UPDATED regularly
Also see Chapter 2 Angelic Intervention and Chapter 3 Other States, ongoing reporting on the counter espionage aka fake support organization SNAP and how it ran damage control for the church in the pedophile priest crisis. A somewhat more cohesive version of this story was written in 2010-2011... and as time passes, there will be more to come.
Feb 2014
Don't expect anything more about the UN Commission or The Hague. Both those projects were already taking place when SNAP stepped in and stifled them. Now we won't hear anything more. That's what they do. Step in and take over things survivors are doing on their own, claim them as SNAP's, then let them fizzle and disappear. That was SNAP's way of doing damage control in the USA and now they are exporting it worldwide.
May 15, 2013
With decades of criminal activity that should be investigated in the Chicago Archdiocese, SNAP draws attention to this one ex-priest who is at least, making a living and supporting himself after being removed from ministry for sex abuse allegations:
SNAP wants ex-priest fired from Des Plaines facility
Chicago Daily Herald
The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests has submitted letters to the Archdiocese of Chicago and Advocate Health Care demanding Russell Lawrence Romano, a counselor in Advocate's Illinois Professional Health Program, be fired. Advertisement ...
Plus upon further scrutiny of this story, once again SNAP opened an opportunity for the Archdiocese to look good and victims to look like unrealistic witch hunters. Chicago is the HQ of SNAP, yet Illinois victims get no window for civil lawsuits in new legislation and Cardinals Stritch, Bernardin, and George go un-investigated. Chicagoland parishes thrive, and all the Catholics I've met here think the pedophile priest victims were just out for the money, a message SNAP has sent out. Plus I am persona non grata for criticizing SNAP. Only two survivor activists in Chicago would speak to me in the year I've been here. Apparently survivors are not allowed to point out elephants in the room when it comes to SNAP. They'll end up being treated like I am being treated. Oh well, I had to write what I saw was truth, let the repercussions fall, it's what I have to do.
This observation of SNAP has gotten me ostracized and despised,
so would I write it if I did not believe it to be true?
In 2007-2009, SNAP went to every city as the pedophile priest story broke in the USA, vacuumed up all the contact information of press and victims, then took it all back with them to St. Louis or Chicago. SNAP executives kept to themselves all the data on allegations against new priests, new victims coming forward, and names of news media interested in writing more stories. They then don't follow up.
They never follow up.
Everything victims tell SNAP gets lost in a sinkhole somewhere between Chicago and St. Louis.
May 6, 2013
They take center stage when the news is there. SNAP was ubiquitous in the Papal conclave and release of archdiocese files in L.A. recently. Wherever reporters are going, SNAP gets itself there, then there is no follow-up. SNAP gets quoted everywhere, then sucks up all the contact information and goes silent again. There is no vast connection of the hundreds of thousands of victims worldwide, rallying together. There's just these streams of PR events.
April 7, 2013
They are doing it again: "The pope should demote or discipline a few bishops who were found to have covered up misdeeds, said David Clohessy, executive director of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, noting that Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City has held onto..."
Once they are in a position to say something significant, such as turn the bishops over to law enforcement, release all files, they instead say something milquetoast like, "demote the bishops." Of course by now the media have learned to just call SNAP for a sound bite, so this is all coverage we get. New reporters don't realize SNAP has been repeating the same maxims since 2002, so gobble them up and publish them word for word. And no bishop ever suffers.
March 27, 2013
SNAP had all that time in the media last weeks in Rome during the conclave, yet SNAP never once mentioned either the UN statement on clergy abuse or SNAP's own Hague filing against the Papacy itself. If they were real SNAP would have been talking up both of those major developments, including the UN and the CCR in their news releases, taking advantage of the time they had news cameras pointing to them, talking up progress they've made so far. Instead SNAP just found another new victim or two to put in front of the camera and now the media is silent about all of it.
Been sleeping a lot
A group of us tried to get SNAP to approach the UN Committee on Rights of the Child back in 2006 and got no response. Then last week the UN mentions clerical abuse of children in two sentences of a report, the news media pick it up and go to SNAP for a quote, and SNAP is like a deer in the headlights, totally caught off guard not knowing what to say. Now days later SNAP has filed a document with the UN committee for children and Clohessy is holding press events in The Vatican to announce it.
Once again SNAP execs are taking their steps after someone else has done work that has made headlines. Once again, SNAP takes something they had nothing to do with and makes it their own and uses it to get the name of SNAP all over the news. So from here on out every story about the UN committee children and pedophile clergy will include quotes from SNAP, and no reporter will ever dig any deeper.
And the story will never go any further.
SNAP execs are So Good at making themselves look So Good that this week I was even starting to fall for it myself, for a while anyway. Now I see it's just more of the same. Back in 2006 several of us wanted SNAP to approach the UN committee on children. We discussed it at the SNAP message board, but we could never got a rise out of the execs of SNAP.
Then in February 2013 mainstream news reports that the UN Committee on Rights of the Child on its own mentioned clergy sex abuse of children in the U.S., and SNAP execs are all over it.
Also, last Wednesday was SNAP's lobby day in Springfield Illinois as there is a bill in the legislature there to eliminate the SOL on child sex crimes. SNAP was silent about the bill until a Chicago lawyer (not one of Jeff Anderson's group) sent out a mass email telling people about the bill. Then SNAP organized a lobby day. Then Wednesday came and went and there was NOTHING in the news about the Illinois bill or SNAP's lobbying efforts.
As always, SNAP jumps on a bandwagon after someone else has gotten it rolling, so it's likely that as always the bandwagon will mysteriously come to a stop.
Don't count on any follow-up with SNAP and the UN after this week, but their document filing sure gives Clohessy a great way to get his name and SNAP in the news over and over again. So now any researcher seeking follow-up information from a survivor perspective about the UN will go to SNAP and copy down what they say and print it. And there will never be any progress with the UN after that, or any stories about survivors in the U.S. that go farther than a quote from SNAP.
Not only is SNAP in a lot of news events in Australia right now, they are showing up unannounced at people's houses. They are announcing a press event three hours before it happens, so the result is chaos and minimal coverage.
Barbara Blaine is center stage
Several Aussie survivors are enamored of her now, think she and SNAP are The Greatest and the Snap execs are getting across the message in Australia, "We know how to do it, we've been doing this for years, so this is how to do it,"
and then they take Aussie survivors with them to leaflet on church properties, outside church offices, etc... where church hierarchy can see everyone there and everything they do, same pattern as in the U.S.
Yes, they know how to do it, just look at the results in the USA. A hundred thousand victims yet no real network of survivors, no foundation. But if you Google any perpetrator priest, you will find news stories featuring Barbara Blaine and SNAP.
She's is the Killroy pf the survivor movement. Except in World War Two, the American soldiers who wrote "Kilroy Was Here" on walls all over Europe were able to win a war.
No American bishop has gone to prison after more than 20 years of SNAP running the "movement" in the USA.
SNAP showed up at one of my friend's houses in Australia, at his front door, no advance notice, Blaine and Iseley, wanting my friend to drop everything and join them at their press event. My friend was working and they wanted him to come with them to their last minute press event.
No advance notice for their press events, for the media or the survivors. Sound familiar?
I mean, it's a 14 hour plane ride and they must have spent some time in the Chicago airport before taking off, couldn't they have planned something in advance?
IMPORTANT ABOUT THE REPEATED PATTERN;
Remember, the survivors in Australia really accomplished something on their own, getting a Royal Inquiry into Institutional Child Sex Abuse started in November 2012. So by the end of that month, of course SNAP showed up and made the pedophile priest issue in Australia theirs and, well, we'll watch and see what happens next.
But just like efforts by Germans in spring 2011 to get The Hague to prosecute the Pope that were overcome by SNAP's similar efforts in Fall on 2011, just like efforts to hold several events in the USA that were taken over by SNAP from 2001 to 2011, indeed just as the entire survivor movement in the USA went from being run by gaggles of victims winging it at a grass roots level in the 1990s to SNAP stepping in and taking over what locals were doing, and then conducting very managed and exclusive damage control of the story, SNAP is now stepping in and beginning its information management in Australia.
Oh, and Blaine can not really be running SNAP. Most of the time she is off in graduate school. She now has a Masters in Divinity as well as a Law Degree, all earned since 2001 while she has been President of SNAP. Someone is writing those sound bytes and sending her wherever the story breaks.
And Clohessy seems to have disappeared just as the press finally got wind that his own brother was a pedophile priest whose crimes Clohessy hid. Mainstream press still has not made the connection that at the same time Clohessy's brother went secretly into treatment, Clohessy was named by "somebody" to be Executive Director of SNAP.
Mainstream media still has not realized that the great job SNAP has done in the survivor movement exists mostly in SNAP press releases. Otherwise there would be much more outrage among Catholics and several bishops would be in U.S. prisons.
What can one survivor do? Me, I'm writing fiction now at City of Angels 15, and trying not to dwell on the SNAP counterintelligence story as it makes my blood pressure rise too high.
Still The Other SNAP Story continues here when there are new developments.
Still The Other SNAP Story continues here when there are new developments.
like it or not
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(Nov. 27, 2012: It's not slander if it's the truth. No one has ever contacted me saying this story is not true.)
UPDATE: October 24, 2012
If SNAP had really been a survivors network there’d be American bishops in prison right now. People look at the pedophile priest survivor movement in the U.S. and say SNAP did a great job. I see the church skating over most the charges, and victims keeping their stories secret. The "movement" turned into a mass of civil lawsuits, where details of the crimes stay hidden in documents and the parties stay silent.
With a hundred thousand victims of these crimes in the USA today, why isn't there a powerful voice or a movement, why isn't there a network and foundation of survivors? Why doesn't the world know by now what happened?
UPDATE: October 3, 2012.
A SINK HOLE
Somewhere between Chicago and St. Louis
Still ruminating on all this and what it comes down to is:
In 2007-2009, SNAP went to every city as the pedophile priest story broke in the USA, sucked up all the contact information, then took it all back with them to St. Louis or Chicago. SNAP executives kept all the information about pedophile priests, new victims coming forward, and news media interested in writing more stories to themselves. Then SNAP never follows up.
All the information at SNAP gets lost in a sinkhole somewhere between Chicago and St. Louis.
As a result, today even though there are a hundred thousand victims in the USA, there is no network, we are all disconnected and loose on our own, with maybe a small local support group in some cities, not many, where local people work in spite of obstacles. For the most part we do not know each other and have not been able to really combine our information and see the patterns of crime at the top.
They convinced many pedophile priest victims to keep their stories secret, used words like "Shame" struck in all of us a fear of the Church then did all their demonstrations in front of the church under the church's security cameras. SNAP used the same techniques as the church uses, that yearly conference where every minute is controlled and no individual victim's work is ever acknowledged.
End result is, the hundred thousand stories have remained secret, there have been no significant convictions of bishops , and worst yet, the victims/survivors are disparate. We all still don't know how bad it really was. Nobody ever found out more than what was released through the news media. Then SNAP stepped in and there would be no more story.
Every action they took, at least since 2002 when they "revived," was a response to stories that were already in the news. Over and over SNAP insinuated themselves on each pedophile priest story as it broke, designated themselves as the go-to persons for victims and media. That is the key to how this "project" worked. They kept all the contact information to themselves, while claiming to be a network.
Today the only communication there is comes in blind CC'd emails. So today most pedo-priest victims do not even know who are other victims in their own regions.
SNAP is a hologram.
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Previous stuff, needs a lot of editing, but this is a difficult story to tell:
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This post about a "support network" for pedophile priest victims that curiously operates in a way that prevents "survivors" from finding each other, comparing notes, or becoming an aggressive activist force based on our numbers- about a "support group" that I concluded is actually counter intelligence created by the bishops to run damage control on this crisis in the Catholic Church- is a work in progress.
(You can also read Angelic Intervention Chapter 2 and read Chapter 3: Other States: SNAP Curious Pattern Repeated all over the USA in progress, about obstructions other pedophile priest victims have experienced. ALSO: Documents that I think support my suspicions are here: Docs in SNAP Group Leaders Packet 1997 scanned here from the packet I received from SNAP when I ran a small group for them in San Francisco in 1997. Towards the end, this post is a rough draft, but I've left it here as it documents, in a way, what happened when I first posted these observations in Feb. 2010. )
I did not want the story to go this direction, it just went...
*********
Just as sex molestation charges were being dismissed against Father Kevin Clohessy in St. Louis, his brother David Clohessy took reins as Executive Director of SNAP, about ten years into the life of the non profit. Father Kevin faced vague charges of sex abuse of a minor details of which have never emerged. (Read more about Kevin Clohessy here) Interesting chain of events, and timing.
SNAP had been started in the mid-1980s by Barbara Blaine, soon after she got her MSW from University of St. Louis, a Jesuit college, and began her career as a social worker with a Catholic social services agency in Chicago. Soon after starting SNAP as a tiny nonprofit, Blaine went to law school.
Now (2012) the Archdiocese of St. Louis is according to SNAP trying to dismantle SNAP with subpoenas, which I find curious, since it looks to me more like the Archdiocese of St. Louis started SNAP back in the 1980s, around the same time Servants of the Paracletes ended their operations in New Mexico and moved to Missouri, just outside St. Louis.
Is it a coincidence that David Clohessy was named Executive Director of a "support organization" for pedophile priest victims around the same time that his brother, Father Kevin, got his charges dropped for molesting a minor?
They can say, "We are the largest, oldest and most active support group," for pedophile priest victims, because they prevent any other groups or projects from being able to form.
SNAP went to great lengths to destroy the credibility of City of Angels Blog and of me, the blogger, when I was posting stories and documents that were not being published anywhere else, about sex crimes of Catholic priests. If you look closely, SNAP mainly responds to stories already breaking, or about to break, then takes over control of information about each story as it breaks: Damage control.
What ever happened to the Linkup, which was a genuine survivor generated organization? When the Linkup director died, all their records vanished. Then SNAP emerged as the "voice" of pedophile priest victims. If you look closely, you find that most of the hundred thousand victims of pedophild priests in the USA feel marginalized, isolated, and that we have no voice at all.
11/25/11: You get screwed by a priest as a child, you get screwed by the church when you tell them about it, then you get screwed by the organization that is supposed to be a support group for survivors. If I were the only person to have this experience with SNAP, I would not write it. The effect is so depleting that most survivors just quit trying to be advocates and leave the "movement." (Email Kay Ebeling at cityofangelslady@yahoo.com to comment.)
***************
(This story is still a work in progress.)
By Kay Ebeling
Oh no! Now they are maneuvering all reports for The Hague on pedophile priests to go to SNAP, assuring that from here on out, those new charges will be heard as little as possible...
Having victims leaflet outside cathedrals is perfect for the Church.
The bishops can see everything we do.
I was pressured into stopping City of Angels Blog by an ongoing onslaught. I was under attack from all different directions, in subtle ways that you can't quite pinpoint, but that add up to intimidation. In one last gasp, I wrote this post in April 2011 that had to be removed and then updated here in April 2012. The message I was getting was the more I produced the blog, the more the scare tactics would increase.
[UPDATE: Someone even tried to poison me in 2011 in West Virginia. This is a true story. It is now September 2014 and I still have the weird symptoms and no doctor can find the cause.]
Believe me, I know writing The Other SNAP Story makes me look like a paranoid or jealous saboteur, that's part of how perfect their scheme was. Anyone who starts to see the scheme and point it out looks like a paranoid or jealous saboteur. Stranger yet, several other victims share my feelings that, if nothing else, something is not right with SNAP. But it's all set up so people are afraid to criticize, and those who do point out something is wrong get shunned and ostracized instead of heard. Just like the Catholic Church. The pedophile priest movement was manipulated so the victims see the leaders as saints who can do no wrong, even while they are doing wrong... sound familiar?
There's no point in me being silent about this. City of Angels Blog was on the verge of being a source of real networking and exposure of the pedophile priest epidemic in the Catholic Church and how the bishops covered up the crimes. The only thing that stopped the blog from growing was SNAP's work behind the scenes to destroy the blog. And as CofA Blog developed, SNAP's efforts to kill it became more forceful.
Apparently what I was seeing as I produced the blog was exactly what SNAP was working so hard to keep me, or anyone else, from being able to see. So now, I have to write about it, and what have I got to lose, I'm already ostracized.
In the first two years of the blog, my phone was ringing all day, my email was full every day. But eerily, the more I worked, the less response I'd get. Strange things would happen to me and I realized the only explanation was that SNAP was sabotaging me behind the scenes. At first I did not want to think SNAP was the cause of the problem, but by early 2010 it became blatantly obvious. The story of counter-intelligence work of SNAP is now, to me, more important to write than details of the priests' crimes.
***
As to what is posted here, this really did happen, I really did see these things. I had a unique perspective as a result of producing City of Angels Blog from 2007 to 2011 where I interviewed pedophile priest crime victims and their families and lawyers around the country. Individual victims kept volunteering to me problems they had with SNAP preventing their efforts to work at a local level, when I was calling them about something else. At the same time, "something" was beating down my efforts to do the blog and making it almost impossible for me to continue: getting me removed from other sites, intervening, putting up obstacles, obstructing. The one common denominator throughout the experience was SNAP.... So I started writing this, in Feb. 2010.)
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With a hundred thousand victims of pedophile priests in the USA, isn't it strange that only a handful appear at any SNAP event?
The pattern is new arrivals participate enthusiastically, then a few months later get discouraged and disappear.
Although they call themselves a network, SNAP works hard to prevent victims from developing a real network, to keep us from finding and talking to each other, all while putting an image out to the public that they were "giving voice" to victims. SNAP often describes itself as "The oldest" and now "the only" organization that has developed in the pedophile priest crime community, which is true, because SNAP makes sure no other groups are able to form and grow.
No matter how much I tried to focus on stories about the sex crimes of the priests, whoever I was interviewing would want to tell me about the strange things SNAP had done in their towns. I know that my phone was tapped, you could literally hear the clicking noise. In a phone conversation, every time I'd say the word "bishop" or "pedophile priest" the clicking noise would start. Then, a few days later, whoever I was talking to would suddenly, out of the blue, be contacted by SNAP and steered away from me.
Somehow SNAP found out who I was talking to and then they would intervene.
SNAP's obstruction became so obvious that after a while I would just wait for it to happen. I'd track down and interview a pedophile priest crime victim, then wait to see how long it would be before that victim would be contacted by Clohessy or Blaine and be convinced not to talk to me anymore. Soon the phone stopped ringing and the emails stopped coming. Then the victim I was writing about would show up front and center at a SNAP media event that suddenly took place in their town.
By mid-2009 it became almost like a game. I'd be working on a story by phone with a victim, then I'd just wait for the intervention to happen, and sure enough, next time I called them they'd have some explanation for why they could not continue to work on a story with me, and the explanation always involved some interaction they'd just had with SNAP.
(INSERT HERE: the Chicago pizza joint coincidence.*)
A guy in San Diego was real bad at subterfuge. In the middle of a phone call he said, Whoa, wait a minute, are you that Kay and hung up on me. The behind the scenes maneuverings became real obvious to me.
A survivor in New Mexico spent hours on the phone with me, for a story I was to publish two weeks later when he had one final piece of information. In our conversation he assured me that since he was an active member of AA, he knew how important it was to "be there" when someone called. He said, "Call anytime, I'll drop everything and talk to you, as a group we need each other." He also had a conversation coming up soon with Clohessy. I called him two weeks later for that last bit for the sorry and he would not take or return my call. What was said to him between the two phone calls?
That happened over and over again, a pattern, and soon every story I developed, I ran into an obstruction.
So for now, I figure, I have nothing to lose. I still wake up in the middle of the night today (October 2011) with a strong message, I need to tell this story. I have to not care whether everyone hates me for saying it, I need to write it here, and let people find it, and if they hate me for it, oh well, that's life. So here goes:
*******
Victims come and go regularly, but "survivors" rarely stay involved with SNAP for a long period of time. Still the founder and the director of the group, along with a handful of new victims, manage to be front and center dominating the coverage
Wherever and whenever the story of pedophile priests is breaking in the news, there is David Clohessy's sound byte that says nothing more than what is already in the news, yet it's repeated over and over by copy and paste journalists.
The outflow of facts gets contained.
Does SNAP do advocacy for pedophile priest victims, or was SNAP really created in the 1980s to run damage control for the Catholic Church?
*****
It's now Fall of 2011 now and as I look back, it makes me so sad.
Imagine how wonderful City of Angels Blog could have been if there were a genuine support network for pedophile priest victims, but instead I was doing it all alone, with "someone" making sure I got as little recognition or cooperation as possible.
Imagine how effective the movement could have been, if we'd had a real national support network for survivors.
Considering there are a hundred thousand Catholic clergy abuse victims in the USA alone, imagine how effective the activism could have been, if there had been an aggressive, inclusive, genuine network that actually worked the way a network should work, encouraging everyone who had an idea, linking groups around the country, keeping us all involved, informed, "networked."
Instead we got and endless stream of media events, mostly saying the same things, (the bishops are "reckless and callous") with Barbara Blaine and David Clohessy appearing on camera. No matter where the story broke or what priests were accused of what crimes, there would be Barbara and/or David, in the news, saying the same banal sound bytes, dominating the story, making it theirs. When victims participated, they could do no more than stand behind a SNAP leader and hold up the SNAP 800 phone number. Then the SNAP leaders fly home and, in most cases, the local victims and local news reps, never hears any details of the crimes or how the crimes affected the crime victims.
All those calls to the 800 number? The information drops into a sinkhole somewhere between Chicago and St. Louis, never to be heard again. The details of the crimes and how they affected the victims' lives remain untold.
SNAP is not advocacy, it's damage control.
SNAP is a handful of people who co-opted any movement survivors were trying to start at a grass roots level in the USA. They assured that all news queries on the topic of pedophile priests would go to SNAP, which gives an appearance of SNAP employees hard at work, but the result is no other victims' voices are heard.
*******
Things that caused me to question SNAP from the beginning:
The word Counter intuitive comes up often
I broke a story about Fr. Gus Krumm at City of Angels Blog, and Gustavo at OC Weekly picked it up. SNAP arrived a few days later in Orange County doing a press event referring reporters to Gustavo's story and repeating the story I broke at City of Angels as their own sound bites. Not once at the press event did SNAP mention City of Angels Blog, written by one of the survivors SNAP says it represents, me, left out of the loop in L.A. SNAP did not even let me know they were doing the press event until a few hours in advance.
On another occasion, I tracked down the new home of Father Michael Wempe when he got out of prison, and SNAP ran a press event, demonstrating outside the gated community. SNAP got their name in the news again based on a story I discovered and broke, again not including City of Angels in the event, let alone mentioning the blog as the source of the material.
Whenever SNAP came to L.A. in the four years I was doing CofA Blog, I never got a heads up in advance that they were coming, what the subject of their media event would be, or any acknowledgement at all of the work I was doing, even though I broke a lot of stories at CofA that were not covered anywhere else in the news. As late as Spring 2010 after I met with a SNAP leader visiting from St. Louis and I thought fences were mended, SNAP showed up a few weeks later and repeated the same isolationist pattern, leaving CofA Blog out of the loop.
If I mention it by itself, being ignored by SNAP doesn't seem like much, it's the combination of four- to five-years of weird treatment that resulted in this story.
But from the beginning, SNAP acted as if City of Angels Blog was not even there, and bulldozed over the blog whenever the opportunity arose.
*********
As I produced City of Angels Blog, my intent was to tell the story of a hundred thousand crime victims and coverups by the Church. But soon it became apparent, that the real story here is the counter-intelligence, the fake network that the Church or the Vatican or "someone" created in the mid-1980s. To the public they appear to be advocating for the crime victims, but SNAP's real purpose was to keep us all in line, under control, while managing the news story wherever it broke. . . to keep the Church as adored and powerful today as it was when the story first began to break.
Through SNAP, no more damage got done to the Church than the minimal amount that was inevitable, as news stories broke across the USA past two decades. No more of the story got out than would inevitably get out, and damages to the Church were kept to a minimum.
When I was writing CofA stories, I'd call a victim to find out how their project was going and without my even asking, they'd end up telling me, SNAP ruined it. SNAP showed up late, or even worse, SNAP showed up to run a different event at the same time in a nearby location thus destroying the grass roots local effort. Or another outright evil tactic: SNAP stepped in and took over the microphone, keeping the original organizers and local survivors from being able to speak.
*****
If I were the only victim to have a bad experience with SNAP I would not write this post today. (Insert here, what happened to Robert Costello's project when the Pope visited New York; the way SNAP defeated efforts by survivors to hold a vigil in Chicago Easter Weekend 2006; what SNAP leaders said to and about Jim Robertson after he made widespread news by handcuffing himself to Cardinal Mahony's throne at the L.A. Cathedral, thus stopping any other victim from doing any activism outside SNAP's control; and finally re The Hague, since German lawyers were already working to prosecute the Pope at the International Criminal Court, and efforts were already underway to have victims contact the ICC, why didn't SNAP mention any of that work in progress in their Sept 2011 media blitz?)
*****
I remember the moment, Spring 2006, SNAP was holding a vigil in Pershing Square while the U.S. bishops held their annual meeting in the L.A. Biltmore across the street. I was disheveled, bloated, fat, bent-backed, a person with no self esteem at all.
Barbara Blaine sat next to the L.A. SNAP leader Mary Grant and I finally got a chance to talk to them. I was in awe of them, gazing up at them, probably looked pretty pathetic.
I said, "It feels so good to be able to send out a letter to the editor and sign it Kay Ebeling, SNAP Los Angeles."
Blaine and Grant looked at each other then looked at me, and said simultaneously:
"You can't."
They may have explained why I couldn't say I was a member of SNAP but I really don't remember what the reasoning was. Just that I gave them the authority, figured they must know what they are doing, so they must be right, and I left the event defeated.
That vigil in Pershing Square was also one of the first experiences I had with Blaine's snarling glare. At that time in spring 2006 I was all gaga over SNAP, thinking the leaders of the group were true heroes. So when I got close enough to talk to Blaine I gushed, "Wow, how did you manage to go to law school at the same time as running this organization?"
Instead of an answer, Blaine became silent, and fixed me with an intimidating glare that said, "How dare you ask me that question." I shriveled up and stayed quiet.
Stayed in my place and did not ask questions, just the SNAP was set up to affect the victims.
It was all part of the plan back in the mid-1980s, when "someone" created SNAP to run the movement and manage the message, that the victims would stay in their place and not ask questions.
(INSERT here: As I wrote City of Angels, every time I'd hint at questions about SNAP in blog posts, immediately my email would fill up with messages from Tom Doyle and Bob Schwiderski intercepting, making sure I did not pursue the questions any further.)
****
Still back in 2006, I didn't drop out of the movement, and kept trying to find other survivors who lived in the part of L.A. that I lived, Hollywood, by going through SNAP. I kept not getting my phone calls returned. Finally at an event, I asked Grant, "Why don't I start a support meeting for SNAP in Hollywood? I'm sure there are other victims in that part of town." Grant took me off to the side to say to me privately, "Kay we think you are too sick to run a support group."
Again, I felt defeat. I was so certain the people who ran SNAP knew what they were doing, they were the authorities that I left that event and went home and indeed got sick, a depression-fueled sick, and stayed sick almost not functioning for a good six months.
****
Instead of walking away from the movement, I started City of Angels blog in January 2007.
INSERT: Angelic intervention:
SNAP tried to stop me from pursuing journalistic inquiries the beginning.
I posted on SNAP message board that I'd be attending a Jan 2007 hearing, the first I found out about. Immediately Mary Grant slammed me an email. "Don't attend that hearing, the survivor whose case it concerns does not want you there and if you write anything about it, you will hurt his case."
Angelic intervention.
Through the SNAP message board I'd met a few survivors around the country, one of which was the victim whose case was going before the court in a hearing that date, Jan 16, 2007. Out of a thousand or so victims in Southern California with cases going through pre-trial development in 2006, I knew that one plaintiff, Michael Schumacher in Arizona. So I called Mike and asked him, "Is it true you don't want me to cover your hearing? Because SNAP tells me I'll be hurting your case if I go cover it."
"Hell no," Mike told me. "I've never talked to anyone at SNAP about it and I Do Want you to go to the hearing, write about it, let me know what is going on."
So in spite of SNAP's warning me that I'd be "Hurting a Survivor" by covering his hearing, I went anyway, and the result was the first post ever published at City of Angels 3, Jan. 17, 2007.
City of Angels Blog was born in spite of SNAP, thanks to angelic intervention.
*****
And as I wrote City of Angels Blog I inevitably began to learn how SNAP works, which is probably why they tried to discourage and sabotage me to begin with.
No matter where in the country I was doing a story, the anti-network efforts on the part of SNAP would loom over the interviews. I began to realize the efforts of SNAP ended up deflating any real efforts at advocacy or prosecution on local levels, not blatantly, just always behind the scenes. Defeating words whispered into a survivor's ear as they were just about to speak in public, SNAP showing up late and unprepared, so guaranteeing the failure of a local SNAP event, media announcements at way too short notice, with just enough errors in them to deter any real news from being developed.
Then after each event around the country, SNAP takes the media and new survivor contact information back to St. Louis or Chicago, so local grass roots efforts can never get off the ground. They don't share that information with the local leaders. Why do they share it with?
********
Compassionate Coercion
When I tell people my observations that SNAP is really working for the Catholic Church, many argue, "but SNAP is in the news all the time, it sends out press releases every day."
Look closer. Those media releases never say more than what is already in the news. And as a result, nothing more ever gets revealed.
Damage control.
OR
Indirectly, Blaine and Clohessy deliver a message from the Church.
This compassionate coersion tactic is hard to pinpoint, but it emanates from SNAP press statements.
First time I noticed it was in July 2007, after the L.A. Archdiocese settlement hearing. Of course Clohessy was all over the news in L.A. Maybe two L.A. plaintiffs were also able to speak to the press, (persons approved by SNAP only) but mostly it was Clohessy. The SNAP executive director always jets in to take charge wherever the story of pedophile priest crime breaks, to control the message.
A local radio show had Clohessy in a phone call talking about the L.A. cases. Over the air, Clohessy's voice said something like, "Whenever victims come forward, the Church will be there to fight them." (I did not write down the exact quote at the time, wish I had, but it had to do with how the Church will react when victims come forward, and it sent me chills, because the message was, if you call the church what will happen to you will not be plesent.
When I heard Clohessy say that on the radio, I got chills. Clohessy was delivering the message from the Church. He wears the disguise of a concerned caring individual, but the truth is, he's carrying the Church's water, under his shirt.
In that L.A. interview, Clohessy was warning victims that when they come forward, the Church will be there fighting them every step of the way.
It's hard to explain how this double talk works, it's very subversive.
A more recent example is from September 2011 . Blaine posted on the SNAP website a typical emotion-filled SNAP statement about European victims.
(ALSO INSERT HERE CLOHESSY'S STATEMENTS RE THE KANSAS BISHOP, repeated everywhere, saying very little about a case where the bishop is only being charged with a misdemeanor)
Another compassionate coercion statement:
"It’s sad that in Germany, where hundreds of brave, wounded child sex abuse victims have spoken up in the last year, the pope can’t bring himself to openly address the most devastating crisis in modern church history. If he can’t even talk about it, there’s little chance he can fix it."
There once again is the Church's message costumed as the words of a concerned social working advocate.
Blaine tells us, the Pope is not going to talk about it and he's not going to fix it. Indeed, the Pope even has this pseudo-support group leader deliver his message to people, disguised as sympathy.
I know this sounds crazy, and extreme.
But look at who the bad guys are here.
And think of the lengths to which the Catholic Church has gone throughout history to stay in power.
Blaine has gotten "arrested" twice in the last five years while holding press events outside The Vatican. This makes her appear as a brave hero. Especially when she comes out of The Vatican a few hours later and makes the inevitable statement to the press, full of coercive compassion.
But think about it.
When the DEA makes a drug bust, they always arrest the undercover agents along with the criminals.
Then the "arrested" agents can go off to an office, unobserved, and talk to their handlers.
When Blaine gets arrested at The Vatican, it's like they are "bringing her in" so she can talk to her real bosses.
Okay, that may be extreme.
But look again at that statement Blaine made in Germany September 2011. By side tracking us into emotion, we don't take the action we should take. The aggressive action survivors want to take gets mushed down and instead we have victims at home alone crying.
I'm not "sad" about the pedophile epidemic in the Catholic Church, I'm outraged and want legal action. Why even bother following the Pope around holding press conferences? The Pope is never going to change. SNAP always calls victims who come forward "brave" getting the message to us that there is something to be afraid of, and words such as "wounded" are another backhanded way to put us in our place.
Something is not right with SNAP and it shows up between the lines of their press statements. I mean, Blaine is traveling all over the world, "speaking for victims" and all she can say is "it's sad"?
Put emotion all over it and water it down, show up at every possible occasion with an entourage thus keeping anyone outside your group from being heard, take center stage and then waste the opportunity to say, "I feel your pain."
This is not the aggressive activism that hundreds of thousands of pedophile priest victims need. This is
Damage Control.
****
I would have let these negative experiences with SNAP slide and not dwelled on them, except as I started finding out about this story across the country, I interviewed dozens of survivors, and found out many other victims had eerie, unexplainable defeating and dejecting experiences when they reached out to SNAP. I found out SNAP often steps in and usurps work victims were doing locally as advocates.
And the more City of Angels grew, the more SNAP worked behind the scenes to keep the blog from being successful.
***
Thank God for people like Cindy, one of the more vocal L.A. victims.
In early 2007 Cindy emailed me saying something like, "Mary Grant from SNAP told me to stay away from you, so I knew something was up, and decided to contact you right away. Let's get together." Cindy was the first victim to inform me that SNAP was down-rapping me to other victims, in effect sabotaging City of Angels Blog, telling victims not to talk to me. Apparently SNAP told Cindy, Stay away from Kay Ebeling, she's just a crazy lady in Hollywood. I later learned SNAP warned several survivors in L.A. not to cooperate with me for one of my blog posts, which makes no sense. In early 2007, I was saying nothing but glowing words and praises about SNAP, and publicizing their media events.
It makes no sense unless SNAP's goal was to keep City of Angels Blog from developing.
SNAP did not want anyone to interview too many victims and figure out what SNAP was really doing and publicize it.
Today, Cindy has been my dear best friend for more than four years.
But there is still so much unresolved about SNAP.
Imagine what the survivor movement could have been if our "advocacy group" hadn't been working behind the scenes to defeat us, assuring that no grass roots activism ever took place.
Imagine what City of Angels Blog could have been if SNAP had supported it instead of sabotaging it.
*****
I am a journalist by profession, so when word trickled out in 2006 that in L.A. there were hundreds of lawsuits going forward, I wanted to find out more to "write something," yet L.A. SNAP leader Mary Grant kept telling me there was nothing going on in court. I knew that could not be true, so I finally approached her at a moment when she was standing with a VOTF woman, because everything Grant said to me, she'd say when no one else was around. As the VOTF woman stood stunned at my rudeness to interrupt them, I said, "Mary, with all the new victims coming forward in L.A., there must be something going on in the courts, pre-trial motions?" Grant bristled, but since the VOTF woman was standing there, Grant could not get away with the diversion she had been carrying out. Grant had to tell me the truth. "Yes," she said, "there's something going on in Superior Court." I kept asking Grant questions even though she'd turned her back on me, and finally I squeezed the name of an attorney out from between Grant's clenched teeth. Finally I had the name of a contact. I called the attorney and discovered there had been pretrial hearings in L.A. Superior Court going on for months, two or three of them a week. I started attending the hearings and found a huge story there.
And City of Angels Blog was born.
In spite of SNAP.
And the blog grew, thanks, in many cases, to what I came to call "angelic intervention."
******
When SNAP calls itself is a "support network" it is making two false statements. The support is not really there. And the network does not exist at all, it's a hologram.
I know people are rankled at me for down-rapping SNAP but as long as it's impossible to point out anything SNAP does wrong, they will continue to do things in "the way we've always done it," and the same mistakes will get made, with the end result that in spite of a hundred thousand victims in the USA and close to ten thousand priests identified, the bishops are still in power, and Americans think the pedophile priest crime victims or "survivors" are this small fringe group of people who just wants to destroy the church.
*****
Revealing experience at a SNAP conference
Through the blog I was able to raise funds to attend a SNAP conference, in July 2008 and what an empowering experience that was. Everywhere I went in that Chicago hotel meeting area, people would say, "That's Kay Ebeling, she started City of Angels Blog." The survivors and advocates loved the blog, I was getting accolades like I'd never gotten them before. Everyone at the conference was happy to see me
Except
Over on the sidelines I'd see David Clohessy and Barbara Dorris, just standing there glaring at me, shooting darts with their eyes. I talked to Barbara Blaine and she was civil, but I sensed she was bristling as we spoke. Everyone at the SNAP conference welcomed me, except the people who ran SNAP.
Meanwhile I was flying high at the conference on all the positive feedback I was getting, until I went to the Saturday night breakout session, a women's support group.
(I need to work on this, to describe how weird, in fact surreal, this experience was.)
Thrown out of a Saturday night women's group
Tossed into hallway with door slammed behind me.
This is support?
I was overflowing with enthusiasm at the 2008 SNAP conference, so when someone in the women's Saturday night support group outbreak session said something shocking, I let an audible burst of breath come out of my mouth. The "facilitator" stopped the session and told me I was too disruptive. Then she physically removed me from the group, pushed me into the dark hallway, and slammed the door on me. The way that ejection was carried out deflated any self-esteem I had gotten from the conference, instead I spent the next six months thinking there was something inherently wrong with me...
Again, calculated efforts to defeat survivors who are activists working outside of SNAP.
Before the women's Saturday night group started, someone, in my memory she looks like Barbara Blaine, but I can't say for sure, was talking to the facilitator. Then as soon as the group started, the facilitator was harassing me, interrupting me, snarling at me every time I squirmed or coughed, waiting for the right time to eject me from the group.
To be honest, I still am not sure what that sequence of events meant, but the end result was my going to the SNAP conference left me feeling the same lowness that I felt after Blaine and Graint told me I couldn't sign letters to the editor as a member of SNAP.
Dejection, defeat, from an organization that proclaims itself as "giving voice to victims." In spite of all the positive response from people at the conference, the experience of being thrown out of the support group and left standing by myself in a dark empty hallway had a real bad effect on me. Again it was six months before I got any real self esteem back, instead I spiraled into a depression, certain there was something inherently wrong with me.
I later realized these were calculated moves, for some reason SNAP discouraged me from the start from participating, but I persisted, and found out SNAP did the same thing to many other victims.
I came to call them the anti-network. As in there is gravity and anti-gravity. There is the idea of a support group and there is the anti-support group...
************
NO ONE is above criticism, not even SNAP. Many of the victims I've talked to around the world agree with me, that some of the things SNAP does, such as leafletting at First Communion ceremonies make victims look bad in the end. SNAP performs like a counter-network, takes counter-intuitive steps, and takes on projects that eliminate most victims from participating.
For example, leafleting outside churches. Many pedophile priest victims have physical reactions when they go near Catholic icons like statues and cathedrals, so we cannot even participate in SNAP media events outside churches. Yet no matter how much we request leafletting somewhere else, SNAP ignores our input and just keeps going back to cathedrals to leaflet. No matter what the victims say from the grass roots, SNAP has an agenda, written by "someone," and SNAP does what it does, ignoring the suggestions of its "members."
And looking back now, in 2011, it's obvious to me.
By arranging for all our protests to take place outside church properties, SNAP is doing the church's bidding. Every time SNAP met outside the Cathedral in Los Angeles to conduct a media event, the cardinal's security guards were there watching everything we said and did. Security cameras were pointed at us so that anyone inside the cardinal's office, even Roger Mahony himself, could see what victims showed up for the SNAP event, what we said, what we did.
By holding events at churches and no place else, SNAP assured that the bishops knew everything the survivors said and did.
While putting out a public image of advocacy for victims, SNAP was working for the Catholic Church all along.
**************
The thing is, if SNAP told me lies, misdirected me from the moment I started asking questions, and I'm one journalist / survivor, how many other writers and reporters were misdirected by SNAP, and why?
If anything, I know making these statements makes me look petty in some people's eyes. If it was about me-me-me, believe me, I would not have posted this story.
It's about me not wanting to see the same mistakes and screw-ups continue, which is apparently part of the SNAP plan, screw up continuously, so it looks like they are doing advocacy work, when what they are really doing is keeping a lid on the story, as much as possible.
When I suggested an idea, SNAP leaders contacted me and said I was whining or sitting on a pity pot. One of SNAP's most vocal midwest spokesmen hounded me with great vigor.
And the "selfish, Me-Me-Me" idea I proposed:
Set up a trust, a fund made up of donations from settlements, and let survivors who did not get settlements apply to the fund for grants.
What's wrong with that idea? How is that just caring about me-me-me and being on a pity pot?
I think it's a damn good idea, and something SNAP should have done and still couuld do.
But there's Snap-Minnesota screaming at me that I'm on a pity pot and all I care about is me-me-me if I say why not set up a trust for the rest of the victims.
Knee jerk reaction.
*****
(The following was written in Feb. 2010, when SNAP Minnesota had ramped up his online harrassment of me.)
Having the strangest experience.
It's over. I think...
I doubt I'll post another word at City of Angels.
I did what I came for. I identified the problem and wrote about it, reported it here.
Now, I can't hang around while almost everyone else working in this area is not only drinking the Kool-Aid but drunk on it.
If people prefer to believe what they are told instead of what they see, there's not much more I have to write on this topic.
I'm a chameleon, always have been, and it's real obvious, the way I feel, that another change is coming, and City of Angels is done.
I did what I came here for, identified the problem, and until the rest of us see and deal with the problem, I can't function in this "community."
City of Angels was run from the beginning on nudges. They're gone now. They left this morning.
There's nothing more to say. Until other people see what I see, there's nothing more I can say.
I am also, I will admit, going a little nuts. I don't just think David and Barbara are from the Church. I'm getting so every person I talk to on the phone or through email through this blog is an undercover agent from the church, or from David and Barbara.
Maybe if I just write here for a while and stop answering my phone...
****
I Ended Up Having to do the Blog All Alone
I Thought It Was Me, Something Inherently Wrong With Me, that caused other victims to run the other direction.
Then I realized
Whenever I interviewed victims by phone, at first they would be enthused and ready to continue developing their story with me.
Then next time I called, they would not take my call.
I anguished over that, it hurt, it defeated me.
Then I realized there was always one common denominator, one thing that each of those persons did in between the first and second call.
They had contact with David or Barbara, executives from SNAP.
***
(From Feb. 2010:)
There has also been this eerie strange experience I've had since first starting City of Angels blog back in Jan. 2007 (in spite of SNAP's obstruction.
Not long into working on the blog, I'd have this experience, at first I noted it and kind of was left with this, what happened, feeling. When it happened 12, 15 times I began to really notice it and make note of it. Now it happens all the time, with about two exceptions.
I'm talking to a survivor somewhere in the US over the phone, we are getting along great. We make plans to talk again about this or that at a time in the future. I call that person when we are supposed to talk again, and they will not return my call, ever...
Okay, one of the very first times this happened was early in the life of the blog, I was talking to a survivor in New Mexico, his case was current so we could not post the details, but he talked to me at length. He told me he also was real active in AA as a sponsor.
He said, "If you ever need to talk to me about anything, especially these issues, call anytime, because I know how important that contact with another human being is, so I'll return your call no matter what I'm doing, as soon as possible."
Okay that's not a direct quote. Point is he emphasized he would call me back.
He also was very close and in regular contact with David Clohessy.
I called back when we had arranged, he would not return the call. I tried a few more times, then gave up, and took it personally. In early 2007 I was not the self contained person I am today even. Three years back i was barely able to get a sentence out of my mouth...
Okay. It happened then again in states and regions all over the country, the exact same pattern. When a survivor who I'm talking to is in the middle of working with me on a story for the future at City of Angels, or even we are just talking as I need human contact SO BAD in my life right now.
We'll be goign along fine.
Then there is that interaction on their end with SNAP.
From that time on, the person will not call me back again.
This has happened now so many times that what I do now is I wait and see how long it will be before it happens. It happens ALL THE TIME.
Either someone is getting to survivors and telling them not to talk to me, which I know happened in Los Angeles in 2006, SNAP leaders in L.A. have been quoted to me saying, "Don't have anything to do with that crazy lady in Hollywood" to most people in SNAP. I still am stymied by that as well...
Off topic.
At first when people stopped calling me back, I took it personally. Then it became obvious something was going on.
My favorite was on the SNAP cruise, where about six antagonistic people went to Ensenada and back in 2008, it was supposed to be a fund raiser but there was -- six people or so went.
This one guy, he spent two to three hours telling me his whole life story and how it was affected by serial sodomy rape by a sickening German surnamed priest who is among the L.A. perpetrators.
We had this long talk. Plus the guy was my age, educated, I thought we really connected. We sat there both of us crying on a chaise lounge on the cruise ship.
Then he goes off to do something with SNAP which I think had to do with money management, as it was mostly people who had just gotten settlements who were the target of the cruise.
I got to go on the cruise because someone gave me his ticket, he could not refund it, he'd already paid for it then had to work, so I got to go on the cruise.
Boy was I not welcome there, but I tolerated it to experience a cruise one time.
Okay.
That night at dinner I see the guy who had just poured his heart out to me, bonded with me on a shared serial child rape basis.
I say the beginning of one sentence to him and he turns his back, abrupt, says something like, I don't want to talk to you about this anymore, totally shines me on.
I sit there with this person near me at the dinner table who is bristling angry at me, and have no idea why.
****
The first time it happened and I knew I was not imagining it, was a phone call I was having with this one guy from Southern California in the 2006-7 settlements who was also real active in SNAP. We were talkign along, talkign along, making plans to meet soon, sharing our archdiocesical rages.
Then in the middle of a sentence he goes, "Wait, oh, wha- wait, you're that Kay, you're that Kay? Oh, hold on, I gotta go."
And he never spoke to me again.
Lucky for me, he was not good at subterfuge at all. It was so blatant that someone had told him not to talk to me. That is the moment when it became more of an experience than a hurtful thing. I could be objective.
But still to this day is this niggling feeling inside, what is wrong with me. My personality is so bad that 99 percent of the survivors I talk to who are involved with SNAP do not call me back after they talk to someone at SNAP about me?
Is it that I am so disgusting that no one wants to talk to me after the first time?
Or is it SNAP telling them to have nothing to do with me.
I mean which makes more sense to you. Or SNARL as I dubbed them in the Fiction piece over Christmas, and I hope now people who read this will start to understand how I came to the place where I started calling them SNARL instead of SNAP.
Actually look at the comments Bob Schwiderski put on the Sunday post at City of Angels 8. He is snarling right there in print, not much different from emails I used to get from Mary Grant.
The nudges are back.
********
Cut from opening:
Thing is as long as I feel this way about SNAP I can't function in the "survivor community" as 80 percent of survivors tell me they are having a good experience with them. I don't know what the criteria is for who gets treated well by SNAP and who doesn't, I just know that the line is definitely drawn, and a lot of people get this same, they don't want me around feeling that I used to get in 2006, I just am so persistent, and yes, it struck me as ... so counter intuitive, for an organization that is supposed to be empowering crime victims to treat some of the victims so bad.
In some cases we are the wildest weirdest ones, the survivors who don't look good on camera, as I was in 2006. Thing is now that I've been doing City of Angels for three years, I've turned into this confident person. In reality it's the most damaged, broke, half homeless ones who need the most support and attention, yet we are the ones who get snubbed the most.
I used to think it was about money, the survivors who get treated well are the ones who have active cases that are going to end up in big settlements.
I don't know that for sure, because EVERY TIME I've been in conversation with survivors who are heading for big settlements, this David Clohessy or Someone intervention takes place.
I doubt it's the Church intervening. Most survivors would not listen to what a representative of the Church tells them to do.
But they will enthusiastically and reverently do what Clohessy or one of the others in the SNAP regional heirarchy tell them to do....
All this stuff I'm writing here is how I came to the conclusion that at the top, out of St. Louis, SNAP is run by the Roman Catholic Church, and the survivors have just been through years of Crowd Control, and News Information Management.
The only thing they screwed up with this plan is they did not count on the Internet, and survivors finding each other
IN SPITE of SNAP.
And me. I kept digging. And I kept trying to tell myself I was imagining it until it was SO RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY FACE, I could not see it as anything else.
So when survivors are still in that place where they have given a kind of Saint-quality to the individuals who run SNAP, they cannot understand how I could bad rap them.
It's the ones who call me with this same complaint that stymies me, as the weird treatment of survivors by SNAP is almost the same in every city.
In fact, when I first wrote about that strange snub in Fall 2009, where SNAP held a Gus Krumm press event in Orange County without mentioning that City of Angels broke the story, I got several emails from people who have been around a long time, old Linkup Members, and phone calls too, telling me, honey, SNAP has done that to so many survivors, you are not all that weird, don't feel like the Lone Ranger
.
I do feel alone with it right now, as I'm still only one of about three who is willing to say it in print, and use my name, from the dozens of victims I've spoken to who see that SNAP is a sham.
But right now there are so many survivors and advocates angry with me for writing this, that I can't even make a phone call to develop a story.
Thing is, as long as I keep researching, this niggling thing comes up. Something is wrong with SNAP and maybe I haven't figured it totally out, but there is definitely something wrong. And now that I've gone this far, I'm not going to stop, until someone looks into it.
There's more.
For those survivors who are already in a perplexed state like I was in 2006-2008 when I just couldn't figure out why SNAP does what it does, try this formula.
Take all your confusion about SNAP and add one element to the equation, that they are doing it on purpose, that they want to screw up press events and want to discourage survivors from continuing to participate.
Then all of a sudden all your confusion and questions are answered, as it all falls in place. If they really are counter-espionage, created by the bishops as far back as the late 1980s as a way to keep the lid on this story.
Add that concept into your experience with SNAP and suddenly- it's like reconciliation.
Everything falls into place.
Everything makes sense.
They left the survivors standing on a sidewalk with no one in washington and Florida? The way they tried to stifle me from covering L.A. Clergy Case hearings.
Just apply the idea that SNAP is really from the Church to your experience so far.
See if the same thing doesn't happen to you.
Suddenly it all makes sense, it all adds up.
And there was only one group of persons in the mid-1980s who knew how many crime victims there were, who knew they had to do something to keep us from really becoming a powerful force, who knew they had to insinuate themselves into the group of survivors who were already starting to find each ohter.
Only one group knew in advance how many of us there are and that they had to do something to contain us:
The US Conference of Roman Catholic bishops.
************
Oh yeah, David Clohessy. When I was in SNAP San Francisco in 1995, a leader there was confused, "Who the hell is this guy?" he said about Clohessy who seemed to appear out of the blue to take over the job of executive director and run SNAP.
Turns out David's brother Kevin was an accused pedophile priest, who secretly entered rehab for pedo priests in St. Louis (Probably the Paracletes).
Father Kevin Clohessy secretly entered rehab about the same time, mid-1990s, as David Clohessy was placed in his position as Director of SNAP.
I find that fact very revealing.
In the years I tried to write this blog, I came up against obstruction over and over, not from the Church, but from SNAP, particularly Clohessy. Today I think it is no coincidence that David's brother Kevin went into secret treatment for being a pedophile priest at the same time David took over as "director" of this counter-intelligence organization SNAP.
I think SNAP was created by the American bishops in the mid 1980s to run "damage control." They appear to be doing advocacy for victims, what they really are doing is keeping the victims under control, stepping in to run the story wherever it breaks in the USA, and beating down any survivors who seem determined to do advocacy above and beyond what SNAP is doing, with the agenda it has, an agenda created by God only knows who.
With the advent of the internet in the mid-1990s, whoever runs SNAP decided they needed a second "leader" in place besides Barbara Blaine, so they brought in Clohessy. From St. Louis, Clohessy intervenes whenever the pedophile priest story breaks in the news, anywhere in the USA. Before a second story gets into the news, Clohessy has established himself as the "spokesman" the press should go to for the story.
And all they ever get is the same bland quotes. Clohessy has been saying the same quotes about "protecting kids" and "callous behavior" of the bishops for more than 15 years. Quotes from Clohessy never say more than what has already been reported in the news.
Or my favorite, SNAP will criticize the Church for being "too secretive" and for responding to the clery abuse scandal with "more of the same" when being secretive and churning out more of the same is exactly what SNAP does.
It's damage control, calculated and carried out very cleverly.
SNAP is not an advocacy group, it runs damage control for the Church.
The main reason City of Angels is not publishing much anymore is if SNAP sees a survivor who is vocal and determined to be an activist in spite of SNAP, they will find ways beat you down and beat you down until you finally have no choice but to stop.
Then over the figurative beaten down body of the one activist survivor, SNAP will hold another press event and the world will hear about all the great work they are doing.
Oh if only some reporters with real curiosity would uncover this whole truth.
How did Clohessy end up as director at the same time his brother secretly went into therapy as a pedophile priest, for example.
Why does almost every survivor who is vocal and active in the "movement" end up disappearing and fading into a depressed silence while the handful of people who run SNAP keep going and going with all the resources they need for every trip and media event? (I've spoken to several of the victims who dropped out of the movement. Guess what? They felt in many cases that they were "vibed away" by Blaine and Clohessy. Surprise surprise)
Meanwhile expect a few more years of press statements calling the Church "reckless and callous" when the Church is actually a criminal enterprise. But if its victims are willing to stand behind "reckless and callous" then no one will see a need to prosecute.
Expect a few more years of press events taking place in front of cathedrals and Catholic offices, so the Church's security can watch and record everything the victims do when they get together there.
Expect a few more years of SNAP breezing into towns to conduct media events, gather up all the names of new victims and press contacts, then breeze back out of town leaving the local victims with no new information. Then all that contact information, names of new victims and reporters interested in doing stories, goes back to St. Louis and we never hear anything about them again.
All the names and media contact information ends up in a sinkhole somewhere between Chicago and St. Louis and all hundred thousand victims are left with no real voice, no real advocacy, and no stories developed in the media beyond the flurry of shallow responses covering SNAP's media events.
Same thing they were doing in the late 1990s, they are still doing in the 2010's, giving the appearance of advocacy, when in reality they are conducting damage control.
********************
Response to one of many recent emails:
They lied to me about the L.A. Clergy case pretrial hearings. They tried to divert me away from covering them. Clohessy tap dances instead of answering questions
I didn't stumble in here stoned and get mad 'cause no one liked me.
I was pulling on my Journalism skills from one of many careers I sabotaged to try to get this story out.
SNAP was diversionary and untruthful to me As A Journalist not only as a Survivor.
How many other reporters have gotten that same treatment? Makes me wonder if that's why this story has fizzled when it should ahve exploded.
I have many damn good reasons for being suspicious of them, please read what I am writing at http://cityofangels2.blogspot.com/ before telling me this is internal bickering or me being upset about being snubbed.
How can it be internal bickering when there is nothing to be inside of? The "survivor community" is a hologram. Great image, but when you reach out for it, there is nothing there.
***********
Too many unanswered questions and too much power (The Vatican) behind them for one lone blogger to uncover on her own. I feel a lot safer if I just drop it. I did not feel safe towards the end of City of Angels Blog's life. I felt like the more I wrote, the harder they would fight me to stop me.
I honestly became afraid to continue.
**********************************
I know what I am saying is really far out and unbelievable. But think of who the bad guys are in this story...
************************************
God, this is unfolding in layers. As soon as one element gets out and written down another one comes up.
Pacing around my home in early 2009, really working at calling lots of survivors around the country to develop stories for City of Angels.
I actually hollered into the phone, "God, no, I don't want to talk about that.
"Don'tn tell me that. Don't tell me it happened to you, no not again." Still the conversation would inevitably go there.
The obstacle that always ended up being up in front of us was SNAP in St. Louis, the support organization that was supposed to be making things happen.
"No, I really don't want to hear that," I said many times, "or bring that up again, it makes my blood pressure rise too much."
I didn't set out with City of Angels to write this part of the story, it just became to me, the most important story to tell.
It would always come up. The thing that stopped us, the thing that kept the project from being a success. It was always SNAP.
Obstructionist was the word that I kept writing in notes around mid-2008.
In early 2009 when it seemed everywhere I looked I'd see more signs that something was wrong at a shadow level with SNAP, it even affected me physically. I started shaking uncontrollably and it lasted days. I laid in bed shaking, taking muscle relaxants to keep from flying over the edge of the balcony.
Shaking.
Then with time it stopped, and I went back to telling myself, it can't be true. No one could be that sinister, devious, evil.
yes they can.
*****
*
I CAN'T STOP LAUGHING
One of my most prolific critics says I'm after David Clohessy's job. No. I would never want to run a nonprofit, I'm not a hand-shaker, I don't mix, I don't even like most humans anymore and look forward to leaving the planet soon.
I didn't have any agenda when those posts came out Sunday, they just came out. It's my experience, i didn't make it up. Maybe I should deny what happened to me and pretend it didn't so people will like me better?
My critic snarls that I'm jealous because "Clohessy is the most quoted man in the clerical child abuse movement" and that made me laugh so hard and so long out loud.
My critic revealed the problem.
"Most quoted man"?
Good PR results in a change in public thinking and policy.
That emailer was so totally from some other place and time, that I laughed so loud and so long...
**********
I CAN'T STOP LAUGHING
*****************
I've had this experience before, as a journalist, in fact I'm lucky I have, as the scars are all calloused from those times and this one I can just take.
I'd write a column saying something I saw and the result was outrage from the readers. Letter writing campaigns against me. Other columnists writing columns about how wrong I was.
Ostrasizing even.
Then five years later pretty much everyone knows and is saying the same thing that got me ostracized.
If anyone questions what I wrote Sunday and since, just look at this weird reaction I'm getting, it kind of proves what I wrote.
I mean Minnesota SNAP produced a video to snarl at me and sent it to five hundred people. And I'm not surprised. It's the level of intimidation a lot of survivors experience with them, and this is what will happen if you dare to criticize SNAP.
They really do Snarl.
***********
The Unfolding Continues
Brain still processing...
I'm even beginning to think the Support Group experience Summer 2008 at the SNAP conference ties into this scheme to beat me down. The time I was left standing alone in the hallway door slammed on me, thrown out of the Women's Saturday night breakaway event. Left feeling two inches high because of a support group? And all SNAP did about it was keep me from writing about it, that night.
It took me six months at least to recuperate.
Now I'm beginning to think that experience tied in somehow as well, it was a very strange thing.
Another Unfolding:
One of the highest Snappers said something very strange to me at the conference that did not make sense, and it's niggled at me now and then, but I've tried not to dwell on it. Then I realized he was so tied into thish effort to slam me down. He might even be the one writing the script.
All of a sudden that weird thing he said to me a year and a half ago makes sense.
Because that person is in the middle of it.
I'm standing today in my kitchen or wherever and these added elements pop into my head and I go, hmm, yeah, now it makes sense.
Another thing that same very high level SNAP person who is also an attorney said was, "Every time you put a post up at City of Angels, I go there right away and read it from beginning to end."
I thought he was complimenting me, now I see he was telling me, I'm an attorney, and I'm reading every single line you write, carefully.
I thought it was a friendly remark.
Since then he hasn't been too friendly. So it was another thing that just didn't make sense.
Until now.
Now that I realize he might be the one writing the script, I'm looking at both his comments a different way.
Things that didn't add up for so long.
Suddenly do.
Reconciliation
.
****
I'm still working this out in my head. What I'm trying to explain is I think SNAP has had a full out effort going from the beginning to keep City of Angels from happening. It just got so bad that I could barely develop stories for the blog, because so many people would not call me back. Plus, the repeated stories from around the country that I wasn't soliciting. Instead it was more like people felt so glad they finally had someone they could pour out to the bad experiences they had with SNAP.
I stuffed this part of the story down for three years for the exact reasons Bob Hoatson and Tom Doyle got on me for writing it, because I thought it would be bad for the "movement" to put this in print. But truth is there really is no movement to hurt, and that's my point.
What movement?
I've been reeling in the middle of this so long it did not add up in my head. Spewing it all out in a blog on Super Bowl Sunday has... repositioned me. Now I'm looking at all this stuff, and I don't doubt for a minute that I've pointed out something seriously wrong. Don't know if it's the bishops who are writing the script and doing everything they can to keep survivors on point and in line.
But someone is.
*************
Strangest of all in all this week's stuff is no one has validated the weird experience I had or helped explain what happened. It wasn't fun going through this the whole last three years, and the harangue from Minnesota from Sunday seems to have finally stopped on Friday morning. (Except now he's just emailing me.) Kind of proved my point.
No one has explained that maybe I misunderstood and SNAP wasn't trying to steer me away from covering the Clergy Cases in L.A. and then when I persisted anyway, they weren't trying to intimidate me into not covering the hearings. They haven't said, no, Kay, we haven't done that, we aren't trying to stifle City of Angels with contacts around the country.
Just show me I'm wrong, I'll write a mea culpa.
Instead there was a four-day effort to scare me into silence.
Oh, by the way in the two in depth interviews on the story of David C's life that have showed up this week, he doesn't mention his brother the pedophile priest again. I still think that is very weird, it's a major part of the dynamic of his work at SNAP, whether he even realizes it.
It would make his story more interesting even.
If there really was a network of support, all the survivors in far flung places who have tried to start things on their own would be part of it, and a network would really be great because we could reach out and encourage each other, share resources. None of that is happening in SNAP. Instead survivors like me who try to do something on their own are left all alone to do it with out even a nod of acknowledgement from SNAP. Then our projects are either usurped or smothered.
I wrote it all at City of Angels 2.
Funny, when i first arrived here in 2006 and was finding people at the SNAP message board, there were a couple of guys there that were like madmen. They kept hollering, SNAP is the bishops SNAP is the bishops. Now I too have degenerated into one of those insane survivors who are standing outside hollering, SNAP is the bishops, SNAP is the bishops.
The end of the world is Ni.
Soylent Green is People.
If not the bishops, someone is writing a script and keeping anyone from deviating from it, and that's plain weird.
*****
They are determined to intimidate people into not talking. Donald Steier has been more decent to me than hierarchy from SNAP as I've done City of Angels the last three years. He's the lawyer who defends all the predator priests.
The question no one seems to see I'm asking is, why did SNAP try to stop me from covering the LA Clergy cases in 2007, why did they tap dance or outright give me false information, trying to intimidate me then to not write about the cases.
Wow, just realized, in Januray 2007, the tone of the emails from Mary Grant was exactly the same as these Snarls I'm getting now from Minnesota SNAP. Minneapolis SNAP.
Wow, this is taking a turn I never predicted, I just knew I couldn't be silent any longer, I didn't wake up on Super Bowl Sunday saying, time to lash out. I woke up saying, I can't not write this and not post it any longer, when it comes up everywhere I loook and it is not going away.
Readers can figure it out for themselves, just look at what is happening.
SNAP does do a great job of getting plaintiffs to attorneys, and in that respect they do help survivors.
But the lawsuits also keep the truth secret.
************
So SNAP doesn't deny all this happened. They just want me to stop writing about it.
**************
.
I was wrong. Minnesota SNAP is still sending out the video, now in mac format for those who don't have PCs. He's calling it an "out-reach" [sic] video.
Someone sicced this man on me and no one is stopping him. As totally out of line as what he is doing, and no one is telling him to stop.
I'm telling a painful truth and they are doing everything they can to stop me.
Just like SNAP's treatment of me Jan 2007 when they tried to stop me from starting then continuing City of Angels.
They go behind the scenes and SNARL at survivors, freak most of us out so bad we run away and never come back.
.
***********
.
Now MN SNAP is emailing me that if I feel "ostrasized" it must be because it's true. Thanks, SNAP Minnesota for once again showing me, and now the world, the way SNAP treats many survivors.
Bob's latest email:
"How many times do you need to be ostracized (your word) before you stop - look - listen to what so many others are trying to tell you ? If none in a room full of people don't agree with you, stop - look - listen to them. Sadly, you look at a helping hand as being ostracized, stop - look - listen."
There hasn't been anything even resembling a helping hand offered, but he sure is determined to shut me up.
And where the hell is this roomful of people?
SNAP in Minnesota is writing this to me.
SNAP is saying: How dare you point out the nine thousand pound gorilla in the room?
******
Here's another of his emails, this yesterday:
"If you feel intimidated it is because you are uncomfortable with the can of worms you have opened on yourself."
I didn't arrive at this conclusion in a vaccum.
Anyone who can has valid genuine contributions to make to the conversation, I will gladly listen to.
But, Bob, only reason I'm going to open your emails anymore is to copy and paste them and post them here so everyone can see them.
Just like I put my true feelings up here for everyone to see, even though I knew there would be responses like Bob's, I just did not expect it so blatantly from one of the SNAP official "leaders."
The email to me from people who are just "people" has been more like Nine to One encouraging me and thanking me.
That was a surprise. I thought I had self destructed by going public with this.
So City of Angels is not Dead, it's just resting.
.
Good public relations would put our thousands of faces in the news media, and all our stories. What we have instead is "the most quoted man in the clergy sex abuse movement," brags Bob's video. I didn't listen to much past that, as it was not addressing what I wrote. Bob's video was a reaction wo what he thought I was saying, then he didn't bother to read the entire experience, just reacted to the first paragraph or so.
It poured out over days, it will probably pour out more, there's a lot to the story of my weird experience with SNAP.
As to ostracizing, I was ostracized already, before I wrote the stuff last week.
And since when is Shunning a cool practice?
And why are SO MANY people emailing me and thanking me for coming out with this?
****************
At least I put my allegations out in public, written here for everyone to read. The organization I criticize takes most its steps in secret. So which one would you believe?
**********
ALSO:
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Docs in SNAP Group Leaders Packet 1997 scanned here
.UPDATE: The group I ran in SF was 1997, not 1995, sorry for the error. Here are some docs that came with the Leadership Packet and a press release I sent out about the group I was running in the SF Public Library.
***************
I'm real busy at work, can't spend too much time on this right now, but two clicks at the IRS found me this, in FAQs
Q: In general, what public disclosure requirements apply to tax-exempt organizations?
A: In general, exempt organizations must make available for public inspection certain annual returns and applications for exemption, and must provide copies of such returns and applications to individuals who request them.
Copies usually must be provided immediately in the case of in-person requests, and within 30 days in the case of written requests. The tax-exempt organization may charge a reasonable copying fee plus actual postage, if any.
*****
So why has SNAP always said to me, I'll get right back to ya, and then they never do?
It's LAW they HAVE to show their financial papers.
Click here for IRS policy on nonprofits reporting their finances to the public. By law they have to, simply because they are not paying taxes, no further conversation should be needed.
http://www.irs.gov/charities/article/0,,id=214271,00.html
Yet David Clohessy tap danced instead of sending me these docs when I requested them over and over again for at least three weeks in Spring of 2008.
He said, "I have no idea, I have nothing to do with the money," then said he didn't even know who on the SNAP staff to ask for the documents, he would find out and get back to me, but he was totally in the dark about money at SNAP.
Did he really think I'm that stupid?
?????
*********************
(A Lot of copy and pasting from here down in this post, a lot of redundancy. Someday I'll come back in here and clean this up, cut out the repetition, and fix the typos. Not today.)
********************************
I remember the moment, in Pershing Square, a vigil while the bishops held their national meeting in the L.A. Biltmore across the street. I was disheveled, bloated and fat and self esteem? None. This was my second time finding SNAP. First time I'd been a warrior, moved a hundred miles to be closer to a SNAP meeting in Oakland, started a second daytime meeting in San Francisco. Wrote letters, started printing things out that I found on this new thing the Internet.
Mid 1990s.
Now it was 2006, there had been a murder in my family so I hadn't done SNAP for several years, now I could come back, all the chaos and insanity in that part of my life was finally ending and I could start paying attention to this priest thing again.
Barbara Blaine who sat next to Mary Grant and I finally got a chance to talk to them. I was in awe of them, gazing up at them, probably looked pretty pathetic.
I said, "It feels so good to be able to send out a letter to the editor and sign it Kay Ebeling, SNAP Los Angeles."
Blaine and Grant looked at each other then looked at me, and said simultaneously:
"You can't."
Then they explained why I couldn't say I was a member of SNAP but I really don't remember what the reasoning was. Just that I gave them the authority, figured they must know what they are doing, so they must be right.
So, for all the people who tell me, just do something on your own and call it SNAP like they did, you are forgetting that you started that in the 1990s or early 2000s.
Apparently SNAP has changed since then, it's much more controlled from the top, there are a lot more secrets kept than were in 1995.
So as I said, I'm writing what my experience was. Not to whine or ask for pity, but to point out that no one in this movement deserves sainthood. Everyone among us deserves to be criticized if they are putting out false information.
Saying SNAP is a "support network" is two false statements. The support is not really there. And the network does not exist at all, it's a hologram.
I know people are rankled but as long as it's impossible to point out anything SNAP does wrong, they will continue to do things in "the way we've always done it," and the same mistakes get made.
NO ONE is above criticism.
Even me. I hear it and consider it when it's legitimate.
If SNAP told me lies, misdirected me, and I'm one journalist / survivor, it makes me really wonder how many other people were misdirected by SNAP, and why.
If anything, I know making these statements makes me look petty in some people's eyes. If it was about me-me-me, believe me, I would not have posted this story.
It's about me not wanting to see the same mistakes and screw-ups continue. It's about me saying, why doesn't someone go in and reorganize, update, and set genuine Goals at SNAP instead of just letting it continue in its constant state of disarray.
How is that whining or pity potting. One of SNAP's most vocal midwest spokesmen is hounding me now that I'm on a pity pot.
And my idea:
Set up a trust, a fund from donations from settlements, and let survivors who did not get settlements apply to the fund for grants.
What's wrong with that idea? how is that just caring about me-me-me and being on a pity pot?
I think it's a damn good idea, and something SNAP should have done and still couuld do.
But there's Mr. Snap from Minnesota screaming at me that I'm on a pity pot and all I care about is me-me-me if I say why not set up a trust for the rest of the victims.
Knee jerk reaction.
Nothing will improve until we fix the broken parts.
Having the strangest experience.
It's over. I think...
I doubt I'll post another word at City of Angels.
I did what I came for. I identified the problem and wrote about it, reported it here.
Now, I can't hang around while almost everyone else working in this area is not only drinking the Kool-Aid but drunk on it.
If people prefer to believe what they are told instead of what they see, there's not much more I have to write on this topic.
I'm a chameleon, always have been, and it's real obvious, the way I feel, that another change is coming, and City of Angels is done.
I did what I came here for, identified the problem, and until the rest of us see and deal with the problem, I can't function in this "community."
City of Angels was run from the beginning on nudges. They're gone now. They left this morning.
There's nothing more to say. Until other people see what I see, there's nothing more I can say.
ke
****
I am also, I will admit, going a little nuts. I don't just think David and Barbara are from the Church. I'm getting so every person I talk to on the phone or through email through this blog is an undercover agent from the church, or from David and Barbara.
Maybe if I just write here for a while and stop answering my phone...
****
There has also been this eerie strange experience I've had since first starting City of Angels blog back in Jan. 2007 (in spite of SNAP's obstruction, which I already wrote about here yesterday).
Not long into working on the blog, I'd have this experience, at first I noted it and kind of was left with this, what happened, feeling. When it happened 12, 15 times I began to really notice it and make note of it. Now it happens all the time, with about two exceptions.
I'm talking to a survivor somewhere in the US over the phone, we are getting along great. We make plans to talk again about this or that at a time in the future. I call that person when we are supposed to talk again, and they will not return my call, ever...
Okay, one of the very first times this happened was early in the life of the blog, I was talking to a survivor in New Mexico, his case was current so we could not post the details, but he talked to me at length. He told me he also was real active in AA as a sponsor.
He said, "If you ever need to talk to me about anything, especially these issues, call anytime, because I know how important that contact with another human being is, so I'll return your call no matter what I'm doing, as soon as possible."
Okay that's not a direct quote. Point is he emphasized he would call me back.
He also was very close and in regular contact with David Clohessy.
I called back when we had arranged, he would not return the call. I tried a few more times, then gave up, and took it personally. In early 2007 I was not the self contained person I am today even. Three years back i was barely able to get a sentence out of my mouth...
Okay. It happened then again in states and regions all over the country, the exact same pattern. When a survivor who I'm talking to is in the middle of working with me on a story for the future at City of Angels, or even we are just talking as I need human contact SO BAD in my life right now.
We'll be goign along fine.
Then there is that interaction on their end with SNAP.
From that time on, the person will not call me back again.
This has happened now so many times that what I do now is I wait and see how long it will be before it happens. It happens ALL THE TIME.
Either someone is getting to survivors and telling them not to talk to me, which I know happened in Los Angeles in 2006, SNAP leaders in L.A. have been quoted to me saying, "Don't have anything to do with that crazy lady in Hollywood" to most people in SNAP. I still am stymied by that as well...
Off topic.
At first when people stopped calling me back, I took it personally. Then it became obvious something was going on.
My favorite was on the SNAP cruise, where about six antagonistic people went to Ensenada and back in 2008, it was supposed to be a fund raiser but there was -- six people or so went.
This one guy, he spent two to three hours telling me his whole life story and how it was affected by serial sodomy rape by a sickening German surnamed priest who is among the L.A. perpetrators.
We had this long talk. Plus the guy was my age, educated, I thought we really connected. We sat there both of us crying on a chaise lounge on the cruise ship.
Then he goes off to do something with SNAP which I think had to do with money management, as it was mostly people who had just gotten settlements who were the target of the cruise.
I got to go on the cruise because someone gave me his ticket, he could not refund it, he'd already paid for it then had to work, so I got to go on the cruise.
Boy was I not welcome there, but I tolerated it to experience a cruise one time.
Okay.
That night at dinner I see the guy who had just poured his heart out to me, bonded with me on a shared serial child rape basis.
I say the beginning of one sentence to him and he turns his back, abrupt, says something like, I don't want to talk to you about this anymore, totally shines me on.
I sit there with this person near me at the dinner table who is bristling angry at me, and have no idea why.
****
The first time it happened and I knew I was not imagining it, was a phone call I was having with this one guy from Southern California in the 2006-7 settlements who was also real active in SNAP. We were talkign along, talkign along, making plans to meet soon, sharing our archdiocesical rages.
Then in the middle of a sentence he goes, "Wait, oh, wha- wait, you're that Kay, you're that Kay? Oh, hold on, I gotta go."
And he never spoke to me again.
Lucky for me, he was not good at subterfuge at all. It was so blatant that someone had told him not to talk to me. That is the moment when it became more of an experience than a hurtful thing. I could be objective.
But still to this day is this niggling feeling inside, what is wrong with me. My personality is so bad that 99 percent of the survivors I talk to who are involved with SNAP do not call me back after they talk to someone at SNAP about me?
Is it that I am so disgusting that no one wants to talk to me after the first time?
Or is it SNAP telling them to have nothing to do with me.
I mean which makes more sense to you. Or SNARL as I dubbed them in the Fiction piece over Christmas, and I hope now people who read this will start to understand how I came to the place where I started calling them SNARL instead of SNAP.
Actually look at the comments Bob Schwiderski put on the Sunday post at City of Angels 8. He is snarling right there in print, not much different from emails I used to get from Mary Grant.
The nudges are back.
********
Cut from opening:
Thing is as long as I feel this way about SNAP I can't function in the "survivor community" as 80 percent of survivors tell me they are having a good experience with them. I don't know what the criteria is for who gets treated well by SNAP and who doesn't, I just know that the line is definitely drawn, and a lot of people get this same, they don't want me around feeling that I used to get in 2006, I just am so persistent, and yes, it struck me as ... so counter intuitive, for an organization that is supposed to be empowering crime victims to treat some of the victims so bad.
In some cases we are the wildest weirdest ones, the survivors who don't look good on camera, as I was in 2006. Thing is now that I've been doing City of Angels for three years, I've turned into this confident person. In reality it's the most damaged, broke, half homeless ones who need the most support and attention, yet we are the ones who get snubbed the most.
I used to think it was about money, the survivors who get treated well are the ones who have active cases that are going to end up in big settlements.
I don't know that for sure, because EVERY TIME I've been in conversation with survivors who are heading for big settlements, this David Clohessy or Someone intervention takes place.
I doubt it's the Church intervening. Most survivors would not listen to what a representative of the Church tells them to do.
But they will enthusiastically and reverently do what Clohessy or one of the others in the SNAP regional heirarchy tell them to do....
All thish stuff I'm writing here is how I came to the conclusion that at the top, out of St. Louis, SNAP is run by the Roman Catholic Church, and the survivors have just been through years of Crowd Control, and News Information Management.
The only thing they screwed up with this plan is they did not count on the Internet, and survivors finding each other
IN SPITE of SNAP.
And me. I kept digging. And I kept trying to tell myself I was imagining it until it was SO RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY FACE, I could not see it as anything else.
So when survivors are still in that place where they have given a kind of Saint-quality to the individuals who run SNAP, they cannot understand how I could bad rap them.
It's the ones who call me with this same complaint that stymies me, as the weird treatment of survivors by SNAP is almost the same in every city.
In fact, when I first wrote about that strange snub in Fall 2009, where SNAP held a Gus Krumm press event in Orange County without mentioning that City of Angels broke the story, I got several emails from people who have been around a long time, old Linkup Members, and phone calls too, telling me, honey, SNAP has done that to so many survivors, you are not all that weird, don't feel like the Lone Ranger
.
I do feel alone with it right now, as I'm still the only one of about three willing to say it in print, and use my name.
But right now there are so many survivors and advocates angry with me for writing this, that I can't even make a phone call to develop a story.
Thing is, as long as I keep researching, this niggling thing comes up. Something is wrong with SNAP and maybe I haven't figured it totally out, but there is definitely something wrong. And now that I've gone this far, I'm not going to stop, until someone looks into it.
There's more.
For those survivors who are already in a perplexed state like I was in 2006-2008 when I just couldn't figure out why SNAP does what it does, try this formula.
Take all your confusion about SNAP and add one element to the equation, that they are doing it on purpose, that they want to screw up press events and want to discourage survivors from continuing to participate.
Then all of a sudden all your confusion and questions are answered, as it all falls in place. If they really are counter-espionage, created by the bishops as far back as the late 1980s as a way to keep the lid on this story.
Add that concept into your experience with SNAP and suddenly- it's like reconciliation.
Everything falls into place.
Everything makes sense.
They left the survivors standing on a sidewalk with no one in washington and Florida? The way they tried to stifle me from covering L.A. Clergy Case hearings.
Just apply the idea that SNAP is really from the Church to your experience so far.
See if the same thing doesn't happen to you.
Suddenly it all makes sense, it all adds up.
And there was only one group of persons in the mid-1980s who knew how many crime victims there were, who knew they had to do something to keep us from really becoming a powerful force, who knew they had to insinuate themselves into the group of survivors who were already starting to find each ohter.
Only one group knew in advance how many of us there are and that they had to do something to contain us:
The US Conference of Roman Catholic bishops.
************
Response to one of many recent emails:
They lied to me about the L.A. Clergy case pretrial hearings. They tried to divert me away from covering them. Clohessy tap dances instead of answering questions
I didn't stumble in here stoned and get mad 'cause no one liked me.
I was pulling on my J skills to try to get this story out.
SNAP was diversionary and untruthful to me As A Journalist not only as a Survivor.
How many other reporters have gotten that same treatment? Makes me wonder if that's why this story has fizzled when it should ahve exploded.
I have many damn good reasons for being suspicious of them, please read what I am writing at http://cityofangels2.blogspot.com/ before telling me this is internal bickering or me being upset about being snubbed.
How can it be internal bickering when there is nothing to be inside of? The "survivor community" is a hologram. Great image, but when you reach out for it, there is nothing there.
*****
.
I know what I am saying is really far out and unbelievable. But think of who the bad guys are in this story...
Could be that things in SNAP have been so secretive and non-transparent that it makes a person inclined to suspect things are worse than they really are.
Best if from the beginning there are no secrets.
*****
.
God, this is unfolding in layers. As soon as one element gets out and written down another one comes up.
Pacing around my home in early 2009, really working at calling lots of survivors around the country to develop stories for City of Angels.
I actually hollered into the phone, "God, no, I don't want to talk about that.
"Don'tn tell me that. Don't tell me it happened to you, no not again." Still the conversation would inevitably go there.
The obstacle that always ended up being up in front of us was SNAP in St. Louis, the support organization that was supposed to be making things happen.
"No, I really don't want to hear that," I said many times, "or bring that up again, it makes my blood pressure rise too much."
I didn't set out with City of Angels to write this part of the story, it just became to me, the most important story to tell.
It would always come up. The thing that stopped us, the thing that kept the project from being a success. It was always SNAP.
Obstructionist was the word that I kept writing in notes around mid-2008.
In early 2009 when it seemed everywhere I looked I'd see more signs that something was wrong at a shadow level with SNAP, it even affected me physically. I started shaking uncontrollably and it lasted days. I laid in bed shaking, taking muscle relaxants to keep from flying over the edge of the balcony.
Shaking.
Then with time it stopped, and I went back to telling myself, it can't be true. No one could be that sinister, devious, evil.
yes they can.
*****
*
I CAN'T STOP LAUGHING
One of my most prolific critics says I'm after David Clohessy's job. No. I would never want to run a nonprofit, I'm not a hand-shaker, I don't mix, I don't even like most humans anymore and look forward to leaving the planet soon.
I didn't have any agenda when those posts came out Sunday, they just came out. It's my experience, i didn't make it up. Maybe I should deny what happened to me and pretend it didn't so people will like me better?
My critic snarls that I'm jealous because "Clohessy is the most quoted man in the clerical child abuse movement" and that made me laugh so hard and so long out loud.
My critic revealed the problem.
"Most quoted man"?
Good PR results in a change in public thinking and policy.
That emailer was so totally from some other place and time, that I laughed so loud and so long...
**********
I CAN'T STOP LAUGHING
*****************
I've had this experience before, as a journalist, in fact I'm lucky I have, as the scars are all calloused from those times and this one I can just take.
I'd write a column saying something I saw and the result was outrage from the readers. Letter writing campaigns against me. Other columnists writing columns about how wrong I was.
Ostrasizing even.
Then five years later pretty much everyone knows and is saying the same thing that got me ostracized.
If anyone questions what I wrote Sunday and since, just look at this weird reaction I'm getting, it kind of proves what I wrote.
I mean Minnesota SNAP produced a video to snarl at me and sent it to five hundred people. And I'm not surprised. It's the level of intimidation a lot of survivors experience with them, and this is what will happen if you dare to criticize SNAP.
They really do Snarl.
***********
The Unfolding Continues
Brain still processing...
I'm even beginning to think the Support Group experience Summer 2008 at the SNAP conference ties into this scheme to beat me down. The time I was left standing alone in the hallway door slammed on me, thrown out of the Women's Saturday night breakaway event. Left feeling two inches high because of a support group? And all SNAP did about it was keep me from writing about it, that night.
It took me six months at least to recuperate.
Now I'm beginning to think that experience tied in somehow as well, it was a very strange thing.
Another Unfolding:
One of the highest Snappers said something very strange to me at the conference that did not make sense, and it's niggled at me now and then, but I've tried not to dwell on it. Then I realized he was so tied into thish effort to slam me down. He might even be the one writing the script.
All of a sudden that weird thing he said to me a year and a half ago makes sense.
Because that person is in the middle of it.
I'm standing today in my kitchen or wherever and these added elements pop into my head and I go, hmm, yeah, now it makes sense.
Another thing that same very high level SNAP person who is also an attorney said was, "Every time you put a post up at City of Angels, I go there right away and read it from beginning to end."
I thought he was complimenting me, now I see he was telling me, I'm an attorney, and I'm reading every single line you write, carefully.
I thought it was a friendly remark.
Since then he hasn't been too friendly. So it was another thing that just didn't make sense.
Until now.
Now that I realize he might be the one writing the script, I'm looking at both his comments a different way.
Things that didn't add up for so long.
Suddenly do.
Reconciliation
.
****
I'm still working this out in my head. What I'm trying to explain is I think SNAP has had a full out effort going from the beginning to keep City of Angels from happening. It just got so bad that I could barely develop stories for the blog, because so many people would not call me back. Plus, the repeated stories from around the country that I wasn't soliciting. Instead it was more like people felt so glad they finally had someone they could pour out to the bad experiences they had with SNAP.
I stuffed this part of the story down for three years for the exact reasons Bob Hoatson and Tom Doyle got on me for writing it, because I thought it would be bad for the "movement" to put this in print. But truth is there really is no movement to hurt, and that's my point.
What movement?
I've been reeling in the middle of this so long it did not add up in my head. Spewing it all out in a blog on Super Bowl Sunday has... repositioned me. Now I'm looking at all this stuff, and I don't doubt for a minute that I've pointed out something seriously wrong. Don't know if it's the bishops who are writing the script and doing everything they can to keep survivors on point and in line.
But someone is.
*************
Strangest of all in all this week's stuff is no one has validated the weird experience I had or helped explain what happened. It wasn't fun going through this the whole last three years, and the harangue from Minnesota from Sunday seems to have finally stopped on Friday morning. (Except now he's just emailing me.) Kind of proved my point.
No one has explained that maybe I misunderstood and SNAP wasn't trying to steer me away from covering the Clergy Cases in L.A. and then when I persisted anyway, they weren't trying to intimidate me into not covering the hearings. They haven't said, no, Kay, we haven't done that, we aren't trying to stifle City of Angels with contacts around the country.
Just show me I'm wrong, I'll write a mea culpa.
Instead there was a four-day effort to scare me into silence.
Oh, by the way in the two in depth interviews on the story of David C's life that have showed up this week, he doesn't mention his brother the pedophile priest again. I still think that is very weird, it's a major part of the dynamic of his work at SNAP, whether he even realizes it.
It would make his story more interesting even.
If there really was a network of support, all the survivors in far flung places who have tried to start things on their own would be part of it, and a network would really be great because we could reach out and encourage each other, share resources. None of that is happening in SNAP. Instead survivors like me who try to do something on their own are left all alone to do it with out even a nod of acknowledgement from SNAP. Then our projects are either usurped or smothered.
I wrote it all at City of Angels 2.
Funny, when i first arrived here in 2006 and was finding people at the SNAP message board, there were a couple of guys there that were like madmen. They kept hollering, SNAP is the bishops SNAP is the bishops. Now I too have degenerated into one of those insane survivors who are standing outside hollering, SNAP is the bishops, SNAP is the bishops.
The end of the world is Ni.
Soylent Green is People.
If not the bishops, someone is writing a script and keeping anyone from deviating from it, and that's plain weird.
*****
They are determined to intimidate people into not talking. Donald Steier has been more decent to me than hierarchy from SNAP as I've done City of Angels the last three years. He's the lawyer who defends all the predator priests.
The question no one seems to see I'm asking is, why did SNAP try to stop me from covering the LA Clergy cases in 2007, why did they tap dance or outright give me false information, trying to intimidate me then to not write about the cases.
Wow, just realized, in Januray 2007, the tone of the emails from Mary Grant was exactly the same as these Snarls I'm getting now from Minnesota SNAP. Minneapolis SNAP.
Wow, this is taking a turn I never predicted, I just knew I couldn't be silent any longer, I didn't wake up on Super Bowl Sunday saying, time to lash out. I woke up saying, I can't not write this and not post it any longer, when it comes up everywhere I loook and it is not going away.
Readers can figure it out for themselves, just look at what is happening.
SNAP does do a great job of getting plaintiffs to attorneys, and in that respect they do help survivors.
But the lawsuits also keep the truth secret.
************
So SNAP doesn't deny all this happened. They just want me to stop writing about it.
**************
.
I was wrong. Minnesota SNAP is still sending out the video, now in mac format for those who don't have PCs. He's calling it an "out-reach" [sic] video.
Someone sicced this man on me and no one is stopping him. As totally out of line as what he is doing, and no one is telling him to stop.
I'm telling a painful truth and they are doing everything they can to stop me.
Just like SNAP's treatment of me Jan 2007 when they tried to stop me from starting then continuing City of Angels.
They go behind the scenes and SNARL at survivors, freak most of us out so bad we run away and never come back.
.
***********
.
Now MN SNAP is emailing me that if I feel "ostrasized" it must be because it's true. Thanks, SNAP Minnesota for once again showing me, and now the world, the way SNAP treats many survivors.
Bob's latest email:
"How many times do you need to be ostracized (your word) before you stop - look - listen to what so many others are trying to tell you ? If none in a room full of people don't agree with you, stop - look - listen to them. Sadly, you look at a helping hand as being ostracized, stop - look - listen."
There hasn't been anything even resembling a helping hand offered, but he sure is determined to shut me up.
And where the hell is this roomful of people?
SNAP in Minnesota is writing this to me.
SNAP is saying: How dare you point out the nine thousand pound gorilla in the room?
******
Here's another of his emails, this yesterday:
"If you feel intimidated it is because you are uncomfortable with the can of worms you have opened on yourself."
I didn't arrive at this conclusion in a vaccum.
Anyone who can has valid genuine contributions to make to the conversation, I will gladly listen to.
But, Bob, only reason I'm going to open your emails anymore is to copy and paste them and post them here so everyone can see them.
Just like I put my true feelings up here for everyone to see, even though I knew there would be responses like Bob's, I just did not expect it so blatantly from one of the SNAP official "leaders."
The email to me from people who are just "people" has been more like Nine to One encouraging me and thanking me.
That was a surprise. I thought I had self destructed by going public with this.
So City of Angels is not Dead, it's just resting.
.
Good public relations would put our thousands of faces in the news media, and all our stories. What we have instead is "the most quoted man in the clergy sex abuse movement," brags Bob's video. I didn't listen to much past that, as it was not addressing what I wrote. Bob's video was a reaction wo what he thought I was saying, then he didn't bother to read the entire experience, just reacted to the first paragraph or so.
Don't let them tell you we are all damaged survivors, and if you question them it's just because we have "Trust Issues" or you are trying to destroy the "movement." Point out to them that there really is no movement.
Do you see why I no longer trust them?
There's more...
.
You don't have to be a journalist to ask a person at a nonprofit for their financial papers and have them sent immediately, it's in the law.
If you're an American taxpayer you have a right to know.
.
************
This story poured out over days, it will probably pour out more, there's a lot to the story of my weird experience with SNAP.
As to ostracizing, I was ostracized already, before I wrote the stuff last week.
And since when is Shunning a cool practice?
And why are SO MANY people emailing me and thanking me for coming out with this?
****************
At least I put my allegations out in public, written here for everyone to read. The organization I criticize takes most its steps in secret. So which one would you believe?
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
Wow it's so obvious. SNAP wanted to keep me from starting and continuing City of Angels because What I Wrote Here the last three days is What They Did Not Want Me To Find Out.
**********
For a copy of financial papers from SNAP email snapadmin1@gmail.com, it says here in the SNAP Annual report
It's under the pie chart at the bottom of a list in about 2 point type but it's there...
Every time I've emailed I've gotten the answer, "we will send it to you next week." Then next week never comes.
Maybe other people will get a better response. I wish other people would email that address and see if you have better luck than I have ever had, getting to see a copy of their 2007-2008 income and outflow pages.
I think it's strange that a nonprofit sidesteps inquiries about its finances, I mean they are not paying taxes, it's the public's money, we have a right to know.
When David tapdanced with me over a six-week period refusing to answer any questions about money in early 2008 is when the red flags about SNAP really started being so much in my face.
But I still gave them the benefit of the doubt, as long as I could - without turning into a PR writer and not a journalist.
.
We scanned the 2006 financial papers from SNAP here last December and they showed a half a million dollars was taken in and spent in that year. That was before California...
Anyway, I don't think it's legal for a nonprofit to keep their financial papers secret.
UPDATE:
It may be easier for SNAP to hide its financial information since 2006 as they are now incorporated in Nevada, evidently moved from Illinois in 2007, but now they're a non profit registered in the Onetime Mob State to the East of L.A.
There's a lot of dead bodies in that desert.
.
FINANCIAL DOCUMENTS SCANNED
Financial documents from SNAP 2006 can be viewed full screen, click to enlarge, by following the headline below to City of Angels 11
Monday, November 23, 2009
A guy handed me these papers begging me to post them. Here they are, if they are a smoking gun, please let me know...
.
(BELOW are some documents that were in a wad of paper a guy handed me two years ago. I feel a real need to get them online, but have hesitated, as I know some people among the crime victims will stop talking to me because I posted these. Oh well. If there is really nothing wrong here, I would love to hear it. Anyone can email me or call and tell me these docs below are not that revealing, please do. ...
(((((((((((
Also:
For a copy of financial papers from SNAP 2007, 2008, email
snapadmin1@gmail.com
Here in the SNAP Annual report under the pie chart
At the bottom of a list, in about
2 point type
but it's there...
Email snapadmin1@gmail.com for financial documents from 2008, and I assume 2007.
Every time I've emailed though, in the past year, I've gotten the answer, "We will send it to you next week." Then next week never comes.
Now Word Comes to Me that sometime in the past two years SNAP moved its headquarters to Nevada, where as we in L.A. know, anything goes when it comes to law enforcement and oversight.
Anyway, wish someone besides me would email them for financial docs and then post them somewhere or send them to me to post.
I can't believe an organization that takes in millions (est.) in donation money to "help survivors" and then does almost nothing, can get away with not telling the press or publishing at their website the financial docs.
A legitimate nonprofit would have their finances posted in their annual report.
A legitimate nonprofit...
.
If anyone emails that address, please let me know what happens.
ke
**************
AH,
the Mystery of Memory
When you write one memory out of your head, it makes room for another.
Scene was L.A. Criminal Courts, a hearing regarding Michael Baker. SNAP sent out notices and about 15 people would come.
It was December 2006 or Jan 2007, I knew that with hundreds of lawsuits filed back in 2003 in California because of the one-year window, there had to be some activity somewhere in the Courts. My only connection to the information was Mary Grant, Regional Director from SNAP.
Every time I asked, she'd shrug, say, no, nothing is going on. But at this Baker hearing I tried another tack.
I waited until the other Mary, the woman from A Call to Action, was standing in conversation with Mary. I walked up and interrupted.
"Mary, there's gotta be something going on with all those lawsuits that were filed in 2003, what's going on?"
Grant bristled, face beating. Then with calculated control the words formed adn came out of her mouth. "Yes, there are hearings in Superior court."
"Where in L.A. Superior Court, which building?"
"I don't know."
"Which judge, which department?"
"I don't know."
"When will be the next hearings?"
"I don't know."
"Well then who can I call who would know?"
She had to tell me, because the other Mary was standing there. This was already more info that Mary Grant had been willing to divulge for the previous weeks. A name of an attorney doing the hearings.
Grant gave me the name of Attorney Ray Boucher, and finally I had something. Then a woman in Boucher's office told me how to keep track of the hearings, that yes, there had been a few hundred pre-trial hearings so far in the past year. She told me which Superior Court, the name of the judge, where and how to find the Clergy Case Calendar online.
Grant from SNAP had been telling me for months there was nothing going on.
She knew I was a journalist, too, hadn't been published in a while, but anyone even then could find old articles I had written online.
The only reason I got even that much information out of the only full time paid regional director from SNAP at the time was someone else was witnessing the conversation.
I waited until someone else was talking to her and interrupted, it was the only way to force information out of her. She couldn't tell me another lie in front of Mary from A Call to Action.
That is only one of many reasons I've come to believe SNAP has some other agenda than what they purport to the public.
I'm seeing patterns and evidence enough to think SNAP has been run by the bishops since at least 1993 when they incorporated under the Dominican Sisters (see previous post).
Meantime, I'm glad this is pouring out. People need to find out how much they tried to keep City of Angels from happening, whatever and whoever is the cause of it.
If they were lying and diverting me from even knowing about the hearings, what else did they do to keep the press from writing about the Clergy Cases in L.A.?
.
NOT a SMOKING GUN, but something people said, yes, you should post, so I posted:
.
I found this part of a SNAP incorporation paper in a file cabinet a few weeks ago. It doesn't conflict with half the stories I've heard about how SNAP started but it does conflict with the other half.
At first I took advice not to post this, as people who've been around since 1993 or so don't see this as a problem, but new people are calling me and saying, what? No. Post it. It answers so many questions for me.
Here it is in full size, below it is in closeup.
I ran a SNAP group in San Francisco in 1995, that is when I received this document, then found it in a file drawer a few weeks back.
Some of my friends are saying this is a smoking gun.
I don't think it is, but other friends are saying, yes, do post it, because it answers a lot of questions I've had in my mind.
SNAP incorporating paper, click to enlarge, they were set up in 1993 as "an institution of the Catholic Church":
As I said, wherever I turn, even my own file cabinets, I find evidence that SNAP has been part of the Catholic Church all along.
And the way some people reacted this week, I think part of their whole scheme from the beginning was to get us all into a state of awe over the persons who run SNAP at a national level.
So today it is shocking, sinful almost, to criticize SNAP, or publish a "screed" as I've been told by too many people using that same word "screed."
Starting from the day they created SNAP, they wanted us to be afraid to ask questions.
It's the Bishops' MO too...
.
**I haven't even written here yet, how Angelic Intervention in January 2007 showed me the truth, and how what SNAP was telling me was the opposite of the truth. That was the birth of City of Angels, coverage of a hearing Jan. 16, 2007, when SNAP emailed me warning me not to go to the hearing, not to write about it, because the plaintiff did not want any news coverage and it would "ruin his case" or words to that effect.
I think it was angelic intervention that the one plaintiff SNAP was talking to me about was the one and only person from the Southern California cases who I had met, even made good friends with, through the SNAP online message board, which they have since discontinued. So I called the plaintiff and asked him, is that true? You don't want me to cover your hearing? He answered, hell yes I want you to write about it, I never even talked to anyone from SNAP.
So I went ahead and started City of Angels, in spite of SNAP, and the rest is history. It's all here. What I found out, and how it took them three years, but they succeeded and got me silenced.
Not the church, SNAP got City of Angels silenced. Now I'm observing from the sidelines as survivors around the country pop up on blogs and in Comments saying, well SNAP are just a couple of survivors who are dysfunctional like the rest of us, and if SNAP won't let me in, I'll just start something on my own. I'll observe, like others- old-timers around the country who have given up- do, as SNAP sabotages another survivor trying to do something on their after being shot down too many times by SNAP, I'll be on the sidelines at the same email address as always, waiting for someone with some power and force to step in and stop this incredible re-victimization and fraud that has been purported onto the pedophile priest crime victims by the Roman catholic bishops.
Sleazy underhanded back door counter espionage with absolutely no concern for how it hurts the already damaged crime victims, brought to you by the same persons who transferred pedophiles from one parish to another leaving them free to prey on children in their churches. They created SNAP back in the 1980s to dominate the nascent crime victim "community" and keep us all silent and in line as this story broke in oe city after another across the country.
As a result, news came out about these thousands of organized pedophile crimes, and no one is up in arms, no one is crying for prosecution. Because no one really heard the story of what happened to us. The crime victims were kept controlled and silent, by an organization that sells itself as the "support network" for the survivors.
I'll just have to be on the sidelines watching for now, waiting and waiting for other people to "get it."
.
Kay Ebeling
.
****
POST NOTE 1:
Sept. 30, 2011
Blaine is in Rome, getting ready to follow the Pope into Germany with what Irish Times identifies as her "lobbying organization." Now the reporter could have gotten it wrong, but if not, it is illegal for a nonprofit in the USA to engage in lobbying... but who cares about a little thing like IRS laws?
Abuse lobby urges Pope not to meet victims in Germany
Story will also make you laugh when it quotes Blain criticizing the victims meeting because writes the Irish Times:
The Pope will again meet what the survivors’ lobby calls “a small, handpicked group” of victims
Hello? SNAP is run by and for a hand-picked group of victims.
Another quote from this article:
Survivors’ lobby director Barbara Blaine argued that such high-profile meetings between the Pope and victims represented little more than “good PR” for the Holy See.
Well, yeah, like SNAP is nothing more than PR.
Blaine also says in the Irish Times piece:
"In the long term, [victims meeting with the Pope] will only add to the sense of betrayal and disappointment that millions – inside and outside of the church – feel about this pontiff and this crisis."
My friend Jim Robertson of L.A. thinks this current SNAP campaign to focus all the guilt on the Pope is another Catholic bishop-backed effort, as once this Pope dies, there will be no one else left to blame.
***
Pope Benedict is a fall guy.
And Barbara Blaine does not speak for the American victims. Who she speaks for is a question, but the audacity she displays claiming to be "lobbying" for us (illegally) is astounding.
*****
POST NOTE 2:
The result of SNAP's counter-intelligence is the people in the pews and most priests are able to go on with life in the Church as if none of these crimes ever happened. SNAP managed to keep the damage done to the Church down as low as possible by keeping any real grass-roots activism from ever getting started, and creating an image of victims as money-grubbing anti-Catholics.
So we end up like stories like this from Philly Dot Com on Oct. 5, 2011:
Msgr. Lynn got standing ovation at Chaput dinner, say those at event
By John P. Martin
Inquirer Staff Writer
Msgr. William J. Lynn, the former church official awaiting trial for allegedly protecting sexually abusive priests, drew words of encouragement from Philadelphia's new archbishop and a standing ovation from scores of priests at a private gathering last month, according to people familiar with the event.
During the invitation-only dinner for Archbishop Charles J. Chaput at a parish hall in Montgomery County, Chaput singled out Lynn in the crowd and noted how difficult the ordeal has been for him, according to one priest who attended and two people briefed by others at the gala...
If there had been a genuine movement among the hundred thousand pedophile priest victims, and real activism had taken place, the Church would have been damaged, the priests who committed the crimes and bishops who enabled them would be banished. Instead they get standing ovations and most of the victims have been marginalized.
Limited damage is exactly what the Church wanted when they created SNAP to divert and destroy the nascent survivor movement as it was starting in the mid-1980s.
******
Notes: Next Add: The Message Board and "Other States" notes
*******
* Work on this:
The Chicago Pizza Joint Coincidence.
(Details have been changed to protect Rob’s identity. Rob is not his real name.)
It's hard to write this, as Rob is such a dear person, he works so hard at keeping victims informed through regular emails. But again, this really happened, and I have to not care who hates me for writing it and just write it.
In 2009 I was determined to move to Chicago and “work on my story” which would include trying to find other victims of Father Thomas Barry Horne, who is a perpetrator from the Chicago Archdiocese in the case involving me and my sister from the early 1950s.
In 2009 I were having regular phone conversations with Rob in Chicago. He was going to help me find my way around when I got to his city, we were bonding. Rob and I were talking two or three times a week, and thanks to our growing friendship, moving to Chicago would happen more smoothly for me than if I just came there not knowing anyone.
Then one day when I didn't hear from Rob for a while, I called him, and he said, “You'll never guess who showed up in my pizza joint the other day,” he said, then, “Out of the blue, Barbara Blaine comes in for a slice.”
My heart sank, because by then the intervention pattern had been happening with other victims. Rob had told me before that even though they were in the same city, and Rob is a well known long time active person in the pedophile priest movement, he said he never interacted with Blaine, never sees her or hears from her. Now here she was walking into his South Side pizza joint. I knew right away the intervention was happening again and my Chicago plans were about to go downhill.
And sure enough:
Before that very phone conversation was over, Rob added, “Barbara told me she’s got big plans for Chicago and she wants me to be a big part of them. So now we've got a big project in the works for this city.”
I asked him to elaborate and Rob, hesitating and awkward as if he wasn’t sure how to tell me, said:
“Well we really don't want anyone from the outside to be involved."
He was repeating to me what Blaine had said to him.
I tried to protest, "Rob, I'm not from the outside," but he continued.
"We've got a special thing going on here in Chicago now, and it's just not a good idea to involve anybody from outside this region in these plans we've got coming up.”
After that I was cut off. Rob stopped calling me back, like so many other victims, after an interaction with one of the big three who run SNAP, Rob suddenly did not want to work with me.
Needless to say, in the following months, that “big project for Chicago” never materialized.
I really doubt it was just a coincidence that Blaine showed up in Rob’s pizza joint. She never had before and never has again since then.
I think that what happened was SNAP found out City of Angels Blog had plans to come to Chicago and get some real work done, they realized I was going to dig up the answers to some real questions.
So once again, SNAP intervened. This time it was Blaine, convincing Rob to cut off communications with me, and my plans to come to Chicago came to a standstill.
That’s how SNAP works, they carry out sabotage activities behind the scenes, then make sure the press keeps reporting that SNAP does great work for survivors.
SNAP’s advocacy for victims is an image created for the news media. In reality the survivors network is a hologram, something you can see, but nothing for victims to really hold onto.
Damage control.
.
Developing:
SNAP is a counter intelligence group designed to look like they are anti-Catholic, but run by people who are sincerely Catholic. The end result is confusion on all levels.
So adamant Catholics charge SNAP with trying to "destroy" the church> http://www.osv.com/tabid/7621/itemid/8341/Report-questions-motives-of-clerical-sex-abuse-vic.aspx And one real good point they make is asking the question, Why does SNAP keep saying the Church hasn't done enough? More than a billion dollars has gone out in settlements, when you think about it, Roger Mahony was one of the most generous and caring persons in this crisis. But SNAP keeps standing up to say, The Church has not done enough.
The end result is SNAP makes victims look like we are only motivated by money or a desire to destroy the Church.
Clohessy is quoted as saying to Our Sunday Visitor (Sept 11 2011) "The single fact is our movement is providing the Church an incredible gift, and helping to expose and purge the Church of devastating criminals.”
SNAP has provided the Church a gift all right, and its truth slips out between the lines when Clohessy speaks. From the beginning SNAP's purpose has been to sabotage the victims while putting a face in the media of being a support organization.
(The reason I'm not promoting this CofA 2 post yet is I'm still working this out. But truth is, adamant Catholics like David Pierre of The Media Report http://www.themediareport.com/ and even the imprisoned priest Gordon MacRae with his blog "These Stone Walls" http://www.thesestonewalls.com/gordon-macrae/snap-judgements-part-ii-ground-zero-of-the-catholic-scandal/ also see that something is wrong with SNAP. Unfortunately they conclude that SNAP is some organization, part Nazi part left-wing (left wing Nazis?), out to destroy the church, while working secretly for greedy lawyers.
No, that's just the layer you are supposed to see, as the PR project that is SNAP was set up to make people see pedophile priest victims as an angry mob attacking the church for selfish reasons. That's why so many victims sense something wrong and drop out after one or two SNAP events, thinking, They Don't Represent Me. Most of us don't want to attack the church, we just want justice, and we haven't gotten it, instead we've gotten years of redundant media events.
I am convinced SNAP is really counter intelligence, created to make survivors look bad while SNAP's founders actually love the Church, and love the personal aggrandizement they've experienced as a result of running SNAP the way they've run it.
Even the money settlements for victims were designed to tear the movement apart.
Only a fraction of victims got money from the church for damages. Some got ludicrously high amounts, some got mid-five figure amounts, and some, like me, got nothing at all. What better way to put a schism in the middle of a grass roots movement than to make half of them millionaires and leave the rest with nothing? Activists who used to be allies now move in totally different worlds, communications got cut off as, inevitably, those with settlements rebuilt their lives, and those without were left behind to struggle.
And if you point out that settlements in the end actually hurt the "survivor movement," a SNAP leader will pop into your life and yell at you to stop whining.
It will take me time to write this and for other people to understand it, but the truth of how SNAP sabotaged the survivor movement will come out eventually, probably not 'til after I'm dead, but this blog will still be here....)
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-Kay Ebeling
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cut but saved:
Why does SNAP barely mention Bishop Accountability, in their Sept. 2011, letter to the international criminal court except referenced as “A prominent watchdog group in the U.S." Bishop Accountability is, however, source of several footnotes in the Hague presentations.
MORE TO WRITE:
**Sinkholes
While turning their back on most individual "survivors," SNAP will select one or two victims and use them over and over in media events, with no concern for how the experience is affecting the victim, who is often self destructing off camera, as a result of the glare of their story in today's fifteen minutes of fame news world. As SNAP breezes from one town to the next they leave behind damaged victims on two different levels: the survivors who got ignored and sent away, as well as the survivors who got draped in front of cameras where their story was exploited and repeated, then ignored and sent away. At no time does SNAP meet with local activists to see what they want, SNAP just breezes in, does its media event, then breezes out. The two-three people who run this "network" take all the press and victim information with them when they leave.
The stories and details and names of people who could really help gets dropped into a sinkhole somewhere between Chicago and St. Louis, never to be heard again ... then SNAP runs another media event to repeat the process.
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TO COME
Perpetual Victimhood
No, the victims don't disappear from the movement because we are all too sick to function, even though that's the message we get from SNAP, that we are all hopelessly damaged.
An amazing thing happened when I officially broke off with SNAP and started criticizing them and telling the story of my experience.
I stopped feeling like a helpless victim.
I stopped feeling like the pedophile priest experience was the cause of all my problems. It was liberating.
Then
As I deconstructed the whole experience internally I remembered: the first time I reached out to SNAP in Northern California in the 1990s, I was like a warrior at that time. It was at the SNAP support groups that I first heard I was a "survivor" who was damaged, and the more I attended those SNAP groups, which are structured on New Age (mind control) concepts from the 1970s, the more I gave in and became a victim.
Breaking with SNAP was really good for my survival.
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ADD:
I worked hard to get CofA Blog picked up at other locations, like Examiner Dot Com and AlterNet, but someone would complain to their editorial board and soon the blog would be removed. With no one willing to be interviewed and no place to publish, and don't forget Google refused to allow their ads on my site --
I felt like no matter what I did, I'd get beaten down. And, well, without a network of support...
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After doing City of Angels Blog for four years, this story was all I could see or find, even without looking for it. Today [Fall 2011] I see so much good work done at a local level in SNAP, I think to myself, I must not have seen what happened clearly. Then I remember, the whole thing is set up to look from the outside like great work is being done, so now that I am standing outside, to me, too, it looks like good work is being done. Especially at a local level, SNAP works, as if some people got a network going in spite of the obstructions.
I invite people to please email me and tell me what you think one way or the other: cityofangelslady@yahoo.com
May 8, 2013
Once again SNAP only responds after a case is already in the news, a blatant example in today's news. In St. Louis, home of Clohessy, HQ of SNAP- or is that Chicago?- SNAP criticizes the Archdiocese for not knowing about these cases sooner:
MO- Archbishop blasted over announcement regarding predator
MISSOURI
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests
POSTED BY DAVID CLOHESSY ON MAY 08, 2013
A St. Louis priest has been “permanently removed from active ministry” - but apparently not defrocked - 31 years after the first of at least five child sex abuse accusations against him surfaced. And a local support group for victims is criticizing the archdiocese for not evidently supervising the cleric for the last 11 years and for what it calls “a hurtful and gratuitous announcement” about the defrocking.
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests
POSTED BY DAVID CLOHESSY ON MAY 08, 2013
A St. Louis priest has been “permanently removed from active ministry” - but apparently not defrocked - 31 years after the first of at least five child sex abuse accusations against him surfaced. And a local support group for victims is criticizing the archdiocese for not evidently supervising the cleric for the last 11 years and for what it calls “a hurtful and gratuitous announcement” about the defrocking.
My question is:
Why didn't SNAP know about these cases until they were reported in the news today? Things just don't add up. SNAP claims to take calls 8-10 hours a day, survivors of these crimes from all over the world call them to report pedophile priesrs. Surely some of these new victims in St. Louis have found the much quoted David Clohessy of St. Louis, so why does SNAP only tag along on this story when the story breaks in the news? Why doesn't SNAP originate thousands of stories like this?
Thousands of pedophile priest victims have phoned or otherwise contacted SNAP with details of the most heinous crimes, in the last twenty years, told SNAP all the incidentals, and yet, we never get any reports of what happened in any cases, unless a mainstream media outlet breaks a story. Then SNAP jumps onboard. Why doesn't SNAP release info about the hundreds of thousands of sex crimes on which it has received reports? The writers of a SNAP document like that could easily change names and specific locations to protect identities of victims, even to protect identities of priests.
Why is SNAP sitting on all the information it has gotten from survivors over the last twenty years? While at the same time assuring that all calls to report priest sex crimes come to SNAP/ Where did SNAP learn this kind of secrecy?
Instead of aggressive action about hundreds of thousands of sex crimes against children by Catholic priests, all we get is SNAP responding to news as it breaks, and getting their name in print whenever a new case shows up in the news. So all the calls will then go to SNAP. Then everything stays secret.
What are the people who run SNAP really doing?
***
Origins
| Priest Accused of Abuse Was Given Parish Job By Patricia Rice Post-Dispatch April 8, 2002 A priest who is the younger brother of a national advocate for victims of clergy sexual abuse was accused of molesting a college student nine years ago. At that time, the Rev. Kevin Clohessy, brother of St. Louis-based advocate David Clohessy, was serving at a Catholic student center at Northeast Missouri State University in Kirksville, Mo. The university is now known as Truman State University. Kevin Clohessy, 42, is currently on leave of absence from the Jefferson City diocese. He most recently worked as executive director of Boone County Red Cross in Columbia, but resigned March 28 after 14 months at the nonprofit agency. Kevin Clohessy could not be reached for comment. In reply to a Post-Dispatch message left on the priest's answering machine, Jefferson City Diocese spokesman Mark Saucier said Clohessy declined to comment. In a letter to students explaining his departure, Clohessy wrote of being under considerable stress but did not mention the allegation against him, said Sister Ethel Marie Biri, chancellor of the Jefferson City diocese. The diocese sent the priest for treatment at the St. Jean Vianney Renewal Center in Dittmer in 1993 after substantiating the student's complaint that he had been a victim of sexual abuse by Clohessy, diocesan officials said. Just two years earlier, the relationship between Kevin Clohessy and his older brother, David, had become strained after David Clohessy filed a lawsuit against the Jefferson City diocese, alleging that another priest, the Rev. John Whiteley, had abused him when he was a teen-ager at St. Pius Parish in Moberly. The case was dismissed in 1993 because the statute of limitations had run out. Kevin Clohessy was released from treatment in 1995, Biri said. Based on advice of experts, he was then assigned to a parish - St. Francis Xavier in Taos, outside Jefferson City. In May 2000, Clohessy requested a leave of absence, Biri said. "When he left there, it was by his own choice," Biri said. "He has not officially resigned. He is still on leave of absence. He was not asked to leave." Early this winter, the diocese tightened its standards and reviewed all its files of priests with substantiated allegations of sexual abuse against minors who were in a parish and other public ministry. If Kevin Clohessy had not already been on leave, Biri said she expects he may have been removed from a parish since the case involved actions "very inappropriate" with a student. Diocesan records do not indicate whether the student was a minor, Biri said. David Clohessy said he learned about the abuse allegations against his brother in 1993, when the priest left Kirksville to obtain treatment in Dittmer. "I was already involved in victim's advocacy," he said. David Clohessy in 1991 founded an advocacy group for victims of clergy sexual abuse called Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. The group, based in St. Louis, has more than 3,500 members nationwide. "I feel terribly sorry for anybody my brother victimized and for their families and for my family, especially my parents, and I hope that those people whom he hurt are able to come forward and get help," David Clohessy said. Dawn Fallik of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report. Reporter Patricia Rice: E-mail: price@post-dispatch.com Phone: 314-340-8221 |
