Issue 145 – March 2019


Issue 145 – March 2019

S.M.A.R.T.
(Stop Mind control And Ritual abuse Today)
P. O Box 1295, Easthampton, MA 01027-1295 USA E-mail: SMARTNEWS@aol.com
Home page: https://ritualabuse.us

Issue 145 – March 2019

The purpose of this newsletter is to help stop secretive organizations and groups from abusing others and to help those who allege they have been abused by such organizations and groups. This newsletter is not a substitute for other ways of recovering from ritual abuse. Readers should use caution while reading this newsletter. If necessary, make sure other support systems are available during and after reading this newsletter.

 

Important:
The resources mentioned in this newsletter are for educational value only. Reading the books cited may or may not help your recovery process, so use caution when reading any book or contacting any resource mentioned in this newsletter. Some may have a religious or other agenda that may be separate from your own recovery process. Others may have valuable information on secretive organizations, but have triggers or be somewhat sympathetic to those organizations. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, the views expressed in this newsletter constitute expressions of opinion, and readers are cautioned to form their own opinions and draw their own conclusions by consulting a variety of sources, including this newsletter. Resources listed, quoted and individual articles, etc. and their writers do not necessarily support all or any of the views mentioned in this newsletter. Also, the views, facts and opinions mentioned in this newsletter are solely the opinions of the authors and are not necessarily the opinions of this newsletter or its editor.

Copyright 2018 – All rights reserved. No reproduction of any material without written permission from the editor and individual authors.

 

The 2019 Annual Ritual Abuse, Secretive Organizations and Mind Control Conference August 17 – 18, 2019 DoubleTree near Bradley International Airport Windsor Locks, CT Internet conference information: http://ritualabuse.us/smart-conference/

The Survivorship Ritual Abuse and Mind Control 2019 Conference
When: Regular Conference – Saturday and Sunday May 4 – 5, 2019 Clinician’s Conference (CEUs are available) Friday May 3, 2019
Where: Courtyard Marriot Long Beach Airport Long Beach, CA
https://survivorship.org/ritual-abuse-and-mind-control-2019-conference/

Survivorship Conference Speakers
Clinician’s Conference – Friday May 3, 2019

Deception by Organized Abuser Groups: Helping Yourself and Your Clients Think Through the Issues by Alison Miller
Sophisticated organized abuser groups use torture to deliberately split a child’s mind into different parts, train all parts to obey, and indoctrinate and train each part to do a specific job assigned by the abusers. Drugs, acted-out scenarios, stage magic, stories and films are used to deceive and control the children and prevent them from remembering or speaking out about their abuse, even in adulthood, so that the abusers can continue perpetrating this abuse without being caught. Abusers’ power over victims depends on their victims believing their lies, and that power can be diminished when victims see through the lies told to their young parts. It is important for therapists to use critical thinking to discern the deceptions, and to help their mind-controlled clients do the same.

The Use of Music and other Auditory Stimuli in Psychological Therapy with Extreme Abuse Survivors by Randy Noblitt
Extreme abuse (EA) survivors often listen to music for enjoyment, relaxation, and emotion regulation. Some music and other auditory stimuli also have the capacity to trigger a variety of responses including states of adaptive containment, being shut down, identity switching, abreactive responses, trance, automatisms, and flashbacks. Although clinicians who work with survivors often hear about, or observe these phenomena, there is little discussion of them in the clinical literature. This presentation will discuss some of the uses for music and other sounds in therapy with survivors in the context of the ISSTD’s three stage treatment model for dissociative identity disorder.

Regular Conference – Saturday and Sunday May 4 – 5, 2019
Deception by Organized Abuser Groups: Helping Your Front People and Your Insiders Recognize the Lies and Tricks Which Keep You Enslaved by Dr. Alison Miller
If you are a survivor of abuse by a mind-controlling abuser group, you have parts who have been trained to obey abusers because they believe lies your abusers told you. The abusers deceived you in childhood, using drugs, acted-out scenarios, stage magic, stories and films to control your child parts and prevent you from speaking out about the abuse. Their power over you depends on your young parts believing the abusers’ lies. If you learn to recognize when your emotions and behavior are influenced by these deceptions, and to discover the ways in which you were deceived, you can increase your freedom from the abuser group.

Talking About Triggers Without Being Triggering by Dr. Randall Noblitt
This presentation is an interactive discussion about triggering phenomena, with the intent of avoiding causing triggered responses in one another. Such a conversation is possible when we do not use triggers explicitly, when we use synonyms, euphemisms, or other roughly equivalent stimuli that communicate without provoking a response. Triggers can include gestures, words, music, sounds, pictures, colors, etc. Many triggers are not provocative unless they are repeated or paired with other triggers. Being able to discuss triggers without being triggering (or triggered) is one way that survivors can develop their own sense of empowerment.

Barriers encountered by RA Survivors when accessing Support in Offline Spaces (Services) By Joseph Lumbasi
As a support organisation for RA survivors in the UK, Izzy’s Promise (SC033706) has been continuously carrying out research with its service users to identify barriers encountered and how best to overcome such barriers. Since 2002 when Izzy’s Promise was set up, they have commissioned a variety of research projects with abuse support organisations and ritual abuse (RA) survivors to identify how best to improve support services. The research projects have been conducted online using smart survey where more than 150 abuse support organisations in the UK responded to questions around barriers encountered while delivering support services to RA survivors. Similarly, the online research using smart survey where 300 RA survivors in the UK responded to questions around barriers encountered while accessing support services and suggestions on how to overcome such barriers. My intention is to analyse results from these research endeavours to produce a conference paper that I will present to delegates at the Survivors conference in May 2019 as well as publish the findings into a journal article. The findings will also be used to improve service delivery at Izzy’s Promise.

A Survivor’s View of Recovery from Ritual Abuse by Neil Brick
Recovery from ritual abuse can take many years. Recovery may include working through memories, building functionality and developing more effective ways of interacting and integrating emotions. Every individual has different experiences that lead them through the recovery path. Neil Brick will discuss his long journey healing from severe abuse. This will include ways he has learned more about himself, ways he has learned to develop healthier interactions with others and ways he has helped others along the recovery path.

Articles include information on: The 2019 Annual Ritual Abuse, Secretive Organizations and Mind Control Conference, The Survivorship Ritual Abuse and Mind Control 2019 Conference, Alison Miller, Extreme Abuse, Randy Noblitt, Joseph Lumbasi, Ritual Abuse, Neil Brick, New York passes Child Victims Act, Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination, Justice Department probe into Jeffrey Epstein plea deal, Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta, Michael Salter, Origins of Neo-Nazi and White Supremacist Terms and Symbols, FLDS church leader, Warren Jeffs, Online Survey for Ritual Abuse Survivors, R. Kelly, criminal sex charges, Cardinal George Pell convicted of child sex abuse, Priest Jesus Antonio Castaneda Serna, Thousands of Immigrant Children Said Were Sexually Abused in U.S. Detention Centers, Michael Jackson Sexual-Abuse Allegations, HBO documentary Leaving Neverland, Jordie Chandler, Gavin Arvizo

New York passes Child Victims Act, allowing child sex abuse survivors to sue their abusers
By Augusta Anthony, CNN Mon January 28, 2019
New York (CNN)The New York State Legislature passed a bill on Monday that will increase the statute of limitations for cases of child sexual abuse.
The Child Victims Act will allow child victims to seek prosecution against their abuser until the age of 55 in civil cases, a significant increase from the previous limit of age 23. For criminal cases, victims can seek prosecution until they turn 28. The bill also includes a one-year window during which victims of any age or time limit can come forward to prosecute.
“New York has just gone from being one of the worst states in the country to being one of the best,” in terms of the statute of limitations for child sex abuse cases, said Marci Hamilton, CEO of Child USA and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
Hamilton said the bill “represents over 15 years of work by survivors and advocates trying to get around the stiff opposition from the Catholic bishops and the insurance industry” and is a step forward in the national conversation. There are eight other states considering similar legislation….
Catholic Church opposition
Monday’s bill passage comes after more than a decade of opposition from the Catholic Church in New York. In a news conference on Monday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is a Roman Catholic, blamed the church directly for preventing the bill’s passage.
Speaking about why the bill took years to pass, Cuomo said, “I believe it was the conservatives in the Senate who were threatened by the Catholic Church.” The bill passed the Senate unanimously on Monday. In November 2018, Democrats took over the Republican-held Senate….
https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/28/us/new-york-child-victims-act/index.html

Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination and the moral context of trauma science
Michael Salter Published online: 24 Jan 2019
Download citation https://doi.org/10.1080/15299732.2019.1571858
The fraught process surrounding the recent nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court was a spectacular deployment of institutional power to suppress good faith allegations of sexual violence. Trauma survivors and their allies have been shaken by the public scorn and victim-blaming that occurred when a childhood acquaintance of Kavanaugh’s, Christine Blasey Ford, alleged she had been sexually assaulted by him while they were at high school. Kavanaugh denied the allegation and US President Donald Trump firmly supported him. The matter only became more heated when, after Ford agreed to testify publicly to the Senate Judiciary Committee, two other women come forward with allegations of sexual assault and improper conduct by Kavanaugh.
The response of Kavanaugh and his supporters was replete with the rhetoric of denial. Kavanaugh variously characterized the allegations as part of a “coordinated effort” and “conspiracy” to destroy his reputation and prevent his nomination. President Trump agreed that the three women describing abuse by Kavanaugh were politically motivated. He went on to suggest that one woman “has nothing” on Kavanaugh because she “admits she was drunk” at the time of the alleged assault. Conservative media commentators speculated that Ford was suffering from “false memories” of rape, or had mistaken her actual attacker for Kavanaugh. Such language, reverberating from the White House and its spokespeople and advocates, represents a sustained campaign of institutional betrayal that only compounds the trauma of sexual assault (Smith & Freyd, 2013 Smith, C. P., & Freyd, J. J. (2013). Dangerous safe havens: Institutional betrayal exacerbates sexual trauma. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 26(1), 119–124. doi:10.1002/jts.21778[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®], , [Google Scholar]), consonant with other policy positions that have profoundly traumatised the vulnerable (Smidt & Freyd, 2018 Smidt, A. M., & Freyd, J. J. (2018). Government-mandated institutional betrayal. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 26(5), 491–499.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar]).
The proposition that allegations of sexual violence are motivated by animus or the product of confabulation or “false memories” has a long and shameful history (Campbell, 2003 Campbell, S. (2003). Relational remembering: Rethinking the memory wars. Oxford, UK: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc. [Google Scholar]). Movements against sexual assault and child abuse have routinely been accused of hiding an ideological agenda, or creating the conditions for false allegations by confused women and children. The conflicts surrounding Kavanaugh’s appointment have highlighted the persistence of a culture of disbelief. However, it is notable that the attempts by Kavanaugh’s supporters to invoke pseudo-scientific explanations for Ford’s allegation found considerably less purchase in the mass media than they might have in the past. Questions about the integrity of Ford’s memory were largely limited to right wing and conservative media, and were rejected in statements from the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation and the American Psychological Association. Progress against the institutionalized mechanics of denial and unaccountability is substantive although clearly incomplete (Brand & McEwen, 2016 Brand, B. L., & McEwen, L. (2016). Ethical standards, truths, and lies. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 17(3), 259–266. doi:10.1080/15299732.2016.1114357[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®], , [Google Scholar])….
While I hesitate to argue that we can read life lessons directly from research findings, it does appear to me that the overall direction of trauma research and treatment trends in a particular moral direction. If we seek to find opportunities for trauma survivors to recover and live well, and if we want to promote the conditions in which people are not traumatised in the first place, then we are necessarily advancing moral propositions about human happiness and flourishing. Research on trauma, recovery and psychological wellbeing consistently finds that human beings thrive when we are embedded in emotionally rich, mutual and equitable relationships. This conclusion furnishes us with a powerful and, I think, very appealing image of a good life – one characterized by dignity, equality, accountability, and shared recognition – that the trauma field should not hesitate in articulating clearly. Political theorist Alford (2016 Alford, C. F. (2016). Trauma, culture, and PTSD. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.[Crossref], , [Google Scholar]) suggests that a key reason for the expanding public interest in trauma science is precisely because the concept of ‘trauma’ provides a rare acknowledgement of human relationality and vulnerability in a culture that is exhaustively individualistic and atomizing.
When a person like Christine Blasey Ford stands up to testify to a traumatic event, in opposition to incredibly powerful forces, we can recognize this as a courageous step in the fulfillment of a moral vision that we also have a stake in. The visceral and hate-filled response that has driven her, and her family, from their home is stark evidence of the cost paid by people who challenge the structures of traumatisation. Such costs have, of course, been visited in the past on trauma therapists and researchers whose ethical and scientific convictions have also bought them into conflict with vested interests. However the tremendous support that rallied around Christine Blasey Ford, and that recognised and celebrated her bravery in stepping forward with her story, indicates a growing consensus that opposes traumatizing social formations and seeks an alternative. Trauma research and theory, I would argue, is well placed to elaborate on what those alternatives might be.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15299732.2019.1571858

Justice Department opens probe into Jeffrey Epstein plea deal
By Julie K. Brown February 06, 2019
The Department of Justice has opened an investigation into Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta’s role in negotiating a controversial plea deal with a wealthy New York investor accused of molesting more than 100 underage girls in Palm Beach.
The probe is in response to a request by Sen. Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican and member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who was critical of the case following a series of stories in the Miami Herald. The Herald articles detailed how Acosta, then the U.S. attorney for Southern Florida, and other DOJ attorneys worked hand-in-hand with defense lawyers to cut a lenient plea deal with multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein in 2008.
The Herald’s three-part series, Perversion of Justice, was cited by Assistant Attorney General Stephen E. Boyd in his letter to Sasse. DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility will head the investigation, he said.
“OPR has now opened an investigation into allegations that department attorneys may have committed professional misconduct in the manner in which the Epstein criminal matter was resolved,’’ wrote Boyd in the letter dated Wednesday.
“Jeffrey Epstein is a child rapist and there’s not a single mom or dad in America who shouldn’t be horrified by the fact that he received a pathetically soft sentence,’’ Sasse said on Wednesday. “The victims of Epstein’s child sex trafficking ring deserve this investigation — and so do the American people and the members of law enforcement who work to put these kinds of monsters behind bars.’’
Former Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter — who pressured Acosta and former Palm Beach state prosecutor Barry Krischer to more aggressively prosecute Epstein — said he would like to see Epstein’s victims finally receive some form of justice.
“I hope that the Department of Justice investigation answers the questions of why this case was handled by the U.S. attorney’s office in the way that it was, and may it somehow result in justice and an apology by the government for the victims and their families,’’ Reiter said.
The case has raised fundamental questions about whether well-connected, wealthy people wield influence over prosecutors and others in the justice system. Epstein had a wide circle of powerful friends, including Bill Clinton, President Donald Trump, Prince Andrew, lawyer Alan Dershowitz and a former prime minister of Israel, Ehud Barak….
Epstein, 66, could have faced a possible life sentence for sex trafficking, but instead was secretly granted federal immunity, along with others who were part of the conspiracy, some of whom were named, others not.
Epstein was suspected by the FBI of running an international sex trafficking operation involving minors, and federal prosecutors had drafted a 53-page indictment that was shelved after Acosta signed off on a non-prosecution agreement in September 2007.
For months after the deal was executed, federal prosecutors kept Epstein’s victims in the dark, and the FBI led some of them to believe the investigation was ongoing. Most of the girls, ages 13 to 16 at the time, found out about the plea bargain only after learning about it on television when Epstein was sentenced in June 2008.
Acosta agreed to seal the agreement and keep it from Epstein’s victims so that the girls couldn’t try to derail it before he was sentenced, the Herald found.
Epstein’s agreement called for him to serve 18 months in the Palm Beach County jail and to register as a sex offender. But even in jail, Epstein received liberal work release privileges that required him to spend little time in a cell. Six days a week, he was picked up at the jail by his private driver and driven to an office in downtown West Palm Beach, where he spent up to 12 hours a day greeting friends, lawyers and several young women who were named by federal prosecutors as participants in his sex trafficking scheme…. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/article225624945.html

How a future Trump Cabinet member gave a serial sex abuser the deal of a lifetime BY Julie K. Brown Nov. 28, 2018
….His client, Palm Beach multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein, 54, was accused of assembling a large, cult-like network of underage girls — with the help of young female recruiters — to coerce into having sex acts behind the walls of his opulent waterfront mansion as often as three times a day, the Town of Palm Beach police found.
The eccentric hedge fund manager, whose friends included former President Bill Clinton, Donald Trump and Prince Andrew, was also suspected of trafficking minor girls, often from overseas, for sex parties at his other homes in Manhattan, New Mexico and the Caribbean, FBI and court records show.
Facing a 53-page federal indictment, Epstein could have ended up in federal prison for the rest of his life.
But on the morning of the breakfast meeting, a deal was struck — an extraordinary plea agreement that would conceal the full extent of Epstein’s crimes and the number of people involved.
Not only would Epstein serve just 13 months in the county jail, but the deal — called a non-prosecution agreement — essentially shut down an ongoing FBI probe into whether there were more victims and other powerful people who took part in Epstein’s sex crimes, according to a Miami Herald examination of thousands of emails, court documents and FBI records.
The pact required Epstein to plead guilty to two prostitution charges in state court. Epstein and four of his accomplices named in the agreement received immunity from all federal criminal charges. But even more unusual, the deal included wording that granted immunity to “any potential co-conspirators’’ who were also involved in Epstein’s crimes. These accomplices or participants were not identified in the agreement, leaving it open to interpretation whether it possibly referred to other influential people who were having sex with underage girls at Epstein’s various homes or on his plane.
As part of the arrangement, Acosta agreed, despite a federal law to the contrary, that the deal would be kept from the victims. As a result, the non-prosecution agreement was sealed until after it was approved by the judge, thereby averting any chance that the girls — or anyone else — might show up in court and try to derail it….
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article220097825.html

Malignant trauma and the invisibility of ritual abuse Michael Salter
Salter, M. (2019) Malignant trauma and the invisibility of ritual abuse, Attachment: New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis, 13(1), forthcoming.
Introduction
This paper draws on psychoanalytic understandings of malignant trauma to explain the invisibility of ritual abuse. Ritual abuse refers to the misuse of rituals in the organized sexual abuse of children (Salter, 2012). Ritual abuse is typically practiced in extended family networks and criminal groups that participate in the production and circulation of child exploitation material (CEM).
Despite claims that ritual abuse is a hoax or a product of false memories, cases of ritual abuse have been substantiated in child sexual assault prosecutions since the 1980s, including major cases in Canada (Steed, 1995), Belgium and England (Kelly, 1998), the United States (Ellzey, 2007) and Wales (Morris, 2011). Invisibility is a consistent theme in the lives of victims and survivors of ritual abuse. While there is now a considerable literature on the therapeutic treatment of ritually abused children and adults (e.g. Badouk Epstein, Schwartz, & Wingfield Schwartz, 2011; Miller, 2012; Schwartz, 2013), ritual abuse is largely unrecognized outside of the trauma and dissociation field as a distinct form of exploitation. International efforts to develop a coordinated response to the ritual abuse of children in the 1990s in countries such as Australia, the UK and USA were halted or reversed in the face of a media-driven backlash (Salter, 2017).
The invisibility of ritual abuse remains as a doubled trauma for survivors, who endure the effects of past or current abuse amidst the denial of that abuse (Matthew & Barron, 2015), and a vicarious trauma risk for therapists, who treat a profoundly vulnerable and needy client group against a backdrop of professional uncertainty and skepticism (Scott, 1998). This paper uses qualitative data from interviews with ritual abuse survivors and mental health practitioners to argue that the trauma of ritual abuse and its invisibility are co-constitutive. Cultural and familial environments shaped by an infantile dread of human vulnerability are the primary conditions of possibility for ritual abuse, as this dread prompts enactments of traumatized cruelty within contexts with scant capacity to acknowledge or address this form of violence. The mechanisms for the reproduction of ritual abuse are thus submerged within psychosocial structures of normalization, exploitation and dissociation.
The article begins with an explanation of malignant trauma and its applicability to ritual abuse, before examining the social and psychological processes within which ritual abuse victimization is rendered undetectable. The article discusses the enforced disappearance of ritual abuse from public policy and how the provision of care to ritual abuse survivors has become contingent on its denial and erasure. The article closes by reflecting on the role of therapists and others in interrupting the malignancy of ritual abuse, and the possibilities of crafting cultural resources and moral frameworks to transform the dread at the core of ritual abuse….
Conclusion
Theories of malignant trauma offers solutions to the gordian knot of ritual abuse, and the specific dilemmas and paradoxes that it poses: How could parents commit such atrocities on their own children? Why would paedophile rings engage in bizarre ritualistic behavior? And how could networks of child torture flourish amidst the surveillance of the contemporary state? This article illuminates the psychosocial structures within which ritual abuse is concealed and reproduced, in which the intergenerational transmission of ritual abuse is secured through projective cruelty in the embodied resolution of autistic-contiguous anxiety. While the ritual and religious dimensions of ritual abuse channels the vitality of the autistic-contiguous mode into atrocity, it remains concealed within the collective dread of perpetrators, victims and bystanders. This study of ritual abuse provides further evidence for the critical importance of addressing the mechanisms and contexts within which familial sexual violence is intergenerationally transmitted. Gentile (2017) observed the focus of psychoanalytic scholarship on trans-generational trauma on the Holocaust and other forms of mass genocide. Despite the existence of “only a handful of articles that describe sexual violence through the lens of trans-generational trauma”, she notes that the majority of cases she observes in clinical work involve “generations of domestic violence, sexual violence and profound neglect” (p 170). With between 10% and one third of therapists reporting contact with survivors of organised and ritual abuse (Salter & Richters, 2012), identifying and treating familial cultures of sexual violence is vital to the disruption of malignant trauma.
This article argues that ritual abuse survivors are victims of a persistent failure of cultural memory, in which the evacuative responses of perpetrators to dread are reproduced by bystanders and larger systems and processes. The invisibility of ritual abuse is guaranteed by social structures and systems that deny the possibility of the ritualised violation of children, and that refuse to attribute reparative meaning to the struggles of survivors to speak and be heard. In such a context, the malevolent expulsion of dread is multiply determined at the intra-psychic, interpersonal and collective level, of which the dissociation and reenactment of ritual abuse is the inevitable result. The framework of malignant trauma points towards the intersection of forces that are at work in the disappearance and invisibility of evils such as ritual abuse; forces that are grounded in human subjectivity and relationality, and thus present in us all. Indeed, Alford (2016) argues that trauma is irreducibly social and psychological, in which the risks, impacts and understandings of violence and loss are mediated by cultural and political processes. The solution is to craft symbolic resources at the individual and collective level that attribute significance to tragedy, loss and vulnerability as inevitable features of human existence, rather than as embarrassing and avoidable contingencies. The experience of ritual abuse survivors suggests that conceptualisations of abuse and trauma capable of withstanding evacuative impulses may also prompt renewed ethical commitments to the disruption of evil. At the individual and social level, it would seem that the symbolization of dread is intimately involved with moral growth and the containment of malignant trauma.
https://www.academia.edu/38306864/Malignant_trauma_and_the_invisibility_of_ritual_abuse

Origins of Neo-Nazi and White Supremacist Terms and Symbols – A Glossary
The eruption of neo-Nazism and White Supremacy on display in Charlottesville in August 2017 and at other rallies across the country has exposed the public to symbols, terms, and ideology drawn directly from Nazi Germany and Holocaust-era fascist movements. Some of those who carried torches and swastika flags in Charlottesville weren’t afraid to openly call themselves Nazis.
The leaders of today’s Neo-Nazi and White Supremacist organizations are not Adolf Hitler, and America is not Germany, but, in order to understand their agenda, it is vital to understand the history of these code words, symbols, and ideologies. See more resources for confronting hate below….
Nazi Racial Ideology
Hitler was obsessed with race long before becoming Chancellor of Germany. His speeches and writings spread his belief that the world was engaged in an endless racial struggle. White Nordic people topped the racial hierarchy; Slavs, Blacks, and Arabs were lower, and Jews, who were believed to be an existential threat to the “Aryan Master race,” were at the very bottom. When the Nazis came to power, these beliefs became government ideology and were spread publicly in posters, radio, movies, classrooms and newspapers. They also served as a basis for a campaign to reorder German society, first through the exclusion of Jews from public life, then the murder of disabled Germans as well as Slavs and, ultimately, the effort to exterminate European Jewry….
https://www.ushmm.org/confront-antisemitism/origins-of-neo-nazi-and-white-supremacist-terms-and-symbols

Neighbors of polygamist cult issue warning to Minnesota
A recent land purchase by FLDS church leader sparks fear that religious compound could be planned for northern Minnesota.
Author: AJ Lagoe, Steve Eckert February 7, 2019 GRAND MARAIS, Minn….
Child sex abuse
The FLDS split with Mormonism in 1890 when the mainstream church renounced polygamy. For more than a hundred years it was centralized around the remote community made up of the twin cities of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona and had an estimated 10,000 members….
The group was made infamous in the mid-2000s when their self-proclaimed prophet Warren Jeffs landed on the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted List when he fled after being indicted for child sex abuse.
Jeffs was sentenced in 2011 to life in prison plus 20 years after being convicted of sexual assault involving two girls, ages 12 and 15, he took as wives. He is said to still be leading the group from behind bars.
FBI records made public in criminal cases against Jeffs show he instructed his followers to set up what they call “houses of hiding” and “lands of refuge” across the country.
One of those “lands of refuge” is the South Dakota compound next door to the Von Rumps.
Karl says the population of the compound is hard to pin down. “At one time I was sure there was over 300,” he told KARE 11. But he believes recently the numbers have dwindled….
The Brother
Seth Steed Jeffs is also no stranger to legal troubles.
He was convicted in 2006 of harboring or concealing his brother Warren who was at the time on the run from the child sex abuse charges.
In 2016, Seth Jeffs also pleaded guilty to food-stamp fraud as part of a federal investigation into the practice of collecting benefits in the name of children but diverting them to the church. He was sentenced to probation.
After that, he dropped off the radar.
Utah attorney Alan Mortensen has been searching the country for Seth Jeffs since 2017, trying to serve him with a lawsuit alleging that he was involved in the ritualistic rape of a young girl.
“We’ve been looking for him for over a year now,” the lawyer told KARE 11. “We could never locate him.”
Mortensen has filed a civil lawsuit in Utah accusing Seth Jeffs and other FLDS leaders of participating in “religious sexual rituals with underage girls” involving Seth’s brother Warren.
Mortensen’s client is a young woman identified in court papers as “R. H.” She claims that as part of a FLDS ritual she was sexually abused “on a regular basis, between five and six times a week, from the age of 8 years-old” until she turned 12. When she turned 14, she says she was forced to become a “scribe” documenting the abuse of other young girls in the sect.
The lawsuit claims that in his role as a “Priesthood Leader” Seth Jeffs witnessed the abuse by his brother and helped arrange the rituals.
“He allowed it to happen and he witnessed it happening over and over and over to a young girl,” Mortensen told KARE 11….
https://www.kare11.com/article/news/investigations/neighbors-of-polygamist-cult-issue-warning-to-minnesota/89-d5383c46-4e95-41e9-be42-6e6aa03e6631

Online Survey for Ritual Abuse Survivors
To participate in this research:
https://dundee.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/views-and-experiences-of-self-identified-ra-survivors-on-t-4
Views and Experiences of self-identified Ritual Abuse Survivors on the use of Online Forums and Social Media Platforms
The aim of this study is to

Understand the barriers encountered by ritual abuse survivors when using face to face or telephone-based services that have encouraged them to use online forums and social media platforms.

Understand how online forums and social media platforms have helped ritual abuse survivors to overcome or minimise barriers encountered in face-to-face or telephone-based services.

Understand how ritual abuse survivors have utilised the benefits of online forums or social media platforms to offer support to others, access support, talk about ritual abuse, engage in advocacy work, raise awareness on ritual abuse and connect with other ritual abuse survivors.

R. Kelly leaves Chicago jail after posting 100K bail for criminal sex charges Jayme Deerwester, USA TODAY Feb. 25, 2019
R. Kelly has been freed from jail in Chicago after posting bail following multiple charges of criminal sexual abuse, the Cook County Sheriff’s Office confirms to USA TODAY.
Earlier Monday, Cook County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Sophia Ansari told USA TODAY that the R&B singer, who spent the weekend in jail, posted $100,000, or 10 percent of the $1 million bond set Saturday.
The terms of Kelly’s release prohibit him from having any contact with females under the age of 18.
Earlier in the day, Kelly pleaded not guilty to 10 felony counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse. He appeared in an orange jumpsuit during his arraignment on four separate indictments.
The indictments describe the case of four women – three of whom were underage at the time of the alleged sexual abuse. Kelly, who was acquitted of child pornography charges in 2008, has denied wrongdoing….
https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2019/02/25/r-kelly-pleads-not-guilty-criminal-sex-abuse-case/2978510002/

‘Surviving R. Kelly’ Executive Producer Reacts to R. Kelly Charges and Singer Being Unable to Make Bail 2/25/2019 by Jackie Strause
The ecosystem that enabled R. Kelly’s alleged toxic behavior, including sexual abuse claims dating back decades, partly explains why the Grammy-nominated R&B singer can’t make bail, Surviving R. Kelly executive producer Dream Hampton said Monday.
“He has gone broke holding women in his studio,” Hampton said during a CBS This Morning interview when reacting to the charges Kelly now faces. “This lifestyle that he has, moving women — girls — state-to-state where their parents can’t find them, he’s gone broke doing this.”
Kelly was arrested Friday on 10 counts of aggravated sexual abuse involving four females, three of whom were minors. He remains jailed after a judge on Saturday set his bond at $1 million. Kelly’s attorney, Steve Greenberg, said meeting Kelly’s $100,000 bail payment while he awaits trial is complicated, blaming mismanagement and bad contracts for why the singer isn’t wealthy despite decades of success. According to CNN, Kelly also owed more than $169,000 in unpaid child support and $166,000 in unpaid rent on his Chicago recording studio, which he has since vacated.
On Monday afternoon, Kelly pleaded not guilty on the sex abuse charges and remained jailed as of the time of this story.
Lifetime’s hit docuseries Surviving R. Kelly has played a key role in Kelly’s indictment. After its debut in January, Chicago prosecutors began seeking information and sent a call out for alleged Kelly victims to come forward. The explosive claims in the six-part doc included sexual abuse allegations from multiple women, several who were underage at the time of the alleged assaults, who were interviewed on-camera….
Hampton, a filmmaker and activist, and her team spoke to many women for Surviving R. Kelly to paint the doc’s horrifying, detailed picture of how Kelly’s alleged abuse spanned 30 years. Many women were featured in the doc, and Hampton says she and her team spoke to many more who would corroborate claims, but who wouldn’t participate on camera for fear of being harassed. Hampton has said she believes Kelly’s behavior went on for so long because many of his victims were black women and society has a “knee-jerk reaction to protect black men” at the expense of black women….
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/surviving-r-kelly-executive-producer-reacts-r-kelly-charges-1190440

Cardinal George Pell, Pope Francis’ top financial adviser, convicted of child sex abuse Rod McGuirk, Associated Press Feb. 25, 2019
MELBOURNE, Australia – The most senior Catholic cleric ever charged with child sex abuse has been convicted of molesting two choirboys moments after celebrating Mass, dealing a new blow to the Catholic hierarchy’s credibility after a year of global revelations of abuse and cover-up.
Cardinal George Pell, Pope Francis’ top financial adviser and the Vatican’s economy minister, bowed his head but then regained his composure as the 12-member jury delivered unanimous verdicts in the Victoria state County Court on Dec. 11 after more than two days of deliberation.
The court had until Tuesday forbidden publication of any details about the trial.
The convictions were confirmed the same week that Francis concluded his extraordinary summit of Catholic leaders summoned to Rome for a tutorial on preventing clergy sexual abuse and protecting children from predator priests.
The jury convicted Pell of abusing two 13-year-old boys whom he had caught swigging sacramental wine in a rear room of Melbourne’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral in late 1996, as hundreds of worshippers were streaming out of Sunday services.
Pell, now 77 but 55 at the time, had just been named the most senior Catholic in Australia’s second-largest city, Melbourne.
The jury also found Pell guilty of indecently assaulting one of the boys in a corridor more than a month later.
He faces a potential maximum 50-year prison term after a sentencing hearing that begins on Wednesday. He has foreshadowed an appeal.
Pell had maintained his innocence throughout….
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2019/02/25/cardinal-george-pell-convicted-child-sex-abuse/2986107002/

Anglican Church priest arrested for series of sex crimes committed during time with Fresno church
By Corin Hoggard and Jason Oliveira 2/15/19 FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) —
Fresno Police have arrested an Anglican Church priest for a series of sex crimes during his more than a decade with the local church.
Jesus Antonio Castaneda Serna was arrested early Sunday at the Central Fresno church he started — Holy Spirit.
Twenty-two parishioners have come forward to say they’d been victimized by the Anglican Priest but according to police many of the victims are undocumented and afraid to report the crimes to law enforcement.
The arrest comes after a 13-month investigation. Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyers believes the sex crimes date back years and could have hundreds of victims….
Two victims did speak to detectives and say Serna would invite them to his Shaw Avenue office where he would perform what he called a “healing ritual” that involved a massage table, oils and would then turn into sexual contact.
The two male adult victims said Serna told them the repeated rituals would remove a curse or earn them forgiveness for their sins….
https://abc30.com/fresno-police-arrest-anglican-church-priest-for-series-of-sex-crimes/5156232/

Thousands of Immigrant Children Said They Were Sexually Abused in U.S. Detention Centers, Report Says
By Matthew Haag Feb. 27, 2019
The federal government received more than 4,500 complaints in four years about the sexual abuse of immigrant children who were being held at government-funded detention facilities, including an increase in complaints while the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant families at the border was in place, the Justice Department revealed this week.
The records, which involve children who had entered the country alone or had been separated from their parents, detailed allegations that adult staff members had harassed and assaulted children, including fondling and kissing minors, watching them as they showered, and raping them. They also included cases of suspected abuse of children by other minors.
From October 2014 to July 2018, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a part of the Health and Human Services Department that cares for so-called unaccompanied minors, received a total of 4,556 allegations of sexual abuse or sexual harassment, 1,303 of which were referred to the Justice Department. Of those 1,303 cases deemed the most serious, 178 were accusations that adult staff members had sexually assaulted immigrant children, while the rest were allegations of minors assaulting other minors, the report said….
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/27/us/immigrant-children-sexual-abuse.html
10 Undeniable Facts About the Michael Jackson Sexual-Abuse Allegations
The author, who spent more than a decade covering the scandal for V.F., shares the key revelations and insights that viewers of the new HBO documentary Leaving Neverland….
The two-part documentary, which premieres on HBO this Sunday, gives Robson and Safechuck, together with their surviving family members, the opportunity to tell their stories of being first befriended and then seduced, emotionally and—they allege—sexually, by Michael Jackson. What struck me most, as someone who spent more than a decade reporting on allegations against Jackson, was how closely Robson’s and Safechuck’s stories mirrored those of Jordie Chandler and Gavin Arvizo, the 13-year-old whose allegations prompted the 2005 trial in which Jackson was acquitted on 10 felony counts, including four counts of child molestation and one of attempted child molestation. Another boy, Jason Francia, whose mother worked as a housekeeper for Jackson, testified under oath that he was molested by Jackson, bringing to five the number of young men who’ve sworn that Jackson showed them pornography, masturbated them, or introduced them to sex when they were between the ages of 7 and 12.
So many details of each case were the same: the targeting of boys from troubled families, the skillful grooming, the gifts, the seduction, the Jacuzzis, the way sex was performed, the fear and threats of what would befall them if they ever told anyone what Jackson had done. Their dismissals followed a similar pattern, too: as puberty approached, Robson and Safechuck say in the documentary, they were abruptly thrown to the curb and replaced with a new, younger kid.
Even their families got similar treatment: the sisters were put off to the side by Michael, the supposed adorer of all children; the parents were whisked around in limos and private jets, taken shopping, and treated to vintage wine from Neverland’s cellar. Jordie Chandler’s mother got trips to Monaco and Las Vegas, along with a diamond bracelet. Jimmy Safechuck’s parents got a whole house; the documentary never mentions the cars they received, or the permanent residence visa that Wade Robson’s mother testified in 2005 to having received by funneling whatever wages she had received through the Michael Jackson Corporation. Joy Robson also acknowledged accepting a car, a $10,000 payment from Jackson, and a $10,000 loan from Jackson’s investigator….

There is no dispute that, at age 34, Michael Jackson slept more than 30 nights in a row in the same bed with 13-year-old Jordie Chandler at the boy’s house with Chandler’s mother present. He also slept in the same bed with Jordie Chandler at Chandler’s father’s house. The parents were divorced.

So far, five boys Michael Jackson shared beds with have accused him of abuse: Jordie Chandler, Jason Francia, Gavin Arvizo, Wade Robson, and Jimmy Safechuck. Jackson had the same nickname for Chandler and Arvizo: “Rubba.” He called Robson “Little One” and Safechuck “Applehead.”

Jackson paid $25 million to settle the Chandlers’ lawsuit, with $18 million going to Jordie, $2.5 million to each of the parents, and the rest to lawyers. Jackson said he paid that sum to avoid something “long and drawn out.” Francia also received $2.4 million from Jackson….
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/03/10-undeniable-facts-about-the-michael-jackson-sexual-abuse-allegations

 

March 6, 2019 · Filed Under Newsletter 2019 - Issues 144 - 149