up, challenges: "I'm watching Fox News." I don't answer. "Bill O'Riley reports this incredible stuff, you don't hear it anywhere else in the news."
I want to scream, "Because Fox makes news up, they should be indicted."
But her words don't rouse me, for once.
Because I'm re-forming.
***********
Lizzie is so much a part of this story. I would have never even remembered being raped if she hadn't been born when I was 40. Then she turned 5 and I started remembering things. As she approached the age, it started with me being obsessively protective of her, would NOT let her out of my sight except in government-sponsored daycare run by women I first got to know real well, and even then, I was the mom who showed up all the time to help as a volunteer.
I was a Stepford Single Mom.
*****************
*************
TO CHICAGO newspaper November 23 responding to article about African Americans saying they get lower payments than white people:
From: "cityofangelslady@yahoo.com"
To: mbrachear@tribune.com
Sent: Monday, November 23, 2009 6:51:17 AM
Subject: Chicago Gives $0 to Little Old White Ladies
Little old white ladies get no settlement at all.
No one is writing about older persons like me, age 61, raped in Chicago Archdiocese in 1952-55 age 5 and younger, my sister too. Last October the Church managed to get the Illinois Supreme Court to eliminate any cases for people over age 40.
When I went to the Archdiocese in Chicago for help several times a few years back, I said, "I'm a pedophile priest rape victim from just outside Chicago, your archdiocese," and they said, "Get an attorney."
I am a trained journalist and that is exactly what the victim assistance coordinator said, when I approached the Chicago Archdiocese for help.
Then no attorney wanted my case until I interviewed one during a story and in the middle of the interview, just blurted it out, "Will you take my case?" and he sputtered a bit and I finally got a lawyer to take my case.
Then my case gets thrown out thanks to the Illinois Supreme Court.
I live in slums, with my 21 year old daughter we both need dental, medical care, she needs to stop working 50 hours a week with no overtime pay for one of the few corporations still going in this country. She should be in college.
Worse yet, I live in L.A. where I watched people who were raped under similar circumstances as me and my sister by priests get over a million dollars each in 2007, and I got to report on the L.A. Clergy Cases at City of Angels and now I wonder why no mainstream reporter is writing about the inconsistencies. People in some states get settlements, people in other states don't, when this is truly a national, international problem.
The church takes advantage of any law they can use to get out of helping us. So there are hundreds more like me, older, struggling- my daughter is a big part of the story you can read about our personal situation at Cityof Angels 2
Hope you see there are about a hundred more stories here that have not gotten out to the mainstream.
Sincerely
Kay Ebeling
Chicago Archdiocese Pedophile Priest Rape Victim Living in Los Angeles
PS: I can document that I lost every job I had because of the behavior that resulted from being raped at age 5 by a Catholic priest. My need for a settlement is so obvious, I sometimes wonder if it was because of people like me that the Church lobbied and got the Court to stop lawsuits against people older than I am.
Most 1950s era victims are probly dead. I should have been dead numerous times, again a result of the behavior, but I always came back to life or escaped.
Anyway I'm writing my story at City of Angels 2, but wish more working journalists with jobs would get on this story as it is a NATIONAL story, and me, one broke old lady in L.A. alone is not enough to get this story out...
kay ebeling
I read a description in the news of one of the few women who got away from Anthony Sowell, in whose Cleveland, Ohio, home 11 dead female bodies were found last week. This is the way people treat whores, why I'm glad I managed to make it to age 61, in spite of the surroundings I'm living in now, for now.
As they fought, she said she could see a little bit of the outside through a door. She grabbed Sowell's crotch as hard as she could and when he collapsed to the floor, she crawled out the door.
Wade said she shouted to people walking past Sowell's house but they ignored her. Then she ran into a nearby restaurant. They refused to call 9-1-1 and told her there was a pay phone outside.Soon she saw Sowell coming toward her on the sidewalk. She said he walked up and laughed, telling a group of men standing in front of the restaurant "this bitch tried to rob me."
I obsess these days about sex crimes, especially child sex crimes, but also crimes that happen to whores and crack addicts, as there but for fortune go I. In fact, I'm amazed I am even alive.
My daughter was describing in tears to me this morning Shaniya Davis' body "was just dumped by the highway" when they found it in North Carolina.
"Dumped," I said, and kind of drifted.
"Dumped."
They do kill children after they've sexualized them, often. Especially when there is film of the crimes, as there was in my case. I know someone tried to kill me right around the time I was babbling to everyone what Father Horne did to me.
I remember it plainly, it comes up often.
I was riding in the back of a dump truck, preschool age or maybe six. We got to the dump outside Bartlett, Illinois. In the the payload area of the dump truck was little girl me riding happy as can be. After the driver stops the truck, he starts the dump mechanism, and the payload starts to angle up. I'm falling out.
I get to the top, hang on, screaming, "Hey, I'm in here, stop the dump, stop dumping the truck."
I can see through the back window into the cabin of the truck. The man driving stares straight forward stiff, unmoving, acting as if he does not hear me calling out, but he has to.
"Hey, I'm in here! Stop dumping the truck, stop dumping the truck!"
The driver just looks straight ahead but there's a reaction, like he makes his body stiff so he cannot turn his neck. As I go into the memory and elaborate on it, imaginary or not, he turns his head just enough for me to see it's my own father's face, but I refuse to let that image continue.
I landed DUMP on the ground, at the dump, outside Bartlett, Illinois, circa 1954.
Everyone thought I was dead.
The way I know more about this incident than most from pre-age six is my Aunt Irene a few weeks, months, years (?) later told me about it.
The Ebeling family is gathered at dinner for some special occasion around a dining room table, aunts uncles cousins along with dad mom and sisters.
Aunt Irene, still a little Irish brogue, says in her high piercing voice, "And what about the time little Kathy died and came back to life."
The room got quiet. Silent. Tension.
She said to me, "Do you remember that? The time you came back to life?"
I say, huh? I don't remember, I don't know.
My Aunt Irene was a bit of a rebel, grown up Irish in Chicago, always had a look on her face that said, You're not going to get away with that with me. No one was going to tell her not to keep talking. Her posture is, "I got this much out of my mouth, I'm going to go ahead and say the rest."
She said, "You mean you don't remember? You were riding in the back of the dump truck, he gets to the dump yard, forgets you're back there, and what a miracle. You don't remember? You were dumped out on the ground, and you landed so hard, afterwards you just lay there not moving. Everybody thought you were dead. People were coming from all around the dump, everybody thought you were dead.
Then Up with a start like you'd been struck by the Holy Jesus himself, you popped up onto your feet and started running around like a chicken with its head chopped off.
Tense laughter releases the grip around the table, and we all finish dinner.
From then on, every now and then someone in the family would bring it up again, the time in Bartlett when little Kathy died and came back to life after being dumped out from a dump truck at the Bartlett dump. "Then she was running around and around like a chicken with her head chopped off."
****************
This morning my daughter Lizzie was forlorn saying, "The way that poor little Shaniya was just dumped."
And I was right back at the Bartlett Illinois Dump in 1954.
That's PTSD.
1954, we would have been building the house in the town of Bartlett that we moved to from "the woods," the 20 acres my dad bought in 1949 and sold, flipped in 1953, on U.S. 20, on the road to Elgin.
At that time U.S. 20 was a major highway. Now it's a forgotten connecting road going through endless suburbs, a lot of gang activity. My dad was smarter than average, and like me, could see the future by looking very carefully at the present and the past.
When we were building the house in Bartlett, there would have been lots of reasons to drive out to the dump, and no laws against kids riding in the back of an open dump truck back then.
Although these fellows don't follow laws that much anyway.
************
Whoever masterminded the sexual molestation and photographing of my sister and me age 4 to 7 that somehow involved Father Thomas Barry Horne and my father had to get rid of me. My sister became quiet and calculating, but I was acting out loudly.
Babbling.
No older than six, after incidents with Father Horne, I had taken a group of kids into a treehouse in a backyard on Hickory Street in Bartlett to show them what Father Horne had showed me.
Come on, kids, it's fun, and it makes you feel SO GOOD!!!
Then there was the incident with the construction paper Thanksgiving turkeys, me gluing on feathers, that got me thrown out of Brownies. I cannot no matter how I try remember what it is I did or said.
I was babbling. Always babbling.
(Maybe the same babbling that wakes me up at three AM or soon after every morning to this day.)
*************
It just makes sense to the pedophiles.
These phreaks often feel they need to destroy, murder, mutilate beyond recognition, the children they've raped, especially ones where they can't hide the evidence, too much vaginal tearing, too much talking.
Even forty years later, we might talk.
So I guess, I should be grateful I'm still alive today. I just kept living through attempts by others and myself to kill me, all the way to 1988.
****************
I escaped from that house in Paris where two guys were about to sell me to the two Arab men in the living room. Doubt I'd have lived too long after going away with them.
This entry is not fiction, though some posts here at City of Angels 2 are made up. I mark it clearly if it's fiction.
For some reason, after all that, I'm still alive today, writing this...
******************
Back to Anthony Sowell and the 11 dead female bodies at his Cleveland, Ohio, home, the victim who got away said no one would call 911 for her. Then Sowell walked up and made a joke about her and her near naked bruised bleeding body. From the news at Cleveland dot com this morning:
"I just started crying," she said. "I was in this circle screaming that this man attacked me and nobody would hear me."
Been there, done that, the aftermath, when consensual sex suddently turns violent and you run out screaming Help and there are people everywhere, but they just laugh at you. It happened to me on the chi-chi streets of West Hollywood...
Nobody cares about a whore.
********************
I just walked by my daughter's door, it was part open so I peeked in to say hello.
She squints at me and sits up, challenges: "I'm watching Fox News." I don't answer. "Bill O'Riley reports this incredible stuff, you don't hear it anywhere else in the news."
I want to scream, "Because Fox makes news up, they should be indicted."
But her words don't rouse me, for once.
Because I'm re-forming.
***********
Lizzie is so much a part of this story. I would have never even remembered being raped if she hadn't been born when I was 40. Then she turned 5 and I started remembering things. As she approached the age, it started with me being obsessively protective of her, would NOT let her out of my sight except in government-sponsored daycare run by women I first got to know real well, and even then, I was the mom who showed up all the time to help as a volunteer.
I was a Stepford Single Mom.
*****************
*************
TO CHICAGO newspaper November 23 responding to article about African Americans saying they get lower payments than white people:
From: "cityofangelslady@yahoo.com"
To: mbrachear@tribune.com
Sent: Monday, November 23, 2009 6:51:17 AM
Subject: Chicago Gives $0 to Little Old White Ladies
Little old white ladies get no settlement at all.
No one is writing about older persons like me, age 61, raped in Chicago Archdiocese in 1952-55 age 5 and younger, my sister too. Last October the Church managed to get the Illinois Supreme Court to eliminate any cases for people over age 40.
When I went to the Archdiocese in Chicago for help several times a few years back, I said, "I'm a pedophile priest rape victim from just outside Chicago, your archdiocese," and they said, "Get an attorney."
I am a trained journalist and that is exactly what the victim assistance coordinator said, when I approached the Chicago Archdiocese for help.
Then no attorney wanted my case until I interviewed one during a story and in the middle of the interview, just blurted it out, "Will you take my case?" and he sputtered a bit and I finally got a lawyer to take my case.
Then my case gets thrown out thanks to the Illinois Supreme Court.
I live in slums, with my 21 year old daughter we both need dental, medical care, she needs to stop working 50 hours a week with no overtime pay for one of the few corporations still going in this country. She should be in college.
Worse yet, I live in L.A. where I watched people who were raped under similar circumstances as me and my sister by priests get over a million dollars each in 2007, and I got to report on the L.A. Clergy Cases at City of Angels and now I wonder why no mainstream reporter is writing about the inconsistencies. People in some states get settlements, people in other states don't, when this is truly a national, international problem.
The church takes advantage of any law they can use to get out of helping us. So there are hundreds more like me, older, struggling- my daughter is a big part of the story you can read about our personal situation at Cityof Angels 2
Hope you see there are about a hundred more stories here that have not gotten out to the mainstream.
Sincerely
Kay Ebeling
Chicago Archdiocese Pedophile Priest Rape Victim Living in Los Angeles
PS: I can document that I lost every job I had because of the behavior that resulted from being raped at age 5 by a Catholic priest. My need for a settlement is so obvious, I sometimes wonder if it was because of people like me that the Church lobbied and got the Court to stop lawsuits against people older than I am.
Most 1950s era victims are probly dead. I should have been dead numerous times, again a result of the behavior, but I always came back to life or escaped.
Anyway I'm writing my story at City of Angels 2, but wish more working journalists with jobs would get on this story as it is a NATIONAL story, and me, one broke old lady in L.A. alone is not enough to get this story out...
kay ebeling
Maybe It's Time to Go Back to Being Loose, at least to loosen up a little
.
I can't get this quote out of my head, from Huffington Post around the time the Polanski case was in the new (last week ...)
From the classical French point of view, the US is criminally puritanical about sex as opposed to France , with its own more "liberal" wink-an-eye espousal of affairs under the sheets. Le Monde describes what happened as "Polanski's relations with a young girl," forgetting the word "illegal."
Today a crime like Polanski's would receive a much harsher sentence than in 1978. Now, if Polanski returns for sentencing, legally the most he himself could receive is two years.
Since 1994, when this recovered memory flushed into my head about being with Father Horne at age five on his mat on the floor he used as a bed in the church rectory, I have frozen up, bottled up anything that even resembled sexuality in me.
There is something synthetic, unreal, about the way I've covered myself in baggy clothees, it's no more genuine than the 40 years of promiscuity and see-through blouses I endured, in PTSD reacting to being "sexualized" at age five at the fingertips of a Roman Catholic priest.
It's all a reaction. I'm still reacting... opposite reacting, but being totally buttoned up and frozen isn't healthy either.
Now I need a reaction to the reaction, or some kind of balancing out.
ANOTHER POINT to elaborate on soon:
My daughter has decided to get pregnant to give her life more motivation, and worse yet, the guy she’s getting pregnant with is a Republican.
A broke Republican, you know, the ones who read Ayn Rand by candlelight in a tent where they live under a freeway overpass.
My daughter found a broke homeless Republican and now she wants to get pregnant with him. He's probly going to end up balking back to Virginia and be scared to death of California girls for the rest of his life.
And Lizzie and I get to be single mom and single grandma in the flats of East Hollywood.
This too shall go onward...
.
I mean I'm even beginning to wonder if I was really gay, but being fingered by Father Horne when I was five years old SO SKEWERED me, especially because that experience determined my sexual behavior. Going after men.
When for all I know I'm really a dyke. I mean look at me, I'm masculine and husky, like to wear army boots, walk like a mountain climber on flat ground.
I mean, I look like a man, my face. And I find myself weirdly attracted to Rachel Maddow and Ellen Degeneres.
What can I do? I'm sixty-one years old and after the last few years of hearing details of what priests used to do to altar boys under all those skirts they wear, I have been sexually lobotomized.
Still I will always wonder what could have been...
***************
POLANSKI PAYS 4 and a half million and gets out on Bail
City of Angels Celebrates:
If anyone complains Polanski should be in prison, remember Roman Catholic priests committed much worse crimes in the last 50 years. The bishops left thousands of crime victims among parish children, and we did not even get an admission of guilt from our rapists.
If the USA really wants to prosecute sex crime felons, first it start with Roger Mahony, Archbishop of Los Angeles. And while you are extraditing sex criminals, Cardinals Law and Levada are hiding out at the Vatican right now, to avoid prosecution. Read City of Angels blog at http://cityofangels5.blogspot.com for ongoing coverage of these crimes and coverups in the Catholic Church.
I can't get this quote out of my head, from Huffington Post around the time the Polanski case was in the new (last week ...)
From the classical French point of view, the US is criminally puritanical about sex as opposed to France , with its own more "liberal" wink-an-eye espousal of affairs under the sheets. Le Monde describes what happened as "Polanski's relations with a young girl," forgetting the word "illegal."
Today a crime like Polanski's would receive a much harsher sentence than in 1978. Now, if Polanski returns for sentencing, legally the most he himself could receive is two years.
Since 1994, when this recovered memory flushed into my head about being with Father Horne at age five on his mat on the floor he used as a bed in the church rectory, I have frozen up, bottled up anything that even resembled sexuality in me.
There is something synthetic, unreal, about the way I've covered myself in baggy clothees, it's no more genuine than the 40 years of promiscuity and see-through blouses I endured, in PTSD reacting to being "sexualized" at age five at the fingertips of a Roman Catholic priest.
It's all a reaction. I'm still reacting... opposite reacting, but being totally buttoned up and frozen isn't healthy either.
Now I need a reaction to the reaction, or some kind of balancing out.
ANOTHER POINT to elaborate on soon:
My daughter has decided to get pregnant to give her life more motivation, and worse yet, the guy she’s getting pregnant with is a Republican.
A broke Republican, you know, the ones who read Ayn Rand by candlelight in a tent where they live under a freeway overpass.
My daughter found a broke homeless Republican and now she wants to get pregnant with him. He's probly going to end up balking back to Virginia and be scared to death of California girls for the rest of his life.
And Lizzie and I get to be single mom and single grandma in the flats of East Hollywood.
This too shall go onward...
.
I mean I'm even beginning to wonder if I was really gay, but being fingered by Father Horne when I was five years old SO SKEWERED me, especially because that experience determined my sexual behavior. Going after men.
When for all I know I'm really a dyke. I mean look at me, I'm masculine and husky, like to wear army boots, walk like a mountain climber on flat ground.
I mean, I look like a man, my face. And I find myself weirdly attracted to Rachel Maddow and Ellen Degeneres.
What can I do? I'm sixty-one years old and after the last few years of hearing details of what priests used to do to altar boys under all those skirts they wear, I have been sexually lobotomized.
Still I will always wonder what could have been...
***************
POLANSKI PAYS 4 and a half million and gets out on Bail
City of Angels Celebrates:
If anyone complains Polanski should be in prison, remember Roman Catholic priests committed much worse crimes in the last 50 years. The bishops left thousands of crime victims among parish children, and we did not even get an admission of guilt from our rapists.
If the USA really wants to prosecute sex crime felons, first it start with Roger Mahony, Archbishop of Los Angeles. And while you are extraditing sex criminals, Cardinals Law and Levada are hiding out at the Vatican right now, to avoid prosecution. Read City of Angels blog at http://cityofangels5.blogspot.com for ongoing coverage of these crimes and coverups in the Catholic Church.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Am I jealous, paranoid, prophetic, or do I have incredibly skewered insight? I have to start posting these feelings somewhere, so here goes...
.
Like all posts here at City of Angels 2, in editing stages... This post is fiction based on a hallucination that will not go away, and that as a result makes it impossible for me to function in the "pedophile priest crime victim-survivor community" ... (Note to editor: Needs to be more intriguing, and find a better funnier name than SNARL)
***************************
Aargh there it is again.
I'm reading this stuff in my email about the woman who founded SNARL getting an award yesterday from a Catholic pedophile priest victim support group.
This drives me mad, as I seem to be the only one who can see who these people really are.
I can see this when other peopld can't, because I am about the only person writing about the pedophile priest problem in the Catholic Church as a national issue. So I have been doing in depth researching and interviewing on the topic now for three years. Most of the time, I am the only journalist covering the hearings, often I'm even the only reporter at SNARL's local press conferences.
As a result no one else in the world is seeing what I'm seeing.
And I'm seeing it everywhere I look.
For example, the idea that there are lots of pedophiles in other churches, a powerful but untrue talking point of apologists, germinated from right in the middle of SNARL, when in around 2007, they started to put out stories and finding "survivors" from Baptist and fundamentalist churches, and synagogues. Then in 2008 SNARL was joining up with a national group determined to stop child sex abuse of all kids everywhere.
Diversionary tactics. Subtle, subterfugious diversionary tactics.
When I first started seeing it, I used to call up colleagues like a mad woman, saying, "Can't you see it?" But I'm calling persons who I met at SNARL conferences
None of them can see it.
Then they stop calling me back.
For example, the Church publicly tells us the PR firm they use is Sitrick. If anyone asks, even in court documents, the company is the Century City Los Angeles firm "Sitrick," who list the Archdioceses on their website on the "Our Clients" page.
The PR firm pulling off the counter espionage running SNARL is not named anywhere. It's all off the record, no paper or electronic trail.
Paid in cash.
********************
Strange though how this morning (Nov. 21, 2009) was another demonstration of how they work. After I had just posted in this little fiction story, which I continue to write and edit online, that the counter espionage by the Church against survivors was created and run by a PR firm in LA, SNARL put out a press release naming Sitrick as the Law Firm the Delaware Diocese and others around the country.
The Church would never let the real information about their dirty tricks be made public like that. The Church wants you to believe they use the Sitrick PR Agency. Really this whole keep-down-the-victims project is being run on land line phones, postal mail, and in person conversations.
No electronic or paper trail. No corporate entity filing legal documents.
Subterfuge. Counterespionage.
But you have to understand throughout, this post is all fiction, I can't get the hallucination out of my head. So I'm looking at it as a gift of imagination, and so writing the hallucination as fiction. Because I keep seeing collusion, infiltration, diversionary statements everywhere- when really there might be nothing there at all, it might all be my imagination.
******************
The current project for the bishops with the help of SNARL is to focus on other religions. See, there was a pedophile at this church, look the synagogues are full of them.
Diversionary tactics.
SNARL comes out daily with press statements and events. But look closely, they are always AFTER a story has broken, through a lawsuit or through a story in a major newspaper, such the New York Times.
SNARL never holds a press event with news that hasn't already been released to the public in another way.
Damage Control.
It looks like they are making an announcement, but look closer. After a story breaks, SNARL jumps on it, but in the end, they don't release any more than what is already in the news. Then to viewers, SNARL standing up repeating what is already in the news appears to be advocacy, release of new information. What SNARL is really doing, in backroom arrangements with the bishops, is allowing no more details than what has already been released to come out. SNARL makes it look like they are working for the survivors, promoting publication of new stories, when they are really keeping a lid closed down tight on any new information about sex crimes of priests.
After the press event in whatever city, SNARL packs up all the leads and responses from media and new victims, and goes back to its St. Louis headquarters.
The local victims are left, sometimes still standing where the press event took place, wondering what just happened.
Worse yet, after the SNARL media event, when new victims or reporters from that city call the 800 number, or email the person on the flyer, their queries don't get answered.
SNARL's work appears to the public to be advocacy, what they really are doing is keeping us, the victims, from finding each other.
*****************
In fact, if it had not been for the Internet, the victims of pedophile priests would have never found each other. The internet was a surprise to the bishops, they hadn't planned back in 1983 how to battle surivors over the internet, they didn't even envision such a democratic way of communication would be developed. If it were not for the internet, no one would know the extent of these crimes, that there are thousands of victims in the USA right now, that the Modus Operandi was too similar from archdiocese to archdiocese for the bishops not to have known about the epidemic of pedophiles in their churches.
When God created email, the bishops realized they needed stronger leadership in SNARL. They put the guy from St. Louis in as director, sent the woman founder to law school and had her start running the annual conference, as the guy from St. Louis took over.
I know this all seems unbelievable. For the Church to create a "survivor network for those abused" that is really an arm of the Church, the abuser, is truly sinister, I know. But look at who we are talking about ... Roman Catholic bishops who allowed children to get raped by their priests.
They stop at nothing to get what they need. And do whatever it takes to keep their secrets.
And what they knew they needed way back in the 1980s was a way to keep the survivors in a controlled space, and a way to keep the total story, of how many pedophiles there are among Catholic priests and why, as secret as possible.
God only knows how many victims walked away from SNARL, quit being an activist, and gave up on finding other survivors after those anticlimatic press events. I know personally about dozens who quit, changed their phone numbers, when you do find them they say I don't want to have anything to do with that whole issue anymore.
I often talk to victims and they say they've quit trying, too often for it not to be a planned result. And all I do is write one small blog, an old lady at home, with two other part time jobs.
People leave SNARL baffled and twisted, confused, because they have contacte an organization expecting support and a network and when they lean on that support, discover it's more like a hologram, letting them fall right through.
Then SNARL stands at more press events, local victims who've found them show up and get handed a sign, the sign says call our 800 number, then SNARL returns to St. Louis, and doesn't return the calls.
*************************
Who do you believe happened to get into my cab the other day, he says
The counter-espionage group SNARL masquerading as an advocacy group uses subtle techniques, sometimes back door, a lot of whispering, a lot of comments dropped that leave you wondering.
They email each other about me, I know, as sometimes one of the less professional ones screws up and accidently includes my name in the email, so stuff arrives in my mailbox, people writing about me... now knowing I'm reading it.
It's disconcerting.
Another ploy is to say cutting remarks to a victim at vulnerable moments. They pull the victim aside first, or say it over the phone, so no one else hears it.
Then when I'm interviewing them later, I hear about it.
And it happens too often for it not to be a technique, an MO.
They don't leave behind evidence in emails, they never leave an electronic trails of the attacks, it only happens where it leaves no trail.
Emails sent to the victim at the time SNARL is in attack mode will be encouraging, strangely the opposite of what the crime victim is experiencing in person.
They target victims for elimination, the ones who don't stay quiet. Thanks to the internet, a few of us have found a way to get around the SNARL obstacles.
The regional leaders are not part of this subterfuge, but often are unwilling pawns. SNARL carefully selects and trains its regional leaders. They have to be "team players" which in other organizations means working together, everyone participating. In SNARL being a team player means you are willing to only do what SNARL tells them to do,
SNARL justifies this control. It's the Church, they say, you have to be careful and only say certain things or the Church will find out too much or the Church will possibly sue...
This control from above is counter intuitive, but so many regional people feel SOMETHING has to be done, and here are these people who are national leaders, they must know what's right...
SNARL then tells reporters, "Don't talk to the victims who show up at the press conference, as they are such damaged persons, and they don't always have the best mental health, you know what I mean."
The regional leaders are truly innocent pawns in this scheme, they think they're helping survivors by doing what SNARL says to do. It's only one maybe two people at the top in SNARL who really write the agenda. The regional leaders agree to only say what SNARL headquarters in St. Louis has approved them to say, so in the end the bishops really run the whole show.
All the press statements come from or are approved and edited in St. Louis.
If a regional leader says, Let's try this instead, the response from St. Louis is, "We don't do that."
Well who the hell is "we"?
**************
What is so brilliant about this PR subterfuge counterespionage plot is, if any grass roots victim or advocate starts to notice something wrong, and they start trying to explain what they are seeing wrong, they end up looking jealous, vindictive, self serving, even clinically paranoid.
BLIP
SWITCH
I have to do this. I have this sense that someone is going to come in the door and kill me any minute because I'm writing this. Easy to make it look like a burglary gone wrong or just about anything in this neighborhood.
I'm scared I'm going to be dead here in my East Hollywood apartment some morning, and all these documents will just not be in my apartment anymore.
A guy came by my house a few weeks back, with sweat pouring down his face, he stood in my door, said, "NO!" in a loud shout when I said, "Want to come in." Shaking, panting, he handed me this scruffy pile of papers, saying, Read this. They take in more than a half million dollars a year and they spend just less than half a million dollars a year, they say they spend exactly what they get each year, but Where does it go?"
I have to step back, he has white foam forming around his lips. He rises up almost becomes fuller and larger as he hollers:
"They put the money tight back into the church coffers. They take donation money from the plaintiffs after the lawsuit settlements and funnel it right back to the church. They've washed through a few million dollars already."
He hands me the stack of papers, a wad of stained wrinkled photocopies, then scampers down the hall and down the stairs and out of my eyesight before I can blink.
Hmm, these look like SNARL tax forms from 2004, 2005.
These papers, financial papers, I don't understand them. So back in Spring 2008 I called the guy in St. Louis who runs SNARL and tried to get him to explain where the money comes from and where it goes. He never answered, for six weeks of going back and forth by phone and email, he never answered, just kept sidestepping. He's the Director of the nonprofit yet he tells me he has no idea where the money comes from or where it goes? SNARL is a nonprofit "charity" registered in Illinois operating out of St. Louis.
They go through more than a half million dollars a year and there is almost nothing to show for it. Most of it is spent on "travel expenses."
FINANCIAL DOCUMENTS HERE
The rest will are scanned in at City of Angels 11 for you to read and decide what they say.
To be honest, I don't know if that's what these financial papers say. I have a brain that functions almost totally on the right side. I see numbers and they just blur in front of me, they don't have meaning. But it does seem like more than a million dollars came in over a two year period 2004-2005, and to be honest, there is not a million dollars worth of results to show for it.
When I tried to ask the Director of SNARL about finances in early 2007 he did a tap dance. I let these docs collect dust then for two years. Now I feel a real urge to get them up before it's too late. Like writing this in itself is putting my life in danger.
A lot of it is questionable. I don't know if this is smoking gun material or just more of my bizarre hallucination, seeing things that aren't really there. But I do know to go by hunches and compulsions now, after being dead and waking back up so many times. So here goes, some financial documents from SNARL where, to say the least, things don't add up.
By the time any donations came in from the 2007 L.A. settlements, SNARL had changed the password and codes that allowed people to view their financial papers at the Illinois government website that "monitors" non profits. I think that's where that person who handed me the crumpled stack of papers that produced these docs found them, as I went to the site in early 2008 and confirmed, these were the docs there.
But then a few weeks later the same password no longer got me into the Illinois Attorney General site where financial papers were posted.
So as far as I know, nobody really knows how much SNARL took in in 2007 and the following years.
Aren't nonprofits, who don't pay taxes because of their "charity work" (yeah right a charity) supposed to be transparent about their financial papers?
Look closely at the docs, money could be being laundered back into the Church. Imagine a group of bishops meeting in the 1980s adding that little twist, chuckling, "They will be so grateful to SNARL they will give huge parts of their settlements back to us by donating to SNARL. They won't even know they are really giving the money back to us." Then the bishops would all snarl in laughter.
***
Remember this is all just my hallucination being written down here as fiction, because otherwise it runs over and over in my head and drives me crazy.
*******
Wonder if the Director of SNARL answers all journalists' queries about finances with the same tap dance, which after a few weeks causes the reporter to go away.
All part of the scheme plotted up in advance back in the 1980s by the bishops:
************************
Another city, 1996, another madman at my door hands me this sheet of paper. At the time I was running a SNARL group in San Francisco, but it was different then.
This madman also stood at my door, handed me this paper, then scampered away. I didn't see anything significant about it, just a nonprofic incorporating paper. I set it aside. Then I ran across it while cleaning out a file cabinet a few weeks back, in fact it jumped up at me.
In case you wonder if SNARL is connected to the Catholic Church this is from their incorporating papers:
HERE IS THE ENTIRE DOCUMENT
(To see either item closer, click to enlarge)
*********************
SNARL works to keep survivors from connecting and creating a genuine network.
For example I have a friend who is a cab driver in one of the cities where SNARL has an office. He and I were comparing notes, getting real creative, and since his city is sort of close to mine, we were even planning a couple projects together. Neither of us was being secretive about the effort, I put a couple posts up at City of Angels about it, we were getting ideas, going places, growing.
Then I called one day and Rick says, “You'll never guess who got into my cab this afternoon.”
I said, Who.
“Big Bang Boom (Name redacted) of all people. I'm sitting in the square in line, she walks up out of the blue and gets in my cab.”
I know something is fishy here.
“Doesn't she have a car?”
I don't know, he says.
Two weeks later I call again and he’s evasive, but all of a sudden SNARL is working with him on projects, after they’d ignored his presence in the world for about six years. Two more weeks later I called him and he said to me something very strange.
He said, “Yeah I don't know about those projects. We've been doing something here together now as a group for a lot of years, and we don’t really need someone from the outside coming in with a lot of disruptive ideas and shaking the boat. We've got something going here and we don't want to change it.”
Something like that. The end result was Roger and I never followed up on our plans.
I don't know if they ever finished whatever Bing Bang Bong convinced him they had been doing together for six years.
********************
Too bad I didn't get a settlement from the Chicago Archdiocese. I'd be floating on the ocean on a cruise ship right now if I had. Instead I'm in a little room in East Hollywood writing this.
***************
Remember, this all could just be my paranoid delusion, seeing patterns that aren't really there, imagining plots and schemes where they don't exist. But I have to write these delusions down or they will drive me crazy running through my head.
*************************
There’s another strange pattern. Since I am about the only journalist covering the pedophile priest sex crime issue in the Catholic Church on a national level, all the time, I end up calling around the country trying to track down people to interview to get the right information.
I call someone from the SNARL website, they're friendly helpful, assure me they will call back. Then they don't. I call again and they don't call back. This has even happened when the person I called assured me he was an alcohol and drug rehab counselor and he knows how bad it feels when someone says they'll call back and they don’t. Then he didn't call me back either.
The only explanation is that someone told them not to talk to me. And that makes no sense, if SNARL is really an organization dedicated to getting out the truth about pedophile priest sex crimes, I'm the person people need to talk to, as I’ll put everything they want published out there on the internet through my blog.
Instead someone is telling the SNARL representatives not to talk to me, not to return my calls.
I no longer take it personally, now it’s just something I observe, with a wan smile.
****************
They've stopped returning my calls.
Everyone thinks SNARL is this wonderful support organization that has kept the crime victims from tanking and self destructing, when sometimes the result of a victim's interactions with SNARL are tanking and self destructing. SNARL does it in a way that nobody else can see.
Except me.
I've seen the pattern from this unique position I hold, writing about pedophile priests from a national level, in spite of everything SNARL did to keep me from following up from the time I was developing the first article.
SNARL has carried out this wily PR production, started in the 1980s, where they can convince the public the group came together from the grass roots, it formed from the bottom up, one woman's diligent efforts to create a way for the pedophile priest crime victims to find each other.
Network.
But I know that SNARL is really counter espionage, set up by the bishops back in the early 1980s, to give the appearance of being a support network for survivors, when in actuality SNARL's real purpose is to keep survivors as far away from each other as possible.
We are all, in our separate cities, walking around wondering, now, nine years after this story first broke and then burst in Boston, why isn't the mainstream knowledgeable? How come this story did not get out?
The persons who say they are getting the message out are really stifling it. Repeating the same words to reporters they were saying eight years ago, responding to news, not making it.
Separately, individually, isolated still, the victims in cities around the country wonder why this story hasn't broken harder mainstream.
It hasn't broken any more than the church has been forced to release to the public, nothing more.
In Tennessee, West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and all over Southern California, the crime victims wonder, why the story has not come out, and who are the other victims in their area to network with.
SNARL keeps the names of the others in the region secret from each other.
"Survivors want to keep their identities secret, so we never share names among survivors," says the guy in St. Louis.
Yeah? Then why were they calling you, a network, for help?
***************
The guy in St. Louis decides what gets said and by whom at SNARL press events.
*************
Remember, this could all just be my paranoid delusion written as fiction almost as therapy for me.
*****************
In 1980 the bishops knew the story about all the pedophiles in the priesthood was going to break public and break big soon. They hired PR consultants, and came up with a plan to keep the crime victims under control, a way to herd them like sheep, control everything they said to the media, even keep their mouths shut in fear of ruining a civil lawsuit.
The bishops could use this group to appear in public calling themselves advocates for victims. The only phone number they'd give to the press was their own. Then after each press event, they'd pack up and go back to St. Louis, and the actual structure of a support group or local lobbying efforts would fall apart and leave with them.
Then no one returns the calls that result from that press event. And no one tells the other survivors who was there or how to reach them or even if they ever called.
Then they make public statements that appear to be ground breaking, unless you look closely, for example this from that same conference where SNARL got its award last week:
Great! Nice to hear someone in leadership say that, right?
But when you look closely, you see, SNARL never really says anything that has never been said before.
In this case, it’s the same thing advocates on the pedophile priest issue been saying since 1995 at least.
A nice statement, but no earth got shattered.
So the public thinks there is a support organization, indeed even the victims think there is a support organization and forgive the SNARL leaders' mistakes because after all "They are victims too."
I'm the only one who can see that the same mistakes are made over and over again in city after city.
I think that in reality SNARL is run by a religious order, I suspect it's the Paracletes, whose very roots are in the sex crimes of Catholic priests, founded as an order that would serve "troubled priests" back in 1949, when they founded the first treatment center for pedophile priests in New Mexico. The Paracletes headquarters today is in St. Louis.
**************
When I'm interviewing people for City of Angels, the stories they tell me only happen in their one region, so they don't realize like I do, that the strange treatment of victims by SNARL is a pattern of distortion of truth that is happening in every city.
*****************
This paranoid delusion, hallucination that storms my brain daily
**********************
SNARL press statement appear to be coming from the crime victims, but they are actually written and approved by this group in St. Louis that masquerades as a support group but is really run by the Church.
A Brilliant PR scheme, you gotta hand it to them. I'm pretty sure the PR agency that cooked up this plan for the bishops in the 1980s is _______ in Century City, California.
That firms lists the Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archdiocese as onen of their clients. Considering that consultants can do stuff under a PR corporate umbrella and leave no paper or money trail. There is no real accountability in PR, fees can be paid in cash.
********************
2nd EDIT DONE TO HERE:
So I'm trying to keep my blood pressure down as I read in the news today about the SNARL founders getting another award, plus this group is making a nationwide pitch for donations, so right now as we sit here at our computers, thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of dollars are being transfered electronically from bank accounts all over the world into the SNARL coffers.
People donate to them thinking they do all this wonderful work for the crime victims, and yet I keep hearing these horror stories. Privately. Off the record.
In the media this morning is a speech where they list everything SNARL has done.
(INSERT)
But I read and the speech also says, "Still the problem of pedophiles in the priesthood continues to be with us today," and she citing three priests arrested with child porn on their computers in the last three months alone. Just this morning first story I read when I got to Abuse Tracker was about a church right there in Chicago where SNARL has its main offices, well its mailing address.
In Chicago just last week yet another pedophile priest has been charged and removed while there's an investigation. His parishioners adore him like robots and are coming out in huge numbers to support him saying, "this priest is like my father."
It's all over the Chicago news this morning. When the parishioners pour out for their priest it gets real press.
Parishioners in this Chicago church are mad at the plaintiffs.
There’s a quote from a woman saying, “Why did they wait so long? I don't believe what those so-called victims are saying about Father Pervert.”
Chicago where SNARL has its headquarters has one of the worst records of all for dealing with the pedophile priest problem.
********************
I'm sitting here still totally isolated in L.A. after years of trying to find other survivors, a journey that began when I read about SNARL in a magazine at the Catholic Charities office where I was going to go for therapy. Right after the recovered memory poured in, I thought I'd do better talking to a psychologist about it, and my insurance sent me to them, they were the only social service agency there was in Eureka, California. That's where we lived when Lizzie turned five and I would look at her and see myself at age five, and it's all textbook from there. Classic recovered memory of childhood trauma.
I don't know all this from going to therapy. In truth I stole the magazine and never even went to the appointment, instead went home, had a yard sale to raise cash, and moved me and my daughter to the SF Bay Area, because the magazine had that article that told me SNARL had a branch in the SF Bay Area.
I probably should have seen the therapist. But I thought for sure, right there in teh Catholic Charities mental health waiting room, that this was angelic intervention. I had to go right away to the Bay Area and join up with SNARL.
It's now 15 years later.
********************
I know there are other surivors somewhere in or near Los Angeles, as 510 plaintiffs got settlements in 2007 from the L.A. Archdiocese.
SNARL had a full time paid rep keeping the crime victims "organized" during the years long legal battle.
I went to as many of the SNARL events they had, trying to connect with other victims.
Yet I still don’t have a friend in the world. The couple people I met through SNARL here have disappeared.
My experience locally with SNARL left my self esteem in the gutter, only thing that revived me was talking to other crime victims who I found in spite of SNARL and finding out a lot of the crime victims ended up feeling like unwanted trash in the mud after their dealings with SNARL.
It's a "go away” approach to advocacy, that leaves the victim feeling strangely re-victimized,
Victims all over the country tell me they feel the same way after dealing with SNARL: cut off, left out, even snubbed.
******************
My own work feeds the hallucination
**********************
Stories I hear over and over, "They held a press event and didn't tell anyone." "SNARL returns phone calls." And worse: "They pulled me to the side and said... (here then is something very geared for that one person, whispered off to the side, that demolishes their self confidence.)
The end result is the comment I hear so often: "After that experience with SNARL, I decided to quit being an activist at all."
Exactly what the bishops wanted when they set this all up in the 1980s.
The PR scheme also led to their leaders getting awards regularly for the great job they're doing for the crime victims. Because none of the damage control and activist elimination happens where the public can see it.
*****************
SNARL stands for Survivors Network of those Abused by Reverends and Laymen
Yet among the victims there really is no network. When a person runs a local SNARL group, they never see the list of members in their region, they never write the final version of a press statement. All that data and "creative" work is done in St. Louis. A leader who does not stick to the script does not remain a leader for very long.
Locally, you rarely find out the results of these press events. No one finds out how to get in touch with other survivors locally through SNARL.
As a result thousands of crime victims of pedophile priests around the country are all still very disconnected.
It was designed for us to end up this way: disjoined, confused about what happened, still isolated.
**************
(1st Edit done to here)
In the 1980s and early 90s there was another group for the victims that was a lot like SNARL, it started about the same time, and had no connections to the Church. Except its founder was a priest. He died mysteriously, and after he died, family members who no one had ever seen before wondered if they were even real members of his family. They arrived before the funeral, took out the group's phones, packed up all the files, and stopped returning mail. No one was there to answer the phones, and before long the reporters and crime victims stopped calling. (It was still pre-email era).
So the other more grassroots group for survivors was taken care of, gotten out of the way early.
SNARL emerged and grew.
*******************
Most amazing to me is that in L.A. where there was the only full time paid SNARL leader in the country in 2006-2007, when there were more than a thousand plaintiffs who settled with the church in Orange, San Diego, Riverside, as well as Los Angeles Counties-
There is now virtually Nothing Left of SNARL. No meetings (unless they are secret ones, which is not very network-y), no lobbying effort, no organizing or planning sessions for activism, no core group to form a steering committee.
Just people who have stopped calling each other.
With all those plaintiffs in L.A. last few years, and a full time paid SNARL person corralling them around town leading press events, holding regular meetings, why didn't they set up something permanent? Why did the group instead disperse and totally fall apart, here in L.A. where there was the only full time paid SNARL leader working to create the SNARL network for those thousand plaintiffs?
It doesn't add up, unless turmoil and dissolution was on the agenda to begin with.
If turmoil was the purpose of having a full time paid person running SNARL in L.A., it worked, it succeeded.
There is no network of survivors left from all that effort in L.A. two years ago.
It doesn't make sense. Unless it was designed and set up to fail, then it succeeded.
*************
I wasn't part of the L.A. plaintiffs, my stuff happened in Illinois. But I live in L.A.
For one solid year 2006 I emailed the local So Cal rep for SNARL and said, let’s do this, I’d like to organize this, I really want to do this. I never got a word of encouragement, instead I got emails back saying, no, that's not a good idea, and I don't think so, and you're wrong that's not what that article says, things that made no sense at all. But I persisted and finally almost got them to agree to let me start a meeting in Hollywood but then the person running California SNARL at the time pulled me aside at a courthouse gathering to whisper to me, 'Kay, we think you're too sick to run a SNARL group. You wouldn't believe how much time it takes and you're just not healthy enough.'
Thinking these people knew what they were doing I nodded. She and I had our heads bowed together off to the side, I walked back to the group, kept my head bowed, suddenly noticed how much I really am not healthy, and convinced myself I was too sick to do much of anything for the next six months or so.
*******************
********************
I revived and again started asking SNARL to start a group in Hollywood, if I can't run it, I'll help someone else run it, I found someone willing to work with me on organizing a Hollywood group
and well …
Got shot down again by the local paid leader, only this time much harder.
I felt like, Someone is telling her to do this to me, it doesn't match her personality to be this mean.
I started City of Angels blog in January 2007 in a state of reaction and anger, staying up three days in a row with no sleep writing City of Angels 1, feeling, well if I can't do anything through SNARL, I'll have to do something on my own.
And I'm still totally on my own.
One guy who I did befriend through the few SNARL events there were in L.A. in 2006 told me he got the word from other people in SNARL not to trust me. He said it was because I showed up at the courthouse for Michael Baker hearings with a note pad writing things down. Every now and then in 2006 there would be a hearing in criminal courts and a notice would go out by email that SNARL members were encouraged to come and support the victims of Michael Baker.
At these events, we’d sit in the courtroom for hours. The only time for a possible conversation was if you happened to be in the hall going for coffee or to the john at the same time as someone else from the SNARL group.
But you weren't even sure which ones were the people from the SNARL group, so opening up a conversation was awkward.
In the courtroom, there would be three rows or so of people surrounding the California full time paid SNARL leader, but in the end I didn't meet any of them. You’d barely get to know the person sitting next to you, as if you even whispered, these intimidating court officers would glare at you and threaten your removal.
Okay, so defrocked pedophile priest Michael Baker comes out with his orange jumpsuit, we get glimpses of him back behind the jailhouse blockade. He comes out of the holding area about five feet into the room and talks to the judge off mic, and even on mic you can’t hear them. The attorneys judge and pedophile priest exchange two or three words, agree on a date for him to appear again, usually months later, and that would be it.
For this we sit for three hours as a group silently waiting. The notice would go out from SNARL saying it starts any time after 8 AM that morning so get there early, and since it's the closest I've seen to a SNARL support group meeting that I need so much, I'm there before eight and when the court opens, the group goes in, sits in the courtroom.
And we don't talk to each other.
The Michael Baker hearing goes on finally at 11:15 and we've all sat there for three hours to "support the victims of Baker," but I still don't even know which persons in our group are the victims of Baker.
I have PTSD and can’t let my mind be empty, plus I’ve always been a writer even when I haven't been publishing like from 1994 to 2005.
So of course coming to criminal courts I have a yellow legal pad in my bag. Sitting there at this event with no one to talk to, I get out the yellow pad and start writing, writing everything I see, describing the people around me, the attorneys, the cops. Wonder where those notes are today? They're from 2006, and my home is full of little places where I’ve stashed notebooks and pens, meaning to get back to them and then well. . .
(It’s fun to find these notepads here and there around the house and start reading them two or three years later when they emerge. I’ve yet to come across my notes from those Michael Baker criminal court hearings.)
When the "hearing" or "appearance" was over there would be a press conference and the one or two people who were always the core of the SNARL group would answer questions. I’d stand there like a geek, no one introduced me to anyone. Then it would be over and everyone would disperse and that was SNARL in Los Angeles in 2006.
Okay back to my yellow pad.
We're at criminal court, the SNARL gathering where I’ve come hoping to meet people but instead we're sitting in a courtroom and no one can talk. I pull out my yellow pad and start writing down everything I see thinking I'm going to type it all into a story afterwards.
Then two years later, I'm talking to the one person I met locally in SNARL, and he tells me, “Yeah several people from SNARL said, don't trust anyone who shows up and starts writing things down.”
Don't trust people who start writing things down? If I were a spy, would I pull out a yellow pad and openly start taking notes?
Plus this is L.A. Everyone thinks they have a screenplay inside them.
I'm perplexed by his remark.
I ask my friend more, trying to pinpoint if he heard someone from SNARL say not to trust writers before I showed up with my yellow pad or after, but he doesn't know for sure.
He does say, "I do remember someone said something about a woman from Hollywood with a yellow pad."
Another person tells me, "Yeah SNARL said don't talk to that crazy woman in Hollywood."
I begin to confirm it, it's not just paranoia, I've been singled out.
His comment did help explain why even during courtroom breaks when we’d be out in the hallway, no one would connect their eyes with me.
Or it all could just be your plain old Catholic priest crime victim inevitable paranoia and distrust of everyone.
Those hearings about Michael Baker were the last of SNARL in L.A. There are no support group meetings that I know of. Occasionally they throw a press conference and people from SNARL Orange County and Headquarters in St. Louis show up, (the nonprofit is incorporated in Illinois run out of St. Louis) but I'm the only L.A. resident at L.A. SNARL events today.
So I'm sitting here trying to just accept that my life is so isolated while finding another way to solve the problem. Every effort I made to find other survivors here in L.A. was a diffused bomb, never worked, and I was so immersed in the effort that my civilian friends stopped calling me, got tired of hearing about pedophile priests and conspiracies and, I think, got scared of how angry I could get.
Also we've moved from a chi-chi part of town in 2003 to this Midnight Cowboy designed by Ratso Rizzo thousand dollar a month squat in a not too good part of town, a neighborhood I myself would never drive into before the turn of the century (before homelessness from 2003-2005) and I truly believe most people just don't want to be around someone who is so blatantly poor, especially when they've just been awarded a million dollars from a settlement for a crime similar to what put me in these circumstances to begin with.
It's just ... awkward.
I can't help thinking that was part of the bishops' plan from the very beginning when they first started meeting on the issue of pedophile priests back in the early 1980s:
The bishops decided: See to it that some victims get settlements and some don't.
What better way to divide a group than to put them on total opposite ends of the economic spectrum? The crime victims will not mix together, will not run in the same circles, will not even end up living near each other.
And there will always be a level of distrust, those who get settlements immediately suspect those who did not get settlements will ask them for money. Those who shared in a global settlement don't want the others in their globe to know how much or how little they got.
So civil lawsuits themselves have encouraged the opposite of networking in the pedophile priest crime victim community.
I know for a fact that SNARL advised people in the L.A. 2007 settlements to watch out for people suddenly showing up in their lives asking for money.
Maybe people thought that's what I was?
The way the L.A. plaintiffs all stopped returning my calls and emails in late 2007, I can't help but think someone told them to stay away from me. The sudden snub just happened so ... globally.
The end result of civil lawsuits across the country is a population of crime victims who don't want to communicate with each other.
***********
If I'd been raped at age five in California as a kid by a pedophile priest, I'd have a condo now. I'd have been part of the 2007 L.A. settlement. Since I was raped by a pedophile priest in Chicago, I was thrown out into the wind and left to stay resource free in inner city L.A.
The Catholic Church in Chicago ignored my pleas for help.
Because they can. Illinois law has been run by criminals for so many decades, the Church thrives on that state's back door protocols.
I imagine an advantage for a non profit incorporating in Illinois is all they can get away with, since there is little or no oversight ...
*****************
That one guy who did befriend me from L.A. SNARL - once he made it clear to me he would give me no money from his settlement even though I never asked him for any - did not last long as a friend. He ended up being so hostile to females with so many anger management issues, I couldn't take the verbal batterings anymore.
Now I sometimes wonder if he was an infiltrator from the church too. I too now suspect everyone of being an undercover agent for the church at this point.
Don't trust anyone.
So today I'm watching the woman who founded SNARL get an award. I read in my emails the devotional speeches and announcements being made last weekend, as she and SNARL are being credited with the great work they've done, and truly, from the outside, it does look like great work.
And obviously other people have had much better experiences with the support organization than I have. I felt I was not welcome from the moment I got there, and that last attack right after the 2006 Christmas holidays was an extremely painful experience. If my daughter and the few people I'd met over the internet hadn't been here holding me down there in early January 2007 when the weird attack happened, I could have self destructed, it was such a bad experience.
I would have let it go and left it in the pat, if I hadn't heard similar stories from survivors around the country.
Like all posts here at City of Angels 2, in editing stages... This post is fiction based on a hallucination that will not go away, and that as a result makes it impossible for me to function in the "pedophile priest crime victim-survivor community" ... (Note to editor: Needs to be more intriguing, and find a better funnier name than SNARL)
***************************
No one else knew how big the pedophile priest problem was as far back as the 1980s, no one but the Roman Catholic bishops. They knew they had to do something to keep the crime victims from finding each other and comparing stories.
Aargh there it is again.
I'm reading this stuff in my email about the woman who founded SNARL getting an award yesterday from a Catholic pedophile priest victim support group.
This drives me mad, as I seem to be the only one who can see who these people really are.
I can see this when other peopld can't, because I am about the only person writing about the pedophile priest problem in the Catholic Church as a national issue. So I have been doing in depth researching and interviewing on the topic now for three years. Most of the time, I am the only journalist covering the hearings, often I'm even the only reporter at SNARL's local press conferences.
As a result no one else in the world is seeing what I'm seeing.
And I'm seeing it everywhere I look.
For example, the idea that there are lots of pedophiles in other churches, a powerful but untrue talking point of apologists, germinated from right in the middle of SNARL, when in around 2007, they started to put out stories and finding "survivors" from Baptist and fundamentalist churches, and synagogues. Then in 2008 SNARL was joining up with a national group determined to stop child sex abuse of all kids everywhere.
Diversionary tactics. Subtle, subterfugious diversionary tactics.
When I first started seeing it, I used to call up colleagues like a mad woman, saying, "Can't you see it?" But I'm calling persons who I met at SNARL conferences
None of them can see it.
Then they stop calling me back.
For example, the Church publicly tells us the PR firm they use is Sitrick. If anyone asks, even in court documents, the company is the Century City Los Angeles firm "Sitrick," who list the Archdioceses on their website on the "Our Clients" page.
The PR firm pulling off the counter espionage running SNARL is not named anywhere. It's all off the record, no paper or electronic trail.
Paid in cash.
********************
Strange though how this morning (Nov. 21, 2009) was another demonstration of how they work. After I had just posted in this little fiction story, which I continue to write and edit online, that the counter espionage by the Church against survivors was created and run by a PR firm in LA, SNARL put out a press release naming Sitrick as the Law Firm the Delaware Diocese and others around the country.
The Church would never let the real information about their dirty tricks be made public like that. The Church wants you to believe they use the Sitrick PR Agency. Really this whole keep-down-the-victims project is being run on land line phones, postal mail, and in person conversations.
No electronic or paper trail. No corporate entity filing legal documents.
Subterfuge. Counterespionage.
But you have to understand throughout, this post is all fiction, I can't get the hallucination out of my head. So I'm looking at it as a gift of imagination, and so writing the hallucination as fiction. Because I keep seeing collusion, infiltration, diversionary statements everywhere- when really there might be nothing there at all, it might all be my imagination.
******************
The current project for the bishops with the help of SNARL is to focus on other religions. See, there was a pedophile at this church, look the synagogues are full of them.
Diversionary tactics.
SNARL comes out daily with press statements and events. But look closely, they are always AFTER a story has broken, through a lawsuit or through a story in a major newspaper, such the New York Times.
SNARL never holds a press event with news that hasn't already been released to the public in another way.
Damage Control.
It looks like they are making an announcement, but look closer. After a story breaks, SNARL jumps on it, but in the end, they don't release any more than what is already in the news. Then to viewers, SNARL standing up repeating what is already in the news appears to be advocacy, release of new information. What SNARL is really doing, in backroom arrangements with the bishops, is allowing no more details than what has already been released to come out. SNARL makes it look like they are working for the survivors, promoting publication of new stories, when they are really keeping a lid closed down tight on any new information about sex crimes of priests.
After the press event in whatever city, SNARL packs up all the leads and responses from media and new victims, and goes back to its St. Louis headquarters.
The local victims are left, sometimes still standing where the press event took place, wondering what just happened.
Worse yet, after the SNARL media event, when new victims or reporters from that city call the 800 number, or email the person on the flyer, their queries don't get answered.
SNARL's work appears to the public to be advocacy, what they really are doing is keeping us, the victims, from finding each other.
*****************
In fact, if it had not been for the Internet, the victims of pedophile priests would have never found each other. The internet was a surprise to the bishops, they hadn't planned back in 1983 how to battle surivors over the internet, they didn't even envision such a democratic way of communication would be developed. If it were not for the internet, no one would know the extent of these crimes, that there are thousands of victims in the USA right now, that the Modus Operandi was too similar from archdiocese to archdiocese for the bishops not to have known about the epidemic of pedophiles in their churches.
When God created email, the bishops realized they needed stronger leadership in SNARL. They put the guy from St. Louis in as director, sent the woman founder to law school and had her start running the annual conference, as the guy from St. Louis took over.
I know this all seems unbelievable. For the Church to create a "survivor network for those abused" that is really an arm of the Church, the abuser, is truly sinister, I know. But look at who we are talking about ... Roman Catholic bishops who allowed children to get raped by their priests.
They stop at nothing to get what they need. And do whatever it takes to keep their secrets.
And what they knew they needed way back in the 1980s was a way to keep the survivors in a controlled space, and a way to keep the total story, of how many pedophiles there are among Catholic priests and why, as secret as possible.
God only knows how many victims walked away from SNARL, quit being an activist, and gave up on finding other survivors after those anticlimatic press events. I know personally about dozens who quit, changed their phone numbers, when you do find them they say I don't want to have anything to do with that whole issue anymore.
I often talk to victims and they say they've quit trying, too often for it not to be a planned result. And all I do is write one small blog, an old lady at home, with two other part time jobs.
People leave SNARL baffled and twisted, confused, because they have contacte an organization expecting support and a network and when they lean on that support, discover it's more like a hologram, letting them fall right through.
Then SNARL stands at more press events, local victims who've found them show up and get handed a sign, the sign says call our 800 number, then SNARL returns to St. Louis, and doesn't return the calls.
*************************
Who do you believe happened to get into my cab the other day, he says
The counter-espionage group SNARL masquerading as an advocacy group uses subtle techniques, sometimes back door, a lot of whispering, a lot of comments dropped that leave you wondering.
They email each other about me, I know, as sometimes one of the less professional ones screws up and accidently includes my name in the email, so stuff arrives in my mailbox, people writing about me... now knowing I'm reading it.
It's disconcerting.
Another ploy is to say cutting remarks to a victim at vulnerable moments. They pull the victim aside first, or say it over the phone, so no one else hears it.
Then when I'm interviewing them later, I hear about it.
And it happens too often for it not to be a technique, an MO.
They don't leave behind evidence in emails, they never leave an electronic trails of the attacks, it only happens where it leaves no trail.
Emails sent to the victim at the time SNARL is in attack mode will be encouraging, strangely the opposite of what the crime victim is experiencing in person.
They target victims for elimination, the ones who don't stay quiet. Thanks to the internet, a few of us have found a way to get around the SNARL obstacles.
The regional leaders are not part of this subterfuge, but often are unwilling pawns. SNARL carefully selects and trains its regional leaders. They have to be "team players" which in other organizations means working together, everyone participating. In SNARL being a team player means you are willing to only do what SNARL tells them to do,
SNARL justifies this control. It's the Church, they say, you have to be careful and only say certain things or the Church will find out too much or the Church will possibly sue...
This control from above is counter intuitive, but so many regional people feel SOMETHING has to be done, and here are these people who are national leaders, they must know what's right...
SNARL then tells reporters, "Don't talk to the victims who show up at the press conference, as they are such damaged persons, and they don't always have the best mental health, you know what I mean."
The regional leaders are truly innocent pawns in this scheme, they think they're helping survivors by doing what SNARL says to do. It's only one maybe two people at the top in SNARL who really write the agenda. The regional leaders agree to only say what SNARL headquarters in St. Louis has approved them to say, so in the end the bishops really run the whole show.
All the press statements come from or are approved and edited in St. Louis.
If a regional leader says, Let's try this instead, the response from St. Louis is, "We don't do that."
Well who the hell is "we"?
**************
What is so brilliant about this PR subterfuge counterespionage plot is, if any grass roots victim or advocate starts to notice something wrong, and they start trying to explain what they are seeing wrong, they end up looking jealous, vindictive, self serving, even clinically paranoid.
BLIP
SWITCH
I have to do this. I have this sense that someone is going to come in the door and kill me any minute because I'm writing this. Easy to make it look like a burglary gone wrong or just about anything in this neighborhood.
I'm scared I'm going to be dead here in my East Hollywood apartment some morning, and all these documents will just not be in my apartment anymore.
A guy came by my house a few weeks back, with sweat pouring down his face, he stood in my door, said, "NO!" in a loud shout when I said, "Want to come in." Shaking, panting, he handed me this scruffy pile of papers, saying, Read this. They take in more than a half million dollars a year and they spend just less than half a million dollars a year, they say they spend exactly what they get each year, but Where does it go?"
I have to step back, he has white foam forming around his lips. He rises up almost becomes fuller and larger as he hollers:
"They put the money tight back into the church coffers. They take donation money from the plaintiffs after the lawsuit settlements and funnel it right back to the church. They've washed through a few million dollars already."
He hands me the stack of papers, a wad of stained wrinkled photocopies, then scampers down the hall and down the stairs and out of my eyesight before I can blink.
Hmm, these look like SNARL tax forms from 2004, 2005.
These papers, financial papers, I don't understand them. So back in Spring 2008 I called the guy in St. Louis who runs SNARL and tried to get him to explain where the money comes from and where it goes. He never answered, for six weeks of going back and forth by phone and email, he never answered, just kept sidestepping. He's the Director of the nonprofit yet he tells me he has no idea where the money comes from or where it goes? SNARL is a nonprofit "charity" registered in Illinois operating out of St. Louis.
They go through more than a half million dollars a year and there is almost nothing to show for it. Most of it is spent on "travel expenses."
FINANCIAL DOCUMENTS HERE
The rest will are scanned in at City of Angels 11 for you to read and decide what they say.
To be honest, I don't know if that's what these financial papers say. I have a brain that functions almost totally on the right side. I see numbers and they just blur in front of me, they don't have meaning. But it does seem like more than a million dollars came in over a two year period 2004-2005, and to be honest, there is not a million dollars worth of results to show for it.
When I tried to ask the Director of SNARL about finances in early 2007 he did a tap dance. I let these docs collect dust then for two years. Now I feel a real urge to get them up before it's too late. Like writing this in itself is putting my life in danger.
A lot of it is questionable. I don't know if this is smoking gun material or just more of my bizarre hallucination, seeing things that aren't really there. But I do know to go by hunches and compulsions now, after being dead and waking back up so many times. So here goes, some financial documents from SNARL where, to say the least, things don't add up.
By the time any donations came in from the 2007 L.A. settlements, SNARL had changed the password and codes that allowed people to view their financial papers at the Illinois government website that "monitors" non profits. I think that's where that person who handed me the crumpled stack of papers that produced these docs found them, as I went to the site in early 2008 and confirmed, these were the docs there.
But then a few weeks later the same password no longer got me into the Illinois Attorney General site where financial papers were posted.
So as far as I know, nobody really knows how much SNARL took in in 2007 and the following years.
Aren't nonprofits, who don't pay taxes because of their "charity work" (yeah right a charity) supposed to be transparent about their financial papers?
Look closely at the docs, money could be being laundered back into the Church. Imagine a group of bishops meeting in the 1980s adding that little twist, chuckling, "They will be so grateful to SNARL they will give huge parts of their settlements back to us by donating to SNARL. They won't even know they are really giving the money back to us." Then the bishops would all snarl in laughter.
***
Remember this is all just my hallucination being written down here as fiction, because otherwise it runs over and over in my head and drives me crazy.
*******
Wonder if the Director of SNARL answers all journalists' queries about finances with the same tap dance, which after a few weeks causes the reporter to go away.
All part of the scheme plotted up in advance back in the 1980s by the bishops:
************************
Another city, 1996, another madman at my door hands me this sheet of paper. At the time I was running a SNARL group in San Francisco, but it was different then.
This madman also stood at my door, handed me this paper, then scampered away. I didn't see anything significant about it, just a nonprofic incorporating paper. I set it aside. Then I ran across it while cleaning out a file cabinet a few weeks back, in fact it jumped up at me.
In case you wonder if SNARL is connected to the Catholic Church this is from their incorporating papers:
HERE IS THE ENTIRE DOCUMENT
(To see either item closer, click to enlarge)
*********************
SNARL works to keep survivors from connecting and creating a genuine network.
For example I have a friend who is a cab driver in one of the cities where SNARL has an office. He and I were comparing notes, getting real creative, and since his city is sort of close to mine, we were even planning a couple projects together. Neither of us was being secretive about the effort, I put a couple posts up at City of Angels about it, we were getting ideas, going places, growing.
Then I called one day and Rick says, “You'll never guess who got into my cab this afternoon.”
I said, Who.
“Big Bang Boom (Name redacted) of all people. I'm sitting in the square in line, she walks up out of the blue and gets in my cab.”
I know something is fishy here.
“Doesn't she have a car?”
I don't know, he says.
Two weeks later I call again and he’s evasive, but all of a sudden SNARL is working with him on projects, after they’d ignored his presence in the world for about six years. Two more weeks later I called him and he said to me something very strange.
He said, “Yeah I don't know about those projects. We've been doing something here together now as a group for a lot of years, and we don’t really need someone from the outside coming in with a lot of disruptive ideas and shaking the boat. We've got something going here and we don't want to change it.”
Something like that. The end result was Roger and I never followed up on our plans.
I don't know if they ever finished whatever Bing Bang Bong convinced him they had been doing together for six years.
********************
Too bad I didn't get a settlement from the Chicago Archdiocese. I'd be floating on the ocean on a cruise ship right now if I had. Instead I'm in a little room in East Hollywood writing this.
***************
Remember, this all could just be my paranoid delusion, seeing patterns that aren't really there, imagining plots and schemes where they don't exist. But I have to write these delusions down or they will drive me crazy running through my head.
*************************
There’s another strange pattern. Since I am about the only journalist covering the pedophile priest sex crime issue in the Catholic Church on a national level, all the time, I end up calling around the country trying to track down people to interview to get the right information.
I call someone from the SNARL website, they're friendly helpful, assure me they will call back. Then they don't. I call again and they don't call back. This has even happened when the person I called assured me he was an alcohol and drug rehab counselor and he knows how bad it feels when someone says they'll call back and they don’t. Then he didn't call me back either.
The only explanation is that someone told them not to talk to me. And that makes no sense, if SNARL is really an organization dedicated to getting out the truth about pedophile priest sex crimes, I'm the person people need to talk to, as I’ll put everything they want published out there on the internet through my blog.
Instead someone is telling the SNARL representatives not to talk to me, not to return my calls.
I no longer take it personally, now it’s just something I observe, with a wan smile.
****************
They've stopped returning my calls.
Everyone thinks SNARL is this wonderful support organization that has kept the crime victims from tanking and self destructing, when sometimes the result of a victim's interactions with SNARL are tanking and self destructing. SNARL does it in a way that nobody else can see.
Except me.
I've seen the pattern from this unique position I hold, writing about pedophile priests from a national level, in spite of everything SNARL did to keep me from following up from the time I was developing the first article.
SNARL has carried out this wily PR production, started in the 1980s, where they can convince the public the group came together from the grass roots, it formed from the bottom up, one woman's diligent efforts to create a way for the pedophile priest crime victims to find each other.
Network.
But I know that SNARL is really counter espionage, set up by the bishops back in the early 1980s, to give the appearance of being a support network for survivors, when in actuality SNARL's real purpose is to keep survivors as far away from each other as possible.
We are all, in our separate cities, walking around wondering, now, nine years after this story first broke and then burst in Boston, why isn't the mainstream knowledgeable? How come this story did not get out?
The persons who say they are getting the message out are really stifling it. Repeating the same words to reporters they were saying eight years ago, responding to news, not making it.
Separately, individually, isolated still, the victims in cities around the country wonder why this story hasn't broken harder mainstream.
It hasn't broken any more than the church has been forced to release to the public, nothing more.
In Tennessee, West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and all over Southern California, the crime victims wonder, why the story has not come out, and who are the other victims in their area to network with.
SNARL keeps the names of the others in the region secret from each other.
"Survivors want to keep their identities secret, so we never share names among survivors," says the guy in St. Louis.
Yeah? Then why were they calling you, a network, for help?
***************
The guy in St. Louis decides what gets said and by whom at SNARL press events.
*************
Remember, this could all just be my paranoid delusion written as fiction almost as therapy for me.
*****************
In 1980 the bishops knew the story about all the pedophiles in the priesthood was going to break public and break big soon. They hired PR consultants, and came up with a plan to keep the crime victims under control, a way to herd them like sheep, control everything they said to the media, even keep their mouths shut in fear of ruining a civil lawsuit.
The bishops could use this group to appear in public calling themselves advocates for victims. The only phone number they'd give to the press was their own. Then after each press event, they'd pack up and go back to St. Louis, and the actual structure of a support group or local lobbying efforts would fall apart and leave with them.
Then no one returns the calls that result from that press event. And no one tells the other survivors who was there or how to reach them or even if they ever called.
Then they make public statements that appear to be ground breaking, unless you look closely, for example this from that same conference where SNARL got its award last week:
"Whether a pedophile priest is hetero or homosexual is not the problem. It's the culture of sexual secrecy that causes priests to do secret sexual things. If the bishops and pope say all sex by priests is wrong - dating, masturbation, porn, everything is wrong - then priests will have sexual secrets. Then other priests hold those sexual secrets over their heads as blackmail, and pedophiles don't get reported."
Great! Nice to hear someone in leadership say that, right?
But when you look closely, you see, SNARL never really says anything that has never been said before.
In this case, it’s the same thing advocates on the pedophile priest issue been saying since 1995 at least.
A nice statement, but no earth got shattered.
So the public thinks there is a support organization, indeed even the victims think there is a support organization and forgive the SNARL leaders' mistakes because after all "They are victims too."
I'm the only one who can see that the same mistakes are made over and over again in city after city.
I think that in reality SNARL is run by a religious order, I suspect it's the Paracletes, whose very roots are in the sex crimes of Catholic priests, founded as an order that would serve "troubled priests" back in 1949, when they founded the first treatment center for pedophile priests in New Mexico. The Paracletes headquarters today is in St. Louis.
**************
When I'm interviewing people for City of Angels, the stories they tell me only happen in their one region, so they don't realize like I do, that the strange treatment of victims by SNARL is a pattern of distortion of truth that is happening in every city.
*****************
This paranoid delusion, hallucination that storms my brain daily
**********************
SNARL press statement appear to be coming from the crime victims, but they are actually written and approved by this group in St. Louis that masquerades as a support group but is really run by the Church.
A Brilliant PR scheme, you gotta hand it to them. I'm pretty sure the PR agency that cooked up this plan for the bishops in the 1980s is _______ in Century City, California.
That firms lists the Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archdiocese as onen of their clients. Considering that consultants can do stuff under a PR corporate umbrella and leave no paper or money trail. There is no real accountability in PR, fees can be paid in cash.
********************
2nd EDIT DONE TO HERE:
So I'm trying to keep my blood pressure down as I read in the news today about the SNARL founders getting another award, plus this group is making a nationwide pitch for donations, so right now as we sit here at our computers, thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of dollars are being transfered electronically from bank accounts all over the world into the SNARL coffers.
People donate to them thinking they do all this wonderful work for the crime victims, and yet I keep hearing these horror stories. Privately. Off the record.
In the media this morning is a speech where they list everything SNARL has done.
(INSERT)
But I read and the speech also says, "Still the problem of pedophiles in the priesthood continues to be with us today," and she citing three priests arrested with child porn on their computers in the last three months alone. Just this morning first story I read when I got to Abuse Tracker was about a church right there in Chicago where SNARL has its main offices, well its mailing address.
In Chicago just last week yet another pedophile priest has been charged and removed while there's an investigation. His parishioners adore him like robots and are coming out in huge numbers to support him saying, "this priest is like my father."
It's all over the Chicago news this morning. When the parishioners pour out for their priest it gets real press.
Parishioners in this Chicago church are mad at the plaintiffs.
There’s a quote from a woman saying, “Why did they wait so long? I don't believe what those so-called victims are saying about Father Pervert.”
Chicago where SNARL has its headquarters has one of the worst records of all for dealing with the pedophile priest problem.
********************
I'm sitting here still totally isolated in L.A. after years of trying to find other survivors, a journey that began when I read about SNARL in a magazine at the Catholic Charities office where I was going to go for therapy. Right after the recovered memory poured in, I thought I'd do better talking to a psychologist about it, and my insurance sent me to them, they were the only social service agency there was in Eureka, California. That's where we lived when Lizzie turned five and I would look at her and see myself at age five, and it's all textbook from there. Classic recovered memory of childhood trauma.
I don't know all this from going to therapy. In truth I stole the magazine and never even went to the appointment, instead went home, had a yard sale to raise cash, and moved me and my daughter to the SF Bay Area, because the magazine had that article that told me SNARL had a branch in the SF Bay Area.
I probably should have seen the therapist. But I thought for sure, right there in teh Catholic Charities mental health waiting room, that this was angelic intervention. I had to go right away to the Bay Area and join up with SNARL.
It's now 15 years later.
********************
I know there are other surivors somewhere in or near Los Angeles, as 510 plaintiffs got settlements in 2007 from the L.A. Archdiocese.
SNARL had a full time paid rep keeping the crime victims "organized" during the years long legal battle.
I went to as many of the SNARL events they had, trying to connect with other victims.
Yet I still don’t have a friend in the world. The couple people I met through SNARL here have disappeared.
My experience locally with SNARL left my self esteem in the gutter, only thing that revived me was talking to other crime victims who I found in spite of SNARL and finding out a lot of the crime victims ended up feeling like unwanted trash in the mud after their dealings with SNARL.
It's a "go away” approach to advocacy, that leaves the victim feeling strangely re-victimized,
Victims all over the country tell me they feel the same way after dealing with SNARL: cut off, left out, even snubbed.
******************
My own work feeds the hallucination
**********************
Stories I hear over and over, "They held a press event and didn't tell anyone." "SNARL returns phone calls." And worse: "They pulled me to the side and said... (here then is something very geared for that one person, whispered off to the side, that demolishes their self confidence.)
The end result is the comment I hear so often: "After that experience with SNARL, I decided to quit being an activist at all."
Exactly what the bishops wanted when they set this all up in the 1980s.
The PR scheme also led to their leaders getting awards regularly for the great job they're doing for the crime victims. Because none of the damage control and activist elimination happens where the public can see it.
*****************
SNARL stands for Survivors Network of those Abused by Reverends and Laymen
Yet among the victims there really is no network. When a person runs a local SNARL group, they never see the list of members in their region, they never write the final version of a press statement. All that data and "creative" work is done in St. Louis. A leader who does not stick to the script does not remain a leader for very long.
Locally, you rarely find out the results of these press events. No one finds out how to get in touch with other survivors locally through SNARL.
As a result thousands of crime victims of pedophile priests around the country are all still very disconnected.
It was designed for us to end up this way: disjoined, confused about what happened, still isolated.
**************
(1st Edit done to here)
In the 1980s and early 90s there was another group for the victims that was a lot like SNARL, it started about the same time, and had no connections to the Church. Except its founder was a priest. He died mysteriously, and after he died, family members who no one had ever seen before wondered if they were even real members of his family. They arrived before the funeral, took out the group's phones, packed up all the files, and stopped returning mail. No one was there to answer the phones, and before long the reporters and crime victims stopped calling. (It was still pre-email era).
So the other more grassroots group for survivors was taken care of, gotten out of the way early.
SNARL emerged and grew.
*******************
Most amazing to me is that in L.A. where there was the only full time paid SNARL leader in the country in 2006-2007, when there were more than a thousand plaintiffs who settled with the church in Orange, San Diego, Riverside, as well as Los Angeles Counties-
There is now virtually Nothing Left of SNARL. No meetings (unless they are secret ones, which is not very network-y), no lobbying effort, no organizing or planning sessions for activism, no core group to form a steering committee.
Just people who have stopped calling each other.
With all those plaintiffs in L.A. last few years, and a full time paid SNARL person corralling them around town leading press events, holding regular meetings, why didn't they set up something permanent? Why did the group instead disperse and totally fall apart, here in L.A. where there was the only full time paid SNARL leader working to create the SNARL network for those thousand plaintiffs?
It doesn't add up, unless turmoil and dissolution was on the agenda to begin with.
If turmoil was the purpose of having a full time paid person running SNARL in L.A., it worked, it succeeded.
There is no network of survivors left from all that effort in L.A. two years ago.
It doesn't make sense. Unless it was designed and set up to fail, then it succeeded.
*************
I wasn't part of the L.A. plaintiffs, my stuff happened in Illinois. But I live in L.A.
For one solid year 2006 I emailed the local So Cal rep for SNARL and said, let’s do this, I’d like to organize this, I really want to do this. I never got a word of encouragement, instead I got emails back saying, no, that's not a good idea, and I don't think so, and you're wrong that's not what that article says, things that made no sense at all. But I persisted and finally almost got them to agree to let me start a meeting in Hollywood but then the person running California SNARL at the time pulled me aside at a courthouse gathering to whisper to me, 'Kay, we think you're too sick to run a SNARL group. You wouldn't believe how much time it takes and you're just not healthy enough.'
Thinking these people knew what they were doing I nodded. She and I had our heads bowed together off to the side, I walked back to the group, kept my head bowed, suddenly noticed how much I really am not healthy, and convinced myself I was too sick to do much of anything for the next six months or so.
*******************
********************
I revived and again started asking SNARL to start a group in Hollywood, if I can't run it, I'll help someone else run it, I found someone willing to work with me on organizing a Hollywood group
and well …
Got shot down again by the local paid leader, only this time much harder.
I felt like, Someone is telling her to do this to me, it doesn't match her personality to be this mean.
I started City of Angels blog in January 2007 in a state of reaction and anger, staying up three days in a row with no sleep writing City of Angels 1, feeling, well if I can't do anything through SNARL, I'll have to do something on my own.
And I'm still totally on my own.
One guy who I did befriend through the few SNARL events there were in L.A. in 2006 told me he got the word from other people in SNARL not to trust me. He said it was because I showed up at the courthouse for Michael Baker hearings with a note pad writing things down. Every now and then in 2006 there would be a hearing in criminal courts and a notice would go out by email that SNARL members were encouraged to come and support the victims of Michael Baker.
At these events, we’d sit in the courtroom for hours. The only time for a possible conversation was if you happened to be in the hall going for coffee or to the john at the same time as someone else from the SNARL group.
But you weren't even sure which ones were the people from the SNARL group, so opening up a conversation was awkward.
In the courtroom, there would be three rows or so of people surrounding the California full time paid SNARL leader, but in the end I didn't meet any of them. You’d barely get to know the person sitting next to you, as if you even whispered, these intimidating court officers would glare at you and threaten your removal.
Okay, so defrocked pedophile priest Michael Baker comes out with his orange jumpsuit, we get glimpses of him back behind the jailhouse blockade. He comes out of the holding area about five feet into the room and talks to the judge off mic, and even on mic you can’t hear them. The attorneys judge and pedophile priest exchange two or three words, agree on a date for him to appear again, usually months later, and that would be it.
For this we sit for three hours as a group silently waiting. The notice would go out from SNARL saying it starts any time after 8 AM that morning so get there early, and since it's the closest I've seen to a SNARL support group meeting that I need so much, I'm there before eight and when the court opens, the group goes in, sits in the courtroom.
And we don't talk to each other.
The Michael Baker hearing goes on finally at 11:15 and we've all sat there for three hours to "support the victims of Baker," but I still don't even know which persons in our group are the victims of Baker.
I have PTSD and can’t let my mind be empty, plus I’ve always been a writer even when I haven't been publishing like from 1994 to 2005.
So of course coming to criminal courts I have a yellow legal pad in my bag. Sitting there at this event with no one to talk to, I get out the yellow pad and start writing, writing everything I see, describing the people around me, the attorneys, the cops. Wonder where those notes are today? They're from 2006, and my home is full of little places where I’ve stashed notebooks and pens, meaning to get back to them and then well. . .
(It’s fun to find these notepads here and there around the house and start reading them two or three years later when they emerge. I’ve yet to come across my notes from those Michael Baker criminal court hearings.)
When the "hearing" or "appearance" was over there would be a press conference and the one or two people who were always the core of the SNARL group would answer questions. I’d stand there like a geek, no one introduced me to anyone. Then it would be over and everyone would disperse and that was SNARL in Los Angeles in 2006.
Okay back to my yellow pad.
We're at criminal court, the SNARL gathering where I’ve come hoping to meet people but instead we're sitting in a courtroom and no one can talk. I pull out my yellow pad and start writing down everything I see thinking I'm going to type it all into a story afterwards.
Then two years later, I'm talking to the one person I met locally in SNARL, and he tells me, “Yeah several people from SNARL said, don't trust anyone who shows up and starts writing things down.”
Don't trust people who start writing things down? If I were a spy, would I pull out a yellow pad and openly start taking notes?
Plus this is L.A. Everyone thinks they have a screenplay inside them.
I'm perplexed by his remark.
I ask my friend more, trying to pinpoint if he heard someone from SNARL say not to trust writers before I showed up with my yellow pad or after, but he doesn't know for sure.
He does say, "I do remember someone said something about a woman from Hollywood with a yellow pad."
Another person tells me, "Yeah SNARL said don't talk to that crazy woman in Hollywood."
I begin to confirm it, it's not just paranoia, I've been singled out.
His comment did help explain why even during courtroom breaks when we’d be out in the hallway, no one would connect their eyes with me.
Or it all could just be your plain old Catholic priest crime victim inevitable paranoia and distrust of everyone.
Those hearings about Michael Baker were the last of SNARL in L.A. There are no support group meetings that I know of. Occasionally they throw a press conference and people from SNARL Orange County and Headquarters in St. Louis show up, (the nonprofit is incorporated in Illinois run out of St. Louis) but I'm the only L.A. resident at L.A. SNARL events today.
So I'm sitting here trying to just accept that my life is so isolated while finding another way to solve the problem. Every effort I made to find other survivors here in L.A. was a diffused bomb, never worked, and I was so immersed in the effort that my civilian friends stopped calling me, got tired of hearing about pedophile priests and conspiracies and, I think, got scared of how angry I could get.
Also we've moved from a chi-chi part of town in 2003 to this Midnight Cowboy designed by Ratso Rizzo thousand dollar a month squat in a not too good part of town, a neighborhood I myself would never drive into before the turn of the century (before homelessness from 2003-2005) and I truly believe most people just don't want to be around someone who is so blatantly poor, especially when they've just been awarded a million dollars from a settlement for a crime similar to what put me in these circumstances to begin with.
It's just ... awkward.
I can't help thinking that was part of the bishops' plan from the very beginning when they first started meeting on the issue of pedophile priests back in the early 1980s:
The bishops decided: See to it that some victims get settlements and some don't.
What better way to divide a group than to put them on total opposite ends of the economic spectrum? The crime victims will not mix together, will not run in the same circles, will not even end up living near each other.
And there will always be a level of distrust, those who get settlements immediately suspect those who did not get settlements will ask them for money. Those who shared in a global settlement don't want the others in their globe to know how much or how little they got.
So civil lawsuits themselves have encouraged the opposite of networking in the pedophile priest crime victim community.
I know for a fact that SNARL advised people in the L.A. 2007 settlements to watch out for people suddenly showing up in their lives asking for money.
Maybe people thought that's what I was?
The way the L.A. plaintiffs all stopped returning my calls and emails in late 2007, I can't help but think someone told them to stay away from me. The sudden snub just happened so ... globally.
The end result of civil lawsuits across the country is a population of crime victims who don't want to communicate with each other.
***********
If I'd been raped at age five in California as a kid by a pedophile priest, I'd have a condo now. I'd have been part of the 2007 L.A. settlement. Since I was raped by a pedophile priest in Chicago, I was thrown out into the wind and left to stay resource free in inner city L.A.
The Catholic Church in Chicago ignored my pleas for help.
Because they can. Illinois law has been run by criminals for so many decades, the Church thrives on that state's back door protocols.
I imagine an advantage for a non profit incorporating in Illinois is all they can get away with, since there is little or no oversight ...
*****************
That one guy who did befriend me from L.A. SNARL - once he made it clear to me he would give me no money from his settlement even though I never asked him for any - did not last long as a friend. He ended up being so hostile to females with so many anger management issues, I couldn't take the verbal batterings anymore.
Now I sometimes wonder if he was an infiltrator from the church too. I too now suspect everyone of being an undercover agent for the church at this point.
Don't trust anyone.
So today I'm watching the woman who founded SNARL get an award. I read in my emails the devotional speeches and announcements being made last weekend, as she and SNARL are being credited with the great work they've done, and truly, from the outside, it does look like great work.
And obviously other people have had much better experiences with the support organization than I have. I felt I was not welcome from the moment I got there, and that last attack right after the 2006 Christmas holidays was an extremely painful experience. If my daughter and the few people I'd met over the internet hadn't been here holding me down there in early January 2007 when the weird attack happened, I could have self destructed, it was such a bad experience.
I would have let it go and left it in the pat, if I hadn't heard similar stories from survivors around the country.
I also know saying anything bad about this organization or its founders makes you about as popular as the first crime victims in archdiocese offices when they came forward in the eighties and nineties with tales of what they endured at the hands of pedophile priests.
***************
And the world still has not truly gotten the total message about the epidemic of pedophilia in the Catholic priesthood, the organization that enabled it, who the victims are, and what the serial felonies did to us, in spite of charges, prosecutions, and lawsuits in just about every archdiocese or every city in the country the past twenty years.
It was a story that should have flamed across the country.
Instead it just fizzled, controlled, mummed.
A story of thousands of pedophiles in the Catholic Church raping tens of thousands of children broke nationwide in city after city since Boston in 2002- no, since New Orleans in the mid-1990s, then Dallas, then Boston, then we realized it was a national problem. Still today your average joe in the Catholic pew or outside on a bus bench does not know the true details, most people still think it was a few priests and a bit of inappropriate touching, not the systemwide organized criminal operation that it was.
That Chicago parishioner in the news this morning questioned loudly, why does it take these child molestation victims decades to come forward. She is suspicious of the victims because "They waited so long." In this one case the victims waited twenty years, they were twelve when it happened to them. Now it's 2009 and they're in their thirties and finally coming out about it.
Not to mention the extra brain fry you get when it's a Catholic priest who raped you as a child.
************************
Everything I'm thinking about Catholic hierarchy conspiracy and damage control disguised as victim advocacy could just be paranoid delusions.
I'm still all alone in Hollywood trying to figure out a way to re-assimilate now after this four-year-long bizarre experience of trying to connect with other victims, trying to get justice for myself, getting almost no help at all, having my case thrown out of court with no fanfare or even a phone call from anyone saying, too bad, Kay, can I take you out for a drink. Now I'm alone most of the time, with a 21 year old daughter still very dependent on me as I become more dependent on her, still trying to find a way I can pull us up, and it's scary, as we live right on the border of the slums of L.A.
From here we go one way or the other. And I'm entirely on my own, no support, no network, barely surviving, yet there were 510 plaintiffs in the L.A. cases in 2007.
Where did everybody go?
After all that happened here in 2007, you'd think there would be an office, an active lobbying effort, something left over and still going on around pedophile priest issues in L.A.
Back to 2006.
While we were sitting in criminal courts watching nothing happen all those mornings waiting for a Michael Baker appearance, I later found out that right around the corner in Superior Court, a flurry of pretrial hearings was taking place about the 600 plus cases from Southern California heading for "trial." I started going as a reporter in January 2007, for City of Angels- on my own.
No one from SNARL told me about the civil hearings going on in Superior Court, I had to find them on my own.
SNARL told me there was nothing going on with the civil lawsuits in 2006.
I called SNARL to ask as a journalist as well as a survivor and they told me there was nothing going on, when actually there were two or three hearings a week in Superior Court taking place.
Doesn't anyone else find that strange?
*****************
I guess the "support network" has done a good job in the news media, as most reporters around the country today seem to know the truth about Catholic priest sex crimes and how the bishops covered them up and shot down the victims.
Still, the church hierarchy really got away with most of their crimes. Look at it realistically.
************
SNARL has never linked or mentioned one of the City of Angels breaking news reports at the SNARL website. SNARL never mentions City of Angels anywhere. I'm one of the survivors and I've started this thing completely on my own.
Wouldn't a support organization respond to me with a little more ... support?
I mean, look at what I’ve done with City of Angels. Why wasn’t I embraced when I first came to SNARL wanting to start a group or organize a project? Look at City of Angels, then imagine what I could have done with SNARL in L.A., compared to what we have here now.
Which is nothing.
Or SNARL could be holding meetings and just not letting me know where they are.
This could all be my paranoid delusions.
Things just don't add up. I’ve wondered for a long time what it is, and my paranoid mind has created duplicitous plots and schemes that it would take an organization like the CIA to carry out, as these ideas in my head are so subterfugious.
A scheme like the one my paranoid mind has created would involve intelligence, the group would have to have known how bad the pedophile priest problem was way back as far as the 1980s. Then to keep this story down, it would take a group like the CIA or the FBI or -
The Catholic Church -
Something that large, to be able to have pulled off any kind of planned espionage, planned effort, to prevent the whole story about the pedophiles in the Catholic Church from coming out any more than it absolutely has to.
No one else knew how big the pedophile priest problem was as far back as the 1980s but the Roman Catholic bishops, and they had to do something to keep the crime victims from finding each other and comparing notes.
The woman who got the award this weekend formed SNARL in 1988, coming from roots in Catholic social justice organizations in Chicago, I guess including 8th Day Center for Justice, which as the document above scanned in above shows, initially incorporated SNARL.
Then around 1990, maybe with the advent of the internet, they could see that the national support group that would herd around the survivors in the next decades would need a new director.
In St. Louis, 1993, another priest is going into inpatient rehab for pedophilia at the Servants of the Paracletes center in the suburbs. At the same time, the priest's brother is being named the new director of SNARL.
************
The INTERNET was the one thing the bishops did not prepare for in advance in the 1980s, when they planned their strategy on how to handle the crime victims of their thousands of pedophile priests.
They didn't know the Internet would be created and interfere with their plans
Post Script: I did post online some of the notes from the Michael Baker hearings in 2006 at the SNARL message board, which you reach through a link at the SNARL website that says "Online Support." For one solid year 2006 I posted at the message board, and found seven or eight other people around the country. We were just starting to get things going, starting to come up with national ideas for action, and then SABOTAGE, in a way that no one really can explain, the message board just crashed, stopped working. The person in charge left in an emotional spiral from the experience, and no new moderator was ever found. I volunteered to do the job numerous times, no one answered me. Posts from Chicago have not shown in public on the board since 2007. New members have trouble joining. It's impossible to make any headway there. The SNARL message board came to an end just as it was becoming an effective way for survivors to find each other, when I got active there in 2006 and we started coming up with ideas of our own.
It's called Survivors Network, yet they do not encourage networking
It would not have taken a lot of intelligence for anyone to find out in 2006 that I had been employed by NASA Public Affairs in the 1980s and drilled as a JO3 at Naval Air Station New Orleans around the same time.
Intelligence is a major mission of that Naval Air Reserve base.
Finding out my background might explain the way SNARL responded to me when I arrived in 2006, when you'd think they'd welcome a person with my experience.
I've learned: Don't Trust Anyone
I get my support by watching V episodes at ABC online...
Don't Trust Anyone
An example of Damage Control versus true advocacy:
I released the paracletes papers
here
Here
and
here
In June 2008
SNARL ignored it.
Then in 2009 the same woman who leaked those documents to me leaked them to the New York Times, who wrote total coverage stories about The Servants of the Paracletes revealing the very same documents.
THEN
SNARL ran press events and made announcements about the Paracletes docs released that week by the New York Times.
Is that empowering a victim? Is that giving a victim a voice?
They ignored the Paracletes story when I published the same documents, but of course my City of Angels blog is just one small voice, no national structure behind me, no network, no support organization, no budget.
Just me. No ties, no agenda.
Never acknowledged by the national organization that thrives on its reputation of supporting and giving voice to the crime victims.
I find it all very strange ...
*****
As I posted this, I realized.
No more daydreams about going to the next SNARL conference ... oh well... it was never as it seemed, in fact the annual SNARL conference is another example of what should be an opportunity for networking that instead is people sitting captive as an audience listening, for three whole days.
It's never what it appears to be, there is no normal anymore, don't trust anyone...
***********
NOVEMBER 24, 2009
To see what I mean, that SNARL really does NOT give voice to survivors, or lift them up, or support us in any way other than in the news media: I broke the story at City of Angels Last Week about a victim in Sts. Simon and Jude Church trying to report pedophilia being steered to the Confessional to keep it penitent.
Today this morning SNARL calls a press event to leaflet about Gus Krumm, but linking reporters who get the press release to an article by a guy at OC Weekly. I broke the story, I'm a struggling survivor, the kind SNARL is supposed to care about, yet they don't even acknowledge City of Angels broke the story of Krumm and the 1st Amendment ploys of the Franciscans.
Don't even mention the blog by an active survivor right here in L.A.
I'm sitting here trying not to be hurt or angry as I watch the press announcements going out without mentioning me, the source of the information. Now someone from SNARL will stand up in front of the cameras and say the news that I broke last week and not even mention City of Angels and all the local in Los Angeles work I'm doing. The press statement will be approved by St. Louis before she reads it.
I do however have a little recompense. At 7:20 AM SNARL sent out a press announcement about their event at 10 AM and then 20 minutes later sent out the correction, a different address, on the other side of town. So once again reporters and advocates are driving around now trying to figure out which address is the right one, a mistake that happens 3 out of 4 times on SNARL press releases.
Why did SNARL hold a press event and link to the OC Weekly for the story, when the story really broke, in depth, in a blog written by a Survivor, me. Here is the breaking story about Gus Krumm written by me yesterday, after breaking the story in an Extra the previous Thursday (But I was too busy on my other two jobs to be able to write the whole story).
And here is the announcement SNARL sent out the day after City of Angels put up the in depth story about Gus Krumm. SNARL instead links people to Gustavo at the OC Register, who wrote 3 paragraphs on the topic. SNARL never mentioned that a very vocal and articulate member of this crime victims "community" covered the story in depth, here is how to contact her. Here it is in their own words, the opposite of support or networking for victims:
Members of SNARL and supporters will be having a media event today. If you can make it, please email NAME & ADDRESS REDACTED hope to see you there in support of the victims of Fr. Gus Krumm.
Where:
Outside the Orange County Catholic Diocese Headquarters2811 East Villa Real Drive (at Nohl Ranch) in Orange
When:
Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 10 am
Why:
Gustavo Arrellano's Column (at OC Weekly)
*************
The SNARL website says they "give voice to victims" yet in their release, they link to the OC Register instead of a story written by a victim. They don't acknowledge the days of work that went into doing that story, by me, a victim, about Gus Krumm.
Come to think of it, if SNARL was really a national support network, I'd be thriving right now, I shouldn't have to do two part time jobs to support City of Angels. There are things wrong here on so many levels in so many different ways...
I think this stopped being fiction a while back...
SNARL announces a press event using the material in my story, and do not even attribute me. Or mention City of Angels anywhere.
It leaves a survivor on the ground, perplexed,
It makes you end up wondering...
SNARL is a sheer wall of support that is really a hologram that lets the victims fall through to the ground while appearing to outsiders to be a solid support. It's a lot like the holograms on V on ABC on Tuesday nights... a lot like that...
The end result is the network of support is not really there. Though everyone thinks they see it from the outside, in the middle of it, there really is no network, and no support.
***
And Anna bares more than a little resemblance to the founder of SNARL.
Remember this is all a hallucination... isn't it?
See it all makes sense.
If you find yourself at the end of a SNARL event saying, this doesn't add up, something is wrong here, try looking at it from a different perspective. Say SNARL is really an arm of the Church. All of a sudden, everything they do makes sense. It falls together like a dragon's tail landing on Earth.
This is really all just a hallucination, that's why I have to post it here at 2 under Fiction, it has to be, no one could be that evil.
Could they?
*****
BLANCHE wanted so much to be a nun, except for the celibacy. She revered the church so she studied social work, then labored long hours for almost no pay in a Chicago Archdiocese charity, still acting out, though with a confused reverence for her religion and the men who deliver it. In that environment it wasn't long before she alligned her sex acts with a priest when she was a pre-teenaged girl to her current confusion about sexuality and religion. She went to a bishop she knew from her job, it was the early 1990s. She interviewed with several other bishops, then they offered her this opportunity, to work for social justice and still protect the good of the Church, by running a support organization for others who were molested by Catholic priests as children.
SNARL was born.
But then in 1993, the bishops could no longer keep the message under control. Because of this new thing out of California, the internet, the crime victims are still finding each other, especially in San Francisco. One of the crime victim priests had started, in true grass roots form, a network for survivors and it was using the internet, making savvy use of the news media.
"We gotta put someone stronger in there." "Yeah but she'll still want to run things." "Send her to law school, keep her busy."
San Francisco SNARL meeting participants were stunned and surprised when an announcement went out that Darren Clockwork is the new president of SNARL. "Who is he?" was the word most persons spoke at his sudden appearance.
Then one by one each member of the San Francisco SNARL meetings had disrupting events in their home or work lives that made it impossible for them to continue to do advocacy work.
And the young priest who was running the grass roots group suddenly became ill and died.
Meanwhile Blanche went on to earn two PhDs on top of her law degree. (Never did pass the bar exam, but in her work, she did not have to litigate.) She studied theology. She channeled her confused sexual-religious ideas into a new level of strength. Her body stayed perfect, her skin stayed young and thin.
When she made a press appearance, this combination of talents played out as a hypnotic charisma.
Much like Anna, her face shining down on the "survivor community" SNARL created, Blanche has a stunning hypnotizing effect on the group.
An element critical from the very beginning of the bishops' plan. Since most these crime victims are Catholics, the victims want a messiah like figure they can look up to.
Blanche fits the role perfectly. She speaks and all the crime victims get stunned, then compliant.
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