This Really Happened part 2

The Other SNAP Story of Counter Intelligence and Sink Holes**

2011-09-29T15:15:00.000-07:00

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This post is a work in progress.

(You can also read Angelic Intervention Chapter 2 on a different platform. And you can read Chapter 3: Other States: SNAP Curious Pattern Repeated all over the USA in progress, about obstructions other pedophile priest victims around the USA have encountered when interacting with SNAP.)

SNAP was started in the mid-1980s by Barbara Blaine, who went to University of St. Louis, a Jesuit college, and then began her career as a social worker with a Catholic social services agency in Chicago. Soon after starting SNAP, Blaine had the time and resources to go to law school.

Ten years into the life of the non profit, charges were dismissed against Father Kevin Clohessy in St. Louis, and his brother, David Clohessy became executive director of SNAP. Father Kevin faced vague charges of sex abuse of a minor details of which have never emerged. (Read more about Kevin Clohessy here)

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 happening."

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 and then lawyers made me remove it, for now. The message I was getting was the more I produced the blog, the more the scare tactics would increase.

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.)
******************

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....)
.
-Kay Ebeling
.
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.
.

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.
.
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...
.

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

Through Angelic Intervention, CofA Blog is Born, in spite of SNAP attempts to kill it

2011-02-01T02:58:00.000-08:00

.
Work in Progress

(This is Chapter 2 OUTLINE Chapter 3 is here and Chapter One here and all of it is in progress as of Oct. 2011.)

2006: Message Board already starting to not work
Me frustrated every try I make to connect through SNAP in L.A.
- They say “You're too sick.”
- Or “You can’t say you represent SNAP."
Both of which set me reeling.
For months, the local SNAP director Mary Grant has told me, "nothing is going on with the L.A. cases," and I know that cannot be true.
In fall 2006 SNAP calls a "meeting" for survivors at a Michael Baker hearing, although meeting in criminal court arraignments means we have to sit quietly and not speak.
During a break, I “trap” Grant, getting her to talk to me while she is standing with a woman from VOTF. This way Grant has no choice but to tell me the truth. She can't lie to me when the woman from VOTF is standing there.
I say, "Mary, with hundreds of lawsuits filed in 2003, there has to be something going on in a courtroom somewhere about those cases."
Through gritted teeth Grant tells me yes, and she mumbles the name of a plaintiff attorney for me to call about the L.A. cases.
Next day I learn from the attorney’s office how to track the L.A. Clergy Cases at the Superior Court website. They tell me there have been pretrial hearings in L.A. Superior Court for about a year.
Throughout, Mary Grant seemed conflicted, like what she was saying to me was what she was instructed to say, but she could see the damage she was inflicting. She pulled a few other people aside and sent them packing, and at the end of the L.A. Cases, Grant was not in the best emotional shape. I think she was a decent person, doing what her bosses told her to do, and at the end of it, she was deteriorating in a sense of inner guilt.
Those days why did Grant tell me repeatedly that nothing is going on with the clergy cases. I wonder how many other reporters SNAP diverted away from covering the story, but in 2006-2007 I push down theh idea, because like most survivors, I still think the people who run SNAP are the equivalent of saints.

That Christmas holiday a bunch of strange stuff happens personally between me and Grant, resulting in a stream of emails that for some reason I cannot find today. New Years 2007 as I'm still squawking at the monitor, my daughter points out to me, "Don't let them make you feel so bad." She says, "Look at who is sending you these emails."
My intuitive daughter forces me to take an objective look at SNAP. Lizzie sensed something untrue and distrustful about the SNAP since the day we first connected with the local branch, a good two years earlier, my perceptive daughter. So Jan 2007, I ignore these niggering snippets coming in my email and plod on.
Using instincts honed from 1976 to 1988 when I worked as a reporter and editor, one of my careers I destroyed, I decide on a hearing to attend on my own, and do a lot of praying in place of having an editor.
MORE ANGELIC INTERVENTION
I put a Notice on the SNAP Message Board that I'm going to a hearing in L.A. next Tuesday, anyone want to join me.
Immediately SNAP is in my email trying to stop me from covering the hearing, strange since it is the first anyone from SNAP responded to one of my message board posts, and I’d been posting at the board that I wanted to connect with people for a year.
Now after I invite readers to join me at a hearing and SNAP in an email tells me: “Don’t go to that hearing, you will be hurting this survivor and ruining his case." She attaches paragraphs from an email between her and the plaintiff attorney that do not really say that, and adds, "The survivor does not want you to go to his hearing and write about it."
She repeats, "You will be damaging a survivor."
ANGELIC INTERVENTION,
The survivor in that one hearing is the one and only person from all the thousand plus Southern California cases who I have managed to meet, thanks to the message board. So I call him right away and he tells me, "Hell no, I never talk to SNAP and I would never say that. Hell yes, I do want you to cover my hearing, and I want you to write about it."
(Later in 4 years of doing CofA Blog I find out many victims around the country, when proposing activism to SNAP central, are told the same phrase, "You will be hurting [or damaging] a survivor."
Later I also learned that several survivors have had similar dis-spiriting words whispered in their ears by a SNAP leader as I had in 2006 ("You're too sick to run a SNAP meeting"). If I were the only survivor shut out by SNAP, I would not be writing this story. It was after plenty of interviews doing CofA Blog that I realized victims all across the country were having similar experiences to mine, with the end result them not being "empowered" as SNAP claims, but feeling beaten down by SNAP. I concluded the SNAP enigma is part of the pedophile Catholic priest story that has to be written.)

***************

January 2007 I cover the hearing, in spite of warnings not to from SNAP, and find an amazing story there, so January 16, 2007, City of Angels Blog is born, thanks to angelic intervention and the message board.

A few weeks later, SNAP deconstructs the message board, making it almost totally not work. .

*********************
Earlier on the message board I'd my first observed SNAP sabotaging supporters who try to get activism going on their own. A group of us organized among ourselves organized a vigil Easter 2006 to take place in Chicago. After ignoring our requests for help contacting the media and participants, SNAP showed up the day of the event, suddenly having its own idea to hold a vigil. Only SNAP's event is in a different location at a slightly different time. So SNAP detours news media and potential participants from the Vigil we organized, and even sabotages their own event by showing up in the wrong location, at the wrong time, making its announcement too late, a pattern repeated in each city where SNAP appears.
The Chicago Vigil was sabotaged and it sapped the organizers' enthusiasm as well.

These active energetic potential activists who organized the Chicago 2006 vigil were so hurt by SNAP's intervention and spoiler acts that they stop even participating in what's left of the message board.
They drop out of the movement.
Another pattern observed in city after city with SNAP.
A few months later on the message board, SNAP locks the Chicago Archdiocese category at the message board, then two years later claims lawyers told them to take it down.
City of Angels posts a mirror version of the message board.

You can read the mirror version of the old SNAP message board at http://snapsurvivorsnetwork.yuku.com/directory although the board is officially closed...

*****
This is the video that used to be on this link, which is now Chapter Two of The Other SNAP Story.

Video above is from Fall 2010.
.

Other States, SNAP curious pattern repeated all over the USA

2010-12-15T05:34:00.000-08:00

.
This is Chapter 3, Chapter 2 is here and Chapter One here and all of it is in process of being written now (Oct. 2011).

***
We were happy the four or five of us that we had put together this media event on our own, that the Pope’s statements show so little concern about the kinds of sex crimes that had taken place against children in the Catholic Church, and how damaged we all were now as adults with that experience in our childhoods as a result of it.

We were in front of the L.A. Cathedral and we thought we were spontaneous, a group of survivors who’d just gotten in touch with each other and decided to picket in the same place all the SNAP media events had taken place in the previous seven years, though the group had recently disappeared from Los Angeles.

Finally maybe we'd get a chance to speak.

Then as the hour drew near, to all of our dismay, a guy showed up from SNAP to make the “official press statement” and it was like the news media had been informed only to talk to him.

I know this guy and only a week ago he had told me he hadn’t read anything about the pedophile priest issue in months maybe a year, he was so tired of it, and now here he was our designated spokesperson. Dutifully most of the survivors took a position behind him as he took the center stage, and all the news cameras and microphones pointed at him. We had announced the subject of the press statement was new victims coming forward in Europe and how these new allegations show that the Pope had been in collusion with the crime cover-ups for decades, each of us was brewing with rage and had plenty to say about it.

The SNAP spokesman takes control of the event and reads from the prepared statement: “To all the victims in Europe. We feel your pain.”

Not much more than that. “We feel your pain.”

An audible groan came out of me, and I went off to a spot of shade on the sidewalk and dropped out of the event, which resulted in a watered down version of our outrage being broadcast in the news. The rest of the group gathered at the cathedral, most having been raised as good Catholics who don't ask questions, stood dutifully behind the spokesman as he read again, “We feel your pain.” I wasn't raised Catholic after age 13.

****

"Do NOT write church officials. At best, it’s a waste of time. At worst, information you provide might be used against you or others." (From SNAP Spring 2011 Open letter to concerned PA citizens & Catholics)

They say "Do not write church officials" as they will use what you write to them against you. Instead write to SNAP.”

Problem is then SNAP keeps everything as secret as the church.

*********
If I were the only victim to have a bad experience with SNAP I would not write this story today.

With about a hundred thousand victims in the USA of pedophile priests, why do only a handful appear when SNAP holds a media event? Where did everybody go?

*****

May 12, 2008 1:00 PM Harrisburg Pa, capitol rotunda

Rally re HB1137 which will open a two window plus extend the SOL by 12 years. I called someone in PA:

"My pet peeve is we have all these groups that speak out and when it comes time to actually do anything their actions are nil.

"I called SNAP, I couldn't get anybody organized to go up there with me, if the people do not rally at the capitol, it will die in committee." (Ref WTFIT?)

******

(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, and other ways SNAP stops any victims from doing activism outside SNAP's agenda and control.

And finally re The Hague, since German lawyers were alreday 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, in its September 2011 media blitz, any of that work to prosecute the Pope that was already in progress?)

****************

'SNAP tries to malign me, and as far as I'm concerned, tries to malign anybody that gets between them and a TV camera or microphone.'

(Once again, I find in my notes, I'm talking to a survivor about “our issue” and without provocation or prompting, the survivor starts talking about their problem with SNAP to me. I’ve changed the location of the interview quoted here, and hidden the speaker’s identity, because he relates an incident similar to what I heard from people in several cities.)

A pattern repeated by SNAP in city after city:

Words of One Unidentified Survivor:

We have a very bad problem with SNAP so we created our own meeting, we call ourselves -------------

One of the women that came to the meeting when it was a SNAP meeting wasn’t a survivor. She was very hostile towards members and when I brought this to the co-chair’s attention, I said, a lot of the members are complaining about this woman. But the co-chair wouldn't agree to tell her to stop coming.

We had to start an additional meeting.

Barbara Dorris came into the picture and said that's not going to happen. (Dorris, of St. Louis, is SNAP Outreach Director.)

We said we voted on it.

She said call yourself whatever you want but you're not SNAP, then she started to accuse us of tax evasion and misrepresenting ourselves as SNAP leaders.

We're more about healing than hurting people.

We don't want anything more to do with SNAP.

We'll support them to out a priest but...

COFA: WHO WAS THE WOMAN AT THE MEETINGS?

This woman, she was part of Voice of the Faithful and I guess has a very big ax to grind with the Church and joined us because she felt SNAP was more involved in confronting the Church.

Then in meetings she would challenge people, speak sarcastically to the survivors who were sharing.

She’d taunt, I’d say, you gotta stop, if you don't agree, tell me or them after.

The local SNAP leader then wouldn't do anything about it.

It was just- we had to start a new group, we're still reaching out to other survivors.

SNAP tries to malign me, and as far as I'm concerned, tries to malign anybody that gets between them and a TV camera or microphone.

They're intimidated by people like you and me and others that speak out and sometimes speak out louder than SNAP does, SNAP doesn't like that.

You have to realize who you're dealing with, I know enough about SNAP that I know I'm not going to align myself-

Then on their website months later they still had the old meeting at a different place. I called Barbara Dorris, and said, you have survivors that could be going to the wrong building where we don't meet. She says, I’ll take care of it, but the thing is, the wrong address had been up there on the SNAP website for months.

***************

(From November 2007 interview with DOEM of Pennsylvania:)

COFA: IS THERE AN ACTIVE SNAP GROUP BACK THERE?

DOEM: You know what I initially met with the president when we were even heavier in the media, probably around 2002?

COFA: BLAINE?

DOEM: No it was Clohessy and I wasn’t very thrilled with his follow through as far as Pennsylvania, you know. But it’s an entity in itself and wherever their focus may be I don't know.
But
COFA: SO SNAP ISN’T PART OF YOUR STORY AT ALL?
DOEM: No, that's just it. I mean, I just recently discovered there was a guy that handled a chapter for SNAP and he went off and spun off his own, you know, survivor network you might say. It’s just I don't know. Hold on- [OFF TOPIC CONVERSATION]

(DOEM in follow-up 2011: Re SNAP in pa, "There is no ongoing group, nobody has ever followed up with us.")

...

Woman survivor who had dropped out by April 2008:

Sol in Ohio, their [SNAP] tactics wrecked it. They didn't do what they did in Boston. We wanted it abolished, but at least we got length of time extended,
But folks in Boston engaged all the groups who were victims...

*****

Also from April 2008:

Spoke with GG, one of the L.A. plaintiffs, on April 16 in the evening. I called him as he was once an L.A. contact with SNAP. I wanted him to help me find persons involved with the Salesian trial. [GG is not his real initials.]

We were talking about the upcoming trial when he volunteered almost off topic that he’d gotten a bad taste about SNAP. He’d been an activist with them for years.

One Sunday evening a while after the settlements went out, he got a call from Clohessy and Blaine saying, hi, we just showed up at the airport, let’s meet someplace for dinner, you name the place.

GG felt flattered that Clohessy and Blaine would be wanting to meet him, so packed up, left his family for the night, and met with Clohessy and Blaine for what turned into a sales pitch, complete with “So tell me how much will you be donating this evening,” type pressure used as a sales closing technique. [NOTE: L.A. plaintiffs got settlement checks in early 2008, averaging $1.2 million each.]

GG felt it was Tacky and as he described it, so did I. So tacky it could have been designed to turn people off and be tacky. Clohessy and Blaine apparently raised little money on that trip, instead turned off GG. He said he made lots of recommendations on better ways to raise money and Clohessy and Blaine said, great, we'll meet soon and do all that, and never talked to him about it again, although he did make several appearances for SNAP, including travel at his own expense. They never entertained an idea he put forward.
.
*********

The image of SNAP leaders appearing at plaintiffs' doors fundraising brought to my mind this image from The Others

Then I started thinking, when people got settlements, SNAP would be there hands out almost demanding donations from the settlements. Then SNAP keeps its financial stuff pretty secret, you never really know how much comes in and where it goes...

What a perfect setup for a crime syndicate. Pay out settlements in lawsuits to be forgiven your crimes, then strong-arm the plaintiffs for big chunks of that cash back, through an illusive and indistinct nonprofit.

Get the cash back, as much of it as you can, like a Mario Puzo godfather...

*********************

In a January 2008 interview (to be published early 2012) Jim Robertson told CofA:

SNAP was going to ask the cardinal to dedicate one of the chapels in the new cathedral to the victims.

But the cardinal jumped the gun.

He found out we were going to make a request, and he dedicated a chapel to the victims without talking to any victims.

We went down to the cathedral and the cardinal is putting a cross in the chapel for victims but that's an event once again designed to make the church look good and nothing for us.

That's when we started to get pissed off

**********

I asked Jim Robertson what happened with SNAP after he handcuffed himself to Roger Mahony’s throne in July of 2005 on the altar of L.A. Cathedral. Hearings about the misdemeanor Disturbing a Religious Gathering began two months later and Jim’s case was going set to go to trial in December.

CofA: HOW SUPPORTIVE WAS SNAP?

I was attacked for three hours on the phone by Mary Grant.

8 AM the day after, I get a phone call -- I’d been getting lots of calls, in fact I’d been doing interviews, I did the early AM drive time radio interviews. There had been a camera crew there filming the Mass, and the incident was on CNN but I didn't know that would happen. Amy Berg was there interviewing for her film.

Anyway, Mary Grant calls next day and says, I just want you to know you ruined the demonstration and so many people are angry

She said, So many people are angry and they're never coming back because of what you did.

Then David Clohessy wrote that this demonstration was spoiled by one person’s selfish gesture, and it was passed out at the next “support group” meeting at Grant’s house.

They put this out about me after the event.

Yeah, Grant calls me after the demonstration and her tirade goes on for three hours

I mean.

They were all cheering me when I passed by in the squad car.

But here’s Mary Grant telling me I had fucked up.
Failed
Done a bad thing to the movement.

I tried to reason with her, I had no idea all these people would show up. If anybody was offended, I'm sorry, but I had no idea they were offended.

In the end, I said, if anybody needs me to apologize give them my phone number

In the next three years no one ever, ever, ever told me they were angry at me for handcuffing myself to Mahony’s throne.

A new friend in Albuquerque late 2010 is source of this exclusive photo at City of Angels Blog, from the day in July 2005 when Jim Robertson (pictured left) when he handcuffed himself to the throne-like chair on the L.A. Cathedral altar reserved for the Cardinal. The incident was part of demonstrations re the L.A. Clergy Cases, most of which settled in July 2007.

Jim talks a bit about the experience in a 2008 interview quoted below.

Photo comes by way of two plaintiffs in the L.A. cases, one lives in Albuquerque the other in L.A. (how those priests did get around). Read more here http://cityofangels8.blogspot.com/2010/12/photo-jim-robertson-cuffed-to-mahony-on.html )

*********

Me, I'm wondering, who gave SNAP authority? We had started out as a grass roots movement, but now these people from St. Louis are in charge? Who put them in charge and who is their boss?.

******

Somehow the Cardinal in L.A. always knew in advance what SNAP would be doing. (Write here the CNN experience in 2010)

*
The more I learned over four years interviewing pedophile priest victims,
the thought of how much evil it would take to pull off this entire false advocates scenario sickened me.

***

FOUND
November 2011
In CofA Blog notes from June 2008 or thereabouts:

Can I run this?

I don't think it’s any accident that the first time I broke through and wrote a negative paragraph about SNAP it was in the same post as Thousands more children will be raped by priests "

In that post I wrote: “The organization that produced more than four thousand pedophile priest felons and is not being thoroughly investigated is the Catholic Church"

In the same post I wrote: "But SNAP only appears to be there for those crime victims with lawsuits."

BECAUSE both the Church and SNAP had the same goal in their efforts in the USA from the mid-1980s to present:

In the end the civil lawssuits across the country made survivors look like we're all just out for money
In the end the persons who get money from the church retreat after being warned by SNAP about friends who come out of the woodwork, asking for cash, after you get a settlement.
In the end lawsuits pit plaintiff against plaintiff and plaintiffs against survivors not able to be a plaintiff, not necessarily a personality thing. It's just the difference in the financial status of victims who get settlements and those who don't that makes us not be able to interact with each other anymore.
In the end lawsuits perpetuate secrecy about these crimes
In the end lawsuits pit plaintiff against plaintiff as they ended up competing for their share of cash, so were afraid to let another plaintiff know how much cash they got, so dropped out of any movement that was developing.

-- The reason both church and SNAP policy that hurt victims came up in the same story is they are connected

At the top

WHY CAN’T OTHER PEOPLE SEE IT????

**************************

Above: (Soundtrack for 1969 story that used to be at this link but has now moved to a work platform for rewrites.)

********

More stuff found in files:

Not going to say who said this, but I can attest it was someone with a lot of experience.

"1st SNAP convention 2003 was in a St. Louis hotel, Blaine et al stayed in a different better hotel, away from the bulk of survivors."

***
Blaine was in Tampa with Dutch Film crew in 2010. (Doesn't any reporter think it's strange that she’s almost always standing there alone running a “network”? Where are the rest of the hundred thousand of us?)

SNAP Half-Amped: My 2008 Conference Experience

2010-12-13T06:19:00.000-08:00

.
(TK Chapter 4 or 5??? the other SNAP conference story)

******
The Post at this Link Used to Be:

Life in a Tupperware container, 1

I was going to write about how great I'm doing. Finally I can go to sleep without television or radio on, after years of needing some media in my head until I fell asleep, otherwise my head would fill up with my own thoughts and I’d never get to sleep. For years, if I made the mistake of just lying down, or letting a video play out, before I knew it, I wouldn't be asleep, I’d be sitting up, clenched, squirting tears. My face goes into this total twist thing as I realize the horror and shock of my own life. Some incident will enter my memory and before I know it I'm running the details in my head, and that leads to all the physical stuff that comes with triggered memories. Total body pain.

I was going to write that I'm Cured, it's stopped, but actually there have been two episodes now since I got to Albuquerque. Maybe it’s the sheer white of the Motel Six design style of my room, for some reason I'm real clear in here, when the episodes happen, when the line gets crossed between emotional and physical pain. I've experienced it live in person on myself here now twice in less than a month.

Yesterday it was so weird, I totally understood the part about needing media to occupy my brain or else. It was Sunday and I don't like to have to work on Sunday but yesterday I had, instead, more work than usual, on the show "I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant," work that had to be done by early afternoon. So I got up my usual 4 AM and did it, transcribed at full attention at my little laptop, at my little perch on this tiny round table that is the only furniture in the room practically.

The interview was an hour and a half of another one of these incredible undereducated,incurious women who end up being featured on "I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant," whose Season 4 now kept me tied to my laptop on Sunday. More than six hours straight listening to a monotone voice saying, I don't know, what do you mean, I don't think so. The new mother was so DUMB.

Hey, realty TV keeps me working, I should be grateful.

Anyway. Just at about two in the afternoon as I'm finishing up work, I'm thinking there is nothing I’d like more than to lie down and watch a movie, and the cable goes out, third or fourth day in a row, same time, just as I'm finishing work. But not being totally addicted to television, I thought, no big deal I’ll watch a movie on my laptop, nope, gave all the DVD’s to Lizzie when I left L.A. No problem, I thought, I’ll listen to the radio, but the connection was not good enough over the hotel internet ISP to get in the station I listen to on Sundays from L.A. KJLH

So here I was in this blank white room with no TV, no radio, no one I felt like I could call*, and within an hour I was tearing myself apart. Squealing, twisting my face, crying so much that when I woke up later in the night, and saw myself in the mirror, I was shocked. The clouds of puffed skin all over the face, not just puffy eyes, but all the way down to the cheeks, just huge lumpy folds of creased puffs, with little slits at the top where the eyes would be, and from those slits my beady little eyes beamed out, looking angry. *Once an episode starts I can’t call anyone, that's part of the episode….

Wow. No way I went out of the room looking like that.

So cried in here because I'm so lonely instead.

The first episode in this room was totally connected to the recent incidents in L.A. from living in an apartment owned by a slumlord. I don't think people realize how much having a slumlord for a landlord can affect a person, but it got me in ways I didn't realize until the second week I was here, when I asked the hotel people to let me move to a room on the top floor, so I could have a better view.

It is a better view in this new room, lots of twinkly lights.

But this is not the kind of hotel where a bellman shows up and packs your things and all you have to do is ride the elevator up one flight of stairs, tippling on four inch stilettos, petting a little Pekinese that lives in your handbag.

No, here at the Motel Sic, I had to lug all my stuff to the elevator, wait, ride, lug all my stuff to the new room. I don't know how I managed in a week to acquire so much more stuff, more than the 70 and 58 pound suitcases I had to repack at Amtrak to get here. I had Amazon send a coffeepot, a hand-held vacuum (I'm too OCD to only have housekeeping once a week like they have in these hotels and a programmable coffee pot is mandatory when you get up at 4 AM for your job). After being here only a week, I’d acquired kitchen stuff, bags of it, from the Dollar General Store. Anyway, it took 2 hours of continuous pulling and packing and shoving and unloading to get my stuff up one flight of stairs, while the guys who run the hotel stood outside tapping their feet waiting, and I so wished I was at one of those other kinds of hotels….

Not this lifetime.

Anyway, inside the room I had to unpack everything again, so by nightfall I was wiped out, and only then realized the heater in the room was broken. I called and the maintenance guy came and said, it's not broken, sometimes with these heaters you think they're broken, but they aren't and I agreed, even said, hey you don't want a room to get too hot, it can ruin your computer equipment.

But at one AM as I shivered in the little bed you get for $200 a week here, the heat didn't work, and I was more worried about the computer equipment freezing by that point,

It was the first night this season that Albuquerque went below 30 degrees.

My 4 AM I had pushed the little hotel room table into the hotel room kitchen where I kept the electric stove on all night by turning the timer back on every half hour.

And I went into a total episode, this one trigged by slumlord landlord memories, thinking I was in the same mess now again, only now in a hotel in Albuquerque. From 2-5 or so AM, I relived everything we went through in L.A. with the guy who ran his rental business out of a high rise office building in Beverly Hills. There by the heat of two electric stove burners, I remembered how we went one whole summer of 2009 without an air conditioner, spending hours each day immobilized covered with sweat, in that apartment that cost me $1300 a month. When the slumlord finally replaced the AC, it still did not work, so I spent the summer of 2010 sweltering immobilized, not all day, just a few hours a day, but I was still at the mercy of this slumlord landlord who would respond to maintenance requests with months of arguments that made no sense.

“We need pipes replaced in the bathroom.”
“Miss, Ebeling, it's come to my attention that you have a cat in your apartment, now that goes against your lease....”

That kind of thing, fights back and forth with the landlord about total irrelevant topics, just to get basic maintenance done, after a while you stop bothering to even ask, just live with everything falling apart around you.

I was so sure I'd left that all behind me.

Then I sat here in this motel room with no heat remembering the months we lived with feces stains on our bathroom floor, in that apartment in L.A. When “maintenance” finally came in and fixed the pipes, they left the stained linoleum behind. I’d had to call the Health Department to finally get the bathroom floor replaced, but never stopped smelling feces coming from beneath the floor.

Somehow the landlord from hell in L.A. tied in with today December 2010, in a hotel room in Albuquerque with no heat, and I turned back into this impotent, battered, broken woman who could do nothing but simper and whimper in the kitchen, waiting for the hotel office to open. Then at 7 AM or so the housekeeper knocked on the door, I was still in this oblivious state, frozen, immobilized, and told them about the heater,

and

Ta Da

Within a half hour the hotel guy was there with a new heater, the maintenance guy took out the old one and replaced it with a new one, in seconds. And I had heat again.

So I was going to write today about how much better I'm doing. I can finally sleep without media in my brain, but that's not true, because last night I didn't make it.

The total body pain that started right in the middle of the episode yesterday, I felt it, the poison, go from my brain where it had me twisted, to everywhere else in the body, and I could not stop it.

Now pain has got me slammed down here in Motel Sick for a couple days.

Good thing the heater works.

Life in a Tupperware container will be continued.
.

I have to brag on my daughter a minute

2010-11-29T07:30:00.000-08:00

.
She toddled right up to each person at the meeting, held out her hand to shake theirs, went onto the next citizen, shook their hand, onto the next. Lizzie, barely walking yet, already knew how to work a room.

When Lizzie was about age two we lived in Arcata. I had run away from L.A. when she was just weeks old to bring her up in small town Northern California, got a little job on the little weekly newspaper there, The Union, writing a column about being an ex-pat Angeleno. One night I was going to a political meeting, Concerned Citizens of Arcata, local Arcatans meeting in a community hall to share their irateness with Arcata’s liberals proclaiming the town a sanctuary in the Gulf War, refusing to participate in America’s war effort, I think Berkeley did it as well and Ann Arbor (?)

For The Union I wrote a column on the editorial page so figured it was my beat to cover the meeting. As often was the case I had no babysitter for the evening, so brought toddler Elizabeth with me. At that age she was just walking. It must have been 1990 fall or 1991 winter, as those are the months of the Gulf War, and Lizzie was born in July 1988, so she was still very young the night of that meeting.

When we arrived, most the people were sitting in chairs lined up along the wall. My toddler in leggings, a dress, and a head that had not yet sprung all its hair, pulled off my arms and climbed down to the ground.

She must have seen a local politician doing it.

It was like Lizzie knew exactly what to do.

She toddled right up to the first Arcata resident sitting along the wall. Lizzie, put out her hand, shook the person’s hand, then walked down to the next person, shook their hand, then walked onto the next person. Of course, she must have seen someone else at this local political meeting doing the same thing, and she just jumped in and took on the behavior, but to everyone watching it was like it was what she was born to do.

Several people in the room joked, laughed, “She’s a future politician this one.” A lot of comments like that went around the room. And it was true, my daughter just knew by instinct how to go in and work the room.

Now I'm in Albuquerque and my daughter stayed behind in L.A., where she’s walked right into a world of comedy production, set design jobs, some costume design, some Production Assistant work, and taking improv classes. She’s also in that horrible city so I worry about her, but she’s doing what people stay in L.A. to do. As long as she’s entrenched in a population of colleagues, she’ll be okay. People who work in production in L.A. have fences and guards keeping everyone else from the city out, it's about the only way to live safe in that city anymore.

So I know Lizzie will do well. I’ll be watching her on YouTube from a hotel room anywhere in the world I want to be.

***

Whew, just went to take an early morning walk and the amount of car exhaust in the air here is astounding, like walking out into an atmosphere of poison on a planet not meant for human habitation. I'm glad my hotel room encloses me as if I were in a Tupperware container. No air at all from outside gets in and the fan on the wall seems to filter out a lot of the muck, as honestly, as I ventured out this ayem, wanting to just take a sunrise stroll, I had to cower and run back for cover inside. I'm close to a freeway, it's not only sunrise, but also morning commute time.

Sometimes I think I'm more Native American than a lot of Native Americans, just because I can’t take part in this car thing. When I see a freeway, I see concrete loaded down with roaring fossil fuel burning monsters. I feel like Earth cries out in agony in areas where freeways and overpasses pour the car people all over the place, and nowadays everyone must be burning cheaper gases, as the exhaust in the air is much more deadly than a decade ago.

Like I said earlier, Albuquerque is like L.A. exploded and part of it landed here and became Albuquerque, with everything you have in L.A. but in microcosm (macrocosm?) form.

*****

Thinking a lot about my daughter and what happened in the 1990s that caused me to drop out of the movement, so to speak. I had been running a SNAP group that met in the public library downtown San Francisco at noon twice a month, and as a result I was getting the survivor phone calls. My daughter must have been hearing my conversations and picking up bits of information, she was middle school aged, nine or so.

There on the wall of the hallway one day a friend of mine found pencil drawings of naked people. Lizzie had drawn naked dancing people in various forms of celebration and happiness bounding all the way down the hallway, a child’s imagination turned loose with the strands of conversation she was overhearing from me running a SNAP group.

They were a lot like drawings I used to do as a child, and I was molested. So little Lizzie was experiencing part of the molest in my life, just by being around me at that time.

My response was to stop running the SNAP group and drop out of things and I didn't come back until around 2006, when Lizzie was in her late teens.

By the late nineties, Lizzie had seen more than I ever saw at her age, not because of pedophile priest stories, but because we always ended up living in slummy neighborhoods. In San Francisco it was Webster near the corner of Haight, very inner city. At that intersection, the projects were about to be torn down. They backed right up to our building, so from our apartment we listened and looked over the last straggling families that refused to move out of the empty projects, staying there as long as they could for free.

They dealt drugs, loudly.

They held dog fights.

Lizzie and I had no choice but to listen to the sound of dog fights from our apartment.

Two dogs would be snarling as they tore into each other, then one dog would squeal louder than the other, stop squealing, and become silent. Then male voices would cheer as the victorious dog howled.

It was horrible. And it provided for me the backdrop, the soundtrack that ran in the background as I got these calls from survivors coming out for the first time as victims of pedophile priests in San Francisco.

Still dog fights over the back fence were not the worst things Lizzie ever experienced; the worst was exposure to my oldest sister, who lived in a state of prolonged resentment that, I think, dated back to the early 1950s, the period when my middle sister and I were getting inordinate attention from Father Thomas Barry Horne-y.

Oldest Sister did not suit the priest’s tastes. As a result, first-born grew up to be totally different from middle sister and me, the youngest, because she was cut off, separated from us in ways no one can ever explain. Middle sister and I were like a carbon copy of each other in everything we did, thought, believed. And then oldest sister was this oblique overweight awkward person, who by adulthood lived in a nonstop state of rage.

Exposure to the antagonism of oldest sister in Orange County in 1998 was worse for the development of my daughter than listening to the dog fight sounds coming from the Projects in San Francisco a few years earlier. Indirectly it's all the fault of the Catholic pedophile priest epidemic.

See, now to Oprah it sounds like like I'm stuck in the blame game. In the real world the blame game is real and denying blame exists allows perpetrators to maintain power.
.

Thank God for Emails or the Mystery Lady would be Insane

2010-11-17T12:30:00.000-08:00

.
Adjusting to this life living in a hotel anywhere, it's so much more like I'm on a space station now than it was doing City of Angels Blog from L.A., because there, even though I was cut off from the world in the back of an apartment building, in the courtyard every day were these Armenian women drinking coffee, and gossiping. Their warbling soprano voices often would drown out the audio on the reality TV show videos I work on. Today I'm in a hotel room in any city anywhere, this month it's Albuquerque, working on the same reality TV show videos, just putting on a jacket when I go out to walk later in the day.

Just south of here is Roswell, New Mexico, known for its residents who communicate with space aliens, and when you look at the topography of this area on a Google map, you can see why spacecraft would choose this site for landing. The private sector Go into Orbit for Vacation project is also nearby, the entrepreneur founder of Virgin finished building a landing strip for the venture just last month. Maybe in a few decades they'll actually launch.

Point is I feel like I'm so much of a space alien myself, I fit right in here. As I ride around town staring at things I've never seen before, my little brain that never stops starts analyzing everything. You can see the Navajo influence, the Pueblo influence, feel its continued presence.

Story continues after this picture of a downtown Albuquerque bail bonds shop a block from the courthouses.

Then as you ride around town, on the landscape is the aberration, the slick, clean, more wealthy than the entire rest of the neighborhood, Catholic Church. I rode by one where I know James Porter of Massachusetts fame was allowed to perpetrate freely while he was an out-patient with the Paracletes just yesterday while out riding the Number 10 bus, just to see where it goes. Need to go back there and take a picture soon…

I went downtown to see the courthouses, one of which holds an archive of documents that I will dive into later on this trip. The real reason I went downtown yesterday was to see how people dress here as that's the kind of person I am, I don't want to show up looking all L.A. So I stood outside the courthouse yesterday to see what other women wear here, so I’ll know what to wear next time I come, as that's how space aliens blend in. I need boots and long skirts.

URBANE LADY on an outpost in space

I'm not really here, I'm just in a hotel, here to do my work, but still absorbing this geography at the same time I'm absorbing the horrible facts about what priests did to kids in this region, twelve-fold number of perpetrators per person compared to the rest of the country, at least it seems that way. More I learn about what really happened here in New Mexico, I can’t ignore the addition of a racist, who gives a damn about all these brown people, attitude that seemed to go with the turning loose of Servants of the Paraclete priests on these parishes.

In my hotel I'm isolated, cut off more than ever, but it feels right. From here I talk by phone and email with the world, I'm even geographically closer to the center of the country. I need to get even closer to the center. Maybe next year I’ll make it to Illinois.

Two or three times a week I file my report from the space station in the form of posts at City of Angels Blog.

I noticed it when I looked in the mirror the other day, I even look more and more like a space alien. My eyebrows have disappeared as my hair has gotten white. The white hairs are of a nature that will not absorb color from dye or even darkening with eye brow pencil, the eyebrows just aren't there, making me bear a strong resemblance to ET, the character in the Steven Spielberg movie.

My eyes now have this staring, penetrating, probing look to them that they never had before.

I can make this whole experience even more fun by pretending to be a mystery woman, hiding out, “I ‘vant to be alone’ acting as I venture outside my hotel room like there’s someone I'm hiding from, someone looking for me. So have to keep my identity secret, keep my location secret, and when I go out, interact with hardly anyone, just walk to the bus stop listening to Randi Rhodes on my radio, ride the bus around town as Progressive Talk Radio KABQ 1350 that sounds eerily like KTALK Los Angeles goes on to Ed Schultz. I have this ongoing relationship with the world that goes on only internally. Back to my hotel room, I'm hooked up to the world by internet connection, but never feel the human sensation of touch.

I'm that mysterious gray haired woman who around four AM you can see a glow of computer screen through her curtains. She has a job she does online, something to do with TV shows, working on videos that stream into her computer from Los Angeles. She’s done with her job around 10 in the morning, then spends a lot of time on the phone and riding around town taking pictures. That's her, walking with the hood from her jacket pulled over her face, always has earphones on which is another way to keep from making contact with anyone she passes.

That's me right now, the mystery woman in Room ___ at Hotel _______ who spends long hours behind a closed door, her head in her laptop. Sometimes from outside the room you can hear her breaking into uproarious laugher, sometimes she throws herself on the bed spasming in tears.

That's me right now, with this story to write.

Meanwhile I'm scared to get into cars even of people who are my friends. Hey, no one said I was sane.

Leaving L.A. was so hard, but so worth it

2010-11-15T08:51:00.002-08:00

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“You got a few dollars you can give me?”At the Amtrak station last week I heard, “I need ten dollars to catch a train to Oceanside.” Her voice came over my shoulder as I was bent over readjusting my pile of carryons. I looked up into a face you see a lot in Southern California, the aging crack head. Angular cheeks, rash-y skin, mouth indented due to missing teeth, a face that may once have been pretty but now reflects years of tricks at truck stops and Inland Empire street corners. She speaks with that accent you hear a lot in the lower rent areas of Southern California, the under-educated mangled word structures. Lots of “ain’t doing nothing’s” and “you know’s” and “I'm just saying’s.”

She put her forearm in my face. “These abscesses hurt so much,” she says in a cooing voice, “they hurt so much,” she repeated and I stared at her forearm, lined with scars of a junkie. It like a shock choreography shot in a Tarantino film, right in my face. Some of her abscesses were healed and hardened, some recently scarred so still red and brown, some fresh and oozing. I stared and stared, then thanks to my survival instincts I looked down and realized-

With her other arm the junkie was reaching for my laptop which was at my feet, as I’d been in the middle or readjusting my carry-ons when she approached me. I grabbed the laptop as her hand was just inches from it, put it back on my shoulder, and slipped out of the seat in the Amtrak waiting area to get away from her.

It was about the fourth time someone had asked me for money as I waited for my train out of L.A. last week. I went over and joined a guy who later sat next to me on the train and I realized his way of avoiding ever getting up until he got to his destination was to wear adult diapers. Hmm.

My departure from L.A. came with a comic routine as you can’t take bags on Amtrak that weigh more than fifty pounds. When I arrived I found out one of my bags weighed seventy something pounds, the other was 14 pounds over. So I'm on the floor in the Amtrak ticketing area, rearranging and rearranging my suitcases and everything got scattered, my clothes were thrown slipslod sloppy around in the suitcase and I think some stuff spilled out and got lost forever somewhere in the ether of the train station floor and people surrounding us. I ended up right there on the floor packing an extra bag that weighed forty pounds, and it would just cost ten dollars to send it extra, but then I couldn't check it because it was plastic, which they said would tear too easily.

I said, no problem, I’ll just add it to my carry on. If all I had done is go sit in a chair and wait for my train to come, the extra 40- pounds of carry-on would not have been a problem. But I'm so neurotic and wasn’t wearing an adult diaper and wanted to get away from L.A. so bad, I asked my friend to deliver me to the train station four hours early just to get out of my apartment as quickly as possible because I hated that place so much. So I mean at some point I had to go to the bathroom. Then every time I walked, the pile of bags on the carry on cart kept toppling more to one side or the other.

Why was I carrying so much weight with me?

I packed the scanner and brought it with me to Albuquerque.

I had packed my HP Inkjet 5600 in a large suitcase, and stuffed it tight with sweaters. Then in all the frenzy of getting the bags down to under 50 pounds, I threw the inkjet back into the suitcase without tightening the zipper tighter. So I spent four hours in the Amtrak station and later 16 hours on the train worrying that the scanner would be broken by the time I got to Albuquerque because it would be jiggling around, and it was all because I felt so rushed at the ticket station, when I shouldn't have felt rushed, I mean, I had four hours. If only I’d packed it tighter, if only.

Damn should have tightened the zipper on the suitcase, I kept repeating to myself.
But it's fine as you can see from the post I am about to put up at City of Angels 8.

I hate L.A. As I waited for my train, lugging around that extra 40 pound bag that kept overturning my whole carryon wheeler, five times someone came up to me asking me for money, not spare change but dollars. The woman who was telling me how much the abscesses on her arm hurt as she was using the other arm to reach down and grab my laptop was just the last person from L.A. I saw.

After another foray around the Amtrak station forever rearranging my carryons, having them topple over in doorways landing me on the floor repacking, I'm daydreaming about the days you see in black and white films, when gentlemen would never walk by and leave a woman buried under heavy suitcases, but not today, not in L.A., in L.A. if people see you struggling, they stand alongside and watch, waiting for you to drop something, so they can scavenge it.

At one point with that carryon that kept toppling over and I'm an old lady with gray hair and wrinkles, I was having so much trouble, all those people just kept walking by me, like I was invisible doing all that struggling. If only, if only there were some civility left in the world.

“These abscesses really hurt,” she said and put her forearm in front of my face, so I was looking at these pussy scabs up and down her veins. Then my eyes were riveted, just like she wanted, with her other arm she was reaching down for the laptop I’d set on the ground next to me. Goodbye L.A.

Now I've been in my Extended Stay room in Albuquerque for one week, and last night I wrote, “I'm so looking forward to getting up tomorrow morning, my coffee pot is set for four AM but I know I’ll be awake in the minutes before it begins to perk, just waiting for it. Here I am on my outpost, my space station, this splash of city thrown along a flat part at the foot of the Rocky Mountains.”

I'm doing what I always wanted to do. I'm set up in a place where aside from my little transcribing job, I have nothing else to do but write. Part of that 40 pound overflow in my luggage was caused by the book manuscript I have with me now that just needs a good rewrite. It's all here beside me in boxes here in my hotel room in Albuquerque.
I feel so at home here, in a way I feel like I'm still in L.A., which is my hometown, like it or not. This little city Albuquerque is like a tiny L.A., so much is the same here, just cooler and smaller. I get on the city bus here and the same exact voice announces the next stop, and “Please use rear exit.” They have the same machines by the driver where riders press their passes on an electronic thing and it gives out the same exact “beep.”

To me, Albuquerque looks like L.A. exploded and a splotch of it landed here at the foot of the Rockies and just kept on with daily life like nothing ever happened. But since from one end of the city to the other is only about 10 miles, it's like a little version of L.A. that's so much more manageable. I can get from one side of town to the other on the bus in an hour for 35 cents as they recognize I'm a senior citizen here, and they don't in L.A.

So here I am in this nice clean hotel where I pay about 70 percent of what I paid to live in L.A. and I can still do my job, that's why I was able to make this trip, plus I took Social Security early retirement, no I didn't get a big chunk of cash from someone as people in my emails and phone calls seem to be inquiring.

I can walk in this neighborhood without getting accosted.

After being in Albuquerque less than a week, already something is changing in me. I'm eating breakfast. For years I couldn't get anything passed my clenched teeth until late in the afternoon every day. Three days in a row here in my little hotel room, I've not only gotten hungry but been able to eat in the morning. I think that's a good sign.
Can’t believe how hard it was to get out of L.A. I talked about it almost nonstop beginning about 2006. I finally did it.

Here is another pic and a video from last Saturday. In Albuquerque riding hot air balloons is part of the lifestyle.

Watch the video of balloons going across the sky posted earlier today.

Albuquerque Sky on Saturday

2010-11-15T08:51:00.001-08:00

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I love it. Hot air balloons are part of the landscape.

Walmart Zombie, Liz Ebeling Halloween Costume 2010

2010-10-31T19:00:00.000-07:00

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She gnaws on a 99-cent store rubber foot. My daughter plays a Walmart Zombie employee named "Brains" this year. When Walmart asked her name, all she could say was, "Brains." Liz Ebeling on her way to an Improv Comedy Halloween party.

The WalMart Zombie stops when she sees her mother's camera, gnaws on the oozing foot in her hands, and snarls, then goes on to her Improv Class Halloween party

Yikes Part 2: More HLR stories from the nineties by me

2010-10-23T10:40:00.000-07:00

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I just realized (Oct 2011) there is another Human Life Review story I wrote in the 1990s that I did not copy in yet here. I will add it soon to this post even if I have to find the original and scan it over. -ke)

(Part 1 is here) I wrote this story that was in Newsweek November 1991:

Then wrote this piece for Human Life Review about the backlash to my Newsweek piece:

HERE is cover and title page. All being scanned here as I continue to empty out the file cabinet and get ready to take City of Angels out of L.A>

Onward

Yikes! Ann Coulter and Me on the same Cover (I was so confused those days)

2010-10-18T20:52:00.001-07:00

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I just realized (Oct 2011) there is another Human Life Review story I wrote in the 1990s that I did not copy in yet here. I will add it soon to this post even if I have to find the original and scan it over. -ke)

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Packing to leave L.A. I found an article I got published in Human Life Review in 1992 in a file cabinet, here is the cover, article scanned in below:

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Ryan Bingham is so right when he says, "Moving is Living," in the George Clooney movie "Up In The Air."

My file cabinet is now empty. I'm about to move to Albuquerque to write about Servants of the Paraclete, and then go to points onward, to blog about pedophile priest crimes all over the country. So I have to keep my load light, scan in memorables, then trash them, like the story below I wrote for Human Life Review Spring 1992, and I see now, I shared the cover with an up and coming conservative journalist Ann Coulter.

Yikes! I shared the cover of a conservative review with Ann Coulter in 1992: The apex of my confused era, before I realized it was the sexualization by a Catholic priest at age five that had screwed me up, not the feminist movement as I was trying to explain in muddled free lance articles I was writing at the time to support me and Lizzie, who was then about three years old.

Last week, cleaning up, packing, I found this story among several I got published in HLR when we were living in the woods of Northern California.

This was the period before my daughter turned five when we lived in an environment sterile with isolation. After the episode described in the article, I got clean and sober, then after two more years, my daughter turned age five. Then I remembered what happened to me when I was age five, that had made me this compulsive person from age five on.

The months right before the repressed memory came in and totally changed my life, I was writing all kinds of weird political essays, trying to find some explanation in social sciences for the mess my life was in.

One result was this story published in Human Life Review, below from spring 1992, which I forgot about until I just now found it, with me promoted on the cover along with another pretty much unknown writer at the time, Ann Coulter. HLR asked me to write a response to the Susan Faludi book Backlash, as I was in the "pro life" movement at the time.

To this day I hate abortion, but today I realize the medical procedure has to be legal for women's protection and health, and am glad I have never personally been faced with a question of whether to get one. Right after Lizzie was born though, after so many people chided me for not getting an abortion as a forty year old single mom, I got adamant and anti-abortion for a period, even went to demonstrations and sought out work writing on the topic, hence the relationship with Human Life Review:

Here is the story on Susan Faludi's book Backlash from HLR, more to come:

So glad I lived long enough to find out what the real cause of my problems was, and as a result, have this incredible story of pedophile priests in the Catholic Church to write... God is good, and all that jazz.

How did I end up writing for HLR to begin with?
First, this article ran in Newsweek. I was trying to find a humorous way of blaming the world for my horrible circumstaces, and decided it was all feminism's fault, or at least thought it would be funny to say so, didn't really believe it, didn't believe anything at the time, I was so lost in these years. First the Newsweek piece I wrote that started the whole thread in HLR.

Newsweek piece November 1991

The Newsweek piece led to a relationship that developed between me and Human Life Review, through degrees of separation that may come up some other place in this story at City of Angels 2.

Next assignment I had for Human Life Review was a story on the way the world reacted to the above Newsweek piece, which is scanned and posted at Yikes Part 2 at CofA2

I Shared a Cover with Ann Coulter in Spring 1992, Yikes Again!

2010-10-18T20:50:00.000-07:00

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"Moving is Living," says Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) in Up In The Air. My file cabinet is now empty in preparation for my move to Albuquerque to write about Servants of the Paraclete, and then more moves to points onward, to blog about pedophile priest crimes all over the country. So I have to keep my load light, scan in memorables, then trash them, like the story below I wrote for Human Life Review in Spring 1992, and I see now, I shared the cover with an up and coming conservative journalist Ann Coulter.

Oops posted this twice, read this post here Yikes! I shared the cover of a conservative review with Ann Coulter in 1992. The height of ...

And Part two of this Story was posted Oct. 23rd.
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Message Getting Out that Pedophile Priests are More than a group of perverts, re Aberration of the Bible

2010-10-17T06:15:00.000-07:00

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"We see pedophile priests allowed to escape punishment, we see prosperity preachers telling us that if we just repeat a phrase about Jesus, he’ll make us rich and happy, just a tiny portion of what goes on in this world regarding the Bible and people who claim to follow it. It partially sums up what we, in our present culture, feel about the issue. It is a tragedy.
The whole thing seems like a big joke played on people for centuries. It has to be.

"But it’s not.

"None of the above represents God’s message in the Bible. None of it is what he said.... "

(Continue reading here)

Yikes, Frying Planet, NWS device explodes in L.A. 3 hours before highest temp

2010-09-27T20:49:00.000-07:00

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This really happened today: Los Angeles, CA
Monday
113° high temperature
67° low

It's so hot the official thermometer broke. It might have been even hotter, as at 113 degrees the measuring devices shattered, per L.A. Times:

"It was so hot Monday that it broke the all-time record — and the weatherman's thermometer.The National Weather Service's thermometer for downtown Los Angeles headed into uncharted territory at 12:15 p.m. Monday, reaching 113 degrees for the first time since records began being kept in 1877. Shortly after that banner moment, the temperature dipped back to 111, and then climbed back to 112.

"Then at 1 p.m., the thermometer stopped working." (Read More)

Everyone who lives here knows, the heat just keeps getting hotter all afternoon, the hottest time of the day is around 4-5 PM then around six o'clock it finally starts to break, if it's going to break that night.

So the high temperature Monday Sept. 27, 2010, in L.A. is unknown, three hours of frying hotter than at around 1PM when it reached 113 degrees and the measuring devices exploded.

So glad City of Angels Blog is leaving L.A. soon.

But where can you go to stay cool?

It Never Fails to Happen, even among the dissenters

2010-09-23T04:58:00.001-07:00

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People form groups to buck the system, and then as their group becomes successful, those same people take a big gulp and join up with the system. I've seen it happen a thousand times, dissenters in suits with designer briefcases, ending up in places the people they "advocate" for would not even enter. That's why I don't join anything to begin with.

Another Eerie Thing found as I pack, from Austin c. 1975

2010-09-20T09:39:00.000-07:00

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Going through files been carrying around for a long time, as I have to thin my load, I'm soon getting on the road. Found this, which eerily reveals facts about the "Taken" incident I wrote about on this blog here a few months back. These pages I found as I pack to move, reminded me of two more incidents that I haven't revisited on these pages.

So revealing of the effects being sexualized by a priest at age five had on my life, for decades. What gave me shivers as I read this was the "How Do I Forget" stuff at the end of page 2... and everything in between.

THE RAPE BY FIVE INDIANS was on Mount Shasta 1969, in one of the other many times I've run away from L.A. From there it was Boulder for the Holy Man Jam (see previous post), which landed me in Texas. There was this transition I went through while I was in college in Austin. It seems to begin in this note to myself.

It had to do with realizing my sexuality was so different from most people, and trying to live with it.

I was so lonely and out of place in Texas.

Boulder Whole Earth Festival 1970

2010-09-12T20:14:00.000-07:00

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I was there, got hold of a typewriter soon after and wrote about it. Today, I found these pages as I started packing to take City of Angels out of L.A., and scanned them here to serve as a segue in my story, from 1970 California by way of Boulder, to Texas, where I ended up pregnant. Then I ran back to Northern California, but later back again to Texas to be with the baby's father, who took the baby away from me, so I went to college in Austin and really dug Astronomy, and that's how an ex-hippie named Sunshine ended up working at NASA.

And always, just under the surface, I was in pursuit of the priest.

This Really Happened:

I Trained To Do This Blog At NASA

2010-08-31T13:12:00.000-07:00

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I must have been living faster than the speed of life all the time by the 1970s. Otherwise how the heck would I have ended up at NASA in the first place?

(Expect more of the story on the period I was at NASA in posts coming in 2013-2014)

I lived a life led by compulsions put in me when a Catholic priest "sexualized" me at age five. Promiscuity, or "sexual confusion," is an inevitable effect on the victim of child sex assault, as we grow up, when and if we make it to adulthood. Add to it that in my case the molester was a priest, God and the sky got added in to the confusion.... I ended up in my thirties chasing astronauts in Houston, and the period I worked at NASA, 1978-1983, is a time I remember in dark shame.

This could be a comedy routine: Thanks to Fr. Horne-y, I had to be with men in high places, connected to the sky, so I went to work at NASA.

The KC-135 aircraft on which we are flying in these shots was known as the "vomit comet" because the jet flew parabolas- up and down and up and down. Astronauts and techs tested equipment and ways for humans to endure low gravity in space by riding on these KC135 flights over the Gulf of Mexico.

You got zero-gravity during the apex and double gravity while in the bottom half of the parabola (see illustration). Everyone throws up on the vomit comet, especially the first time they ride it. Me, I had no nausea at all, and I attributed it to the soda crackers in my flight suit pocket. But my t-shirt hidden under the zipper told the true story, "Better Living Through Chemicals," illustrated with a graphic leaf of fine cannibas.

I knew is 1979 that cannabis was being used to stop nausea. It was Texas, easy to get weed, if you were fearless.... I mean, in that state in the 1970s they still put you in prison for possession of less than an ounce.

For these zero-G trips, I drove onto the Air Force Base used by LBJ Space Center, parked, pulled out a baggie or unwrapped a hidden piece of foil, toked on the joint I'd taken out, then suited up for the flight.

Nothing could stop me by then.

I was impervious, having gotten into and survived several scrapes with death by 1979, such as this one in 1966. So when I was at NASA, I could do anything, even toke up on pot on an Air Force base in my car, before getting on a test flight to cover experiments as a journalst.

Plus, I was always in pursuit of the priest. There was always this underlying breathlessness as I confused sex with everything else in life, while trying to be straight and professional.

My job on these flights was to take pictures and then do a story for release to media and for the inhouse newspaper, Space News Roundup. I had the journalist grad's dream job, and I literally screwed it up, by confusing men who had a connection to the sky with the priest I had been pursuing in compulsion since puberty.

Here is the story that resulted from one of these flights: (Top and bottom half of P. 4, see front page below:)

Page 1 of issue w/above story.
WOW!
Look what else I found! I edited and recorded these updates of Skylab as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere, remember that?

EDITING NORAD?
Me? Kay Ebeling?
Who once passed a hasheesh pipe with Timothy Leary?
Man, what a pedophile priest affected compulsive pursuit in life can lead you into... (PS: Never shared my scientific results, on the use of marijuana to prevent nausea in space, with NASA bosses at the time though...)
All this ability I had, all this skill, and I never experienced success, because of the compulsion. My sexual acting out, done almost by rote like I was pre-conditioned, always got me shunned and ousted. No matter how good a job I did, no matter how upright and disciplined and productive I made myself- I'd always get fired.

Getting fired from NASA, now that's a story... More to come
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MORE Skylab Re-Entry Copy:

I think there was a call-in number for people to get updates, and it ran these recorded messages. We manned the newsroom 24-hours as Skylab re-entered, only mission I ever got to work on while I was at NASA....

Like Everyone Else in L.A.?

2010-08-16T18:21:00.000-07:00

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When I came back from Texas in 1983, I was so lost and demoralized, and once again found myself on Sunset Boulevard. That day I’d driven up from my parents’ house where they'd retired in South Orange County.

I had the idea all I had to do was walk into a literary agency office, tell them, "I used to write for NASA Public Affairs," show them my portfolio of Space News Roundups from LBJ Space Center in Houston. Say, “I used to edit these, and 25 thousand people received them in their inbox every other Friday.” (Don't know what i planned to say if they ask me why I left NASA, as always I was going faster than the speed of life, did not stop to look at that problem.)

Now that I was an out of work journalist in L.A, I had to get get an agent, I figured. So I got the address of an agency in about the 9200 block of Sunset, past Doheny, where it curves away from the Strip and starts into Beverly Hills.

I’d been in Texas since about 1970. But still this street was home, not the whole city of L.A., not the east side suburbs where I grew up, but Sunset Boulevard. Last time I’d been a resident of Hollywood was in 1969.

…

Now I entered this glass slick building with no one stopping me in 1983 in the lobby, even though it was a Beverly Hills office building with all kinds of movie industry businesses inside, probably even celebrities. I just walked in and pushed the elevator button, went up a few flights, and walked into the office of Well Known Literary Agency. They had a phone listing with their address in the Yellow Pages that I’d read in my parents’ kitchen.

I said, "I'm here, I want to get a job writing for television or films, so I need an agent," in my elongated A's of L.A. with acquired Texan twang.

The receptionist stopped short, she was a city girl laughing at this Texas newcomer, even though L.A. is my hometown. She gave a grin meant for someone not me, and said, "No agent will talk to you unless you show up with a large body of work."

I said, A large body of work? But I have these Space News Roundups full of stories I wrote.

She shook her head. Doesn't matter.

What's a body of work, I asked. She said:

Like fifteen, twenty, completed full length feature film scripts, not just one novel but several novels you've gotten published.

Oh, I said.

I left the office, crossed the street, and sat on a bench, just sat, looking at the sleek office building I'd just left. Just sat there looking at it.

Five years later I left L.A. with newborn Lizzie and moved to Humboldt County, convinced that a baby would keep me at home, plus moving to the country, I’d finally sit down and write that body of work.

Never did.

Ended up getting a job and entering the frenzy chaos and exhaustion of life as a single mother.

In 1993 in Eureka I had this bizarre experience as my daughter turned age five. Right then and there I remembered what happened to me at the hands of Father Thomas Barry Horne of Bartlett Illinois when I was five years old myself. It all became clear and vivid as I looked at my daughter as I was hiding her from the front windows.

And it came clear in my head because I hadn't been in the bars in two years.

I confirmed what happened at the hands of Father Horne over the phone with family members. Then entered the world of hundreds of thousands of crime victims of pedophile priests all over the world, and all that has led to where I am today.

To this day, when I look at my daughter, I see myself at her age. It’s hard right now that she’s age 22, as I did my worst… sexual confusion… acting out around that age. I want to move away from my daughter so I don't have to see those horrible years of my life every time I look at her.

All those greasy body fluid filled nights...

In 2007 I finally figured out how to start a blog and created one about pedophile priests, the crime victims, and the perpetrators. I found hundreds of stories, maybe thousands of stories, and started writing them.

The other day I realized that now, without setting out to accomplish it, I have a large body of work to show to an agent.

Wonder if that one literary agency is still in that building on Sunset Boulevard. Maybe I should look them up… wonder if I could get in the door in 2010.

Should just go sit on that bench and look at the building again.

-kay ebeling, today

In Pursuit of Timothy Leary, years before I realized it was really pursuit of the priest,

2010-08-02T16:30:00.000-07:00

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I'm still the same person as the hippie who came out of Hollywood and started people singing:

All we are saying is give peace a chance

At a spontaneous event at Mystic Arts Bookstore in Laguna Beach, Summer 1969.

The same hippie girl who hitchhiked into Boulder for The Holy Man Jam in the student square a few months later, and as the clouds threatened rain, I jumped on the stage and did a sun dance,

and the sun come out.

The crowd hollered out, her name is Sunshine, your name is Sunshine.

And everyone started calling me Sunshine.

It stuck.

Two years later my common law mother in law even called me Sunshine, when I was living in her basement with her son and our baby. My own parents did not call me.

I left the Holy Man Jam in Boulder with a car full of hippies from Texas, we were segueing into Eastern Mystics with Swami Satchidananda, our guru, I moved to Dallas to live in the Integral Yoga Ashram.

Swami Satchidananda came through on a visit one week to “initiate” us, and he gave everyone a secret mantra and a Hindu name.

Except me.

Me, he said, “You are Sunshine. I can’t give you any other name, that is your initiated name, just like it was, Sunshine.”

Today at age 62, after four years of dealing with the Holy Roman Catholic Church and its upside down treatment of pedophile priest victims,

One would not be inclined to call me Sunshine.

One of the grown up victims, I am, which may explain my pursuit of Timothy Leary, Gurus, and astronauts- men with connections to the heavens...

Sun Shine!
is how I signed articles and letters for years, into the mid-1970s.
I always wrote, even in elementary school, I'd write stories through the summers.

What happened to Sunshine?

Somewhere along the way I lost that enthusiasm, that almost manic approach to life that brought rooms alive, that ignited projects, that got a gaggle of disconnected hippies to all sing together.

All we are saying is give peace a chance.

At the Mystic Arts Bookstore in Laguna Beach 1969.

Hmm, maybe I should give peace a chance now.

In 1969, running away from Hollywood, I was hitchhiking up and down Highway Five, the Santa Ana freeway (there was no 405 yet), to go north you went on Highway One, twisting through Big Sur.

Always Running always living faster than the speed of life.

I was standing on an onramp somewhere south of Long Beach. A carful of guys got mad when I wasn't a hooker, when I really was hitchhiking not turning tricks, so they dropped me on some Anaheim area street, and I lugged my bags back to the freeway, my thumb stuck out as I stood on the onramp.

Looking for Timothy Leary. He had a ranch, I'd heard, inland from Laguna, you got to him through Laguna Canyon, Laguna Beach, the Mystic Arts Bookstore.

Just off Sunset Boulevard I had left an apartment full of belongings behind, had not even dealt with mounds and mounds of clothes, had left them in a friend's closet.

I packed a duffelbag for my trip in pursuit of Timothy Leary, and it was imbalanced and awkward, due to the portable typewriter I also packed, and a stack of typing paper, ribbons...

Left behind an apartment half a block from

Sunset Boulevard,

on Leland Way.

Left a mound of clothes a half block from Sunset Boulevard. Weeks later that mound of clothes followed me to Laguna Canyon.

-more to come

This is My Church, a Center on Sunset Boulevard, for some of us, this is as close to church as we can get

2010-07-24T06:30:00.000-07:00

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No stained glass windows or altars, no mystical statues, no confessionals. Re quality of video, I see now, I need to put my arm somewhere stable so the camera doesn't shake, but this is how we do church in East Hollywood, CA:

Will go next Friday and try to shoot this better. Also the people are the interesting part, have to show more of them. Still, I love the way Patrick sings, that's Patrick singing...

This Is Me

2010-07-19T05:58:00.001-07:00

Life On Earth is a Fluke, Enjoy It While It Lasts, Yet I Call Myself Spiritual

2010-07-11T05:58:00.001-07:00

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It's so strange. I pray, I believe in Something, yet just wrote this to a friend:

I think Earth is an accident and life here is a fluke and someone higher up watches it, watches us as if we are a laboratory.
Humans mistake a sense of being watched for something mystical, but the higher place is very physical, just on a dimension we can't see from Earth...
My religion is Cosmology or maybe even Astronomy, more than it is something magical and mystical. I know that with a Universe this big there has to be more, and I know I've been around longer than since 1948 when I was born here, as I remember things in history at a visceral level.

But I don't know much more, as the rest takes place on a plane we cannot find from Earth.

I believe all this, and yet call myself spiritual. I'm a Christian who thinks Christ was a brilliant, futuristic, compassionate, caring person who prayed and studied and meditated and came up with a better way to live, and we are all better off if we live the way he envisioned.

But I don't believe in any of the woo-woo mysticism of Christ or God. As to miracles, I think that when a throng of people are elated through group prayer and the words of a charismatic leader, they can think they are satisfied from only a whiff of loaves and fishes being passed through the crowd, that's the miracle. I think he walked on water because that sea was so dead, full of saline and oil, the water was thick enough for a very lightweight person (one who has been fasting praying and meditating for a while) to appear to be walking on top of it.

Jesus wasn't a spirit, he was spiritual.

Christianity is hundreds of years of stories being passed on by excited individuals with little media to use to document things. So the stories, of course, changed over time, then later were written in stone, by groups who had agendas, like Fourth Century Romans.

I believe all this very unethereal unreligioius stuff about God and Christ, and yet-

A Gospel music song comes on and I'll jump right in, enter it, and live in bliss for five minutes or so.

I think the Bible is thousands of years of humans trying to describe the spiritual life, so you read the Bible to figure out the best way to live on Earth.

In the Bible you find out what has been working for thousands of years, the wisdom of those who took the trouble to write things down before there were even pens or pencils, they were so driven to record what they saw and believed.

So my Sundays are left for the joyous cosmology of unstructured life on Earth, with lots of Gospel music and action that is something other than work, because humans do better when they take at least one day off out of every seven, in other words a Sabbath, as someone figured out thousands of years ago.

(Unfortunately for me I live here where TV production never stops in Lala Land in 2010, so I'm working on Ax Men Season Four this Sunday morning and can't take the day off, maybe that's why this is only as spiritual as I can get right now, gotta go back to work.)

PIC: For Religious Freedom, the Right to be Atheist, My Grandparents Came to the USA

2010-07-03T21:36:00.001-07:00

In 1900 Wadja and Janik Jendrzewski moved from Poland to Indiana and opened a bakery.

86'd Again

2010-06-30T06:17:00.000-07:00

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"You mean you're not here mandatory?" The guy beside me asked. I said, no I come from the neighborhood for Anger Management. Earlier he had said he plans to be a preacher, he carries a frayed Bible always in one hand. We are at a Saturday Barbecue at Hope Again.

My voice deepens: “You know what I discovered? Nothing satisfies you better than smashing plates on concrete.” He seems to be interested, so I keep talking: “You take old china plates, you know, cracked used pieces from a second hand store, stock up on them at yard sales.

“Then when you start getting angry, grab those plates, take ‘em outside, and smash them on something really hard. I mean it’s really gratifying. You hear this melodic crash and splinters of ceramic shoot out all over the place. There’s just something really satisfying about destroying something beautiful, I mean, when you're angry.”

The guy has his face forward, only lets his eyes swipe sideways at me. He says, uh, yeah? and I go on:

“So that's how I was dealing with my anger. But then I ran out of dishes.”

He sniff-laughs but I don't notice, as I'm laughing too hard at myself. I hear other laughter around me, don't know if it’s with me or just alongside me, it’s probably from the crowd forming across the yard, a lot of them people who used to be sitting here with me. At this table it’s down to me and this Kenyan guy who is very tall and skinny and has come to America to preach on the streets of Hollywood with that lovely accent.

He swallows, thinks, then figures out to say, “Well at least you have a sense of humor” and chuckles a bit.

Empowered, more inappropriate stuff flops out of my mouth, it never fails. Someone asks me what church I go to and I give a litany of all the churches I've tried to go to since 2004 when I landed at this Christian outreach place for homeless people on Sunset Boulevard and started trying to go to church.

The girl next to me looks like Laura Bush would have looked in her twenties, and when in conversation I mention the Gulf oil spill, she sighs and says, “Oh yes, I don't watch much news, but I did see pictures of all those dead birds,” then wrinkles her nose and I get the idea she thinks the news should have hidden the dead birds like BP asked them to. . . .

But we're still talking, and Young Laura Bush asks me about Churches and I say, well I've been bouncing around. At first I say the problem is there’s not enough little old ladies with white hair in any of the churches I go to, when what I really mean is the people with white hair in most churches are these little old ladies who I can’t relate to, even though I'm becoming a little old lady myself.

The Generation Gap Follows Baby Boomers into Old Age.

Actually the problem is most people in my generation are not Christians, the Jesus movement came “after” the hippies. There were a few late comer hippies who started the Jesus Freak groups in the midst of a dying Haight Ashbury in the seventies, and then moved out into communes in several northern California towns.

But face it, most of my peers, people from my generation in L.A., are atheists.

Feminists.

Bisexual, even.

I say to Laura B on my right, "Yeah it’s really unusual for someone in my age group to become a Christian," and no one argues with me on that one.

So I've opened the door to mention unmentionables in this crowd and I say, “Yeah I used to go to REDACTED Church, but things sort of fell apart there when people found out the pastor was gay.”

The women around me become silent, and I keep talking:

“I was like, you mean you couldn't tell?”

That got a little uncomfortable laugh. Then the woman with a post-grad education across from me spoke: “My momma told me when she was carrying me, she went to a gay church once.” She then mumbled a few words so we weren’t sure if her mom knew they were gay or just happened to go there, and continued: “She was six months pregnant, so they were all-“

I interrupt in one of my silly voices: “How did you do it?”

They're quiet so I think they want me to say more and add:

“Or better yet: It’s a miracle. It must be a miracle.”

After a beat, the educated woman across from me said, “Well Kay thanks for coming by, hope you enjoy the rest of your afternoon” silently adding:

“Elsewhere.”

And cracking more jokes, I exited.

I always do it, always end up walking home alone, because when I do finally find a way to be with people, I make the worst of the opportunity. I get so excited from months of isolation, and because I easily get people laughing. Then I want to push it farther so I do, I push it farther, and it ends up being even more funny, yes. But always people end up offended and I end up out the door.

I should just do standup comedy, but I'm an old lady.

Hmm, my daughter might just pick up that baton. She is studying improvisational comedy at a theater school up the street as we speak.

Just off Sunset Boulevard.
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POST POST

Wow, here is proof of how therapeutic it is to write. This morning's posted started out like this:

You Can’t Hide

I’m an old whore and it shows. Even though I'm living this godly life today- well more or less- the way I talk, the way words come out of my mouth, my walk, all of me betrays years of low life. I spent too many hours loud hollering in dark bars to speak today with eloquence, especially once I relax. My belly pours out and some wisecrack betrays me, and the church ladies turn their backs.
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Moderating the Moderating

2010-06-28T04:50:00.000-07:00

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COMMENT POSTED ON LEE PODLES' Blog this AM
and copied and pasted here
in case it never gets published:

The Perp who got to me and my sister was in the BA database and then was removed when their policy changed. So I am living proof also that there are perps who are not in the database, even though they've been accused in public and in my cases, several times on my blog.
Our perp Thomas Barry Horne from Bartlett Illinois was removed because no "mainstream" news organization has named him as a perp. But most news orgs will not name him if his name is not on BA.
Problem overall and not just in clergy sex abuse cases is the whole world is run in a way to avoid lawsuits, avoiding lawsuits has become everyone's top priority.
Screwiest result is that "mainstream media' has more credibility than one of the victims blogging, because they have lawyers basically, no other reason.
Nothing is perfect in the USA today, so just keep going forward and don't get stuck, that's how I deal with all of this.
*******

Here is the original post, don't know if this comment will be approved or not:
http://www.podles.org/dialogue/bishopaccountability-mexico-and-murders-338.htm#comments

It's so hard not to sound paranoid when trying to describe how the Catholic Church beats down the crime victims of its pedophile epidemic. I mean, the public, even most of the advocates, only see the part that is meant to be seen. And your only way to explain it to a therapist or cop is "It's a conspiracy run out of The Vatican," which immediately categorizes you as an aluminum foil head reflector wearer.

The damage control on the issue of pedophiles in the Catholic Church, overseen and abetted by the Vatican, has been monumental, and some of it slickly under the radar. So anyone trying to point it out immediately sounds like a blithering paranoiac, just because it's the Vatican and the Pope and Church hierarchy who are the perpetrators.

Basically, no other news on this issue has gone out than what has gone out. If a story breaks in the mainstream, then it is fodder for both the nonprofits and the Church to acknowledge.

The end result is no accusations are recognized until they are so public they have to be recognized.

A bishop's testimony opens up and includes new facts AFTER evidence comes out proving those new facts. SNAP holds press conferences AFTER public docs are filed in lawsuits so AFTER the story has already broken. (My favorite were two recent SNAP press conferences to announce new lawsuits against an Archdiocese but Not Publicly Naming the Accused Perpetrator Priest.)

Even BishopAccountability, who appear to be real heroes in this movement, only documents charges and priests AFTER they are public information already in the public domain and documented.

The way things stand now, the Church AND the advocates never reveal more than is already revealed.

And I am living proof that there are stories being shot down and buried, voices being shut up and stifled, and obstruction of justice on several different layers in the pedophile epidemic in the Catholic Church.
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Trust Your Instincts, Not a Press Release

2010-06-18T06:07:00.000-07:00

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The entire way that SNAP and the structure around it responded to its criticism here at city of angels was counter intuitive to how a legitimate support organization for crime victims would have responded.

If what I was reporting was incorrect, they would have communicated with me, explained to me where I was wrong.

Instead they made sure as few people heard what I had to say as possible.

They attacked me, shunned me, and locked me out, but they never just explained to me or anyone else where my observations were incorrect.
To me their very reaction to a survivor who used to be a member asking questions and pointing out things that are not right SHOWS what I reported was true. They were set up to create an image of support for survivors, while down here on the ground we were really being shut down and shut up.

So I'm off to the movies again
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It's Not that Victims of Pedophile Priests Can't Forgive Mahony

2010-06-16T11:45:00.000-07:00

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It's that we are disgusted watching these guys get away with all these crimes. They never say more than they have to. The truth keeps changing. Oh an investigation found this? Okay, then now we'll admit to what was just discovered, but not any more than that. Here, here is a new press statement.

Those of us watching over a number of years have watched the truth change, the truth boundary line for Catholic hierarchy explaining the pedophile priest epidemic just moves around as different evidence comes out. Then the Cardinal stands up and makes a press statement admitting that one more bit of evidence is true after all, that their slimeball treatment of children was really worse than they admitted earlier, but it's no big deal because those sex crimes don't happen anymore.

And everyone just believes them.

After all they're wearing a collar. If Mahony had to be deposed on every single perpetrator priest in Los Angeles, the boundary line of how far the truth goes would just keep moving all over the place, and soon the cardinal would be shrugging off rapes of hundreds of children, with the same ease as he shrugs off the two boys who were just disposable "illegal immigrants" from his testimony released this week.

I CRY OUT FOR REPORTERS who ask questions, and don't just rely on press statements and releases for stories. Meanwhile, we all get what we get. Mushy leadership.

Criminals run everything in the USA now, why wouldn't they also run the Church?
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Sigh It is So Much Bigger than Any of Us can battle on our own, and there is No Network...

2010-06-16T07:19:00.000-07:00

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People call one person getting his name in the news thousands of times great progress for survivors. Re Pew Research:

PHEW PEW
June 13th, 2010, by Jerry Berger, St. Louis Blogger: A new Pew Research Center study of clergy sex abuse media coverage lists our town’s David Clohessy, director of SNAP, as #6 on a list of “Abuse Scandal Lead Newsmakers.” Based on appearances in 52 mainstream news outlets, in a six-week period in April and March.... On the same day the study was released, SNAP’s founder, SLU-grad Barbara Blaine of ChiTown, was deemed “Most intriguing Person of the Day” on CNN’s Rick Sanchez show.

In reality, every time DC is quoted in the news it's one less survivor's story getting out. SNAP has stood in the way, as an obstruction, between survivors and the media, from the start. Almost every one of those thousands of DC quotes are inane and vetted at a corporate level (by whom?). Clohessy never says anything more than what has already been in the news, then gives it a nice "survivors'" touch like, "Keep Kids Safe." I mean, who can argue with that?

SNAP has been saying the same thing from the start, and the media has been writing it down. The result was to keep things insular. SNAP continues to call for the bishops and church hierarchy to change, as if they ever would. Still SNAP leaflets churches.

And the same two to three people are about the only voice the public has ever heard across the USA: David Clohessy and Barbara Blaine, and occasionally one or two more.

So to me, all this attention to two people who run a group that should be representing hundreds of thousands of crime victims shows the group was set up, from the start, to keep the true story of these crimes from surfacing. And they succeeded.

Basically, across the country, the crime victims went to the Church expecting help and got none. Then we went to SNAP expecting help and were told yes, you are getting help. But then we never saw it, but if we pointed that out we were called crazy. Then they continued to be quoted in the media about all the help they were giving.

None of the support is really there, it's all a hologram. Reach out for it and it disappears.

Now most North American victims are isolated, marginalized, out here trying to do things on our own with little or no resources, almost worse off than we were before we got our hopes up that as a group we would accomplish great things. The settlements put a big schism in the middle of us, creating two groups, the ones who got money and the rest of us.

President Obama, almost every state house, state supreme courts, news media, all of them got the wrong message, that this issue was about money. Across the country, the image of survivors is that we bankrupted the Church and it was all about lawsuits. And SNAP ran that message.

Yes, SNAP was about lawsuits, not all the victims wanted lawsuits. I never thought of a lawsuit until I'd been in SNAP for years and realized that's all that was ever goign to happen, then it was too late. But to the world, this whole thing was about suing the church.

And now, at least in L.A., SNAP is gone, now that their work is finished here. They're off to Europe, to do the great job there that they did here.

No. Clohessy's name in the news does not show what a great job he did, unless the job was to put all the focus in one small little area, until the story blew over. Keep most of the crimes from ever surfacing, and keep the ones that did surface as little exposed as possible. If that was the goal, then yes, SNAP deserves awards.

But the victims have nothing, got nothing, ended up with nothing but an odd shared sense of justice interruptus as we watch the news media, like blithering idiots, continue to copy down and repeat every thing SNAP says, and call it reporting.

I'm going to the movies.
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VIDEOS: The Date and Place I was Born

2010-06-03T05:47:00.000-07:00

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Hot Night Life in Chi, 1948

Chicago was so proud and full of progress in 1948:

Music Break, from 1984, I Just Discovered This Song

2010-06-02T16:05:00.001-07:00

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I keep playing this song over and over:

Talk, Talk: It's My Life
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The Isolation Comes with Aging, then Add On having lived a weird life like mine...

2010-05-27T12:21:00.000-07:00

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The music was inspiring, plus free donuts. Still in the middle of Church that Sunday, I just … realized I totally didn't want to be there.

In his “teaching” the pastor said, "We came to California to plant churches in the inner cities, so now we're opening a new branch in Northridge.”

I almost laughed out loud. Maybe to people who moved here in the past ten years, Northridge is a city. I mean there are some big buildings there now, but man, Northridge is, is, is…

It’s the San Fernando Valley, the north end!

Then I looked around the auditorium where this church meets so I'm able to stand being there, because it’s not a church building it's a school building. There was not one other person there with one gray hair or one wrinkle.

I used to pat myself on the head for being such a young thinker I only feel comfortable in a church full of twenty-somethings. But truth is, there is no feeling of community for me there. No reason really to even be there, since I find God, in our personal relationship, walking in the breeze listening to music.

So I got up and left. No one stopped me and asked me to stay as I walked away, the “prayer team” members in the back just looked at me with the same perplexed sense that I seemed to have.

I don't fit in anywhere.

This church is another one of those Church Plants you find around Los Angeles, and I'm told other inner cities, today. Totally non denominational, kids winging it with a microphone and garage band. Kids with guitars and the Bibles, trying to figure out new ways to do Church.

The music’s great at this church which meets, funnily enough, in the Michael Jackson Auditorium of Gardner Elementary School in Hollywood behind the Guitar Center.

I have to go back to get a picture of the plaque: Michael Jackson Auditorium, where my church meets...

I walked right by the “Prayer Team” members, past the plaque commemorating Jackson. Out through the doors into the unseasonably cool and refreshing breezes we're having in L.A. lately.

I'm the little old lady with gray hair now almost totally white. How do I explain Joni Mitchell and Love-Ins at Big Sur in the sixties to these people who think Old School means Madonna?

Music in my headset, I'm walking around the streets of L.A. again, trying to accept my situational uncorrectable aloneness in this already isolating city. I mean, the older you get, the less people there are around that are your age- they drop dead every day. So you have to be grateful just for being able to chew food anymore.

I see other people with wrinkles sitting across from me on the Metro and I want to pull them aside, compare lives. How did you make it this far? Were you in San Francisco or Hollywood in 1966 or 1967, did all that stuff really happen?

I spend my Sunday walking around L.A. with music in my ears discretely smoking.

***

Haven’t been to the Farmers Market at Ivar between Sunset and Hollywood in years, so wandered there that Sunday morning, thinking the handful of change in my pocket would buy me a tomato or two. It was more like nine dollars would buy me a sack of organically grown produce manured by happy cows, or something like that.

The blocked off streets of the Farmer's Market, with newly built high rise luxury apartment and retail buildings all around it, was jammed.

Proprietors of the ramshackle lean-to sales outlets were not friendly to me at all, as it was obvious I wasn’t there to spend money. My shoes, my hair, hands, all show I don't have any "disposable income."

Around me was a bustle of people, curiously many of them Asian, with shopping bags bulging, buying gallons of raw milk, masses of carefully assembled nine dollar sacks of produce.

I just wanted a place to sit down, some shade.

There was nothing there for me.

Well, there was a 3-piece jazz combo, a guy my age there singing sleazy blues-jazz songs with another guy on keyboard and a bass player, set up in one of the farmers' stalls, with a hat in front of them to collect dollar and coin tips. I tried to lean on a pole and watch them perform a song, and almost pulled down the Santa Barbara Pistachio Farm stall.

The singer finished his song and got real aggressive about wanting coins and dollars. I wandered a few feet out of range, and he said, “Well if you don't have any coins, why don't you take me home with you?”

I was stunned. Thirty years ago I would have taken him up on it. Today standing there in the heat, I felt the remnants of my old life in my sweat left over on me, residue from a hundred or so men with skinny bony bodies like the guy flirting with me from the makeshift stage.

I shivered, and really didn't want to be there anymore.

My sister would have stayed until the fare close and taken the singer home.

We two adult victims of Father Thomas Barry Horne of Chicago, 1940s-70s.

I walked up the slight grade of hill between Sunset Boulevard and Hollywood, so tired it felt like San Francisco topography, but at least there’s shade up on the Walk of Fame. Still no place to sit for blocks. I walked, I walked.

Then at last, comfort: A wrought iron bench. I sat down finally, it felt almost soft. In the shade, that cool wind massaging me, I gazed up at the Capitol Records building, remembering that time.... I could sit here for hours, I thought, just continue to discretely smoke, using my visor to hide the pipe and block the wind. Gaze at people walking by, enjoy the day.

Then three recent arrivals from some Southeast Asian nation squeezed onto the bench next to me and asked about the bus. I was friendly, tried to be hospitable, but on a Sunday, them waiting for a bus, they could be there another hour.

So wandered on to Argyle and caught a Number 180 home.

Stopped in the Armenian grocery where they really are trying to keep the floors clean now and keep the fruit from rotting. Bought some Liqueur and Vodka Chocolates and spent the rest of the day at home. The closest I’ll ever get to a park and shady place to sit in this city is probably the small square of yard in front of my apartment building. As long as I live in L.A., I have to accept that if you want greenery, or anything resembling a park, you have to buy your own real estate.
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Aftermath from Recent Offer Dangled in front of Me that Would Have Solved a lot of our Problem$ but Seriously Compromised the Truth.

2010-05-27T05:53:00.000-07:00

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I walked out of there with my integrity. Holes in my clothes, but I still have my integrity.
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We are Under Attack by a Foreign Oil Company, Ecological War, After Last Year a Financial Attack.

2010-05-24T13:57:00.001-07:00

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They won’t let us know what they're doing or how much oil is pouring in. They're not letting the U.S. government in to monitor or take any action. The dispersant is actually pouring more toxicity into the Gulf of Mexico and they're refusing to stop using it.

This is War, people. We are under attack by a foreign entity. They got to us last year electronically with the disappearance of trillions of dollars from the American economy, that people have not yet really grasped.

Now this attack on our coastlines and with full force in the Gulf, and they are using the item that makes them despise us the most to attack us, the oil that fuels our lifestyle, ten times better than anyone else’s in the world.

People, we're being attacked. They're not letting us onto the place where the attack took place.

In 1980 I joined the Naval Air Reserve, mostly because of a confused compulsion I had to be around people in high places, astronauts on my job in Houston, and Naval pilots on my drill weekends. When I got to Naval Air Station New Orleans, I found about half the units there, drilling and serving fulltime, were doing Intelligence work.

All wide eyed innocent and Annie Fannie, I asked, why do we need so much intelligence here on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana?

They informed me, there’s a huge amount of oil under the Gulf of Mexico, huge amounts that people don't even comprehend, and as a result, the Gulf of Mexico was one of our most vulnerable places for attack.

But it was 1980 and everyone knows they will never attack on U.S. land. Right?

The amount of oil in the Gulf and all the intelligence around it was a quiet thing, known to this community that drilled in buildings on the air base that I never got to go into. This humongous amount of oil that-

In the last two decades of privatization Americans have insanely allowed to be drilled, with no real oversight. Huge careless mile deep suction devices stuck into this vast sea of oil under the Gulf that used to be a high priority for Naval Intelligence.

Then, oh what a surprise, one explosion at the bottom of an unmonitored deep drilling device, and toxic oil is pouring into the Gulf and eventually the ocean.

Will we ever know what caused the explosion that caused this well to become the worst disaster in American history? Why did this drilling device explode, when there have been other wells deeper and more dangerous operating from off shore platforms all over the world now for decades?

There are a lot of unanswered questions. I'm beginning to feel eerily that this is too much like a sci fi movie, the part where the government is keeping the people from knowing what is really happening. Only it’s not our government doing it, it’s this foreign oil company.

Uh, Ocean Temperatures?

ONE MORE THING has anyone thought about how much it’s going to contribute to the rising temperature of the ocean, when the summer sun starts to beat down on all the oil that's coagulating in the Gulf of Mexico right now, along with the billions more gallons that are pouring in? In fact, oil spills are a large part of what caused ocean temperatures to get hotter recently, now the temperature of the ocean will be increase tenfold.

It brings to my mind images of artists' renderings of Venus, with its boiling ocean of toxic elements...

In California, we've had sloppy oil drills and barges pouring oil onto our coastline for decades, most of the leakage owned by foreign oil companies.

The ship that decimated the coast off San Francisco November 2009 was owned by a company in Dubai. And the press totally snoozed through that disaster.

I think it’s time we all wake up and realize, we have been attacked, first economically and now ecologically.

And the fact that Bobby Jindahl is even waiting for a permit first to build barrier islands off the coast of Louisiana is just another sign of how much our system has broken, that allowed us to be vulnerable and to be attacked in this way.

It’s war, people. We have to start realizing there is an enemy doing this to us.

Meanwhile, I’d say get away from coastlines, if you want to survive.
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Anger Management Notes, cont'd.

2010-05-15T11:24:00.000-07:00

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(Didn't make it to Anger Management last week and boy does it show... Last session, the guy who's told this story two times now told it again:)

I did the time for the crime that he--

So two or three years down the line, I see the cat in the Parole Office. Now I could o' taken him outside, you know.

Instead I just said, hey, it's all good, man. I did the time, it's over, behind me.

He looked at me and gave me a hug. Now whether he continues to do what he do, that's him.

But I'm glad I saw him 'cause I can only get it off of me.

***
Someone mentions how so many people BS their way through life, and the Moslem guy says:

"God never falls for it."

And I write down in careful letters, "God never falls for it."

***
Pastor Ron who runs this group says:

"Continuing to be angry is like drinking poison and expecting the other guy to die." And:

"What that person is angry about may not even be about us. We are just caught in the crossfire." And:

"Before you give in to the anger, stop to think, Will this matter five hours from now?"

They all seem to agree that most things won't matter five hours from now, but I wrote in my notes, "What if it WILL still matter five hours from now, or five days, or five years?"

Ron says, "Meanwhile the other guy you're angry at has long ago moved on."

And into my head pops an image of Father Thomas Barry Horne, old and drunk, cracking dirty jokes, nasty jokes with sexual language, the priest shocked people within earshot all the way up to the day he died. And got respect 'til he died, because he wore a priest collar.

It doesn't just go away for the victims.

Best punishment for the perpetrators - all of them - would be no more respect.

They deserve no more respect at all.
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What's Going On Right Now

2010-05-14T05:28:00.001-07:00

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K: I'm real sick, so try to do everything by email these days.

Q from several readers: How much does a doctor charge out there? Do they have any walk-in clinics? If so, what do they charge? Also what is the cost of your meds, not including the medical weed?

K: I go to the L.A. Free Clinic and they did enough lab work to know I need more tests that they don't have resources to do. They referred my case to County for a colonoscopy and County did not even ever call to set up the appointment. Your case, your file, all get lost in the chaos. Thousands of people needing help and no one to give it.

All the free and sliding scale things that used to exist in L.A. for low income people are almost gone. Thanks to my weird job where I make a lot by the hour but there is only about 10 hours of work a week, I'm barely paying my rent and bills, no cash at all left.

There is a place that does "discount" colonoscopies for $650. Good for them.

Charity has disappeared from American life. Even the food banks have no food. It's america today. i'm hoping the bowel problem is just PTSD and so just trying to clean up my diet. Do Yoga. Free health care available if can you learn how to breathe and do Yoga, all you need is a towel on the floor.

You can go crazy comparing your life to other people's, or get more sane. At least I did not pay into an insurance policy that was now turning down my treatment, as so many other people have.

I'm trying to just say, it doesn't matter. It's only a few years shaved off my life. Other people have it much worse. I could have died numerous times before and instead I still lived. So this is bonus time already.

Now I'm real sick and I still have to work and keep my bills paid as well. Everything sucks right now. Since I work at home, no one notices how sick I am.
Oh, one more thing. i tracked down a new federal program, tracked down a U.S. Nurse working on the new Federal program to stop colon cancer. Guess what they do:

"Education."

The U.S. Government Nurse called me back and wanted to talk my ears off about how important it is to get a colonoscopy but they can't tell you where you can get one without insurance.

I had to beg her to hang up finally, because i was on deadline and had to get back to work, didn't have free time to chat, as did this salaried, insured, government nurse.

I'm almost glad i'm dying early... this country sucks today. I used to be patriotic, I fucking served in the Navy for a while, not long enough for Veteran's benefits, just long enough to act out like a priest rape survivor and be put on "inactive" status until my discharge.

What can a person do? If i bitch and moan all i'll get is bitch and moan karma. there is no help out there. Just don't let me get too far away from a toilet, and I'll make it to the end.

Thank god I can still at least buy legal weed now and then to make it less horrible

PS: The L.A. Free Clinic keeps giving me free antidepressants. I can't take them, they give me heart palps. But I think it's weird that they will give me armloads of free antidepressants, but can't get me diagnostic tests. I keep telling them, these pills make me feel like I'm going to have a heart attack, and they still keep giving me these "reuptake inhibiting tricyclics" or whatever they are. I throw them away after three days as the palps are scary.

It's like the government (or someone) wants me to die.
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(Don't trust anyone, the V's are everywhere. Sit still and breathe.)
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I Will Not Be Silent, SNAP leafleting at First Communion is Beyond Insensitive, Outright Crude

2010-05-12T12:36:00.000-07:00

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Sickened. I'm sickened at the thought of SNAP leafleting outside a Sunday Mass in Chicago last weekend, during First Communion ceremonies.

Apologies to individuals who took part, but that bristles to me as a totally wrong thing to do, an inappropriate place to hand out material about pedophilia. Shows an insensitivity that to me is totally counter intuitive. Not only insensitive to all victims who never want to step on or near church property, so they are automatically eliminated from the processs.

But First Communion, all those kids wondering what that piece of paper was that made their parents so angry. To me, this sends a total wrong message to church goers, a message that "survivors" in SNAP are callous and insensitive.

I don't want to be represented in this way. I wonder how many other of the hundreds of thousands of crime victims, if nine thousand of them really are members of SNAP, how many have asked SNAP to stop leafleting at Sunday masses and elementary schools and places where the leaflets get into the wrong hands.

One, leafleting on church property does NOT get the message to new people who can actually do something, church goers if they haven't gotten the message by now are likely unreachable. All that time and energy should be spent reaching out to law enforcement. Why hasn't SNAP started leafletting in front of U.S. Attorneys offices around the country asking for more grand jury investigations? Trying to actually accomplish something.

But 2: This handing out leaflets about pedophilia to families on Sunday with all those little children at First Communion...

How is that showing any sensitivity?

It shows NO sensitivity, it's... to me it's re-perpetrating, perping back, which some of us do not want to do. The churchgoers do not deserve their Sundays interrupted so harshly.

SNAP does not represent me, never has. I've tried to express this very sincere and genuine concern about the way SNAP leaflets at churches NUMEROUS times to the SNAP hierarchy and they just turn their heads, refuse to listen, and continue to- re-perpetrate. That's what it is, sorry, that's how I see it.

Leafleting at First Communion, the kids get their hands on the leaflet, it's so inappropriate!

It really bothers me that SNAP claims to represent survivors, because tactics like this are the OPPOSITE of what should be going on right now in a network of crime victims rebuilding their lives.

Why isn't there a group health isurance plan? Why isn't there a couple of recovery centers around the country by now? What has SNAP really accomplished other than getting its name in the news over and over again, with no substance behind the press statements?

They bring in $750,000 in a bad year, according to their own statements and IRS papers, and there is absolutely nothing of substance to show for twenty-one years of SNAP that's Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, for Google to find

After 21 years, there is not even a genuine network of survivors.

It's all been one big press event, with nothing behind it, there is not even a man behind the curtains to pay no attention to, just empty space. Survivors have all learned to accept that, as just what SNAP does, press events, and we tolerate it, take part in it, or abhor it, as I do. Press events are NOTHING, empty space. But hey that's what SNAP does and I've learned to turn my back.

Except when they do really damaging things, like leafletting at First Communion ceremonies. That just pushes the SNAP disconnect beyond acceptability at all.

Kay Ebeling.

Pay Attention

2010-05-12T10:14:00.000-07:00

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The V's are the Vatican in real life, including the guys they placed into Snap and other places to f--- with survivors. Get clues on how to deal with it here:

Watch Full Episodes & Shorts - ABC.com
Watch full episodes and shorts from your favorite ABC programs online. ... V; /watch/v/240273; Today, the world woke up to find spaceships over every major ...

MORE:

ABC's 'V' climbs
ABC's "V" -- on the bubble for a renewal and approaching the finish line for the season -- climbed in the ratings Tuesday night...

Shh. Don't trust anyone...

For the Record. Birth Certificate and Military Discharge Papers Stolen Recently

2010-05-10T07:32:00.001-07:00

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Lucky for me I had scanned these docs earlier:

44,000 People Will Die This Year from Not Having Health Insurance, and I May Be One of Them

2010-05-08T07:01:00.000-07:00

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Three years ago I went to County USC Hospital complaining of chronic stomach problems. In that three years I've been to four free clinics. Now at the place I go regularly that runs on donations, they are just now realizing the stomach problems I've had all this time are really serious.

Here is the scenario: In 2007, after sitting in the ER waiting room about 12 hours, honest, I finally got to see a doctor who told me, sorry, if it’s a chronic problem we can’t help you. This is for emergencies only.

I got irate. I started hollering, Why didn't they tell me that when I got here twelve hours ago.

The doctor shrugged and went to leave. I got mad. I started crying and babbling in confusion.

They said, straighten up, lady. Do you want us to put you in the hospital?

I said, Yes, Yes put me in a hospital even though what they meant was a psych ward. In 1987 when I checked into Thalians at Cedars Sinai near Beverly Hills, they gave me a series of medical tests in the periods of time between Art Therapy and Group. So I thought I'd finally get tests I needed on my stomach at the psych ward.

Not when the county locks you up.

They kept me for six days in this horrible place with one beaten up paperback book and a TV room for therapy. I had to stay six days because the doctor who could release me was on vacation. Not once in those six days did they order any medical tests. When it became obvious my stomach is bad, they gave me Immodium. That made me nauseous so they gave me an anti-nausea drug. Then the nurses would go back and sit in their station and I'd go back to the ward and read the one bent up paperback book.

They filled me with psych meds so by the time I did see a doctor the sixth day, I’d forgotten about the diarrhea I’d had for a year and a half that brought me to County in the first place, I just wanted to get the hell out of that ward, where genuine crazy people followed me around, one lady collected her mucous and then chased me around the ward trying to smear it on me.

I showed them. I took that paperback book with me when I left.

Anyway. Point is at that place, no one checked into the stomach problems that brought me to County to begin with. And it got worse. Since then I've been to a few other free medical places around the city, and no one seemed even to be alarmed at a person having diarrhea every day for two years, then three years.

Diarrhea is part of having PTSD, they all told me.

Now this date it’s four and a half years of pretty much liquid shit every time I eat a meal, unless it’s plain rice, which means probably what I need to do is switch to just eating rice…

Anyway.

So finally at the Free Clinic last February I went to get the muscle relaxant that helps me stop the other problems I've got.

Every three months when I go to the Free Clinic for my geriatric care checkup, I mention the chronic diarrhea and no one thinks it’s an issue.

What, do I look like I'm lying maybe?

Anyway.

Wait a minute, why would someone lie about a thing like that?

Anyway. Finally at the Free Clinic last February they order a smear test, which I think a decade or so back was part of your first visit to a doc office, but now it’s what they think of two years later. So I did the smear test last visit, and they got alarmed and ordered another one. When I saw it, I got alarmed too and said, please contact me right away if there’s anything wrong with test results.

No one called.

So I waited patiently for my next three month checkup to talk about the results instead.

That was yesterday.

I go and find out the results are alarming and they want me to go right away for a colonoscopy and possibly surgery.

Guess where they're sending me.

County USC Hospital.

I'm thinking, why couldn't they have just given me this test three years ago, why did I have to live with this horrible pain and symptoms for three more years and also let the condition get three years’ worse.

What if it was a tumor three years ago that is now cancer? The arrogance of medical people in the world of no health insurance is horrible.

Three years ago that doctor who shrugged at me could have had me do a smear test, one little smear test, and gotten me started finding out what's wrong with me three years ago.

The arrogance. It’s like, if they aren’t going to get paid as much as the Beverly Hills doctors, they don't want to bother with you.

It’s like, anyone who looks healthy and complains of a health problem must be lying.

See I don't look sick. Whatever is wrong with me, it doesn't show. Plus I've learned to fake a positive attitude and happiness as it produces endorphins and really does make you feel better. So even when I'm in so much pain I can barely walk but I have to take Metro for some reason, sometimes I have to argue and fight to get someone to give me a seat.

They say, you don't look disabled.

It’s not just doctors who don't give a damn about old women who have no money.

Soon after that debacle of being locked on a psych ward for six days with no medical attention to the stomach problem, I was back home and heard on the news about the woman who died in the ER at Martin Luther King hospital here in L.A. They described how she was moaning and groaning even lying on the floor, complaining of stomach problems. At one point a medic there dressed all in white actually stepped over her while he was in the process of ignoring her. And she died, right there on the floor of the ER waiting room.

It made the news.

The County of L.A. responded right away.

They closed down the ER at ML King Hospital and created nothing to take its place.

Nobody cares about health problems of people with no money.

They are letting me die right here on the floor in front of them.

I can’t stop thinking that's what's happening.

As soon as I saw the statistic last year during the health care political debates, I knew.

They said, 44,000 people will die next year from not having health insurance.

I knew right away when I heard the number, that I was going to be one of the 44,000. (Then ran to the bathroom to squirt.)

Whatever was wrong with my stomach in 2007 HAS gotten worse, I can feel something wrong inside. I used to teach Advanced Hatha Yoga, I know I'm sick I can feel it.

Yoga and Dance is also why I have muscle tone and strength, so when you look at me, you don't see a sick person but I can feel something is wrong in me.

I know there were about a hundred opportunities for doctors to do something about my stomach in the last three years, and none of those salaried, insured medical employees at any of the centers I went to wanted to take the time to give me a simple smear test.

Now I'm supposed to go to LA County Hospital for further testing and if needed surgery.

County Hospital on the East Side, the only place in all of L.A., with all the movie stars and producers and Charlie Sheen types making a million dollars a month, and there is no place on this side of town to get a free colonoscopy. It's going to be great when I'm finished with the test that puts a tube all the way up my a-- coming home afterwards on a three hour bus ride.

I may not even bother to do the test.

Because County will then send the results of the test to the Free Clinic who will then just ignore them anyway.

I almost would rather just get sick and die like people used to do before the miracle of modern medicine. I'm scared I'll end up in surgery at County hospital where I'll contract some other worse disease. I wish the Chicago Archdiocese would get around to giving me a settlement, as that's the only hope I have, and as far as I know the Church thinks they don't have to help me either.

I had health insurance on my last real job, the one I lost in 2006 after flipping out when I saw Deliver Us from Evil and realized the Church could have stopped the pedophiles decades ago. I got fired for crying too much at my computer while I was working.

Now I've learned, when you're poor and show up at an ER with an unusual health problem, like ones that develop from prolonged PTSD, they don't know what else to do with you but lock you up in a psych ward.

With that PTSD diagnosis, they can ignore everything else wrong with you, say it's just the PTSD.

(Whoops, wait a minute, gotta run again to the---)

You can’t go through an experience like this without feeling like the world just sees no value in you at all. My health is not worth the trouble to waste some cardboard and five minutes of a lab tech’s time to give me a smear test when I first presented to County with Chronic stomach problems in 2007?

Well, maybe diet and Yoga will keep me alive. I don't want to turn my health over to these people, so they can lock me down in a hospital bed and continue to neglect me.

I'm really distracted by this, and the fact I'm still running to the bathroom four or five times an hour. It’s become worse gradually, I'm just now realizing how bad it’s gotten over the past three years, me thinking it must not be anything wrong or one of those doctors I spoke to about it would have done something.

Something.

NO, they don't. Free clinic doctors are distracted, not listening, pissed at the endless flow of untended humans.

People don't want untended humans around. In L.A. you have to find a way to tend yourself, no one is going to do it for you.

Yoga and diet. Screw County USC hospital, they're not getting my body again.

What should I do? Where can a 62 year old gal get a good colonoscopy in this part of town?

Wish I could join the new L.A. trend and go to Mexico for health care.
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More Anger Management Notes

2010-05-01T17:23:00.000-07:00

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The guy across from me wears headdress and his beard decorated, trimmed, in a way that is either Moslem or Deep South Central L.A. He talks of the place he lived before coming to Hope Again on Sunset Boulevard. At his old place "the brothers were in The Word all day, but they also smoked, smoked and smoked." I'm wondering if he's talking about tobacco or weed, but don't ask.

To his left a guy tells his tale of forgiveness, how after getting out of prison, in the parole office, he met the guy who really did the crime for which he'd just done time. "And I forgave him," he said, "I said, it's cool, bro."

We all talk I listen more than talk and take a lot of notes, jot things down.

The former Moslem guy says, "That's just how people are."

That's just how people are, I write in my notes in curly letters. Sums it up.

The guy who leads Anger Management at Hope Again is Pastor Ron, I've known now for more than five years. He's my age, grew up in L.A. near where I lived, but he grew up in a totally different L.A. than me. His parents were Christian preachers as well. Ron just gets it, he's embued in it, he's so ... calm.

He says, "You have to forgive yourself first," and I write down, "Let go. Stop beating myself up."

And I start daydreaming about the lies people have said about me to try to discredit me, that I'm "not a real journalist." Oh, and my favorite, which apparently comes from a couple board members of groups that allegedly advocate for victims, which is really mysterious: "Kay Ebeling is conducting a behind the scenes smear campaign to harm survivors," or words to that effect.

That stings. It rankles worse than if Mahony said it.

I jot down in my Anger Management notes,

"Truth = Freedom"

In big letters, then beneath it:

"They can lie about me all they want. I know I'm telling the truth, no matter what happens here temporarily as a result."

Just before the session started, there was a Bible on the table, and I opened it to Proverbs randomly, as it's always good to read a proverb when you have a few minutes of extra times.

The one I turned to was Proverts 24:24 which in the Amplified translation reads:

24 He who says to the wicked, You are righteous and innocent- peoples will curse him, nations will defy and abhor him.

25 But to those [upright judges] who rebuke the wicked, it will go well with them and they will find delight, and a good blessing will be upon them.

See, I think I'm seeing another layer of wickedness here, even lower and deeper than the pedophiles, and the bishops who enabled them. Most other people don't see it yet, and I'm being condemned for saying what I'm saying.

Ironically the persons condemning me most for saying it are the ones from whom who I see evidence of great wrongdoing. So I can't shut up about it, just have to keep reporting it as it comes up, as it is appropriate to report. And yes, there are a whole bunch of people who insist on continuing to glorify the wicked.

Here is Proverbs 24:24 from The Message translation:

"24-25 Whoever whitewashes the wicked
gets a black mark in the history books,
But whoever exposes the wicked
will be thanked and rewarded."

AH this translation works even better, New Living Translation:

"24 A judge who says to the wicked, “You are innocent,” will be cursed by many people and denounced by the nations. 25 But it will go well for those who convict the guilty; rich blessings will be showered on them."

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It's sundown. My sabbath starts now.
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Cut Paragraphs for May 1, 2010 story

2010-05-01T07:59:00.000-07:00

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Cut paragraphs actually are here. That's the fun of a blog, I can say and do whatever I want. The reputation of City of Angels lies totally on my integrity. Plus you can always count on more stuff here at City of Angels 2, even though I don't tell you about it at the main page.

PARAGRAPHS CUT : From:
No, City of Angels Would Not Make A Good Book Because...
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I didn't even tell people I was a journalist for a while. Because the conversation would then go to NASA and it was just easier not to mention I used to work at NASA, than to try to explain to people why I left NASA. I’d also done some freelance journalism, but to be honest, before I got sober and recovered the memory of what happened to me at the hands of a priest at age five, my thinking was much more skewered.

I’d write these opinion pieces that would get published, I think only because the editors knew the opinions would arouse strong opposition, lots of angry letters. Like the Newsweek My Turn I got published in November 1990. It was supposed to be comedy, Newsweek re-cut it and made it sound like serious journalism, and I got boxes- BOXES- of hate mail forwarded to me from the magazine.

Around the same time my neighbors were getting boxes of Christmas presents delivered I had boxes of hate mail come right to my door by postal delivery, forwarded from Newsweek. Whole university classrooms got assignments to write a response to this Newsweek My Turn by some bitch Kay Ebeling out in California.

It was supposed to be funny. That's why I have the stupid expression on my face in the picture. The bastards edited it wrong and it looked like a crazy lady spouting weird politics.

I didn't write another word after that for 7 years. No 17 years (god my math is bad). A couple letters to the editor. My letters always get published, so sometimes I’d write them during political campaigns I cared about and feel glad that maybe I influenced one or two more votes by getting my feelings into print.

But after the newsweek experience, and the way it played out locally in the town where I lived, Arcata, CA, where old hippies and liberals have gone to hide out while the rest of the state goes Republican, when word got out that there was a woman living there who wrote an anti-feminism article in Newsweek, well, I stopped writing checks at the grocery store, I didn't want people to see my name.

So I isolated, went into the Redwoods, got sober in AA along the way, and then as my daughter turned five, I started remembering what happened when I was five with the priest, and my motor started running again.

Still I wasn’t doing journalism for a living. Instead, we migrated again to L.A. where I got a job that required a “degree in communications.” Most people who do this job have bachelors in RTF from back east, they come to L.A. thinking a college degree will open doors, and end up in that job I've got, sweeping through the babbling of reality TV participants making sure everything they say gets taken down so it can be made into a script by another staff person. (See reality TV is really a way to get rid of unions in tv production, by creating new jobs that aren’t unionized and then having everyone work from home so they can’t meet and organize.)

OTHER CUT 'GRAPH

First of all Snap emailed me saying I was “harming survivors” by writing about the hearings, which is a phrase Snap uses with survivors whenever one of us strikes out on our own. Funny, since we only strike out on our own because we are frustrated Snap won’t entertain any of our ideas. For example, they said I was harming survivors by writing City of Angels, and they said Jim Robertson here in L.A. was "harming Survivors" by doing a demonstration that got into the news without Snap.
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So I do City of Angels from a Matt Drudge style slum with no resources at all.

It's all part of the story.
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2010-04-30T09:43:00.000-07:00

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12 Fo we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.

13 Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm.

From Ephesians 6 Above is English Standard translation, here is Amplified, and at the bottom is The Message:

12 For we are not wrestling with flesh and blood [contending only with physical opponents], but against the despotisms, against the powers, against [the master spirits who are] the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spirit forces of wickedness in the heavenly (supernatural) sphere.

13 Therefore put on God's complete armor, that you may be able to resist and stand your ground on the evil day [of danger], and, having done all [the crisis demands], to stand [firmly in your place].

THE MESSAGE TRANSLATION (My favorite, it sounds like a Black Preacher shouting truth at you):
A Fight to the Finish

10-12 And that about wraps it up. God is strong, and he wants you strong. So take everything the Master has set out for you, well-made weapons of the best materials. And put them to use so you will be able to stand up to everything the Devil throws your way. This is no afternoon athletic contest that we'll walk away from and forget about in a couple of hours. This is for keeps, a life-or-death fight to the finish against the Devil and all his angels.

13-18 Be prepared. You're up against far more than you can handle on your own. Take all the help you can get, every weapon God has issued, so that when it's all over but the shouting you'll still be on your feet. Truth, righteousness, peace, faith, and salvation are more than words. Learn how to apply them. You'll need them throughout your life. God's Word is an indispensable weapon.

Corruption and Lack of Accountability All Over the Place

2010-04-30T08:57:00.001-07:00

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Do you believe this?

"It was London-based BP, with quarterly profits that rose to $6.1 billion from $2.6 billion a year earlier, that was the lightning rod for ire over huge earnings in the midst of a deadly and growing disaster."

From L.A. Times today. when we are realizing the extent of damage in the BP Oil Spill. Off Topc, but point is, there is a reason for Oversight. All corporations put profit above human needs. The thing that destroyed the Catholic Church was when it went corporate. They then created the Catholic Pedophile Priest Disaster with hundreds of thousands of children damaged to keep the church from losing business.

BP Oil cuts overhead thanks to the removal of Oversight, i.e., regulation, under the Bush Administration, and BP profits soar, more than ever. Then their blowout on an oil rig destroys the Gulf Coast.

Oversight is not a Commie plot.

Oversight is the Goal of efforts to investigate the Church internationally and as a U.S. Federal Case. We gave to make a federal case out of it and create a way to have oversight, because no institution that gets this close to families and children should operate without someone over them who knows what they are doing.

So their crimes end up better reported than treatises in Latin sent to the Vatican.

Oversight.

I think the only way to get accountability in your religion for Catholics is to drop out and join a Baptist Church or something nondenominational. In local churches that I've gone to for decades now, the members vote on everything, in endless monthly meetings, endless and dull meetings, yes, but they don't just give the problem to the priest, who passes it to the monsignor, and then criminal activity ends up being written up in Latin to be hidden in the Vatican.

Catholic members of churches should just take over the churches, buy them at real estate auctions, and continue Church, without the Vatican.

In a New America with Oversight of Religious Institutions.

Catholicism is ingrained in the Dark and Middle Ages, its practices just don't work in a world where people watch out for each other.

Thank God.

God does not limit himself to Catholic Churches, that's one of their many lies.
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Ruminations:

2010-04-30T08:08:00.001-07:00

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A little too dilettante for a priest, that's how I remember him, although last time I saw him I was age seven.

AS SOON AS my dad was buried in 1997, the funeral was over, my mom relaxed, got a salacious grin on her face and said, “Now I wonder where Father Horne is.” Like she’d been daydreaming about him for 50 years.

Also, female family members always remarked that he was “So handsome”then got all dreamy eyed. Fr. Thomas Barry Horne probably had some good sides. I'm beginning to realize the real criminals here were not these sick priests but the people in charge who didn't do anything about it.

Remember, my mom was an atheist, and a former flapper. She married my dad because he was a good catch, a good looking guy working his way through lawschool in the middle of The Great Depression of the 1930s, when mom went from Chicago Art Institute student with money from home to a waitress in Hardings Restaurant, where my dad was manager by day and going to La Salle University at night. My mom, daughter of Polish immigrants who came to the U.S. for their freedom to be atheists, had no clue about my dad's religion

Becoming Catholic came with the marriage for my mom, but she never bought into the god thing at all, and she retained her "free love" ideas from the Roaring Twenties. My mom was the conduit. Her willingness to diddle around with Father Horne while my dad was on business trips, then let the priest watch over her daughters while mom got "the break she so needed" -the door was opened for the predator to get access to the children.

It was late 1940s, early 1950s. People did not talk about any sexual matters in those days. So of course children raped by pedophiles in those years never told anyone about it.

For decades.
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Anger Management Notes April 27th

2010-04-27T21:12:00.001-07:00

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Got to get past the thing that is making you angry, some people call this "forgiveness," I prefer to call it resolution. The pastor who runs this class says, "Think of all you did and God forgave you, gives you another chance always," but "we're not God," so we can only strive for that.

Point is holding onto the anger acts as an

ANCHOR

holding you back and keeping you down.

Me, I say, when you see something that keeps happening and keeps making you angrier and angrier, you have to turn the anger into laughter, find a way to make it funny.

Anger and Laughter, same degree of passion, same expulsion of energy, much different end results.

I am learning to make humor out of this evil that will not go away, and does not stop, no matter how many statements the V's make to the media.

So I'm thanking God right now for giving me ALL THIS GREAT MATERIAL to make into comedy.
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Song streaming in my head this AM, John Lennon

2010-04-26T06:40:00.001-07:00

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"I was dreaming of the past and my heart was beating fast. I began to lose control. I began to lose control."

I'm Just A Jealous Guy

That line sums up human experience. We are imperfect, we do things that hurt other humans just responding with human emotion. Most of us have good intentions.

Some don't, most do.

"I didn't mean to hurt you, I'm sorry that I made you cry."
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Yes, Establish the Work of Our Hands!

2010-04-25T08:15:00.000-07:00

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15 Make us glad for as many days as you have(Z) afflicted us, and for as many years as we have seen evil.

16 Let your work be shown to your servants, and your glorious power to their children.

17 Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and establish the work of our hands upon us. Yes, establish the work of our hands!

***
Psalm 90 English Standard translation
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Reading through Psalms online, slowly, came to Number 90 this morning. Amazes me how often, reading Psalms and Proverbs, I feel like I knoe what the people writing it were saying, even though it was thousands of years ago.

Like this passage as well:

- all our days pass away under your wrath;
we bring our years to an end like a sigh.
10
The years of our life are seventy,
or even by reason of strength eighty;

yet their span[c] is but toil and trouble;
they are soon gone, and we fly away.

****
ME: IT'S REALLY ENDLESS

For thousands of years humans have tried to put the Spirit into words, so don't take it literally, just get the ... gist of what the words say. Read Psalm 90 here
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Freedom Through Truth Posts on Jeff Anderson is Free From Truth

2010-04-25T07:38:00.000-07:00

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Comment Posted this AM:

What Lena says here is a rehashing of old Church attorney statements, not relevant to this case. (CofA NOTE: Lena, the attorney defending the Pope in U.S. Courts, must have recently hired a publicist).

Anderson deserves every dime he gets for his work, it's not publicity, it's perseverance and tenacity. Once you see evil, if you don't confront it, you are abetting the evil. Read City of Angels at http://cityofangels8.blogspot.com for the total truth on the pedophile priest epidemic in the Catholic Church. No matter who it hurts, these storires are true.

Anderson's work is relentless pursuit of the truth. Take off your blinders.

Posted at a blog with the audacity to publish this article on Anderson and call itself "freedom through truth" blog.
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A Way They Mess With Me Since I Have Been Doing City of Angel

2010-04-24T18:03:00.001-07:00

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Okay, this is complicated, and it could be paranoia, except I'm conscious that it could be paranoia, have analyzed it, and can only come to this conclusion.

My 21 year old daughter, on her way to work Thursday night stopped at a friend's, lost her cell phone, and around 7AM next day I tried to call her (she works overnights).

The recorded sound in her cell phone instead of the ringing noise was not her usual music, but the sound of her voice-

IT SOUNDED MUCH BUT NOT QUITE LIKE LIZZIE'S VOICE-

going "glub glub glub" gurgling, my daughter's voice, bubbling, like she was underwater. Like someone was holding a girl's head underwater, or making the sound of Lizzie's being held underwater.

That horrible sound! I left a message saying, Lizzie, that is one weird sound.

I was working that morning, and worked about a half hour more, then thought, I must have dialed the wrong number, dialed again, and this time the usual musical message played instead of the phone ringing noise, it was Lizzie's music back in place.

And this time a guy answered.

Her friend "Al" who lives a few blocks west. He said, Yeah, Lizzie lost her phone last night, and just about fifteen minutes ago my neighbor found it outside, and knocked on my door to give it to me.

They returned the phone to him, after I heard that horrible sound.

But he had looked all over outside his apartment the night before trying to find it.

I know someone was messing with me. They recorded that sound, got Lizzie's phone, kept it overnight until I called her, had me hear that horrible sound, then got the phone returned fifteen miutes later to her friend.

It was her voice, it sounded like my daughter being drowned.

I'm not imagining this. Someone was messing with me, got me real scared. I messed up the job I was doing that day.

I just have to keep telling myself, they are Catholics first, they don't believe in murder, right?

Up until now, I've always said City of Angels is not going to stop until the story is written, no matter how they threaten me. Like my friend C says, hey, even after we are dead we are going to haunt the hell out of these guys.

But don't bring my daughter into it.

That is so low, and I hope my posting this here will help keep it from accelerating.

I hope the bad guys are up to no more more than threats and intimidation, I hope they wouldn't sink to actually carrying out one of those threats ...

Weird. Creepy. I will never forget that sound.
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Just Keep Telling the Truth, The Outcome Is Not in My Hands

2010-04-20T14:06:00.001-07:00

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Whoever says to the wicked, "You are in the right," will be cursed by peoples, abhorred by nations,

But those who rebuke the wicked will have delight, and a good blessing will come upon them.

Whoever gives an honest answer kisses the lips.

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(Proverbs 24:24-26)
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Onward
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2010-04-19T13:13:00.000-07:00

Images here go with story posted today at AlterNet:

Not a Smoking Gun & SNAP Did Not Move to Nevada

2010-04-19T12:29:00.000-07:00

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First we have to run this Correction. The information we got that SNAP moved in 2007 from Illinois to Nevada is not true. We did finally find a way to see their IRS 990 forms and here is 2007 and 2008, 2009 is not yet available.

Wonder what all the fuss is about, why SNAP did not just send these pages to City of Angels when we asked, when, as far as I know, it is illegal to refuse to release this information when someone requests it.

Whatever, add it to the piles of unanswered questions about SNAP. We found the information and posted it here, for the sake of truth and transparency.

None of it is all that revealing, not even anything to be secretive about. If you want to see the entire form with all the details, email me at cityofangelslady@yahoo.com and I'll send you the link.

SNAP should learn: If you answer people's questions, they don't become suspicious.

Anyway, here is the information a lot of people have been asking me about. It's up there, now.

SO what else is going on.
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POST NOTE: SNAP should just publish these docs on their website. If they are calling for transparency from the church, then should run SNAP with transparency.

This May Sound Paranoid But

2010-04-19T05:55:00.000-07:00

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I am not the author of everything that shows up here. I can come here and find things posted that I did not write.

SOMEONE has found a way to enter my Blogspot editing space and post things here. They are also accessing my saved drafts that aren't published.

ALL I CAN SAY IS, everything you read here may not have been written by me.

I just discovered this three minutes ago. I'm not sure how or what to do about it, just want to write here, now, THIS IS REALLY KAY EBELING WRITING THIS, and I don't know how everything that gets on here gets on here...

stay tuned.

just trust your instincts...

shit!

*****

UPDATE: A few minutes later

I just checked for Help with Blogspot and this seems to be the answer:

"There are a few ways to "hack" your blog, or your Blogger account. Understand what the possibilities are, then try to secure yourself."
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So

That's life in the Ethernet, folks, nothing is secure, and trust no one.
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And don't turn the computer off for a day to do other stuff as that is the day they will hack you,

Guess even on days off I have to monitor everything.
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SHIT
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It's not that difficult to hack in here, I am finding out at the Blogspot Help place. Changing the password does not make a difference. Hacking is common here at blogspot, just like anywhere else, and all you can do is be careful... It's not a bank, so no one seems to even be getting alarmed about it.

It's a blog.
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I just have to be more vigilant and go back and read things after I post them, to make sure they have not been "edited."

That's life in the twenty-first century.
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THis is not the first time weird stuff like this has happened.

On 8, when I post a post with the word Pope in it, the paragraphs get all jumbled, I have to keep re-posting and re-posting, entire words and phrases show up that I DID NOT TYPE IN.

Then there was the mystery of why my ads got canceled, something someone did on the blog while I was at the SNAP conference in Chicago in 2008.

It's not unbelievable, it's to be expected, it's probly some Opus Dei creep with too much time on their hands.

Let it pass.

REAL WAY TO DEAL WITH hacking security problems, is to always be totally honest, never lie, then it doesn't matter what people hack in and find out.

No Secrets.
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Still Kicking

2010-04-16T05:14:00.000-07:00

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At age 62, perfecting the art of chair dancing

Still Kicking

On AlterNet, But It follows the Sunset Boulevard Theme

2010-04-14T11:43:00.000-07:00

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Sometimes you gotta write about something besides perverted priests:
I Lived in a Car in L.A. with a Teenage Daughter and Survived to Write About it, Part 3

POSTED: 10:43 am, April 14, 2010 COMMENT NOW!

April 2009 Sunset at Normandie, photo by Kay Ebeling
Every morning there was a period of deep quiet, after the helicopters stopped and before morning deliveries began. Then I’d hear runners in Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety vans pull up near us, double park, then footsteps ran up to front porches around us. Lizzie and I would stay hunched down low, but I imagine after several nights, the neighborhood had seen us sleeping out there in our parked car. But no one said a word. You become invisible when you are homeless.

It’s a mutual invisibility. They pretend not to see you and you pretend not to see them.

This particular morning I started the car and the heater, we stretched, pulled onto the street, and headed to the Welfare office, kinda grateful you don’t sleep late when you’re living on the street. It was good we beat the traffic, good the ride was mostly downhill, from Franklin near Highland down to McArthur Park “human services” office, as the car was literally running on fumes.

Paying for motel rooms over three months, we’d gone through our move-in money, run up every credit card I had, and finally even maxed out the gas card.
In those two months we’d...
***
On Page One of AlterNet in SoapBox now, or click headline to read later.

From Kay Ebeling, Producer, The City of Angels Is Everywhere
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Endurance

2010-04-14T06:03:00.000-07:00

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Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning... (Psalm 30:5 also the first words of Fly Like A Bird by Mariah Carey:)

Them Christians always trying to sneak joy in on us.

11 You have turned my mourning into dancing for me.
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Marijuana Fumes Come In My Window

2010-04-10T07:33:00.000-07:00

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I swear, I opened the window just now and the smell of marijuana is everywhere, outside, in the L.A. atmosphere.

It's a foggy morning, the air is still. There are MedMJ dispensaries within blocks of where I live, several of them, actually. I live right in the middle between Sunset Boulevard and Hollywood Boulevard and there are shops within blocks on both streets. The law says, walk at least a block from the dispensary before you light up, no smoking right outside the door.

So the patients probly park their cars on my street, buy their medicine, then walk back here to my block, and light up.

Maybe that explains it.

On a foggy morning like today, a sick little old lady in L.A. only has to stick her nose out the window to get pain relief and suddenly feel 25 years old again.

Nice change after all those years of smog...
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Inspired Choreography

2010-04-09T09:55:00.001-07:00

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To get in shape for the mission, dance along:

2010-04-06T11:08:00.000-07:00

Liz Ebeling Rave Costume March 2010

This Image has Popped into my Head 8 Times this Week, So Going to Record It

2010-04-02T05:32:00.000-07:00

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1961 or 63(?), playing on a Sunday afternoon with friends, I see her coming down the street. We had a white Thunderbird and my mom never drove fast even on freeways. Going down our side street she creeped, creeped. She got to the driveway where we were playing ball and the T-bird stopped. Gray funk filled my good mood. She was making me go to Church, making me stop having all this fun on a Sunday afternoon because I wouldn't get up and go with the family that morning.

I sulked all the way to the Church (It was San Gabriel, not San Marino, as written here before). My mom pulled away as I walked in the door where the Mass had already started. As soon as she turned the corner, I was back out the door and around the back of the church, where there was an elementary school and a girls rest room.

Panting. Angry. I had just entered puberty, so all the arousal I'd shoved down with food and strange behavior was now bypassing all the stuffing and coming out into the fore. And I was reacting different from the other girls, with much more enthusiasm, let's say. And I knew it had something to do with this Church that my atheist mother insisted I go to because of my devout German-Irish father.

No way I could hold in all that anger and other exploding emotion.

I tore the bathroom apart. Grunting probably like a ravaged animal. I had a lipstick in my bag with which I wrote: "Hypocrites, Catholics are all Hypocrites" on the Catholic elementary school girls' bathroom walls. I pulled toilet paper out of the rolls and spread it on the floors. I tried to pull the cloth towel roll-dispenser off the wall and couldn't, so just pulled the cloth towel out farther and farther. It was chaotic. I was groaning and throwing things and-

The light in the room changed and I stopped. A nun, in full habit, stood in the girls room door, silhouetted with the sun setting behind her. The sight of her made me stop, and relax. I stopped.

And after that I never had to go to Catholic Church again. No one ever really mentioned the incident, just a few days later, my dad set me down where he was reading the L.A. Times morning paper, I inhaled his Kent cigarette smoke, as he said, "It's up to you. You are thirteen years old and I think you can make your own choice. So you can go to Church or not go to Church, it's your decision."

Well, you know I never went back there, until decades later, as an adult, I tried a couple times to return to the Church with different levels of humorous to disastrous results.

For decades I wondered why my dad let me quit going to Church and today I just feel blessed that he did. He knew something was wrong.

So I never got fully indoctrinated or mind-bent or sucked in, whatever it is, which is both good and bad. It means I'm totally on my own trying to live a spiritual life, and it means I'm totally on my own to try to live a spiritual life.
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Daniel Maguire, Theology Professor at Marquette, Calls for Pope Resignation

2010-04-01T08:23:00.000-07:00

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Former priest, now Theology professor Daniel Maguire was just on MSNBC saying this:

Marquette Professor Calls For Pope's Resignation‎
Today's TMJ4 - Tom Murray, Wed. March 31
“Marquette University disagrees with Professor Daniel Maguire's recent call for the ..

He was also just on MSNBC...

Read it at City of Angels 8

Celebrate (He Lives) song saved my head when I was homeless

2010-04-01T07:17:00.000-07:00

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I pulled up to a parking spot, the radio played this song, and I got it. I got it. And since then it's been coming in even more clearly:

It's not about the exact words or even the facts about Christ. It's about the Spirit and it's best expressed on Earth today in black gospel music.

SNAP Revolution in L.A. Today. Event Friday 11 AM to be Last at Cathedral, Moving Future Action to Federal Building

2010-03-31T16:13:00.001-07:00

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Ya Basta! This morning Jim Robertson was elected to run the new SNAP Los Angeles, and not a day too soon, as SNAP sent out the press statement below last night with a major error, referring to the "Paracletes." The religious order they referenced are "Servants of the Paraclete."

A lot of Los Angeles survivors had grown weary of continuing professional mess-ups that we have learned to expect from SNAP in Los Angeles the last few years. As a result the press is not getting the whole story and many survivors dropped out of the movement locally, agreeing among ourselves that we need representatives who live in Los Angeles, not Orange and Ventura Counties. Most of us in L.A. are media savvy enough to run a press conference, we don't need or want David Clohessy in St. Louis to tell us what to say and do.

There will be an event in front of the Cathedral Friday at eleven AM, and Jim promises it will be the last event in front of the Cathedral until things change. On Friday, we may actuall march to the new location for future events, three blocks south to the Federal Building, I believe it will be at the Main Street entrance, where we can leaflet and start conversations with individuals who can actually DO SOMETHING about prosecuting the perverts in the Catholic priesthood and their enablers.

Below is yet another press statement from SNAP from whoever was running the Los Angeles branch before today, when veteran activist Jim Robertson finally took over.

Survivors in Los Angeles now have local control and we can build a democratically run organization.

************
SNAP PRESS STATEMENT WITH ANOTHER GREAT BIG MISTAKE
Hopefully the last incorrect press statement to come out of SNAP in Los Angeles for a long time:
*****************

Please consider coming to this event!

Clergy sex victims release more church records

Church had 'centers' for predators as far back as 50 years ago

Frustrated by 'on-going church secrecy,' SNAP urges Pope to 'come clean'

Group is also upset because LA archdiocese & priests still hiding documents

One Catholic official admitted that 30% of rejected seminarians are later ordained

What

Holding signs and child hood photos at a sidewalk news conference, clergy sex abuse victims will release a dozen pages of once secret church records proving that the Pope and other top Catholic officials - in Rome and here - knew much about pedophile priests even decades ago. (Several of the documents have never been released before publicly). They will also urge

-- the Pope to disclose how he and his office handled pedophile priests for years from 2001-05, and

-- Cardinal Roger Mahony to prod the Pope to directly answer questions about recent allegations against the Pope,

-- Mahony to speed up the release of thousands of pages about LA predator priests and cover ups.

When

Wednesday, March 31 at 11:00 a.m.

Where

Outside Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, 555 W. Temple St. (at N. Grand Ave.) in Los Angeles

Who

A few clergy sex abuse victims who belong to a support group called SNAP, Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, including a California police officer who did a week-long vigil in front of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels seven years ago.

Why

Newly released records, including letters to the Vatican in the 1960s, show a Catholic official admitting a "tremendous problem" of predator priests. The documents prove that almost 50 years ago, top church staff knew how widespread and incorrigible pedophiles are. They severely undercut recent claims by the Pope's defenders that he and others in the church hierarchy mishandled cases because they were "on a learning curve."

Some of the records are written by the head of the Paracletes, a religious order that tries to rehabilitate predator priests. Decades ago, he admitted that "There are now in many parts of the world (facilities) "where 'Christ's wounded priests' may be cared for." In another shocking acknowledgement, he said that 30% of all priesthood candidates who are first rebuffed because of "question(able) qualifications" are later ordained because "someone in authority overruled" the initial rejection. He also urged the Vatican to adopt a "heavy penalty" for those "tampering with the innocence of the young," including "retirement . . .within a monastery" or "complete (defrocking)," in part because "Many experienced priests agree (we) not turning out men as dedicated to their priesthood as we did in former days."

The cleric had a private audience with then-Pope Paul VI and later wrote that he opposed "the return of priests to active duty that have been addicted to abnormal practices, especially sins with the young."

These records, and thousands of other similar pages, were to be made public as part of the $660 million Los Angeles Archdiocese settlement in 2007. Church defense lawyers are still fighting to keep those records hidden.

Several times during his papacy, Benedict has urged bishop to be "transparent" with child sex cases. In light of his advice, and recent disclosures of abuse and cover up in the Pope's home diocese in Germany, SNAP wants the pontiff to publicly disclosed how he handled hundreds of cases from across the globe from 2001-2005 as head of CDF (the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith), the Vatican office where all such cases are sent.

SNAP is holding a similar event simultaneously in St. Louis, where the Paracletes are now headquartered. (314-965-0860, stmichael@primary.net, http://www.theservants.org/servants.htm) It's headed by Fr. Peter Lechner.

****

WE NEED TO PLEDGE to do research and know the subject matter starting DAYS BEFORE conducting any press events. No more embarrassment for L.A. Survivors, as we watch our "spokesmen" get up and say incorrect information, stumble, not know names, not know where the church was, which perp, I for one am so glad that period of the strangelhold from St. Louis we have had is over, and we can finally start doing things right in Los Angeles:

Personally, I'm frustrated with SNAP secrecy and think the organization has no credibility calling for transparency from the Pope when it hides all its own records and actions and backgrounds and everything it does from all but a handful of survivors.

YA BASTA!

Enough of this impotence. SNAP is going to accomplish things in Los Angeles, starting this Good Friday.

It's weird they would make a mistake about "The Paracletes"

Weird, considering both SNAP and "The Servants of the Paraclete" are headquartered in St. Louis:
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2010-03-28T16:44:00.001-07:00

V Prophecy

2010-03-26T13:21:00.000-07:00

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"They are arming themselves with the best weapon out there."

"What weapon is that?"

"Devotion."

Watch Full Episodes

(Except I really hope female FBI agents wear more fabric and cover themselves more in blouses than the characters here, it's TV. Barbara Blaine reminds me of Anna.)
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2010-03-26T08:02:00.000-07:00

What a Strange Coincidence... Robbed of our Birth Certificates, neither of us can travel for months

2010-03-26T07:04:00.001-07:00

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Another of the adult victims who is verbal like me said they would have gone to Europe too but about a month ago they were robbed of just one item, an envelope with their birth certificate in it, when they were taking it to a government office. My friend said the envelope was snatched out of the hand by a thief who then ran off. So that survivor is now waiting for a new set of documents ... and efforts to get a passport have been put off by months.

I got a chill when I heard that, because some time between last September and now my birth certificate left my home somehow, nothing else was stolen but my documents. The Birth Certificate and original SS card were in an envelope in a safe place, put back there last September after needing them, then GONE last week when I needed my ID papers again.

My friend and I both may have wanted to go to Europe to get arrested at the Vatican too, but would not have even been able to try it, as without our ID documents we cannot even apply for passports.

It's just funny that two people who are independently vocal on this issue would have the same things stolen from them around the same time, preventing us both from being able to travel for a while... we both have other valuable things that could be stolen, we both were only robbed of our birth certificates...

My friend was going to a government office where they had asked for the documents to be brought in. Me, I have a 21 year old daughter with a variety of friends from farflung places who come through the apartment all hours of the day and night. I already made one of her boyfriends last year as an agent of some kind and he disappeared after I mentioned it, he was looking too closely at things, his story didn't add up...

Anything can happen to you when you write on this topic, it could just be free lance opus dei types agitating on their own, it could all be run by the Vatican. I like to document it all here, as someday maybe in ten years, it will reveal a pattern.

Good morning, everyone, personally I am tired of reading about the Pope and the CDF myself, not tired, but getting kind of numb, like how much evidence do people need. The story I am working on now for a future post is about serial sodomy of a young boy, and the details of these crimes are becoming redundant.

I won't be satisfied until I see some kind of international court seek real justice and prosecution of people who let children get raped like we were.

AMAZED at how much media is just spitting out what other reporters write. We are living in the world of copy and paste news dissemination.

At City of Angels we ALWAYS write what has not been reported in most other places. When I was in J school we were taught NEVER repeat what other reporters have written as that is not NEW, as in Not News. We were taught to throw away press releases as they were just pap from a corporate flack, good for little more than a phone number and address if you need it.

Watching news about this issue and the Pope and all of it, past few years, it has been amazing how aside from the New York Times, most other publications are just running wire copy. Not even attributing it sometimes, just lifting paragraphs and rerunning them as their own.

At age 8, I got a printing press for my birthday and started a neighborhood newspaper, putting one little rubber letter at a time into the columns and producing full pages of stories. At a Bible Study recently someone asked what would you be doing if you were there when Christ got executed. I said, I would have a scroll and pen and be writing it all down.

Can't fight your DNA.
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good morning
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Did 4 SNAP guys getting arrested help get the Wiscon deaf school story out? I don't know about that, I think the New York Times did a good job of getting out that story, with or without the SNAP arrests ...

Did you notice, though, that SNAP released the arrival of the whole crew in Rome in a press release, all the names, almost with a flight number and time of arrival, they were getting that information into press releases last week.

Then they were detained and taken off to talk to... ?
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good mid-morning...
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Oh Now I See What They Did

2010-03-25T15:09:00.000-07:00

Truth Out...

2010-03-25T12:37:00.000-07:00

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The real reason I'm not covering hearings in L.A. Superior Court is I don't have five dollars for a Metro Day Pass. There has been almost no work on my job, I barely make the rent each month, pay the utilities, then... stay in my rental and use the utilities for a month. Go for walks. We often go without food as well but I've learned to be grateful for that, we both needed to lose weight. I got tired of asking for money to support this work through PayPal as most of the people who ever sent high fives were people I knew really didn't have money themselves, people with young children. So I quit asking. I figure City of Angels is like an ongoing audition. Someday someone will stumble across it and contact me for a book deal or a screenwriting job and I'll finally be able to move out of the slums. I'd like to be going to the Courthouse and just buying documents, they're all down there in the Archives, at fifty cents a page. But lots of these docs are hundreds of pages. Like I said, I can't buy a Bus Pass most weeks. This is truly a humbling experience. I grew up in houses with swimming pools in towns like Forest Hills, New York, and San Marino, CA. Today each month, we pay the bills, then dangle by a thread. My daughter gets sick but can't afford the copay to see a doctor after paying for her insurance. That has happened to her at least three times in six months. Me, I still only go to an L.A. Free Clinic and have never seen a real doc in years. My teeth are all rotting in my mouth, I have learned not to open my mouth too much when I smile or talk or I gross people out, I can see it on their face, they look at my teeth and go wretch. It is in these conditions that we produce City of Angels. We don't get paid by anyone for anything and if we ever get any money again, you will start to see documents from the 510 L.A. Clergy Cases be scanned in here, as we've tried to do but as I said, it's fifty cents a page. The "movement" invested in four people to travel to the Vatican for a few weeks... and those documents sit in L.A. Superior Court archives unread because City of Angels does not have bus fare. So maybe I'm just full of sour grapes, but face it, wouldn't you be, too?

Why Do I Write This Stuff?

2010-03-24T09:13:00.000-07:00

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Because otherwise it would be running and running through my head and driving me crazy. I can't just go through life knowing all this stuff really happened and turn the other way. It's my karma, my curse, I'm even partially crippled these days, so often stranded at home alone with no thing more to do than put my hands on the keyboard, and no real skill other than an ability to observe and type fast.

I have to get out ALL the stuff that's hammering around in my head, rather than let it drive me insane.

Isn't it difficult, though, to travel in a population of people whose one main common characteristic is an inherent inability to trust anyone...

As an adult victim of a pedophile priest, if you were very young at the age of the assaults, that distrust got into your very cells as they were developing. A reaction of distrust is instinctive to many of us, like coughing when dust enters your throat.

Especially when I sense someone is not being totally truthful, there is an immediate connection, a knowing, recognizing lies, because as children we had to observe lies at such a base level at such a young age.

There are some advantages to having PTSD, it makes you very... alert.
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2010-03-23T18:50:00.000-07:00

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2010-03-23T08:05:00.000-07:00

2010-03-21T15:55:00.000-07:00

2 Journalists on their own try to get out whole story of Pope collusion and coverup of pedophile priest crimes

2010-03-19T07:13:00.000-07:00

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So it was just me and Jay Nelson, trying to get our small unfinanced voices into the news, last weekend, releasing the part of the story where the Pope was involved in collusion and coverup of pedophile priest crimes since at least the turn of the century.

SNAP ignored the CDF in its 30-plus press events last weekend. As a result only CNN in the UK and one or two other media reported on the Pope's years of having judicial review of pedophile priest sex crime charges when he ran the CDF (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith).

CNN STORY

Jay and I got the information out as well as we could, ignored by Abuse Tracker as always for Jay, since last Super Bowl Sunday for me. When I stopped writing PR puff pieces for SNAP and instead started reporting what they really do, City of Angels got Banned from Abuse Tracker. Go figure.

That means nothing we've reported at City of Angels 8 and at AlterNet since Feb. 7, 2010, has gone into the Bishop Accountability database through Abuse Tracker, even though many stories in the past weeks held facts that are not being reported anywhere else.

If anyone is really paying attention, notice the Vatican as well as everyone else is putting the focus on ONE CASE in Munich where Ratzinger may have helped a perpetrator priest transfer to a new territory.

That, my friends, is very professionally employed Spin.

Put all the focus on one small case, and divert attention as well as you can from the real criminal activity.

Of course brainless mainstream media fall for it, as most reporters don't have time anymore to do more than read a press release, after the way news staffs have been cut in the past two decades.

But those of us who have been watching pedo-priest events for several years should be able to see through media spin.
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2010-03-17T10:19:00.000-07:00

Any friends I lose for writing what I believe to be true are not really friends to begin with.

Beauty Found Around L.A.

2010-03-16T17:25:00.000-07:00

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Photos by Kay Ebeling, please credit if used
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