A "Why" Blog--questions about the Elsa Newman Case

FOR THE WANDERING JEW...

2009-11-02T09:20:00.001-08:00

Please see below: I hope you will take a look at the story of this Jewish mother, innocently imprisoned for a crime committed and admitted to by someone else. The collage is the cover of a brochure I created for Elsa Newman, #921975, Maryland Correctional Institution at Jessup. The text is the material from the inside of the brochure.

As an additional note, I want you to know that I have learned that Newman suffers incredible harrassment for being a Jew...an attorney...white...and innocent. I have written to Gary Maynard, head of Maryland's Department of Public Safety and Corrections, and he has been able to reduce some of the harrassment--but not all of it...never all of it.

This is the story of Elsa Newman and her sons, a mother unjustly imprisoned in Maryland, while her two boys live in Tampa, Florida, with a father they have accused of incredible molestation and abuse.
In the early 2000's in Maryland, Newman and her then-estranged husband, Arlen Slobodow, were divorcing when her two small boys began disclosing that they were being molested by their father. Before visitation, the boys clung to furniture and begged their mother not to make them go.
On a night in January, a friend of the Newman family, Margery Landry, broke into the home of Arlen Slobodow while his two sons were visiting. She carried a gun containing two whole bullets--hardly the arsenal of a woman intending murder--possibly the arsenal of a woman afraid of Slobodow because he had assaulted her more than once.
Landry, having heard of the molestation and abuse by the children's father and seeing that neither children's protective services nor law enforcement nor the courts seemed able or willing to do anything about it, entered the home at night to see if she could find evidence of the molestation.
She found no evidence, but before she left, she decided to look in on the two little boys. However, when she reached the bedroom of the younger son she found his bed made and empty.
Landry turned toward the master bedroom and looked in. There she saw Arlen Slobodow, nude from the waist down, in bed with his younger son, who was completely nude.
Question: In January in Maryland, how would she have known about the nudity if the pair had been sleeping and thoroughly covered as one would expect in the NE at that time of year?
Question: Why did Landry testify at trial that she "tried to pull them apart" if they were doing nothing but sleeping?
A struggle followed the attempt. Slobodow forced Landry to the floor and tried to turn the gun on her. It went off. One bullet struck the wall and one struck Slobodow in the thigh. Although his pajama bottoms were covered with blood, there was no bullet hole in the pajamas, verifying the claim that he had, indeed, been half naked when discovered.
Landry broke free and fled. She would be arrested the next morning.
Slobodow called 911 and set up the case for the prosecution in the trial that was to follow: "My wife sent someone to try to kill me."
During this time, Elsa Newman was out of state. When she heard that the police wanted to talk to her, she returned voluntarily, with no idea that authorities would accuse her of involvement. She was arrested and charged with everything Landry had done, plus conspiracy and attempted murder.
Landry pled guilty to other charges, but refused to plead either to conspiracy or attempted murder. Conspiracy and attempted murder were both null prossed for Landry. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Offered a reduced sentence if she would implicate Newman, she refused to do so.
Newman was tried twice. In her first trial one of the witnesses against her was her own divorce attorney, who, some two days after he discovered that she was planning to file a complaint against him, suddenly remembered that she had sat in his office and plotted to kill her estranged husband.
Maryland’s highest court voided the verdict the first trial, saying that her attorney should never have been allowed to testify against her.
Newman was released. In the second trial, the divorce attorney's secretary testified against her. Although Landry had denied conspiracy or murder attempt, those charges were held against Newman, who was offered a reduced sentence if she would apologize. She refused to apologize for something she had not done, and is now in Maryland Correctional Institution for Women at Jessup.
Her two sons, now young teens, continue to live with their father in Tampa. Since molesters do not change, I assume they are still being molested.

I am not alone in my belief that the court system is failing

2009-10-31T05:01:00.000-07:00

Scandal Illuminates Troubled Family Court System

By Byron Williams

The family court system has, in theory, operated on the question, "What is in the best interests of the child?"

But the findings articulated at a one-day workshop hosted by Alameda County Supervisor Gail Steele and the Center for Judicial Excellence suggest that question is more theory than practice.
If the statistics are accurate, the frequency with which children are allowed to have unsupervised contact with physically or sexually abusive parents after divorce in this country is alarming and worthy of the public's attention.

According to the Center for Judicial Excellence, "Not since the Catholic Church pedophile scandal has the United States seen this level of institutional collusion and corruption harming innocent children."

This may sound like hyperbole, but the comparison holds if, in fact, most family court professionals know the system is broken and are allowing the most vulnerable members of society to potentially suffer lifelong consequences.

It is indeed a broken system that allows 58,000 children each year to be placed in harm's way simply because the abusive parent also possesses the resources to hire a bevy of professionals who plead his/her case to judges, mediators and other family-law professionals.

Heavy caseloads, bad judges and unqualified mediators, who evaluate families sometimes based on no more than a one-hour meeting, can add up to decisions that permanentlyaffect families.

As one parent shared with me, "I wouldn't believe my own story if I didn't live through it. We trust the courts to do the right thing, but it's just not that simple."

Those who are not directly involved trust the system to work — but there was a consistent message at the workshop that it does not work, and children are paying the price.

Are these simply the musing of parents and attorneys who did not get their way? No, there is more than enough data to suggest there is a problem that warrants investigation. The primary charge finds that many judges, for reasons ranging from being overworked to becoming jaded by the system, have placed an inordinate reliance on court appointees such as mediators, evaluators, investigators, and minors' counsel, who may or may not act in the best interest of the children.

This has created a scenario whereby individuals who have no understanding of the law often sway the individual who is appointed to administer justice.

Steele also cites a level of dishonesty that she states is pervasive throughout the system. "It's not just mediators but social workers who are not telling the truth," she said.

The workshop featured experts in the field and parents sharing their gut-wrenching, first-hand testimony and offering solutions to the problem-plagued system in California.

State Sen. Mark Leno and other members of the Legislature are calling for an audit that will evaluate the magnitude of the concerns expressed over a number of years.

A number of participants also made it clear the problems they cite are not emblematic of the whole, maintaining there are indeed a number of good judges within the system. But there are enough bad ones who are not held accountable, causing the system dysfunction.

Steele should be commended for her willingness to bring attention to an issue that has flown under the radar for years. Investigation is long overdue.

Byron Williams has served as pastor of the Resurrection Community Church in Oakland since 2002. As the only pastor/syndicated columnist in the country, Williams writes a column which appears in 10 publications and several progressive web sites across the country.

22 DAYS AND COUNTING DOWN...

2009-10-29T11:42:00.000-07:00

...to the FREE-ELSA-NEWMAN trip

The brochures are ready to be printed, as of this morning.

I set aside the flyer and used that material on the outside of the brochure. One less thing to keep track of as I travel.

The paper petition is ready to be printed for me to carry with me on the trip.

I have gathered information from The Innocence Project at Yeshiva University; The Innocence Project has meant exoneration for some 240 people--many on death row. My hope is that this will prove helpful to establish without argument that there actually are innocent people in US prisons.

I have bumper stickers that say "Free Elsa Newman," and they are all ready to go.

The signs are on the motor home. The signs on the metal stayed on well. However, I must make some replacement signs for some that came off the glass. I will put the replacement signs INSIDE the windows, rather than trying to drive in pouring rain with outside signs.

I am beginning to make some media contacts, despite the poor piece of writing I put out at first. I think I will now send copies of the brochure to media, rather than trying to write a "press release" at which it seems I am a dismal failure.

I have twenty-two days to go, leaving three weeks from tomorrow, God willing.

All that remains is to finish the printing...make four replacement signs and have them laminated...and get the MK ready to go. Hmmm. Maybe I'll leave early. The earlier I am on the road, the better my hopes for the weather between here and northern Idaho, which will be my first stop.

DOGGONE...I FIGURED IT OUT!

2009-10-24T20:22:00.000-07:00

The two little boys who, according their own disclosures, have suffered for years at the hands of the father they said molested them

Re: Stephen Friedman-- I FIGURED IT OUT!

It’s easy to understand why Arlen Slobodow would lie. He had been accused by his sons of molesting them sexually as well as savaging them physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. The accusations never reached a courtroom in Maryland because Margery Landry's crime intervened. If Slobodow lied and his estranged wife went to prison, he was free and clear.

But why on earth would a woman’s former attorney lie about her in court—saying she had sat in his presence and plotted murder?

It’s easy to understand why Doug Gansler, then State’s Attorney for Montgomery Country and now Maryland’s Attorney General, might not care much about the truth of the matter. He was planning a run for state office. The Newman case was high profile. The media coverage was doubtless helpful. And all the more helpful if he could put the defendant away.

But Newman’s own divorce attorney?

It’s easy to understand why Slobodow’s attorney might not be interested in truth. She was being paid to defend him, not find out the truth.

But why would Stephen Friedman, Newman’s own attorney, perjure himself on the witness stand?

It’s easy to understand why the prosecuting attorney, Katherine Winfree, would not seek truth. Her emails show her disdain for Newman. In addition, she had a reputation to uphold; her boss, Doug Gansler, has said she is a better prosecutor than even he is.

But dammit…the one thing that I couldn’t figure out for the longest time was why a man like Stephen Friedman would lie about his own client.

And now? I’ve figured it out. At last.

Perhaps, after reading this brief account, you can draw your own conclusion as to why Stephen Friedman would have been motivated to bear false witness.

Friedman, you see, was not Newman’s attorney in any way that had anything to do with the criminal trial. Nope. He was her divorce attorney. And Newman was becoming sick and tired of his behavior as her divorce attorney. She began putting together a list of his misdeeds.

· He made appointments and then kept her waiting interminably with no apparent reason, once when she waited with her elderly mother, now 96 years old.

· He would talk to other clients on the phone while Newman sat in his office—and then he would bill her for the time he was using the phone.

· He would take a “break,” be gone for as much as half an hour or forty-five minutes, leaving her alone in his office—and then bill her for that time.

· He would often seem to fall asleep during time that should have been used for preparing the divorce case. Whether he was really asleep or not, he billed her for the time.

· He left to use the restroom—and billed her for the time.

· Friedman double billed—meaning he would go back and bill again for something he had already included in a bill. One month he billed Newman $40,000. Nor was this a month when he went to trial for her. There was nothing going on but office visits.

· Friedman billed Newman some $300,000 for a year’s work—although he stretched the work out for well over a year.

· According to Newman, Friedman wrote three- and four-page threatening letters.

As a result of these and other equally “obscene practices," Newman was preparing to accuse Friedman of malpractice. This she did not want to do during the divorce hearing. She intended to wait until divorce issues were settled.

Newman never got that chance. Margery Landry broke into Slobodow's house, and the rest is news I've written and rewritten.

Now you need to know that Newman has a habit of planning everything out on paper, and even before the divorce hearing, she made a list, some two or three pages long. At the time of Margery Landry’s crime, officials removed a computer and personal papers from Newman’s home, in search of evidence. Included in the papers was Newman’s list of complaints against Friedman.

Ah-oh! Guess who saw them!

Somehow, it seems, possibly with the assistance of Katherine Winfree in the State’s Attorney’s office, Friedman became aware of the paper and the charges Newman was planning to bring against him.

Two days after he saw the papers, he suddenly remembered that he had heard Elsa Newman sit in his office and plot to kill Arlen Slobodow, and rushed to two different judges to ask advice about what he should do with this horrible knowledge. Two days. And then he testified against her at trial.

Ladies and gentlemen…readers of this blog…I rest my case.

TO THE SONS OF ELSA NEWMAN:

2009-10-24T14:23:00.000-07:00

One of my fondest hopes for you is that you will forever--no matter what anybody makes you say to the contrary--be proud of your mother!

I've ever known a mother more proud of her children, more pleased with them, more hopeful for their future; more frightened that the horrible abuses you disclosed might damage you and your bright future.

Of course her heart is broken over her separation from you, but she did nothing to deserve that. All she did was believe you when you disclosed the abuses your said your father was perpetrating on his two very young sons.

Did you know that your mother, when she was offered a reduction in her prison sentence if she would apologize for "conspiracy" and "attempted murder" held her head high and said simply, "I cannot apologize for what I did not do."

It did not matter what the jury said. It did not matter what the judge said. It did not matter what your father had said. The only thing that mattered is what she knows to be the truth. Your mother is a brilliant woman and a woman of integrity. It takes guts to do what she did--face a longer prison sentence, rather than deny that integrity.

Enough said for now.

THE FIRST LEG OF THE COAST-TO-COAST TRIP!

2009-10-24T13:55:00.000-07:00

The first leg of the coast-to-coast and border-to-border trip on behalf of Elsa Newman has been completed. On Wednesday last the pugs and I climbed into the motor home, took our places and picked up Lois, a friend who had agreed to accompany me on this part of the journey.
Thanks to Lois, I have pictures for you. I will try not to write much, but just let you look at the pictures and captions.

We drove to Long Beach in Washington, where we picked up a small piece of driftwood, thanks to Lois, who found it. I was about ready to give up on the driftwood and just take a tiny container with a few grains of sand. The idea behind the driftwood is that as I travel I will pick up a small rock or other found item from each state I visit, carrying all of them with me as a symbol of my attempt to unite people in all the states behind Elsa Newman and her sons.

After Long Beach, we drove across the Astoria bridge and back to Vancouver, Washington--and then the pugs and I came home.

It was a good shakedown trip. I learned that I may not be able to drive that far every day. We found that some of the signs came off, so I will have to replace those. The ones on metal were fine. The ones on glass were a lost cause.

Now for the pictures:

The view from the passenger seat. We drove about two miles out of the way to take a look at this historic covered bridge.

Notice the signs. Please notice also my "prison blues,"

which I wore, but which had not yet

been stencilled with the words "PRISON BLUES...

in honor of Elsa Newman...#921975 MCIW...

innocent but imprisoned." I am right now in the process of

doing the stenciling

Me--with some of the pug herd, in their ex pen.

Somebody must have still been inside, because I seem to be informing someone that

it is time to disembark.

If you scrunch up your eyes just right, you can see some of the herd of elk we

saw on the way to the coast.

Plans Proceed Apace

2009-10-16T19:56:00.000-07:00

Several things have happened over the last few days. All good, so far.

· The motor home is repaired and ready to travel. Ooops! That reminds me: I’d better start it up and let it run for a while.

· My stencil has arrived, so I can get my prison blues ready—thank you, Johnny Cash for the name. My blue shirts will say “PRISON BLUES…in honor of Elsa Newman…#921975 at MCIW…innocent but in prison.”

· I’m planning to purchase little blue shirts for all the pugs. I need to get fabric paint in tubes, so I can write on their shirts, things like “Free Elsa Newman”…”Elsa Newman-unjustly imprisoned”…and maybe even “Shame on Maryland!”

· The signs for the MH are due on Monday. I can hardly wait to get them on, so I hope the weather accommodates.

· The backup mirror for my MH arrived. I’ve got to get that installed. It helps a lot when I am driving. For example, I will be able to see if some ning-nong, invisible in the side mirrors, is tailgating.

· I even received the little rubber piece I needed for the vacuum cleaner, so I will be able to carry a Dirt Devil and vacuum the carpets, which needs to be done rather often, in view of the fact that statistics show that one pug sheds enough hair every day to make a whole new pug!

· Next week should bring the trip to the coast with a friend. Looking forward to it.

· I’m still working on the press release…finding it difficult to write about myself and mine in the third person.

· Found out I cannot use dried egg whites for my liver shunt puppies, so I will have to carry fresh eggs and/or make frequent stops for fresh eggs. Guess I’ll be eating lots of egg yolks or making lots of puddings—or something.

· Starting to receive word from folks who will welcome my dogs and me—and some even have suggestions for publicity in local news media. Yesssss!

· Received washable pads for the floors, to protect the carpet. Also have lots of homemade “rugs” that I use for the same purpose—mostly old towels sewn together.

Hey! This is really going to happen. I can hardly wait to get on the road.

Journal--day three

2009-10-13T20:04:00.000-07:00

Elsa Newman and her sons

with friend of a canine persuasion

Wheee! Count down another day! Thirty-eight days until we leave; and sooooo much still to do!

The signs for the motor home have shipped—due here on the 19th of this month, but that is about all the news for the day.

We had a power outage this morning and into part of the afternoon, which put a crimp in some of my preparation plans. Preparation, of course, includes getting my home ready to leave behind, as well as getting the motor home and the dogs and myself ready for travel. Getting the house ready? Means putting covers over the screens on my screened back porch. Means getting all washing caught up. Means keeping up on dishes. Nothing very exciting.

Most of the preparation for the dogs means being sure I have the right foods with me. I have very young little girls with liver shunts. They have to have a special diet and special meds. They also need filtered water. Gotta be sure I have everything with me.

As to the rest of the herd? I’ve switched them all to Beneful—because I know I can get that anywhere. They are good to go.

Come November 20? We'll all be good to go.

Watch for us in your state or your city!

Journal--day two

2009-10-12T21:04:00.000-07:00

Not much to record today on the preparations for the trip. I did begin writing a press release, after looking up a how-to and a guide on the net.

I have signs coming for the motor home. The first one has arrived: a banner which I can attach to the MK at stops. It says, “Elsa Newman and Sons—information here.”
The rest are supposed to arrive on the 19th. I hope the company keeps that commitment. I am looking forward to decking out the MK in her new clothing. Among the signs I am expecting are the following:
1. Coast to coast and border to border for Elsa Newman and sons
2. elsanewmanisinnocent.blogspot.com
3. Free ELSA NEWMAN –unjustly imprisoned in Maryland
4. Elsa Newman—Innocent but in prison
5. Time for justice—Elsa Newman—unjustly imprisoned
6. Time lost in prison is gone FOREVER—missing out while your children grow up—ALSO GONE FOREVER
7. Sign petition: thepetitionsite.com/1/Free-Elsa-Newman
8. Free Elsa Newman [with two pics of Elsa]
9. Plus a pug sign, since I’m a pug person, in which a pug bewails the fact that “Elsa Newman has been in prison sooooo long!” That one is for the driver’s- side door.

Looking forward to taking this message across the United States. Look for me in your state and your city. I’ll be the obnoxious little, old lady retired school teacher, traveling in a “Jubilee” motor home covered with signs, and accompanied by 11 ½ pugs, ½ Chihuahua, and one pug in a tuxedo—that’s Holly, the Boston Terrorist!

THE TIME HAS COME...

2009-10-11T20:57:00.000-07:00

It is October 11, 2009—40 days to departure--and time to begin a journal of my coast-to-coast and border-to-border journey to publicize the plight of Elsa Newman and her sons.
In September, I made a shakedown run to LaGrande, Oregon, with the motor home. I took all 13 small dogs with me, using built-in crates that I had made myself. I have 11 ½ pugs, ½ Chihuahua, and another person who is either a pug in a tuxedo, a penguin, or some relative of the flying nun. We all learned a bit from that trip. I took notes on things I wanted to change or improve. And we headed home.

After that? Boy, howdy! Did things ever shake down! On the way home, as I passed some construction, I remember thinking, “Wow! That stuff is too close to the road.” And before I could even finish the thought, something hit my front awning arm, pulled it loose and created a tremendous racket.

When I finally got to a place where the road was wide enough to allow for pulling over, I clambered out to survey the damage. The awning arm hung loose. The door was scraped and looked pretty bad. Nor would it open. Fortunately, I try to plan for emergencies and had with me a length of clothesline, which I used to secure the battered arm.

After sitting a while in an attempt to calm down from the incident, I drove on home, nearing despair at the thought of what the cost of repairs would be.

When I checked online, it appeared that a new door would cost about $400 and the new arm for the awning would be something over $200. Ahh…then came David.

An online friend of mine speaks often of angels—in various forms, canines, other animals, people. I wonder often if David is not one of mine.

David, you see, lives on my land in a fifth wheel. Why is he here? Well…it’s a long story, but to keep it short, he lives here to help me care for his mother, Alice, who lives in my travel trailer [not to be confused with my motor home; the travel trailer is more-or-less permanently in place, and I consider it an extension of my house]. David’s mother, you see has terminal cancer. Actually, she was not expected to be still living by this time in 2009; in January, the doctors gave her two to five months at best. She is now at the beginning of the tenth month since her diagnosis.

OK…so all that is sort of an aside where this journal thing is concerned, except to explain the presence of David, who is helping me prepare the motor home for the journey. David felt nothing like the despair I had felt. “You know,” he said, “I believe I can fix this.”

The first step was to persuade the door to open and close. Which he did. Then we applied a painted plywood panel to cover the worst of the scratches and hold the door straight.

That left only the front arm of the awning. I ordered parts and David—bless him again—replaced the damaged one. Just today we rolled it up and down and it works fine.

I don’t know exactly how much money this young man has saved me, but I can make a rough guess, starting with the $400 I did NOT have to spend for a replacement door. Plus labor for replacing the door. Plus labor for replacing the awning arm, even if I had bought the parts myself and taken them to a repair shop. I’m appropriately grateful. I rather need the money for the trip, instead of repairs to the vehicle.

So now the repaired motor home—which my friends call the “motor kennel” or “MK”—stands in the yard, waiting for final preparations.

I have signs ordered, which should arrive on the 19th of this month. After that? A trip to the Washington-Oregon coast, accompanied by a friend, so I can say literally and truthfully that I am travelling coast to coast for Elsa Newman.

More later. This will do for a start. I have planned this venture for a long time now. I do hope it will call attention to the unjust imprisonment of Elsa Newman—as well as the abuses her sons have said they live with at the hands of their father.

Quick test about those involved in putting Elsa Newman in prison--despite her innocence

2009-09-28T11:02:00.000-07:00

1. What do you call it when a father molests his two sons sexually?
a. Incest
b. Sexual abuse
c. Child abuse
d. All of the above

2. What do you call it when a father is found in bed, nude from the waist down, with a small son who is completely nude?
a. A situation which would suggest child abuse.
b. A situation which would suggest child molestation.
c. A situation which is improper.
d. All of the above

3. What do you call it when a state’s attorney from Montgomery County, Maryland wants to convict a suspect so badly that he decides to retry her case after the state’s highest court has voided the verdict?
a. Political ambition
b. Fear of looking bad when a high-profile case went bad on him
c. Preparation to run for the office of Attorney General of Maryland
d. Deciding ahead of time who was at fault and then accepting only evidence which supports his theory.
e. All of the above.

4. What do you call it when Katherine Winfree, prosecuting attorney in the Newman case is
observed late one night, driving erratically; when stopped by police, she refused a breathalyzer test?
a. DUI
b. Illegal
c. A sign of an individual who cannot be totally trusted within the framework of the law.
d. All of the above

5. What do you call an attorney who lies on the stand about his own client, stating that he has heard said client, while sitting in his office, state that she wanted to kill her estranged husband?
a. An attorney who is testifying in defiance of attorney-client privilege.
b. A man who is willing to lie about a former client
c. A man who believes he will be believed by a jury when he claims that his former client--well-educated, an attorney in her own right and a woman of considerable wisdom--sat in his office and talked about a plan to murder her estranged husband, when her attorney knows she never did this.
d. All of the above.

6. What do you call an estranged husband who sets up the prosecution case against his wife for said prosecutors?
a. A sociopath
b. Someone able to make a good impression when he chooses to do so
c. Someone who has a darker side, which before the trial had taken the form of spousal abuse, physical and sexual abuse of his children, and who, although friendly and believable in public, became at home a surly, sullen man who seldom spoke unless to shout or demean.
d. All of the above.

7. What do you call a court psychologist who sets aside the results of psychological testing in favor of his own personal opinion of Elsa Newman and her estranged husband?
a. A liar
b. A man who will one day recommend that the Castillo children in Maryland be allowed unsupervised visits with their father.
c. A man who will be responsible for the fact that said father drowned all of his children in the bathtub during one of those unsupervised visits.
d. A man who has no integrity.
e. All of the above.

A BLOG FOR AS[S]...

2009-09-26T20:04:00.000-07:00

Recognize the hands? Remember when I used them in one of my original blogs, not just on this site, but on several sites? Remember how quickly you removed your picture--which contained those hands--from your Facebook page? Why did you remove that picture? I can only suppose that you removed it in fear that someone who saw both pages might recognize the hands and know of whom I was writing.

That is certainly what I would have done, if I were a pedophile who was molesting my own sons and somebody cropped my hands from MY picture and put those hands on a blog site.

After spending two years and more researching your situation and the case of your ex-wife, Elsa Newman, I have a pretty good idea about some other things I would do if I were a pedophile, abusing my own sons, and some obnoxious little old lady from the state of Washington began exposing me on a blog site. Oh, yes! How about some of this:

1. I would be sure that CPS never interviewed my sons except in my presence.

2. I would lie to my sons about their mother. I would say things like, “Your mom is nothing but a failed lawyer.” It’s balderdash; Elsa Newman was quite a successful lawyer. But that’s what I would tell me sons if I were a pedophile and I were molesting them.

3. I would tell other lies about their mother. I would tell them she is “crazy,” despite the fact that Elsa Newman’s psychological testing showed her well within the framework of what is considered normal.

4. I would lie about my own psychological testing. I would never let my sons know that I was the one whose tests showed more-than-questionable tendencies toward mental problems.

5. If I were a child molester, and if I were molesting my own children, I would be delighted at the opportunity to put my sons’ mother in prison. Said mother, after all, is their primary line of defense. I would lie, if I had to, in order to make her look guilty.

6. Hell…I’d even pay other people to lie. I would do most anything to keep my obscene secret a secret.

7. If my children disclosed the truth, I would beat them and/or use any other possible form of intimidation to force them to take back their words of accusation.

8. If I were a child molester who specialized in molesting his own children, and my children disclosed the truth, I would take what those children said and tell authorities that it couldn’t have happened: Nobody could stuff a whole transformer toy into a little boy’s rectum. Ridiculous. Of course the fact would remain that I hadn’t stuffed the whole toy in there--it just felt that way to the kid. But I would make the kid look foolish and unbelievable.

9. If I were a child molester, abusing my own children, I would persuade my children that those things never happened. I would use mental, emotional, physical, spiritual and any other kind of force I could think of to assure that my sons lost track of reality--and wouldn’t even remember the things I had done to them.

10. If I were a child molester, and my own children were the primary objects of my attentions, I would do everything in my power to keep my children from their mother. She’s in prison, after all. She must have done SOMETHING to deserve to be there. And I would lie about my ex-wife until my sons believe me.

How am I doing, AS[S]?

And there’s so much more I would do, isn’t there? But that’s enough for now. Maybe you will write a response to me and continue with further thoughts about the actions of a pedophile who abuses his own children?

The coast-to-coast/border-to-border campaign begins

2009-09-24T11:57:00.000-07:00

Finally I have thought of something to do to publicize the case of Elsa Newman and her sons.

On the 20th of November, I will begin a cross-country trip in my recently-purchased motor home. I will travel with my 13 pugs, who now have cages built into the motor home so they can travel safely.

The motor home will bear signs such as "Free Elsa Newman;" "Elsa Newman, Innocent and in prison," "#92197, Maryland Correctional Institution at Jessup," "8 years behind bars--but innocent," "Elsa Newman, separated from her sons by Maryland's injustice system."

The motor home will travel through as many states as possible, en route to Maryland. Also posted on the MH will be the website for this blog, as well as the website for the online petition. In addition, I plan to carry a paper petition and find as many signatures as possible to add to that. There will be handouts: a flyer for those who want a quick summary; a brochure for those who want more.

If you read this, please wish me blessing and peace for this journey. And please pray that my audacity will stir interest all across the United States, but especially in Maryland, where Governor McNalley has the power to step into this case and actually DO something, whereas all I can do is make a fool of myself on a cross-country tour.

And if you have not yet signed the online petition, please do so at this site: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/Free-Elsa-Newman

Thank you, friends. And feel free to check around you for others in Newman's situation. Estimates range as high as 1 in 7 prisoners who may be innocent of the crime for which they are imprisoned. A despicable failure in the so-called American justice system.

Peace...blessings...love and light...

Aine

Not Your Usual Elsa Newman Story!!!!

2009-09-07T17:53:00.000-07:00

But a story of a whole other kind...and one I cannot resist sharing.

Today I met a man, a grizzled, softhearted and kindly man, a Viet Nam veteran whose eyes and heart still fill with tears when he thinks, reads or writes about things that happened to him as the Viet Nam War was drawing to a close.

May I call him “Bill”? That’s not his real name, but although he gave me permission to write this and to share the story of one particular experience that left him haunted and hurting, he wants to remain anonymous.

Bill was among the last servicemen sworn in at the time of the Viet Nam War. Unable to see himself struggling through steaming jungles, he enlisted in the Navy. The Navy promised him that if he would take and pass certain classes, he could serve as an electrician. He took them. He passed. And he was on his way to the far east, aboard ship.

One thing you should know before you read further: Bill wishes there might be some way men--and now women, too--might learn even a little about what to expect in war--even when that war has ended. He was, he says, totally unprepared for the things he saw.

This is the haunting story that he wrote as he was trying to recover from the horrors of one of his last days in the Navy

As the fall of South Vietnam was taking place in late April, 1975, I was proud to be a crew member aboard the USS Blue Ridge (LCC19) [photo above] and be called upon to take part in “Operation Freedom Wind,” the evacuation of the last Americans and of loyal South Vietnamese civilians. I was in the Navy, on a ship and mostly safe. I was not out in the jungles fighting the Viet Cong, dodging bombs and gunfire, but I nevertheless had experiences that still, to this day, haunt and trouble me greatly.

As the evacuation was going on--escaping and frightened civilians--as they were swimming and floating on almost anything that could float, I had to watch helpless from the deck of the ship, as multitudes of them drowned. There were old people, young people, women with their babies and their other children--all of them fighting to get close to the ship, get to safety.

It was horrible for me that I could do nothing to help them. I know that I was not responsible for them. But the guilt and shame that I have carried for the last 32-plus years have been unbearable.

The ship quickly became filled to capacity with the people we could safely bring on board. Even the helicopters bringing out evacuees had to find alternate landing places--and then the helicopters were ditched, to make room for these fleeing swarms of human beings.

As more and more people were able to climb on board, we were busy throwing overboard weapons, supplies--anything we could find to get rid of--just to make room for more people.

We were about a mile from shore, and as people weakened and fell away from their flotation devices, I had to watch them drown. They were just too exhausted to hang on anymore. There were literally hundreds of people just out of my reach--out of our reach.

This event will stay with me for the rest of my life. I cannot escape it. Sometimes when I hear a helicopter--or even a spinning washing machine--it is like I am right back there on the ship, watching people who desperately needed help, people who were reaching out to us. But they were not within range of help, not by me…not by anyone else.

On that same occasion, one helicopter brought aboard a wounded Marine. He was pretty banged up, and I assisted the team to get him to sick bay. I never knew if he turned out OK, if he died or not. I just knew that I had seen another man in pain. And I realize that watching this guy, all bloody and screaming, created in me the same feelings of watching all those helpless people drown.

After the war I began abusing alcohol, just so I would be able to get to sleep without nightmares--the faces and the screams of those people, both the hundreds in the water and the single Marine I helped to sick bay.

After treatment for alcohol abuse, at the VA in Seattle, I no longer drink. But drinking was the only way I could cope back then.

CHILDHOOD LOST...

2009-08-19T10:45:00.001-07:00

Please add your signature to the online petition for Elsa Newman and her sons:

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/Free-Elsa-Newman
[the website above is not clickable; please copy and paste]

TRANSCRIBED: material from flyer

2009-08-12T08:37:00.000-07:00

It seems that the material on the flyer I posted previously may be difficult for some of you to read. Here then is a transcription of the material to help you:

"This was a beautiful, loving family. Then mom expected the courts to protect her children from abuse. Everything went topsy-turvy. Now mom is in prison for a crime she did not commit, and the children are stuck with the very person who abused them.

Please sign our petition and ask friends to sign. Your signatures help not only this family but thousands of others whose cries for help--along with the expectations of their concerned mothers--were silenced.

Speak up. Judge righteously. Proverbs 31:9

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/Free-Elsa-Newman

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/2/free-elsa-newman--save-her-kids-from-abuse

The best way to reach these to sites is probably to copy and past the addess into your browser.

Elsa Newman is innocent--please sign the petition

2009-08-12T08:25:00.001-07:00

The problem with this petition has been that signatures don't seem to be showing up on the original petition. Over 100 people have told Friends of Elsa Newman that they have signed the petition...yet the number of signatures remains steadfast at 277.

I have written to the petition site. As yet I have heard nothing from the managers of the site.

My suggestion? Sign both of these. The original petition is in black below...the new version is in blue. [An apt color scheme, I suspect, for a woman and children who have been battered, abused and bruised by the Maryland "justice" system, by the prison system, and by the abusive father of the two boys.]

If you wish to sign only one petition, perhaps the new version would be preferable, since it still seems to be accepting signatures. I'll be back with news about why signatures are not posting on the other one.

ORIGINAL: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/Free-Elsa-Newman

NEW VERSION: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/2/free-elsa-newman--save-her-kids-from-abuse

A LETTER TO ELSA NEWMAN'S SONS...

2009-08-09T17:28:00.000-07:00

Dear young men who have asked me not to use your names any longer,

Please notice that I respect your wishes, even though I must continue to write about the abomination your father has made of your lives, and the hell on earth he has created for your mother.

Her hell has more than one part, you know: one part, of course, is the imprisonment itself, unjust as it is, and the way she is treated in prison. Another part is her separation from you. And still another is her knowledge of the disclosures you made when you were much younger; your mother has to live every day of her life with the belief that your father abuses and molests you in every way he can think of.

And one more part of your mother's hell on earth is the certain knowledge that your father lies to you about her. Yes. He lies.

LIE: Your father told you that your mother planned to kill her older son, in order to save the younger one. LIE!

LIE: Your father told you that your mother pushed you down the stairs. LIE! In reality, your father pushed your mother down the stairs while she was holding a baby...the older of the two of you.

LIE: Your father told you that Margery Landry tried to kill him. LIE! If she was even remotely thinking of murder, why did she have only two bullets in the gun?

LIE: Your father told you that it was crazy for you to call Margery Landry "Aunt Margie." LIE! Lots of kids call their mom's best friend aunt...or other friends of the family aunt or uncle. It is actually quite common in the very finest of families.

LIE: Your father tells you that your mother is crazy. LIE! Your mother is a woman unjustly imprisoned. She is a mother who loves her children far beyond what anyone who has not had children can understand. She is a mother who suffers the tortures of the damned as guards, officers and other inmates turn their anti-Semitism on her. She suffers abuse at the hands of guards, officers and other inmates who resent her because she is educated...because she is an attorney...because she is gentle and kind...perhaps even because some of them actually believe in her innocence.

LIE: Your father tells you that your mother tested as borderline--or some such psychological drivvel--when she was tested by a court-appointed psychologist. LIE! Actually, your mother tests well within the normal range; any statement to the contrary is based on a whim...just something the psychologist felt like saying. [Incidentally, do you know that this is the same psychologist who said that Mr. Castillo, the father who drowned his children in a bathtub, was normal and sent the children off to him on unsupervised visits--and to their death?]

LIE: Your father tells people--and perhaps you as well--that he has your welfare at heart. Pardon my Spanish, but nierde! nierde! nierde! LIE!

LIE: Your father tells you that HE is the one who tests normal. LIE!

LIE: Your father tells you that your mother and Margery Landry had an unhealthy relationship, in which Landry was manipulated by your mother to do your mother's dirty work. LIE! Your father is the one who manipulates others to do HIS dirty work.
Just like he got you to write all that horrible stuff online about your mother.

LIE: Your father tells you that there were other things abnormal about the relationship between your mother and Landry. LIE! Margery Landry was a friend of your family. She was also a long-time friend of your mother; the two, as I understand it, were like sisters.

So what am I saying here? Bluntly, I am saying that your father is an immense liar...a mammoth, continuous liar...a remorseless liar. And that is in addition to the fact that you and I and your brother and your mother all know: he is a living lie, because he is a pedophile.

Time to end. I could say a lot more. I will refrain for now.

QUESTION: WHAT KIND OF PARENT...

2009-08-09T17:16:00.000-07:00

...allows his children to "ramble" around the back of a Jeep Cherokee and without seat belts...in heavy traffic...or on the highway...and all the time?

ANSWERS:

A parent who virtually always neglects to watch for his children's safety.
A parent who watches them closely otherwise--every word...every gesture...every thought they share with their unjustly imprisoned mother.
A father who molests, beats, exploits and otherwise debases his children, in order to satisfy his dark urges.
A father who is not "raising" his children but using them.
A "man" who lied on the witness stand to take these children's mother away from them.
A father who has been heard to say, "I don't give a damn if the kids grow up fucked up."

This is the kind of parent who lets his children ride without seat belts...who abuses their mother...and who abuses those children in every way he can think of.

ATTENTION TAMPA AND THE MAN WITH THE INITIALS A.S.

2009-08-09T16:47:00.000-07:00

She's back! You know who I'm talking about: the little, old lady from Amboy, Washington who thinks you're a pervert of the grow-your-own-victims persuasion. That is to say, a so-called "father" who molests his sons.

Yes...that little, old lady would be me.

And I have a few questions for you:

You took your sons to visit their mother--Elsa Newman, #921975, Maryland Correctional Institute for Women at Jessup--in prison just over a week ago, did you not?
Why is their mother in prison? All she did was try to protect her sons from you, the perpetrator they accused of all kinds of abuse--including sexual, physical, mental, emotional and anything else you could think of.
Could it be that you lied on the witness stand?
Could it be that other witnesses also lied?
Why do you cut visits short? Your kids are supposed to see their mother for two hours each time you take them to the prison. Yet you cut the visits to an hour and a half--or sometimes just an hour and a few minutes. I'm sure you understand the importance of every second to a mother who sees her children only once a year. I'm sure you understand that. Cutting the visits short...insisting that the boys leave at your whim, when they are hanging back, trying to get another word or two with their mother...sounds to me like sheer vindictiveness. Well, duh...what else would I expect from a man who molests his own sons?
Why do your sons look so tired when you take them there? Your elder son has bags under his eyes from weariness. And the bags under his eyes were worse on the second day.
Why do the boys behave differently on the second day of visits? Do you coach them overnight? Do you threaten? Do you abuse again? What is it that you do to break them in preparation for the second day of visitation?
Your younger son was far more solemn and careful on the second day. What did you do to change his aspect that way?
Surely you do something to keep them from drawing closer to their mom. I wonder what horrors would thus change children overnight.
And what about the older boy's taking your side against his little brother? That's what seems to be going on. Is the older boy trying to curry favor with his father? Is he trying to earn points for himself, so that he is less frequently and less viciously abused? What is going on here?

Someday, the truth will out. And what will you do then, AS? Whatever will you do then, when all the people you have abused, threatened, humiliated, cheated, intimidated and used let the world know what you are? And I include, of course, your own sons, who know better than any of the rest of us that the first four letters of your last name describe you to perfection.

Take careful note, Mr. S--THE TRUTH WILL OUT!

HOW DO I MAKE THIS ADD UP?

2009-07-17T20:31:00.000-07:00

WHY? WHY? WHY? AND WHY? AGAIN!--PLUS A COUPLE OF HOW?S OR SO

Elsa Newman sees her sons twice yearly, by court order. Their father testified against their mother. His testimony, despite the fact that it was composed of smiling, bald-faced lies and a sociopathic bent, apparently was a huge factor in sending their mother to prison for a crime which she had not committed. The crime, in fact, did not even exist. She was accused of attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder.

In the first place there was no murder attempt--there was only an attempt by a family friend to search for evidence of the molestation the boys had disclosed. True, this search ended with shots being fired. Why? Because Margery Landry found Slobodow, nearly naked, in bed with his younger son, who was completely naked. Apparently Landry found Slobodow in the process of molesting the child. When she tried to pull him off the boy, Slobodow attacked her, knocked her to the floor, and tried to turn her gun and its two whole bullets on Landry. When the gun went off, one bullet struck Slobodow in the thigh.

In the second place, there was no conspiracy. Margery Landry acted on her own and undertook the search on her own initiative--while Newman was out of the state--and despite the fact that Newman had told Landry to keep away from Slobodow and the boys.

Thus it is that Elsa Newman sees her sons only twice a year. She is unjustly imprisoned at Maryland's Correctional Institution for Women at Jessup. Technically, she was given a life sentence for these two non-existent crimes. All but 20 years, however, were suspended.

With that background, I come to my list of why and how questions:

1. During divorce proceedings, and when Newman's elder son was still a small boy, Newman discovered a tiny toy clutched in one sweaty palm when his father returned him from a visit. Why did the boy look at her, terrified, as if begging her not to mention what she had noticed? Why such fear? It was a toy his mother had given him, and he could not afford to have his father know that he had been carrying it--perhaps during the entire length of the visit. I have wondered if he carried it, perhaps, as some kind of charm to ward off his father's sexual assaults?

2. Another time Newman found this same son wearing two t-shirts. When she started to ask about that, the same look of terror appeared. The second t-shirt, under the one his father could see, was an old, worn and cherished shirt his mother had given him. He dared not allow his father to know how he loved it. Was there, perhaps, a huge price to pay for loving a gift from his mother.

3. When their father picked them up for a visit with him, the boys would sometimes cling to furniture and scream and beg not to have to go. They were more than frightened of visits with their father...they were terrified. At that time, they preferred their mother--who tried to protect them--to their father, from whom they so desperately needed protection, considering the unspeakable sexual, physical and other abuses he heaped upon them.

4. Both boys, when very young, obviously loved and respected their mother. Don't these examples--only three of many I have at hand--demonstrate their deep love for their mother and their preference for her? Do they not also demonstrate a deep-seated fear of their father?

5. Why, when these boys have not lived with their mother for over five years, has the elder one now apparently turned against her?

6. Why does the older boy write filth and vulgarity when he writes to me about his mother? Is the father forcing him to write like that? Is he writing like that in order to get on his father's good side? Is he afraid? Perhaps even for his life?

7. Newman is seldom permitted to talk to her younger son. When she calls, she usually hears, "He's visiting friends." Why isn't she allowed to talk to him?

8. In a recent call, when she was finally allowed to speak briefly with the younger boy, he virtually whispered into the phone, "I love you, Mom." Why did he have to whisper?

9. In that same call and in that same whisper, Newman's younger son added, "[My brother] loves you, too." The abusive father is permitted by the courts to monitor all phone calls. Was the boy hoping he could keep his father from hearing? Was he trying to save himself from abuse at the hands of a father psychiatrists have called "a sadist"?

9. When the boys visit their mother in prison, why is the younger son friendly and wanting to touch his mother on their first day of their visit...and yet on the second day, he seems distant and afraid to get too close to her?

10. When the boys make their semi-annual trek to Maryland to visit their mother, why does their father cut the visits short? When you only have eight hours a year to see your sons in person, why would any decent human being leave before the time was up?

10. Why doesn't any of this add up? When they were younger, both boys loved Newman and preferred being with her to being with their father. But now that they haven't lived with her for years, have lived, instead, in their father's house his physical custody and under threat of his constant abuse, at least one of them has learned to spout crude, vile and vulgar messages about his mother and has even declared, "Until this is over, I don't have a mother."

They both loved her, but now, living with their father, one of them says, "She's crazy," and the other is mostly not allowed to talk to her.

They both loved her, but now, under their father's influence, the older boy--or someone pretending to be him--started a petition on Care2, stating that his mother is mentally unbalanced and should not be allowed out of prison. He even got a few signers--very few--before someone shut the petition down.

They both loved her. So why has at least one of them seemed to turn against her?

Gotta say it again: it simply doesn't add up.

Maryland's Shame--Children in Custody of Abuser

2009-07-17T18:44:00.000-07:00

[Just in case you have a hard time reading the web address for the petition: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/Free-Elsa-Newman]

Once upon a time...

...there was a happy family: a mother who loved her two sons and tried to protect them from the father they said was molesting them; the two sons; and a grandmother who also adored them.

Then disaster struck. Please see the flyer below:

WHERE ARE THE ETHICS IN THE COURTS OF THE STATE OF MARYLAND?

2009-07-08T21:56:00.000-07:00

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/Free-Elsa-Newman

And what about Maryland’s prisons?
Are prisoners treated according to some code of demoralization or what?

It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything here. I guess I got discouraged. For that an apology is due, and I duly apologize.

The reality is that my discouragement and lack of blogging may well have contributed to the dismal situation Elsa Newman continues to endure at Maryland’s Correctional Institution for Women at Jessup.

People who have previously read here probably remember the name of Elsa Newman. Please allow me to refresh your memory as to said “dismal situation.”

First let me remind you how firmly I believe Elsa Newman’s imprisonment is unjust. As far as I can tell from extensive research into the Newman case, Newman did nothing to deserve prison. Back in the days when Doug Gansler, now Maryland’s Attorney General, was a mere state’s attorney in Montgomery County, Elsa Newman was incarcerated. I have long believed that Gansler rode to political success in Maryland partly on the back of the case he made against Newman. If you disagree? Well…that’s OK…but you might want to take a trip back through some of the things I wrote earlier before you make a final judgment.

At that time of the Newman trial, Doug Gansler’s chief assistant was a woman named Katherine Winfree. Make no mistake, Winfree is probably one of the best prosecutors in the United States. She is so good that she can make a case out of lies and partial truth, witnesses who look good on the stand but are willing to lie through their teeth, and suspicions she created by well-placed questions and her own creative ideas.

In my opinion, Stephen Friendman lied. He was Newman’s former attorney.
Maryland’s highest court said his testimony should never have been allowed at all. But he testified against Newman, saying she had sat in his presence and plotted to kill her estranged husband. Pardon the expression, but that’s bullshit. I wonder sometimes how Friedman manages to eat, using a mouth that spouted such infamy. Again: BULLSHIT! Elsa Newman is an extremely intelligent woman. Had she wanted to kill Arlen Slobodow, she would never have sat in the presence of an attorney she despised and for whom she had literally no respect, an attorney she accused of overbilling [an attorney who, for example, would “step out for a moment to get a Coke” and then bill her for the 45 minutes or so she sat in his office waiting for his return], and attorney she wanted to fire because she did not trust him…Newman would never have sat in the presence of such a man and plot ANYTHING, let alone murder.

Another witness was the aforementioned estranged husband, Arlen Slobodow, now of Tampa, Florida. If you’ve read any of what I said before, you know that I firmly believe Slobodow is a sociopath as well as a child molester who has repeatedly assaulted his own children sexually and in every other way possible. And you know what it is that a sociopath can do best? Lie! And be personable in his lying. He made, I am sure, a fantastic witness for the prosecution. Eloquent. Charming. Apparently candid. Said anything he wanted and made it believable. And he somehow made the jury believe that his estranged wife had plotted with a family friend to kill him.

More bullshit.

There would come a day when the family friend, Margery Landry, would testify also. According to her testimony, Newman knew nothing of what would happen that night in January. No plot. No conspiracy. No attempt to murder, for that matter.

Landry broke into Slobodow’s house, looking for evidence of child abuse. She found it. Oh, boy, did she find it! Slobodow was in bed--nearly naked--with the younger of his two sons, and the boy was completely naked. It sounds to me like Landry stumbled across a scene of abuse-in-progress. She was the child’s godmother. She loved the boy as she would have loved a child of her own. And she found him there in bed with his father, both nude, and apparently in the middle of a sexual assault upon the child. What would you have done? Crept quietly away? I doubt it. Nor did Landry. She lost it. This government employee, highly intelligent, and with the highest security clearance possible in the US foreign service, scheduled for an ambassadorial post at her next promotion…she completely lost it. She saw her godchild under attack. She entered the bedroom and try to pull the molesting father away from his son. The father struggled, shoved Landry to the floor, tried to turn on her the gun she carried for protection…and it went off. One bullet struck him in the thigh. The other, I understand, struck a wall. And she had no more bullets. Only two. Hardly the arsenal of a woman intending to kill.

After than, Landry fled. Slobodow called 911 and set up the prosecution case for them with his first words: “My wife sent someone to kill me.”

And it was there that the prosecution took its stand. As if the words that Arlen Slobodow spoke had been true, the prosecution set about the convict Elsa Newman of conspiracy and attempted murder, when she was guilty of neither one.

Elsa Newman is guilty of only one thing: she tried to protect her two sons from an abusive father. They had disclosed abuse to their mother, to family friends, to doctors, to psychiatrists, to law officers. All these people had seen signs of abuse. Some of them reported the abuse.

Margery Landry, unbeknownst to Newman, went in search of evidence in Slobodow’s own house. And the result? Elsa Newman was tried and sentenced to prison for a crime of which she was innocent. Furthermore, she had known nothing of this crime until police informed her what had happened and she was arrested…tried…convicted…sent to prison.

And this is what passes for justice in the state of Maryland?!? If so, Maryland has no justice…nothing but injustice. Shame on the state of Maryland. Shame on Montgomery County. Shame on Doug Gansler and Katherine Winfree and Stephen Friedman and Arlen Slobodow who wanted things their way and happily dissembled to get their way.

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/Free-Elsa-Newman

ANTI-SEMITISM? In Maryland's Correctional Institution at Jessup?

2009-07-08T21:52:00.000-07:00

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/Free-Elsa-Newman

Elsa Newman is a Jew. She is white. She is above average intelligence. She is an attorney. She was a US government employee. She was very good at what she did.

Then she was unjustly arrested…unjustly accused…unjustly tried…unjustly convicted…and unjustly imprisoned, despite her innocence.

And now? I believe her to be the victim of anti-Semitism, racial prejudice, intellectual prejudice, status prejudice, professional and perhaps any other kinds of prejudice you can think of.

Humor me while I present a few examples:

Another inmate, head down, walks by Newman muttering, “Kill all Jews!”

Her cell is searched, frequently and repeatedly and left in a mess by the officials who search. She seems to be under far greater scrutiny than other prisoners.

Medications that are to be issued to her from the prison pharmacy in a blister pack containing a full months supply--meds which are a matter of life-and-death for Newman--sometimes appear in a blister pack containing only three or four pills, rather than the month’s supply.

Newman lost her job. She could not seem to get another.

A roommate--much larger than Newman, who is small and appears somewhat frail after her years of fighting for her sons and for the justice which has, thus far, eluded her--stands in a doorway so Newman cannot leave the cell.

Another time the same roommate is on her top bunk, watching TV. As Newman attempts to walk past her, the roommate reaches out to adjust her TV, and the movement effectively “clotheslines” Newman.

Same roommate, seemingly a lesbian, makes a pass at Newman. When Newman does not respond as the roommate desires, since the roommate apparently wants her to become something she is not, the roommate begins urging her to fight. “Come on girl. Let’s fight. Let’s go down!” You should know that this roommate is a woman who sent one of her previous roommates to the infirmary.

Same roommate leaves bloody sanitary napkins on the sink. When Newman reports this to guards and requests assistance, she is ignored.

Same roomate is in her top bunk when Newman fixes herself a cup of tea and sits on her bed, preparing to drink it. The roommate throws her legs over the edge of her top bunk and begins to swing them--kicking the cup and spilling scalding hot tea all over Newman.

Newman requests another cell. There is another woman who has a cell to herself and is willing for Newman to move into that cell with her. Officers and guards tell Newman there is no cell available.

Newman repeats her request to move--or to have the offensive roommate moved. Newman is informed that any roommate problems are obviously her own fault, since she has had six roommates and they all left. Hmmmmm.

Two of those roommates were released. Two were injured and had to be moved to a cell where they could have lower bunks. One stole her blind.
And then there was the most recent roommate, of whom I have been speaking, the one who said to her, “You should have been burned when all the other Jews were!” [I wonder if the woman knows when the Holocaust occurred. Probably not, if she thinks Newman is old enough to have lived through it!]

Oh, my, yes! Clearly all the roommate problems were caused by Elsa Newman! Mmmmmm-hmmmmm! NOT!

Anyhow, as the story continued, Newman was finally moved…to an older part of the prison where the rooms are smaller and darker, and where, in her cell, the hot water did not work.

About this same time, a problem appeared when Newman went for her kosher breakfast. Now with this kosher breakfast, Newman is supposed to get two hard-boiled eggs. Her previous roommate--the one who wanted her to fight--works in the kitchen. Lo and behold, on the day after Newman moved, she received, instead, two raw eggs for her breakfast. You figure it out.

In the process of the move, some of Newman’s things were stolen. Logically enough, she complained. The Lieutenant to whom she spoke ignored her. When she complained again, the Lieutenant told her “If you complain once more that you had things stolen, I’ll put you on lock.” [Newman would be locked into her cell and not be able to leave.]

It begins to look to me like one finds the same kind of “justice” in Maryland prisons as one finds in Maryland’s courts. I’ve heard it said--I’d never say it myself, of course--but I’ve heard it said that Maryland has one of the most corrupt systems in the country. However, as I have researched the case of Elsa Newman, I begin to entertain just the teensiest bit of suspicion.

Now things change slightly. Enter the picture, but from the opposite side of the country, a little, old lady by the name of Aine O’Brocken, from the state of Washington. O’Brocken [yes, that would be me] writes to Gary Maynard, head of Maryland’s Department of Corrections and Public Safety, and…OMG…at last…someone in the state of Maryland who will take me seriously--and reply! At last, someone in the state of Maryland I can respect!

His email was to the effect that he would send someone to investigate my allegations.

And you know what? The day he sent someone to investigate, Elsa Newman got hot water in her cell! It was still the crummy, frumpy cell in the old part of the prison. But it had hot water! Wow!

Shortly thereafter, she was moved again. This time she had lots of volunteer help from other prisoners and from guards. Nobody stole anything. And nobody threatened lockdown. Hmmm. A great improvement, I must admit. And, what was unusal, perhaps, she had no new roommate.

Lack of a roommate was unusual, however, and shortly thereafter, other prisoners took up a spiteful cry: “Oooooh, Elsa! You have your own condo!”

And then came further harrassment: one of the guards manipulated a situation and issued Newman a ticket. Understand now, Newman tries her best, both to be a cooperative prisoner and not to make waves or draw attention to herself. She tries to follow all the rules. She does not get tickets.

This time, however, she did. The guard claimed she had disappeared from the area where she was supposed to be, the area for which she had been issued a pass. There were, however, cameras in that area, which showed that Newman had NOT disappeared. Nevertheless, the guard issued the ticket. Oh…and I must add, that the guard waited until the following day to issue it, and it was authorized by a Lieutenant who had not even been on duty when the supposed “disappearance” occurred. Tickets, you see, are supposed to be issued on the day of a supposed infraction. And the authorizing/signing officer is supposed to be one who was on staff and working at the time of the supposed infraction.

Enter O’Brocken again. What a nuisance this obnoxious little, old lady can be!

Another letter to Gary Maynard. No word back this time, but the ticket was disappeared. And as to the “condo”? Newman shortly had a roommate.

Not a perfect outcome, perhaps…but something.

And I repeat, I am gratified that I have found one man to respect in the Maryland system--one man who would take action on behalf of an abused prisoner and try to insert some degree of fairness and justice into an unfair and unjust situation.

Thank you, Mr. Maynard.

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/Free-Elsa-Newman

WHAT IS A MOTHER TO DO?

2009-04-30T13:02:00.001-07:00

...when she is in prison, by the dictates of the American "justice" system...when she is--by the dictates of that same system--deprived of any but minimal contact with her children, and that only through the custodial parent... when she has heard the children disclose terrible sexual abuse by their father, the custodial parent mentioned previously...when the children are so frightened of their father that they will no longer attempt disclosure to anyone...when no one in the legal system will acknowledge the possibility that she might be right...when all she can do for her herself is try to hold her head up and deal with the realities of her imprisoned life.. when all she knows in the deep places of her spirit that her children are in a prison that is, if anything, worse than her own...when all she can do for those children is weep.

Besides begging authorities to listen to her and take her seriously, what on earth is this mother to do???

Courageous Kids....a message for **** and

2009-04-22T12:16:00.001-07:00

COURAGEOUS KIDS NETWORK
P.O. Box 1903, Davis, CA 95617
www.courageouskids.net

We, the Courageous Kids Network, are a growing group of young people whose childhood was shattered by biased and inhumane court rulings, which forced us to live with our abusive parent, while restricting or sometimes completely eliminating contact with our loving and protective parent. We know how horrible it is to be forced into the arms of an abuser. We have been there. We are now free.

We have some suggestions for you who have to live with a batterer or molester because an attorney, an evaluator, a mediator, or a judge did not believe you.

Contact us at www.courageouskids.net from a safe computer (your friend, school, library) and post a blog on our messageboard with your name, age, school, and what you have suffered.
Mail pictures of your bruises or other pictures to P. O. Box 1903, Davis, CA 95617.
Keep telling people about the abuse. Don�t stop, no matter what. Tell someone new at least once a month. Tell your teacher. Tell your principal. Tell your school counselor. Tell your coach. Tell your therapist. Tell your friends� parents. Tell the police. Call 911. Keep on telling. Ask for advice and protection.
File a complaint against your court-appointed attorney if your were not protected by the attorney. Just write what the attorney did or did not do and fill out the form at www.calbar.ca.gov/state/calbar/calbar_generic.jsp?cid=10179
Call a good attorney and tell him or her exactly what is happening to you � when, where and how often you are abused. Ask that the attorney replace your court-appointed attorney.
Write a letter to the judge asking the judge to get rid of the attorney.
Get evidence. If you get raped, don�t wash. Go right to the emergency ward of a hospital with a rape trauma unit so they can do a DNA test on the sperm. If you can get pornographic computer pictures with you in the pictures, give them to the police right away and let us know who you gave the pictures to.
Always tell the truth about the abuse, even if you are threatened or hurt, or if there are threats against people you love. This is really important, especially when you talk to court people.
Don�t hurt yourself! You will one day be free. We care about you and need you to join us.
This needs to come from you. The court always blames things on our mothers, so be careful not to tell the perpetrators about the Courageous Kids. We are counting on you.

With honor and respect for all your courage,

The Courageous Kids

HOW MANY CHILDREN MUST DIE?

2009-03-31T09:08:00.000-07:00

How many dead children will it take? Courts need to start listening when children say they don't want to go with their father. Courts need to start listening when mothers say their children are not safe with their father.

Remember the Castillo case in Maryland? Three children drowned in a bathtub--because the court refused to listen when a mother said the children were not safe in unsupervised visits with their father.

And what about the two Slobodow boys--who accused their father of virtually unspeakable sexual molestation...of all kinds of other abuses...and of child pornography? Well...what about them? They now live in Tampa, Florida, with their father--who gained custody of the boys by default when he and his attorney, in cahoots with the Montgomery County prosecutor, managed to convince two juries that their mother had tried to have their father killed. This, despite the fact that Maryland's highest court opined that there was absolutely nothing to connect their mother, Elsa Newman, with the breaking-and-entering crime of family friend, Margery Landry.

There was no murder attempt. There was no conspiracy. Landry acted on her own, and in fact, acted behind Newman's back while Newman was out of the state, attending a wedding.

And now we have another case in Illinois. Once again, a mother said to law enforcement, "I don't want to send my children to him. They are not safe with him!" And the courts and law enforcement laughed her to scorn.

Now her sons Duncan and Jack are dead. Their father has apparently committed suicide.

The mother has blamed the courts and the legal system.

McLean County State's Attorney Bill Yoder said at Monday's news conference that he was not exactly sure what Leichtenberg referred to.

Perhaps Mr. Yoder had to take some kind of IQ test before he became State's Attorney in order to prove that he is sufficiently inept and lacking in intelligence to provide such an answer when an agonized mother says the judicial system failed her. She means, Mr. Yoder, that the American system of "justice"...the Illinois legal system...the prosecutor's office...ALL OF YOU failed to listen to her when she did not want her sons to spend time with their father, her former husband.

Read on for more of the story.

Sheriff: Ill. boys, father died in murder-suicide
By DAVID MERCER Associated Press Writers
7:12 PM CDT, March 30, 2009

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Two young central Illinois boys missing for three weeks were found dead in the back seat of their father's car, apparently killed by their dad before he took his own life, authorities said Monday.

A 911 call led authorities in rural Putnam County to a remote spot Sunday night where they found 9-year-old Duncan Connolly and his 7-year-old brother, Jack. They discovered the body of 40-year-old Michael Connolly about 60 yards away. The boys, from the small town of Leroy, were the subject of a national search after their father failed to return them to their mother on March 8 after a weekend custody visit. The couple divorced in 2006 and Connolly had only recently been allowed to keep his sons overnight. Autopsies were being conducted Monday afternoon, but McLean County Sheriff Mike Emery, whose agency investigated the boys' disappearance, and Putnam County Sheriff Kevin Doyle said the case was being investigated as a double homicide-suicide.

Neither would discuss many details of the case at a news conference Monday, including how the boys and their father died, how long they had been dead or why they ended up in a rural location about 60 miles north of the area where the lived. The sheriffs said they would respect the family's wishes in withholding details. "Our hearts and prayers now are with Jack, Duncan and (their mother) Amy Leichtenberg," an emotional Emery said, his voice wavering.

Leichtenberg issued a statement expressing her own heartbreak. "No parent should have to bury their babies," she said. "Duncan and Jack, Mommy loves you to the heavens and back." Leichtenberg also blamed the courts. I feel that the judicial system failed me," Leichtenberg said, without elaboration. "I pray that the courts listen to the warnings from other parents like me."

McLean County State's Attorney Bill Yoder said at Monday's news conference that he was not exactly sure what Leichtenberg referred to, but his office had recently filed four "criminal actions" against Connolly and that his continued visitation rights had been under discussion.

Connolly was to have dropped the boys off at the police department in Leroy after picking them up there March 6, Emery said. A court order had barred Connolly from contact with Leichtenberg, according to Bloomington attorney Helen Ogar, who represented her.

The order also initially prevented Connolly from seeing his sons. Connolly was only allowed to start keeping his children overnight without supervision last December, Ogar said. Connolly had never hurt Leichtenberg or their sons, but scared her because he called often, sometimes threatening suicide and at other times trying to intimidate her or convince her to come back to him, Ogar said. Police investigating the boys' disappearance said Connolly had threatened to kill himself, and had a history of gambling problems and been treated for depression. He worked as a pharmaceutical sales representative, making a "good living," Ogar said.

Before the weekend the boys disappeared, Leichtenberg did not want to turn the boys over to their father, Ogar said. "She was contacted by the Leroy police and told that she had to send them, that it was an arrestable offense (if she did not)," she said. Ogar said she told Leichtenberg that failure to give the boys to their father was a civil matter, not criminal, and told her not to turn them over if she didn't want to.

Authorities did not issue an Amber Alert in the case until the evening of March 8, roughly a day after they were due back to their mother. Leroy police did not issue the alert -- eventually issued by the McLean County Sheriff's Department -- because the agency did not believe the boys were in danger, Ogar said. An officer who answered the telephone at the Leroy Police Department Monday directed questions to police Chief Gordon Beck, whom he said was out of town.

Todd Roseberry, who represented Connolly over violations of the court order barring contact with Leichtenberg, said he was stunned by three deaths. "The Michael Connolly I knew was very affectionate and loved his kids," Roseberry said, adding that he hadn't spoken with Connolly since late last summer.

On Monday in Leroy, counselors came to schools to talk with friends of Duncan and Jack and other kids upset by the news. A lighted sign outside a hardware store in town read "Forever in our Prayers." A spokesman for Leichtenberg said Monday that if she ever doubted her sons would come home, she didn't show it. "I spoke to her last evening. She was in downtown Davenport, Iowa, handing out fliers and putting up posters," said family friend Brad MacAfee. "Every interaction I had with her, she had all the hope in the world she was going to see those boys."

Oh, my dear young man!

2009-03-21T14:25:00.000-07:00

"Checkmate
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data2/marylandstatecases/coa/2004/31a04.pdfThis is an official document directly from the trial of the trials websiteThis document proves not only is she mentally unstable as i said before............but that she has thought of killing her own children.....my brother. Her lawyer accidently told it to the prosecution in the trial.......Im not proud of this at all, i may have proven that i am not lying about my mother........but some thing i really wish i never found.I can now say im apathetic about whatever happens to my mom, i really dont care any more, after what she said about my brother, my mom can die of heart failure in prison and it wouldnt bother me.she is no longer my mom and i wont ever want to talk to her again"

For some reason young Mr. ******* Slobodow seems to believe that the material I have cited from his blog--please see above--is proof positive and final that his mother is insane and he has never been molested by his father.

On the other hand, the legal paper which HE cites, states quite clearly, in the majority opinion of Maryland's highest court, the court which heard the Newman case on appeal, that they could find absolutely nothing to connect Newman to the crimes committed by Margery Landry.

I fail to understand why this young man uses the term "checkmate." I was not aware that we were playing a game here. This is deadly serious: his mother is unjustly imprisoned. And ****** has turned against her. Now ****** is writing about his younger brother as though the boy were joining him in his anti-mother-proclaim-the-innocence-of-the-father campaign.

Give it up, *******. Your mother is innocent. Your father is a child molester. And I believe you either know it or you have dissociated.

Congratulations on opening the world up to your father, Arlen Slobodow, so that he can now venture out into the world and prey on other children--because you so vehemently defend him as a good and decent human being, when he is in fact quite the opposite.

Sheesh!

With the help of the evil one?

2009-03-21T12:27:00.000-07:00

Greetings, everyone: especially greetings to *******, ****, and Arlen Slobodow, who have long been the subject of my blogging on this site.

I’d say greetings also to Elsa Newman, but of course she is the mother who is unjustly imprisoned in the state of Maryland, so she will not get a chance to see this.

I suppose the people I am greeting are a bit disappointed to realize that I am back. But I have been gone for a couple of weeks due to taking time off from the stress of day-to-day life here in the land of Brocken.

While I was gone I had some random thoughts that struck me, and I believe I’ll share them with you.

You may have noticed in reading here that ******* has become quite vocal about the abuse and molestation he and his younger brother have suffered at the hands of his father. But his becoming vocal has taken the form of denial. He has called me a liar…a bitch…a fat slob...and has used an assortment of other terminology not nearly so polite.

The thought that struck me is this. Young Mr. ******* Slobodow is setting himself up to take a fall. How is that? Well, many men and boys who have been raped, molested or abused are not able to admit that fact until they reach their forties or fifties; it is, for many men, only at that time that the complete horror of what has been done to them somehow hits them full force. They become angry. They want justice.

Several states—including Florida, I believe—are now working on extending the statute of limitations for childhood abuse, molestation and rape. [From this page to G-d’s eyes, please…please…please.] What this means is that when children grow to adulthood…and when they reach that stage of recognizing and admitting the unspeakable horrors that have been imposed upon them, they will be able to take the issue to court and sue their molesters/abusers/rapists.

When young Mr. ******* Slobodow was even younger than he is now, he was quite vocal about the molestation. It was, in fact, ******* who had to have his hands pried from a table by legal authorities who came to force him to visit his father.

Obviously Arlen Slobodow would be quite pleased with *******'s insistence that the father never molested his sons. ******* is playing right into his father’s hands. It is greatly to the elder Slobodow’s advantage to have *******’s revocation on the internet.

So what will happen when ******* reaches the age of forty or fifty or so and is finally able to confront what happened to him? Well…his father will have a written record of a teenage *******’s denial that there ever was any molestation or abuse.

Kind of a sad plan, *******. A very sad plan, indeed, and one you may well live to regret.

Your father, Arlen Slobodow of Tampa, Florida, is a child molester. Does he limit his molestation and abuse to you and your brother? Or are your denials giving your father the freedom to exercise his pedophilia on other children, in addition to his two sons?

Are you helping create a monster, *******? No. The monster created himself--most likely with the assistance of the Evil One. But you may well be clearing the path for him—to other children who, like you, will be molested and abused and made the subject of child pornography.

Is that the path of a good Jew, *******? To help make life a living hell for other children and teenagers?

Why is this a worldwide epidemic?

2009-02-05T09:50:00.000-08:00

Defiant: mother tells why she took her son and ran
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Caroline Overington February 02, 2009
Article from: The Australian
MELINDA Stratton is a woman on the run. In April last year, she fled Australia with her four-year-old son, Andrew, to avoid a custody hearing in the Family Court.
In December, her husband, NSW deputy fire chief Ken Thompson, asked the court to lift a ban on identifying Andrew so he could launch an international campaign to find the boy.
Photographs of Andrew are now plastered on buses in Europe, and on billboards in England. Mr Thompson has launched a website, and a group email has gone around the world, urging people to contact Interpol if they see Ms Stratton.
Ms Stratton - a professional woman from Sydney's northern suburbs, who has an MBA, speaks French and German, and has lived and worked abroad - has so far managed to dodge the authorities, but yesterday emerged from seclusion to tell her side of the story.
A 10-page letter - the first contact between Ms Stratton and anyone outside her immediate family since last April - was provided to The Australian with no identifying marks. It was dated January 15.
Ms Stratton says she had no choice other than to flee Australia, because she had lost faith in the Family Court.
She says the balance of the court - once firmly in favour of granting custody to mothers - had tipped dramatically towards fathers. The Howard government's regime of "shared parenting" had given power to fathers at the expense of mothers.
"I have lost all faith in any form of justice coming out of Australia," Ms Stratton says.
"By remaining silent, however, I ensure that they (the Family Court) can continue to treat other mothers and children this way."
Ms Stratton does not say where she is hiding, but adds: "Currently, my son is well and happy.
"I spent $30,000 on court proceedings. I have been told I will receive harsh penalties as 'punishment' for leaving from the Family Court.
"I am in my 40s. My son is only four. His welfare and future are my priority.
"The decision to break all contact with my family and friends, leave my job and our home was not taken lightly.
"I also understand that the Family Court could take my son away from me and give Ken full custody of him, again as punishment."
The battle between Ms Stratton and Mr Thompson for access to Andrew is complex and bitter.
She says he suffers from depression and anxiety. He says he suffered from "mild anxiety" when his first marriage ended 20 years ago.
"It was nothing more than mild anxiety," he says.
"It was a very difficult time, but it was also a very long time ago."
When he launched his campaign to find Andrew, Mr Thompson said that his former wife had a "mental condition". On his blogs, he says she is "paranoid" and that she may harm Andrew rather than return him to Sydney.
Ms Stratton says she has "no mental problems whatsoever".
Ms Stratton has made more serious allegations against Mr Thompson but The Australian is constrained by law from publishing them. She made the allegations in December 2007, left the family home in January last year, and the country in April.
Mr Thompson strenuously denies his wife's claims, saying she "made all kinds of allegations ... the psychologists have said there is no reason to even investigate them".
Ms Stratton says the court psychologist is biased against mothers. She points to papers presented by Family Court practitioners in which they say that mothers can make up allegations of abuse and that children can be manipulated by their mothers to say they have been abused.
The identity of the psychologist is protected by the Family Law Act (1975).
The Family Court ignored Ms Stratton's complaints and ordered her to make their son available for supervised contact with his father three or four times a week.
She complied only a few times before fleeing.
Her move was not unprecedented: although there have been some high-profile cases of men leaving Australia with their children - such as in the case of Canadian mother Melissa Hawach, whose two children were taken to Lebanon by their Sydney-based father and freed by mercenaries - it is overwhelmingly the mother who flees.
According to the Attorney-General's Department, more than 120 children were abducted and taken out of Australia last year. In 75 per cent of cases, the mother was suspected of taking the children.
Mr Thompson said his former wife should return to Australia. "I'm not the one who has run away from the court," he said. "I'm the one who took court action.
"She's decided that the police were wrong, the courts were wrong, the psychologists are wrong, and she's right.
"If she's right, I don't understand why she doesn't come back and see the matter through in the Family Court.
"What kind of country do we live in if people can disagree with what the court says, and just take off?"
The AFP is conducting a criminal investigation into Andrew's abduction and subsequent disappearance.
Interpol has also issued alerts for Ms Stratton and Andrew in 187 countries.
The Family Court publication order warns anyone recognising Ms Stratton or her son not to approach them and to instead pass the information on to police.

The Children of Elsa Newman ARE NOT ALONE!

2009-02-03T12:33:00.000-08:00

The Slobodow children are not alone, although some of my writing in the past may have made it seem so, since I have so focused on the plight of their mother, unjustly imprisoned in the state of Maryland—and the plight of the two sons, in the custody of a father about whom they have revealed sexual molestation, as well as other abuses.

I’ve come to the conclusion that my scope has been too narrow to draw the attention I need.
Yes…my primary focus is still the Elsa Newman case. Newman is in the state of Maryland, charged and convicted of a crime committed and confessed to by another person who acted on her own, without any prior knowledge on the part of Newman…without any assistance from Newman…without any conspiring with anybody.

This other person is Margery Landry, a woman who entered the home of Arlen Slobodow—through, I believe, a basement window. She was in search of evidence that would convict Slobodow of the molestation of Newman’s children. What she found during her search was an Arlen Slobodow, father of Newman’s children, nude from the waist down, in bed with a child who was completely nude. She lost her cool and tried to “pull them apart,” a phrase which would indicate to me that there was something more than sleeping going on. Slobodow reacted by attempting to turn on Landry the gun she had carried “for protection,” since Slobodow had previously assaulted her—although I’m not sure exactly what protection two whole bullets would have been, and that was all Landry had loaded in the clip. At any rate, Slobodow was eventually shot in the leg, the angle of the bullet indicating that Landry had been on the floor when the gun went off.

The passage of time between Landry’s flight and Slobodow’s 911 call would indicate that he may well have taken time to erase from his computer the very evidence that Landry had sought.
By the time of the 911 call, Slobodow was ready to set up the case for the prosecution: “My wife,” he said, “sent someone to kill me.” Of course, even if that had been true, there is no way he could have known it. Beyond getting help for himself, his primary concern seemed to be, “Don’t let my wife take my kids.” As I’ve said before in this and other blogs—I’m sure he didn’t want Newman to take the kids at that point; had she had physical custody, even temporarily, she would have taken them to doctors and/or psychiatrists or other professionals who would have been able to verify the abuse that had been taking place.

So why do I think my focus has been too narrow? Because my sites are not getting enough hits from enough people who might be able to take a hand in further investigating this crime—and establishing what is so clearly a case of unjust conviction and unjust imprisonment.

Thus it seems to me that it is time for me to begin saying again that Elsa Newman is only one of thousands of women in the United States who have lost children to court-ordered abuse. In many, if not most of these cases, children are “kidnapped,” “stolen,” “betrayed” by courts they and their mother trusted; and then the children and placed in the custody of a parent who molests or abuses.

Glenn Sacks is radio talk-show host and a “man” who concerns himself with the rights of "fathers" [would "sperm donors" perhaps be a better term? Being a "sperm donor" does not make a man a father, any more than having a child in utero makes a woman a mother]—who are, in the cases I research, the primary molesters and abusers. He has said that he is interested in truth and is not riding a hobby horse for fathers’ rights. And yet when I wrote to him, in as unbiased an email as I could manage, he ignored me, and did not respond. Was I not sufficiently unbiased to suit his purposes? In other words, did I dare to presume in my email that it is sometimes the father who is at fault?

Children are being kidnapped by courts, with the help of psychologists who frame phony analyses of mothers and fathers and recommend unsupervised visitation for the fathers—or complete physical custody for the father, apparently disregarding a father’s habit of abuse.

Children are being snatched from protective mothers who have loved and cared for them, who have, in fact, been the primary caregiver for all of the children’s lives. The reason cited is often a nasty little invention called “Parental Alienation Syndrome,” or “PAS.” It was created by a man named Gardner, who insisted that sex with children is perfectly permissible and that the children, no matter how young, can learn to enjoy it.

Despicable!

What it means is that one parent—usually it is the father and his cohorts who accept this “syndrome that is not a syndrome—uses an accusation of PAS, no matter if that accusation is founded in fact or not. The courts seem to care little, if at all. And then these children are stolen by the court and placed in the custody of an abusive father.

Now we learn that there are actually “deprogramming centers,” where a child thus stolen can be sent for “treatment”. A recent case in Canada—a country I understand to be rife with the problem of stolen children and fathers’ rights initiatives aimed at protecting pedophiles —removed three girls from the custody of a mother they loved and sent them to such a “deprogramming center” in an unknown location, I believe in the US.

And who pays for this? Three guesses: and here is the answer, from an online group which allows me to join them, even though I am not among the ranks of mothers whose children have been stolen by the courts: “… you just asked if the mother is supposed to pay...the answer is yes, she is responsible for ALL cost, attorney's fees, therapy and travel, I think.”

Further: "Then if they can't pay they charge them with contempt, sanctions and sometimes put them in jail until they do pay. It's court ordered extortion."

In a similar fashion, a mother must pay for supervised visitation, if the court decides to “allow” her to see her child when said child has been handed over to a molester.

So desperate has this situation become that there is now a website for children who have thus been kidnapped, stolen from their mothers. The website is http://www.messagetoourchildren.com/ On this site, a mother can post a message for her kidnapped or stolen children. Many of these stolen children are computer savvy. They can get on the net, search for information about their mothers, and leave a message on the site to reconnect with Mom—who has left a message there for them.

We were all appalled when we learned that Roman Catholic priests were perpetrating abuse on children in their congregations. Now we find that this same sort of contamination has visited itself upon the Hassidic Jewish community: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99913807&sc=emaf

Or take a look at YouTube, where Rabbi Nochum Rosenberg speaks out against molestation by the men of the Hassidic community. On Rabbi Rosenberg’s forehead is the mark of a bullet wound. He came that close to dying in a drive-by shooting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZAn4cNEVmE

This is no problem of small proportions. It is huge. It is growing. It is visiting itself upon every community in this country—and in multiple other countries around the world. There was a day in the history of the US when a father literally “owned” his wife and children. He could legally beat his wife, although many states provided that he must use a stick no larger in circumference than the judge’s thumb. He could treat his wife in any way he wanted. He could treat his children any way he wanted. And it was nobody else’s business. They belonged to him.

Have we come full circle? Are wives and mothers and children again merely possessions, to be treated according to the whim of the husband and father? It seems so.

S0--as in the case of ******************[name had to be removed because of ongoing court procedures which endangered this mother's right and need to have custody of her daughter; I can no longer use the name, although I previously had permission, permission to use the mother's name in writing]--the father who demanded that she abort her daughter, declared, upon J*******’s refusal, that she should then prepare to beggar herself, because he would take possession of the child. He has more money. He has a new wife. He has the child, compliments of a corrupt court system. ******** is limited to the supervised visitation prescribed by the court at the time of theft of the little girl.

And********, of course, with no-to-low income, must spend much of what she has if she wants to see her daughter. Fortunately this case is not yet final. There are hearings coming up which allow the possibility that the kidnapped child will be returned to the mother. And I must note here that not only does this mother desperately want her child, but the child yearns to be back with her mother.

Fathers’ Rights. Fathers’ Rights Activists. Fathers’ Rights Courts. Fathers’ Rights Psychologists and Psychiatrists.

When will we arrive at the real issue: what are the rights of the child? What is in the best interests of the child?

The children of this country, the future of this country, are at risk here.

Or what about THIS terminology?

2009-01-31T09:08:00.000-08:00

"Extended suicide"--they call it extended suicide. Since the father sees the wife and children as his property/extensions of himself - to him it is just part of killing himself.

A term that clearly reflects the return to the Dark Ages of women's rights--when a woman had absolutely NO rights. Everything belonged to the man--her father or her son; everyone catered to the man; he made all the decisions, even life and death; a woman owned only the clothes on her back, and in some states not even those. And in some countries, young wives were thrown onto funeral pyres with a husband's body. History tells stories of women walking away, stark naked, from abusive relationships they could no longer bear.

Progress? Financial, but limited. Legally the right to abuse has been taken from husbands and fathers--but this also is limited by failure of the law to respond. "There's nothing we can do," say police officers to a woman with a restraining order. "He hasn't DONE anything to you yet." So she sits...and she waits...until he kills her. And THEN the police step in and an attempt is made at establishing some kind of justice--when it's really to late for any kind of justice.

"Familicide?"

2009-01-31T08:52:00.000-08:00

Familicide, the act of killing one's family, is more common among men than women and usually involves a gun, said Phillip Resnick, a psychiatry professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

What a horrible concept. If a man decides to kill himself, I guess that is his right. But why does he have to take his family along with him--his entire family, both wife and children--courtesy of a carefully-placed bullet or two or however many he decides he needs.

An Open Response to Hate Mail from Tampa, Florida

2009-01-28T11:43:00.000-08:00

Anyone who reads what I've been writing about Elsa Newman, knows by now that I firmly believe two things:
1. Elsa Newman is innocent and unjustly imprisoned at Maryland's Correctional Institution for Women at Jessup.
2. Newman's sons were in the past and may still be the objects of sexual molestation, by their father, as well as suffering virtually every other kind of abuse: physical, mental, emotional, verbal and spiritual, at their father's hands.

I believe the first because I have spent more than a year researching and writing about the Newman case, and I see so many holes in the prosecution case that sometimes I fear I could fall into one of them and get lost. This woman is clearly innocent and needs to have someone come forward and take on her case and get her out of prison.

I believe the second because I have spent more than a year researching and writing about the Newman case, and not only did the boys themselves disclose their father's abuse--to friends, to their treating psychiatrist, to law enforcement and to medical personnel, but I have even found a witness to the abuse, as well as reports of said abuse, filed by said treating psychiatrist.

I now have a third reason to believe that Ms. Newman's two sons were indeed the victims of molestation and other abuses: I have become the recipient of absolutely foul hate mail, proclaiming me a fat [true] liar [not true]. The writer of this hate mail claims to be ******* Slobodow, Ms. Newman's elder son. I am not sure this is true, although it is possible. It has been known in the past--whether because of Stockholm syndrome or whatever other reason: fear, coercion or what-have-you--for victims to side with their abuser.

If the author of my personal hate mail is indeed *******, then methinks the young man doth protest overmuch. It would have been sufficient to call me a liar once or twice--but I have received some twenty [ok, I really don't know for sure; it might be more than that...but who counts their hate mail?] comments and emails belittling me, calling me names, saying I'm a liar.

If the author is Arlen Slobodow, then methinks the man doth protest overmuch. It would still have been sufficient to make one or two comments. But now? Virtually every time I post I get a "hate mail" response. Hmmmmmm. Why would a person protest so much, unless the accusation is true?

Now the author has threatened me: he says he could post a video on his YouTube channel, so I could see him saying the words himself. Hmmmmmm. More overmuch of protestation.

Just so you can see what I'm talking about? Here's an example: first the hate mail; then my response.

----- Original Message -----
From: herbert slobodow
To: pugbubbe@earthlink.net
Sent: 1/24/2009 9:17:34 PM
Subject: "responce to yours"

No, you are not a feminist, feminist is a movement that actually benifited society, not tried to tear down the other branch, like you try to do to men.

You dont know what you are even talking about, if i have to ill post a youtube video of me talking about your crazy self, only fear of mine is that the little hits my channel gets may have to read your black blog of smears my mom has you write, i dont really care, any one with common sence knows your completely insane

And how can you talk if you have no idea about this situation, you are completely mistaken, hope your sane enough to understand, doubt it but ill say it one more time, YOU ARE WRITING FOR ONE OF THE SICKEST MOST DISPEAKABLE MOTHERS IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND

she manipulated me and my brother just so she wins custody and has the house to her and her friendshe manipulated her best friend into trying to kill my dadshe manipulated you to cyber bully me and lie about my dad and try to free this derranged woman who calls herself momshe used to scream at me, drop me off when i didnt want to do what she said at a place i was unfamiliar with and come back 2 mins laterAnd since feminism wanted equal treatment of woman the only thing that could be radical would be the higher treatment of woman, sexism,get your teminology right "teacher" lol need ice for the burn?
January 24, 2009 8:44 PM
******* said...
but srsly you cant be that lost to not understand anything i just said and ignore me shes pretending i dont exist because i am an obstical in her crazy world revolving around her idea that all men are evil and all woman are innocent, shes completely lost all touch of sanitymaybe she really is just "moms" responce to my blog, i mean she did say she writes for herand i could see mom being spite full towards men, because the way mom talks about my grand pa herbert sounds like she was abused by him

AND THEN MY RESPONSE TO "MR. SLOBODOW"--whichever one of them is writing this

You know, Mr. Slobodow--It might be a good idea if you made a video for YouTube. It might be a good idea if I could see and hear the words coming from your own mouth.

Then, instead of believing that Mr. Slobodow the elder is actually stooping to writing these and thus ruining his son's reputation, I could believe that Mr. Slobodow the younger is being forced to write them, under threat of god-only-knows what torments from Mr. Slobodow the elder--and thus ruining his own reputation.

OMG--I forgot to tell you! And it's so important, too! I've located a witness who can back up Ms. Newman's claims that Arlen Slobodow molested his sons sexually, as well as abusing them physically, mentally, emotionally, verbally and spiritually. There was at least one individual who witnessed and may actually have participated in abuse. And there are two other potential witnesses. I am in the process of looking the other two up now.

Have a good day, sir--but brace yourself, because the truth will out.

Aine--activist and advocate for battered/abused/molested children
and the mothers who try to protect them
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/Free-Elsa-Newman

Unjust Imprisonment--And It's Not Just Elsa Newman

2009-01-22T12:50:00.000-08:00

The deeper I plunge into research about the Elsa Newman case, the more disgusted awe I find myself feeling--as I come daily to awareness of new cases of unjust incarceration. Here is another one. I have simply copied and pasted what was sent to me. Please notice the petition link at the bottom of this entry. Please sign it and pass it on.

Please assist in making this case public. Forward information to at least 10 people. Request that they do the same.

IN THE STATE OF MISSISSIPPIScott County

• Jamie and Gladys Scott – Black sisters - were convicted in 1994 of armed robbery. 9, 10 or 11 dollars was stolen. The Scott sisters were sentenced to double life.• No one was injured, murdered or, hospitalized in this alleged robbery• At the advice of their attorney(s) – the sisters did not testify in their own behalf. 5 Witnesses testified for the state. All gave conflicting stories regarding this alleged robbery but, All Witnesses stated that Jamie and Gladys Had No Involvement in the robbery – testimony in lower court.

• There are three Signed affidavits stating that Jamie and Gladys had nothing to do with the crime. The lower court did not hear these affidavits.

• One affidavit states that this was a fight which Sheriff Marvin Williams -fabricated- into an armed robbery.

• Witnesses (perpetrators) were coerced, threatened and harassed, the transcripts state that sheriff told witnesses they would be sent to Parchman, the notorious penitentiary, "to be made out of a woman" if they did not lie on The Scott Sisters.

• The sisters were framed because of the Rasco Family name. Their cousin turned FBI informant sent a high white sheriff to prison for five years. Their father became involved in illegalities for which he paid the sheriff (an additional sheriff) off – for protection against the revenue men and to remain out of prison. When the father could or would, no longer pay the escalating bribe money, he was told that they would get him – even if it meant his daughters.

• A robbery of a restaurant occurred – two Black boys committed the robbery. The sheriff attempted to coerce the restaurant owners (two white women) to lie and say that Jamie and Gladys robbed the restaurant. He wanted to pin those charges on the sisters as well. White women – one dead the other severe dementia in nursing home.

• Sisters have been in prison 14 years. Their mother struggled to raise their children (one born in prison) and now their grand children.

• Judge Marcus Gordon presided over this case.

Link To Petition:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/Free-Jamie-Gladys/index.html
Link To Transcripts
http://www.scribd.com/doc/10571890/Jamie-and-Gladys-Scott-Transcript
Interview With Sister Sankofa Uhuru
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/spokentruth/2009/01/16/Black-Unity-1
Blogspot - Donations are needed
www.freejamieandgladyscott.blogspot.com
Flyer – Please Print and Circulate

http://www.scribd.com/doc/10595297/Free-Jamie-and-Gladys-Scott-Flyer

Why Aren't People Signing This Petition?

2009-01-20T13:26:00.000-08:00

If Elsa Newman were a polar bear, floating out to sea on a runaway ice floe…

…If she were a wolf, threatened by Sarah Palin’s “wolf’s-paw bounty”…

…If she were a penguin, somehow stranded in the Sahara desert…

…I would have thousands of signatures on her petition. Animal rights petitions garner such huge numbers of signatures.

But Elsa Newman is none of these. Instead, she is a merely a mother unjustly imprisoned at Maryland Correctional Institution for Women at Jessup.

And the last time I looked at Care2 Petition Site:

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/Free-Elsa-Newman

there were a mere 165 people who had signed the petition asking Governor O’Malley of Maryland to appoint an unbiased and open-minded investigator to check out the circumstances of Newman’s imprisonment, as well as to investigate the claims of her sons that they were molested by their father, who now has physical custody of the boys, by virtue of Newman’s imprisonment for a crime committed by someone else.

Where are all the people who care about the wolves and the bears and the penguins?
Won’t some of you work up the courage to sign this mother’s petition, as well as the animal rights petitions?

Yes…I know there is risk involved. OMG! What if you sign a petition and it has no effect? What if it turns out that the author of the petition—that would be me, the little, old lady retired schoolteacher who happens to believe Elsa Newman is innocent and also believes that her children were telling the truth when they said they were and probably still are being molested by their own father---what if that little, old lady turns out to be WRONG? And your name is there in black and white? And you’ve made a mistake by trying to gain attention and justice for this woman?

What if? Well, if you are worried about that, then please note the feature that allows you to keep your name anonymous on the net. You still have to write it in the appropriate place to sign. You still have to use your real email. But you can keep everything secret, and the site will just post “anonymous” and where you are from.

On the other hand, what if I am RIGHT?

What if you have turned your back on an innocent woman?

What if you have turned your back on her molested sons?

What if you have turned your back on the fact that there is a child molester living in Tampa, Florida—who may well be preying on other children in addition to his own?

What then will you say?

Why Did the Sinsiter Grinch Steal Christmas?

2009-01-19T10:38:00.000-08:00

How the Sinister Grinch Stole all the Christmases—
and a whole bunch of other stuff that went right back up the chimney
with the Christmases!—in smoke.

I sort of hate to admit this, but poking around on the internet is one of the interesting things I do with life. It smacks so much of snooping. However, I also must tell you, no matter how much I hate admitting it, that in this poking/snooping fashion, I do come across some fascinating items.

Thus it was that I came upon a Grinch who would put all other Grinches to shame. This Grinch is so sinister in nature that he makes the original Dr. Seuss Grinch look like Jolly Old Saint Nicholas himself.

Now I know we’ve all heard of Grinches, and we know what they do. But this Grinch? Well…judge for yourself.

Unlike your average, nasty Grinch, this Sinister Grinch began long before Christmas. The Sinister Grinch was not to be content with stealing a major holiday from the Whos of Whoville, as did the Dr. Seuss Grinch. Oh no!

The Sinister Grinch would steal a mother…friends—in the form of Florida’s Big Brother program…a summer camp experience… Christmas…and normal childhoods from his own two children.

I could begin most anywhere, I suppose. But we’re talking Grinch here—so let’s start with Christmas.

This past Christmas—2008—Elsa Newman #921975 at Maryland Correctional Institution for Women at Jessup applied to a program called “Angel Tree.” Angel Tree is a program which provides Christmas gifts—beautiful clothes and toys--to children of prisoners. Newman’s application was logical enough: prisoners make a mere pittance for their assigned jobs in prison; she did not have enough money to send her sons the Christmas gifts she dreamed of sending them. So she applied, and her application was accepted.

Then came the long-awaited report from Oasis Christian Church in Tampa, the organization which had taken responsibility for seeing that Newman’s children would receive presents from her. “Dear Caring Parent,” the letter began. And it continued in this vein: we are sorry to inform you that although the gifts you had requested for your sons were purchased and wrapped and we attempted delivery, the primary caregiver refused to accept the gifts, and we were unable to place them with your sons. We know this must be a disappointment to you. We will be praying for you and for your children. That is all we can do at this time.

Well…having found that bit of Sinister Grinchiness, I decided to check further, wondering if this father was depriving his young “Who” children of other things besides Christmas.

And sure enough, there is more.

Newman contacted the Big Brother League in the hope of finding older friends who would mentor her children, help with homework, take them to ball games—whatever kind of positive activities the Big Brother League has created and loves to provide for children who have only one parent available to them. Representatives from the Big Brother League actually went to the prison to interview Newman, and on behalf of her children, she signed up.

Representatives of the Big Brother League then contacted the Sinister Grinch. He hung up on them. They followed that contact by contacting Dr. Joy Silberg, because of the trouble with the Sinister Grinch. Now remember, The Big Brother League is a national organization of considerable repute. It may well have been a bit difficult for them to understand that there might be a “Who” child with a parent who would not welcome their efforts. Dr. Silberg gave the Big Brother League advice on how to approach the parent. When representatives of the Big Brother League called again on the Sinister Grinch, he informed them—rather rudely, I think—that they should “butt out” of his business. The little “Whos” were his problem, not theirs.

Yikes! When I found this one, I found it, also, hard to believe. But there was more to come.

In the State of Massachusetts, there is a non-profit organization which specializes in helping the children of political prisoners. Wondering whether she would meet their standards, Newman contacted this organization also. What she wanted from them? Scholarships to summer camp for her two sons.

The Newman family has a tradition of sending their children to camp Airy. Elsa attended the camp as a child, as did her older sister and brother. It is a camp of highest quality, one which has traditions of its own, and one worth every cent of the rather expensive fees.

This Massachusetts non-profit apparently decided that Elsa Newman does indeed qualify as a political prisoner. They offered scholarships to the camp for both her sons.

But the Sinister Grinch could hardly wait, it seems, to put a stop to this.
His “Who” children, tradition or no tradition, would not be attending Camp Airy. And his ex-wife a political prisoner? Well! She wasn’t getting away with that! Not while he had anything to say about it!

Two more items are noteworthy here: 1) It is the Sinister Grinch himself who has seen to it that the boys have only one available parent, and 2) reports back from the “Who” children—via blog or blog comments or email--are couched in the same terminology that the Sinister Grinch himself has been using for some eight or so years now, in his attempts to separate the boys from their mother or from anyone else who shows and interest in trying to help them.

Exactly how does that play out? Well…it was the Sinister Grinch who set up the prosecution case against Elsa Newman when he made the 9-1-1 call on the night he was injured. “My wife,” he said, “sent someone to try to kill me.” Had that been true, of course, there was no way the Grinch could have known it. Not only that, but this particular Grinch was one of the main prosecution witnesses, fictionalizing a story of “twisted sisters” who had somehow become so interdependent that they had conspired together and sent the one to the house to try to kill him, while Newman herself was out of the state.

You realize, of course, that if Margery Landry had, in fact, wanted to kill the Grinchly Slobodow, all she had to do was sneak into his room, put a bullet in his head, and sneak out again. She was already, undiscovered, inside the home.

And the terminology question? From the beginning, the Sinister Grinch has never expressed the possibility that he is even slightly offended by accusations that he is/has been molesting his children. Wouldn’t you think that an innocent man would have something—some tiniest thing-- to say in protest and regret concerning false accusations?

Nada!

Rather this Grinch has chosen to call his ex-wife names. He has chosen to label those who disagree with him, using most unpleasant appellations, rather than trying to reach out and touch some kind of proof of his innocence, rather than showing that he gives a damn—which, of course, he does not. This Grinch apparently believes he is right and the world is wrong.

He has called Newman’s advocates her victims, manipulated to do her will. Really? Not on your life!

The Grinch is the manipulator. He fashions his family and those around him into his own image and uses them as if they were puppets.

He has called me the “new Margie,” as if I am somehow a danger to him in Tampa, Florida, from my tiny home in SW Washington State.

He has thought of a thousand ways to sever contact between his “Who” sons and their mother. He wrote to the prison warden to insist that she not allow Newman to communicate with the school her children attend. Is there something wrong, Mr. Grinch, with your “Who” children’s schools and teachers coming to know the real Elsa Newman?

When Elsa places phone calls to her children, which she is allowed to do, although Mr. Grinch is supervises said calls and cuts them off at his whim, she may be allowed to talk to only one child, yet she hears things like this just before the call is over and they are cut off: a whispered, “Mom…it’s me…I’m hiding under the table so Dad won’t see. I love you.”

And the labels that his son, Herbie—or whoever is writing in Herbie’s name—uses today are exactly the same labels used by Stacey Blondes Talbott. Talbott was the Grinch’s attorney at the custody trial and she stood by him during the criminal trial, when the Grinch was writing material for her, so he would be certain that the mother of his children would be tucked safely away in prison, where she could not intervene between him and his children. They are the same labels used by the prosecution. They are the same labels used by guardian ad litem, Alan Town.

They are the same labels spouted from the mouth of the Sinister Grinch himself for the past eight years.

Good god! Wouldn’t you think that, given eight years to think about it, even the worst of Grinches—which this one is—could come up with something newer than “liar…liar…pants on fire!”

So you see, not only has the Sinister Grinch stolen Christmas…stolen camp experiences…stolen friends that might have been provided through the Big Brother organization, but he has stolen childhood and its rights and privileges from his own children, children who have said he is molester, abuser and exploiter of their young selves.

Sooooo...why DID this Sinister Grinch steal Christmas and all that other stuff? Could it be? Could it possibly be that he really DOES have something to hide? Hmmmmmm.

Before the Elsa Newman Case--What?

2009-01-19T09:33:00.000-08:00

If you read what I have been writing here, you know that I focus primarily on the case of Elsa Newman, unjustly incarcerated at Maryland Correctional Institution for Women at Jessup. You know that I also focus on the plight of her children, who live with a father about whom they have disclosed unspeakable abuses--and no one in authority seems to give a damn, either about this mother or about the plight of her children.

There may be a thousand reasns why Elsa Newman is in prison, none of them valid. There are a thousand holes in the prosecution case, none of which the defense team apparently observed or ripped into.

There have been cursory investigations of molestation charges against the boys' father. There was one psychiatrist who reported abuse. There were medical doctors who observed the results of the abuse. There were police officers to whom the boys disclosed the molestation, but apparently nobody believed them. One of Elsa's sons even chastised her thus: "Mom! You said if we told the truth, the court would believe us. But they don't!"

No, little boy, you were right when you said the court didn't believe you when you told the truth. They only believe you when you lie, under threat of further abuse from your father.

Why? What is going on in America that a child telling the truth about being molested is not believed? He must lie and say there was/is no abuse--and only then will the courts believe him. Then they will send his mother to prison. Then they will place him in the custody of the man he accused of abuse, exploitation and molestation.

Today I received the following information in an email. It offers an interesting backdrop to what has happened in our United States to make such thing as Elsa Newman's situation possible--and her children's situation possible.

Vaccines and Medical Experiments on Children, Minorities, Woman and Inmates
by MoreRockin on Jan.18, 2009, under Health

Mike Adams
Natural News
Sun, 18 Jan 2009

Think U.S. health authorities have never conducted outrageous medical experiments on children, women, minorities, homosexuals and inmates? Think again: This timeline, originally put together by Dani Veracity (a NaturalNews reporter), has been edited and updated with recent vaccination experimentation programs in Maryland and New Jersey. Here’s what’s really happening in the United States when it comes to exploiting the public for medical experimentation:
(1845 - 1849)

J. Marion Sims, later hailed as the “father of gynecology,” performs medical experiments on enslaved African women without anesthesia. These women would usually die of infection soon after surgery. Based on his belief that the movement of newborns’ skull bones during protracted births causes trismus, he also uses a shoemaker’s awl, a pointed tool shoemakers use to make holes in leather, to practice moving the skull bones of babies born to enslaved mothers (Brinker).

(1895)

New York pediatrician Henry Heiman infects a 4-year-old boy whom he calls “an idiot with chronic epilepsy” with gonorrhea as part of a medical experiment (”Human Experimentation: Before the Nazi Era and After“).

(1896)

Dr. Arthur Wentworth turns 29 children at Boston’s Children’s Hospital into human guinea pigs when he performs spinal taps on them, just to test whether the procedure is harmful (Sharav).

(1906)

Harvard professor Dr. Richard Strong infects prisoners in the Philippines with cholera to study the disease; 13 of them die. He compensates survivors with cigars and cigarettes. During the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi doctors cite this study to justify their own medical experiments (Greger, Sharav).

(1911)

Dr. Hideyo Noguchi of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research publishes data on injecting an inactive syphilis preparation into the skin of 146 hospital patients and normal children in an attempt to develop a skin test for syphilis. Later, in 1913, several of these children’s parents sue Dr. Noguchi for allegedly infecting their children with syphilis (”Reviews and Notes: History of Medicine: Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War”).

(1913)

Medical experimenters “test” 15 children at the children’s home St. Vincent’s House in Philadelphia with tuberculin, resulting in permanent blindness in some of the children. Though the Pennsylvania House of Representatives records the incident, the researchers are not punished for the experiments (”Human Experimentation: Before the Nazi Era and After”).

(1915)

Dr. Joseph Goldberger, under order of the U.S. Public Health Office, produces Pellagra, a debilitating disease that affects the central nervous system, in 12 Mississippi inmates to try to find a cure for the disease. One test subject later says that he had been through “a thousand hells.” In 1935, after millions die from the disease, the director of the U.S Public Health Office would finally admit that officials had known that it was caused by a niacin deficiency for some time, but did nothing about it because it mostly affected poor African-Americans. During the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi doctors used this study to try to justify their medical experiments on concentration camp inmates (Greger; Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).

(1932)

(1932-1972) The U.S. Public Health Service in Tuskegee, Ala. diagnoses 400 poor, black sharecroppers with syphilis but never tells them of their illness nor treats them; instead researchers use the men as human guinea pigs to follow the symptoms and progression of the disease. They all eventually die from syphilis and their families are never told that they could have been treated (Goliszek, University of Virginia Health System Health Sciences Library).

(1939)

In order to test his theory on the roots of stuttering, prominent speech pathologist Dr. Wendell Johnson performs his famous “Monster Experiment” on 22 children at the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home in Davenport. Dr. Johnson and his graduate students put the children under intense psychological pressure, causing them to switch from speaking normally to stuttering heavily. At the time, some of the students reportedly warn Dr. Johnson that, “in the aftermath of World War II, observers might draw comparisons to Nazi experiments on human subjects, which could destroy his career” (Alliance for Human Research Protection).

(1941)

Dr. William C. Black infects a 12-month-old baby with herpes as part of a medical experiment. At the time, the editor of the Journal of Experimental Medicine, Francis Payton Rous, calls it “an abuse of power, an infringement of the rights of an individual, and not excusable because the illness which followed had implications for science” (Sharav).

An article in a 1941 issue of Archives of Pediatrics describes medical studies of the severe gum disease Vincent’s angina in which doctors transmit the disease from sick children to healthy children with oral swabs (Goliszek).

Researchers give 800 poverty-stricken pregnant women at a Vanderbilt University prenatal clinic “cocktails” including radioactive iron in order to determine the iron requirements of pregnant women (Pacchioli).

(1942)

The Chemical Warfare Service begins mustard gas and lewisite experiments on 4,000 members of the U.S. military. Some test subjects don’t realize they are volunteering for chemical exposure experiments, like 17-year-old Nathan Schnurman, who in 1944 thinks he is only volunteering to test “U.S. Navy summer clothes” (Goliszek).

Merck Pharmaceuticals President George Merck is named director of the War Research Service (WRS), an agency designed to oversee the establishment of a biological warfare program (Goliszek).

(1944 - 1946)

A captain in the medical corps addresses an April 1944 memo to Col. Stanford Warren, head of the Manhattan Project’s Medical Section, expressing his concerns about atom bomb component fluoride’s central nervous system (CNS) effects and asking for animal research to be done to determine the extent of these effects: “Clinical evidence suggests that uranium hexafluoride may have a rather marked central nervous system effect … It seems most likely that the F [code for fluoride] component rather than the T [code for uranium] is the causative factor … Since work with these compounds is essential, it will be necessary to know in advance what mental effects may occur after exposure.” The following year, the Manhattan Project would begin human-based studies on fluoride’s effects (Griffiths and Bryson).

The Manhattan Project medical team, led by the now infamous University of Rochester radiologist Col. Safford Warren, injects plutonium into patients at the University’s teaching hospital, Strong Memorial (Burton Report).

(1945)

Continuing the Manhattan Project, researchers inject plutonium into three patients at the University of Chicago’s Billings Hospital (Sharav).

The U.S. State Department, Army intelligence and the CIA begin Operation Paperclip, offering Nazi scientists immunity and secret identities in exchange for work on top-secret government projects on aerodynamics and chemical warfare medicine in the United States (”Project Paperclip”).

(1945 - 1955)

In Newburgh, N.Y., researchers linked to the Manhattan Project begin the most extensive American study ever done on the health effects of fluoridating public drinking water (Griffiths and Bryson).

(1946)

Continuing the Newburg study of 1945, the Manhattan Project commissions the University of Rochester to study fluoride’s effects on animals and humans in a project codenamed “Program F.” With the help of the New York State Health Department, Program F researchers secretly collect and analyze blood and tissue samples from Newburg residents. The studies are sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission and take place at the University of Rochester Medical Center’s Strong Memorial Hospital (Griffiths and Bryson).

(1946 - 1947)

University of Rochester researchers inject four male and two female human test subjects with uranium-234 and uranium-235 in dosages ranging from 6.4 to 70.7 micrograms per one kilogram of body weight in order to study how much uranium they could tolerate before their kidneys become damaged (Goliszek).

Six male employees of a Chicago metallurgical laboratory are given water contaminated with plutonium-239 to drink so that researchers can learn how plutonium is absorbed into the digestive tract (Goliszek).

Researchers begin using patients in VA hospitals as test subjects for human medical experiments, cleverly worded as “investigations” or “observations” in medical study reports to avoid negative connotations and bad publicity (Sharav).

The American public finally learns of the biowarfare experiments being done at Fort Detrick from a report released by the War Department (Goliszek).

(1947)

Col. E.E. Kirkpatrick of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) issues a top-secret document (707075) dated Jan. 8. In it, he writes that “certain radioactive substances are being prepared for intravenous administration to human subjects as a part of the work of the contract” (Goliszek).

A secret AEC document dated April 17 reads, “It is desired that no document be released which refers to experiments with humans that might have an adverse reaction on public opinion or result in legal suits,” revealing that the U.S. government was aware of the health risks its nuclear tests posed to military personnel conducting the tests or nearby civilians (Goliszek).

The CIA begins studying LSD’s potential as a weapon by using military and civilian test subjects for experiments without their consent or even knowledge. Eventually, these LSD studies will evolve into the MKULTRA program in 1953 (Sharav).

(1947 - 1953)

The U.S. Navy begins Project Chatter to identify and test so-called “truth serums,” such as those used by the Soviet Union to interrogate spies. Mescaline and the central nervous system depressant scopolamine are among the many drugs tested on human subjects (Goliszek).

(1948)

Based on the secret studies performed on Newburgh, N.Y. residents beginning in 1945, Project F researchers publish a report in the August 1948 edition of the Journal of the American Dental Association, detailing fluoride’s health dangers. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) quickly censors it for “national security” reasons (Griffiths and Bryson).

(1950)

(1950 - 1953) The U.S. Army releases chemical clouds over six American and Canadian cities. Residents in Winnipeg, Canada, where a highly toxic chemical called cadmium is dropped, subsequently experience high rates of respiratory illnesses (Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).

In order to determine how susceptible an American city could be to biological attack, the U.S. Navy sprays a cloud of Bacillus globigii bacteria from ships over the San Francisco shoreline. According to monitoring devices situated throughout the city to test the extent of infection, the eight thousand residents of San Francisco inhale five thousand or more bacteria particles, many becoming sick with pneumonia-like symptoms (Goliszek).

Dr. Joseph Strokes of the University of Pennsylvania infects 200 female prisoners with viral hepatitis to study the disease (Sharav).

Doctors at the Cleveland City Hospital study changes in cerebral blood flow by injecting test subjects with spinal anesthesia, inserting needles in their jugular veins and brachial arteries, tilting their heads down and, after massive blood loss causes paralysis and fainting, measuring their blood pressure. They often perform this experiment multiple times on the same subject (Goliszek).

Dr. D. Ewen Cameron, later of MKULTRA infamy due to his 1957 to1964 experiments on Canadians, publishes an article in the British Journal of Physical Medicine, in which he describes experiments that entail forcing schizophrenic patients at Manitoba’s Brandon Mental Hospital to lie naked under 15- to 200-watt red lamps for up to eight hours per day. His other experiments include placing mental patients in an electric cage that overheats their internal body temperatures to 103 degrees Fahrenheit, and inducing comas by giving patients large injections of insulin (Goliszek).

(1951)

The U.S. Army secretly contaminates the Norfolk Naval Supply Center in Virginia and Washington, D.C.’s National Airport with a strain of bacteria chosen because African-Americans were believed to be more susceptible to it than Caucasians. The experiment causes food poisoning, respiratory problems and blood poisoning (Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).

(1951 - 1956)

Under contract with the Air Force’s School of Aviation Medicine (SAM), the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston begins studying the effects of radiation on cancer patients — many of them members of minority groups or indigents, according to sources — in order to determine both radiation’s ability to treat cancer and the possible long-term radiation effects of pilots flying nuclear-powered planes. The study lasts until 1956, involving 263 cancer patients. Beginning in 1953, the subjects are required to sign a waiver form, but it still does not meet the informed consent guidelines established by the Wilson memo released that year. The TBI studies themselves would continue at four different institutions — Baylor University College of Medicine, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, the U.S. Naval Hospital in Bethesda and the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine — until 1971 (U.S. Department of Energy, Goliszek).

American, Canadian and British military and intelligence officials gather a small group of eminent psychologists to a secret meeting at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Montreal about Communist “thought-control techniques.” They proposed a top-secret research program on behavior modification — involving testing drugs, hypnosis, electroshock and lobotomies on humans (Barker).

(1952)

At the famous Sloan-Kettering Institute, Chester M. Southam injects live cancer cells into prisoners at the Ohio State Prison to study the progression of the disease. Half of the prisoners in this National Institutes of Health-sponsored (NIH) study are black, awakening racial suspicions stemming from Tuskegee, which was also an NIH-sponsored study (Merritte, et al.).

(1953 - 1974)

The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) sponsors iodine studies at the University of Iowa. In the first study, researchers give pregnant women 100 to 200 microcuries of iodine-131 and then study the women’s aborted embryos in order to learn at what stage and to what extent radioactive iodine crosses the placental barrier. In the second study, researchers give 12 male and 13 female newborns under 36 hours old and weighing between 5.5 and 8.5 pounds iodine-131 either orally or via intramuscular injection, later measuring the concentration of iodine in the newborns’ thyroid glands (Goliszek).

As part of an AEC study, researchers feed 28 healthy infants at the University of Nebraska College of Medicine iodine-131 through a gastric tube and then test concentration of iodine in the infants’ thyroid glands 24 hours later (Goliszek).

(1953 - 1957)

Eleven patients at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston are injected with uranium as part of the Manhattan Project (Sharav).

In an AEC-sponsored study at the University of Tennessee, researchers inject healthy two- to three-day-old newborns with approximately 60 rads of iodine-131 (Goliszek).

Newborn Daniel Burton becomes blind when physicians at Brooklyn Doctors Hospital perform an experimental high oxygen treatment for Retrolental Fibroplasia, a retinal disorder affecting premature infants, on him and other premature babies. The physicians perform the experimental treatment despite earlier studies showing that high oxygen levels cause blindness. Testimony in Burton v. Brooklyn Doctors Hospital (452 N.Y.S.2d875) later reveals that researchers continued to give Burton and other infants excess oxygen even after their eyes had swelled to dangerous levels (Goliszek, Sharav).

A 1953 article in Clinical Science describes a medical experiment in which researchers purposely blister the abdomens of 41 children, ranging in age from eight to 14, with cantharide in order to study how severely the substance irritates the skin (Goliszek).

The AEC performs a series of field tests known as “Green Run,” dropping radiodine 131 and xenon 133 over the Hanford, Wash. site — 500,000 acres encompassing three small towns (Hanford, White Bluffs and Richland) along the Columbia River (Sharav).

In an AEC-sponsored study to learn whether radioactive iodine affects premature babies differently from full-term babies, researchers at Harper Hospital in Detroit give oral doses of iodine-131 to 65 premature and full-term infants weighing between 2.1 and 5.5 pounds (Goliszek).

(1955 - 1957)

In order to learn how cold weather affects human physiology, researchers give a total of 200 doses of iodine-131, a radioactive tracer that concentrates almost immediately in the thyroid gland, to 85 healthy Eskimos and 17 Athapascan Indians living in Alaska. They study the tracer within the body by blood, thyroid tissue, urine and saliva samples from the test subjects. Due to the language barrier, no one tells the test subjects what is being done to them, so there is no informed consent (Goliszek).

(1956 - 1957)

U.S. Army covert biological weapons researchers release mosquitoes infected with yellow fever and dengue fever over Savannah, Ga., and Avon Park, Fla., to test the insects’ ability to carry disease. After each test, Army agents pose as public health officials to test victims for effects and take pictures of the unwitting test subjects. These experiments result in a high incidence of fevers, respiratory distress, stillbirths, encephalitis and typhoid among the two cities’ residents, as well as several deaths (Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).

(1957)

The U.S. military conducts Operation Plumbbob at the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Operation Pumbbob consists of 29 nuclear detonations, eventually creating radiation expected to result in a total 32,000 cases of thyroid cancer among civilians in the area. Around 18,000 members of the U.S. military participate in Operation Pumbbob’s Desert Rock VII and VIII, which are designed to see how the average foot soldier physiologically and mentally responds to a nuclear battlefield (”Operation Plumbbob”, Goliszek).

(1957 - 1964)

As part of MKULTRA, the CIA pays McGill University Department of Psychiatry founder Dr. D. Ewen Cameron $69,000 to perform LSD studies and potentially lethal experiments on Canadians being treated for minor disorders like post-partum depression and anxiety at the Allan Memorial Institute, which houses the Psychiatry Department of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal. The CIA encourages Dr. Cameron to fully explore his “psychic driving” concept of correcting madness through completely erasing one’s memory and rewriting the psyche. These “driving” experiments involve putting human test subjects into drug-, electroshock- and sensory deprivation-induced vegetative states for up to three months, and then playing tape loops of noise or simple repetitive statements for weeks or months in order to “rewrite” the “erased” psyche. Dr. Cameron also gives human test subjects paralytic drugs and electroconvulsive therapy 30 to 40 times, as part of his experiments. Most of Dr. Cameron’s test subjects suffer permanent damage as a result of his work (Goliszek, “Donald Ewan Cameron”).

In order to study how blood flows through children’s brains, researchers at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia perform the following experiment on healthy children, ranging in age from three to 11: They insert needles into each child’s femoral artery (thigh) and jugular vein (neck), bringing the blood down from the brain. Then, they force each child to inhale a special gas through a facemask. In their subsequent Journal of Clinical Investigation article on this study, the researchers note that, in order to perform the experiment, they had to restrain some of the child test subjects by bandaging them to boards (Goliszek).

(1958)

The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) drops radioactive materials over Point Hope, Alaska, home to the Inupiats, in a field test known under the codename “Project Chariot” (Sharav).

(1961)

In response to the Nuremberg Trials, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram begins his famous Obedience to Authority Study in order to answer his question “Could it be that (Adolf) Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?” Male test subjects, ranging in age from 20 to 40 and coming from all education backgrounds, are told to give “learners” electric shocks for every wrong answer the learners give in response to word pair questions. In reality, the learners are actors and are not receiving electric shocks, but what matters is that the test subjects do not know that. Astoundingly, they keep on following orders and continue to administer increasingly high levels of “shocks,” even after the actor learners show obvious physical pain (”Milgram Experiment”).

(1962)

Researchers at the Laurel Children’s Center in Maryland test experimental acne antibiotics on children and continue their tests even after half of the young test subjects develop severe liver damage because of the experimental medication (Goliszek).

The FDA begins requiring that a new pharmaceutical undergo three human clinical trials before it will approve it. From 1962 to 1980, pharmaceutical companies satisfy this requirement by running Phase I trials, which determine a drug’s toxicity, on prison inmates, giving them small amounts of cash for compensation (Sharav).

(1963)

Chester M. Southam, who injected Ohio State Prison inmates with live cancer cells in 1952, performs the same procedure on 22 senile, African-American female patients at the Brooklyn Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in order to watch their immunological response. Southam tells the patients that they are receiving “some cells,” but leaves out the fact that they are cancer cells. He claims he doesn’t obtain informed consent from the patients because he does not want to frighten them by telling them what he is doing, but he nevertheless temporarily loses his medical license because of it. Ironically, he eventually becomes president of the American Cancer Society (Greger, Merritte, et al.).

Researchers at the University of Washington directly irradiate the testes of 232 prison inmates in order to determine radiation’s effects on testicular function. When these inmates later leave prison and have children, at least four have babies born with birth defects. The exact number is unknown because researchers never follow up on the men to see the long-term effects of their experiment (Goliszek).

(1963 - 1966)

New York University researcher Saul Krugman promises parents with mentally disabled children definite enrollment into the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, N.Y., a resident mental institution for mentally retarded children, in exchange for their signatures on a consent form for procedures presented as “vaccinations.” In reality, the procedures involve deliberately infecting children with viral hepatitis by feeding them an extract made from the feces of infected patients, so that Krugman can study the course of viral hepatitis as well the effectiveness of a hepatitis vaccine (Hammer Breslow).

(1963 - 1971)

Leading endocrinologist Dr. Carl Heller gives 67 prison inmates at Oregon State Prison in Salem $5 per month and $25 per testicular tissue biopsy in compensation for allowing him to perform irradiation experiments on their testes. If they receive vasectomies at the end of the study, the prisoners are given an extra $100 (Sharav, Goliszek).

Researchers inject a genetic compound called radioactive thymidine into the testicles of more than 100 Oregon State Penitentiary inmates to learn whether sperm production is affected by exposure to steroid hormones (Greger).

In a study published in Pediatrics, researchers at the University of California’s Department of Pediatrics use 113 newborns ranging in age from one hour to three days old in a series of experiments used to study changes in blood pressure and blood flow. In one study, doctors insert a catheter through the newborns’ umbilical arteries and into their aortas and then immerse the newborns’ feet in ice water while recording aortic pressure. In another experiment, doctors strap 50 newborns to a circumcision board, tilt the table so that all the blood rushes to their heads and then measure their blood pressure (Goliszek).

(1964 - 1967)

The Dow Chemical Company pays Professor Kligman $10,000 to learn how dioxin — a highly toxic, carcinogenic component of Agent Orange — and other herbicides affect human skin because workers at the chemical plant have been developing an acne-like condition called Chloracne and the company would like to know whether the chemicals they are handling are to blame. As part of the study, Professor Kligman applies roughly the amount of dioxin Dow employees are exposed to on the skin 60 prisoners, and is disappointed when the prisoners show no symptoms of Chloracne. In 1980 and 1981, the human guinea pigs used in this study would begin suing Professor Kligman for complications including lupus and psychological damage (Kaye).

(1965)

As part of a test codenamed “Big Tom,” the Department of Defense sprays Oahu, Hawaii’s most heavily populated island, with Bacillus globigii in order to simulate an attack on an island complex. Bacillus globigii causes infections in people with weakened immune systems, but this was not known to scientists at the time (Goliszek, Martin).

(1966)

U.S. Army scientists drop light bulbs filled with Bacillus subtilis through ventilation gates and into the New York City subway system, exposing more than one million civilians, including women and children, to the bacteria (Goliszek).

(1967)

The CIA places a chemical in the drinking water supply of the FDA headquarters in Washington, D.C. to see whether it is possible to spike drinking water with LSD and other substances (Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).

In a study published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers inject pregnant women with radioactive cortisol to see if the radioactive material will cross the placentas and affect the fetuses (Goliszek).

The U.S. Army pays Professor Kligman to apply skin-blistering chemicals to Holmesburg Prison inmates’ faces and backs, so as to, in Professor Kligman’s words, “learn how the skin protects itself against chronic assault from toxic chemicals, the so-called hardening process,” information which would have both offensive and defensive applications for the U.S. military (Kaye).

Professor Kligman develops Retin-A as an acne cream (and eventually a wrinkle cream), turning him into a multi-millionaire (Kaye).

Researchers paralyze 64 prison inmates in California with a neuromuscular compound called succinylcholine, which produces suppressed breathing that feels similar to drowning. When five prisoners refuse to participate in the medical experiment, the prison’s special treatment board gives researchers permission to inject the prisoners with the drug against their will (Greger).

(1968)

Planned Parenthood of San Antonio and South Central Texas and the Southwest Foundation for Research and Education begin an oral contraceptive study on 70 poverty-stricken Mexican-American women, giving only half the oral contraceptives they think they are receiving and the other half a placebo. When the results of this study are released a few years later, it stirs tremendous controversy among Mexican-Americans (Sharav, Sauter).

(1969)

Experimental drugs are tested on mentally disabled children in Milledgeville, Ga., without any institutional approval whatsoever (Sharav).

Judge Sam Steinfield’s dissent in Strunk v. Strunk, 445 S.W.2d 145 marks the first time a judge has ever suggested that the Nuremberg Code be applied in American court cases (Sharav).

(1970)

Under order from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which also sponsored the Tuskegee Experiment, the free childcare program at Johns Hopkins University collects blood samples from 7,000 African-American youth, telling their parents that they are checking for anemia but actually checking for an extra Y chromosome (XYY), believed to be a biological predisposition to crime. The program director, Digamber Borganokar, does this experiment without Johns Hopkins University’s permission (Greger, Merritte, et al.).

(1971)

Stanford University conducts the Stanford Prison Experiment on a group of college students in order to learn the psychology of prison life. Some students are given the role as prison guards, while the others are given the role of prisoners. After only six days, the proposed two-week study has to end because of its psychological effects on the participants. The “guards” had begun to act sadistic, while the “prisoners” started to show signs of depression and severe psychological stress (University of New Hampshire).

An article entitled “Viral Infections in Man Associated with Acquired Immunological Deficiency States” appears in Federation Proceedings. Dr. MacArthur and Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division have, at this point, been conducting mycoplasma research to create a synthetic immunosuppressive agent for about one year, again suggesting that this research may have produced HIV (Goliszek).

(1973)

An Ad Hoc Advisory Panel issues its Final Report on the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, writing, “Society can no longer afford to leave the balancing of individual rights against scientific progress to the scientific community” (Sharav).

(1977)

The National Urban League holds its National Conference on Human Experimentation, stating, “We don’t want to kill science but we don’t want science to kill, mangle and abuse us” (Sharav).

(1978)

The CDC begins experimental hepatitis B vaccine trials in New York. Its ads for research subjects specifically ask for promiscuous homosexual men. Professor Wolf Szmuness of the Columbia University School of Public Health had made the vaccine’s infective serum from the pooled blood serum of hepatitis-infected homosexuals and then developed it in chimpanzees, the only animal susceptible to hepatitis B, leading to the theory that HIV originated in chimpanzees before being transferred over to humans via this vaccine. A few months after 1,083 homosexual men receive the vaccine, New York physicians begin noticing cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma, Mycoplasma penetrans and a new strain of herpes virus among New York’s homosexual community — diseases not usually seen among young, American men, but that would later be known as common opportunistic diseases associated with AIDS (Goliszek).

(1980)

According to blood samples tested years later for HIV, 20 percent of all New York homosexual men who participated in the 1978 hepatitis B vaccine experiment are HIV-positive by this point (Goliszek).

The first AIDS case appears in San Francisco (Goliszek).

(1981)

The CDC acknowledges that a disease known as AIDS exists and confirms 26 cases of the disease — all in previously healthy homosexuals living in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles — again supporting the speculation that AIDS originated from the hepatitis B experiments from 1978 and 1980 (Goliszek).

(1982)

Thirty percent of the test subjects used in the CDC’s hepatitis B vaccine experiment are HIV-positive by this point (Goliszek).

(1985)

A former U.S. Army sergeant tries to sue the Army for using drugs on him in without his consent or even his knowledge in United States v. Stanley, 483 U.S. 669. Justice Antonin Scalia writes the decision, clearing the U.S. military from any liability in past, present or future medical experiments without informed consent (Merritte, et al..)

(1987)

Philadelphia resident Doris Jackson discovers that researchers have removed her son’s brain post mortem for medical study. She later learns that the state of Pennsylvania has a doctrine of “implied consent,” meaning that unless a patient signs a document stating otherwise, consent for organ removal is automatically implied (Merritte, et al.).

(1988)

(1988 - 2001) The New York City Administration for Children’s Services begins allowing foster care children living in about two dozen children’s homes to be used in National Institutes of Health-sponsored (NIH) experimental AIDS drug trials. These children — totaling 465 by the program’s end — experience serious side effects, including inability to walk, diarrhea, vomiting, swollen joints and cramps. Children’s home employees are unaware that they are giving the HIV-infected children experimental drugs, rather than standard AIDS treatments (New York City ACS, Doran).

(1990)

The United States sends 1.7 million members of the armed forces, 22 percent of whom are African-American, to the Persian Gulf for the Gulf War (”Desert Storm”). More than 400,000 of these soldiers are ordered to take an experimental nerve agent medication called pyridostigmine, which is later believed to be the cause of Gulf War Syndrome — symptoms ranging from skin disorders, neurological disorders, incontinence, uncontrollable drooling and vision problems — affecting Gulf War veterans (Goliszek; Merritte, et al.).

The CDC and Kaiser Pharmaceuticals of Southern California inject 1,500 six-month-old black and Hispanic babies in Los Angeles with an “experimental” measles vaccine that had never been licensed for use in the United States. Adding to the risk, children less than a year old may not have an adequate amount of myelin around their nerves, possibly resulting in impaired neural development because of the vaccine. The CDC later admits that parents were never informed that the vaccine being injected into their children was experimental (Goliszek).

The FDA allows the U.S. Department of Defense to waive the Nuremberg Code and use unapproved drugs and vaccines in Operation Desert Shield (Sharav).
(1992)

Columbia University’s New York State Psychiatric Institute and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine give 100 males — mostly African-American and Hispanic, all between the ages of six and 10 and all the younger brothers of juvenile delinquents — 10 milligrams of fenfluramine (fen-fen) per kilogram of body weight in order to test the theory that low serotonin levels are linked to violent or aggressive behavior. Parents of the participants received $125 each, including a $25 Toys ‘R’ Us gift certificate (Goliszek).

(1994)

President Clinton appoints the Advisory Commission on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE), which finally reveals the horrific experiments conducted during the Cold War era in its ACHRE Report.

(1995)

A 19-year-old University of Rochester student named Nicole Wan dies from participating in an MIT-sponsored experiment that tests airborne pollutant chemicals on humans. The experiment pays $150 to human test subjects (Sharav).

In the Mar. 15 President’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE), former human subjects, including those who were used in experiments as children, give sworn testimonies stating that they were subjected to radiation experiments and/or brainwashed, hypnotized, drugged, psychologically tortured, threatened and even raped during CIA experiments.
These sworn statements include:

Christina DeNicola’s statement that, in Tucson, Ariz., from 1966 to 1976, “Dr. B” performed mind control experiments using drugs, post-hypnotic injection and drama, and irradiation experiments on her neck, throat, chest and uterus. She was only four years old when the experiments started.

Claudia Mullen’s testimony that Dr. Sidney Gottlieb (of MKULTRA fame) used chemicals, radiation, hypnosis, drugs, isolation in tubs of water, sleep deprivation, electric shock, brainwashing and emotional, sexual and verbal abuse as part of mind control experiments that had the ultimate objective of turning her, who was only a child at the time, into the “perfect spy.” She tells the advisory committee that researchers justified this abuse by telling her that she was serving her country “in their bold effort to fight Communism.”

Suzanne Starr’s statement that “a physician, who was retired from the military, got children from the mountains of Colorado for experiments.” She says she was one of those children and that she was the victim of experiments involving environmental deprivation to the point of forced psychosis, spin programming, injections, rape and frequent electroshock and mind control sessions. “I have fought self-destructive programmed messages to kill myself, and I know what a programmed message is, and I don’t act on them,” she tells the advisory committee of the experiments’ long-lasting effects, even in her adulthood (Goliszek).

President Clinton publicly apologizes to the thousands of people who were victims of MKULTRA and other mind-control experimental programs (Sharav).

President Clinton appoints the National Bioethics Advisory Committee (Sharav).

Justice Edward Greenfield of the New York State Supreme Court rules that parents do not have the right to volunteer their mentally incapacitated children for non-therapeutic medical research studies and that no mentally incapacitated person whatsoever can be used in a medical experiment without informed consent (Sharav).

(1996)

Professor Adil E. Shamoo of the University of Maryland and the organization Citizens for Responsible Care and Research sends a written testimony on the unethical use of veterans in medical research to the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Governmental Affairs, stating: “This type of research is on-going nationwide in medical centers and VA hospitals supported by tens of millions of dollars of taxpayers money. These experiments are high risk and are abusive, causing not only physical and psychic harm to the most vulnerable groups but also degrading our society’s system of basic human values. Probably tens of thousands of patients are being subjected to such experiments” (”Testimony of Adil E. Shamoo, Ph.D.”).

The Department of Defense admits that Gulf War soldiers were exposed to chemical agents; however, 33 percent of all military personnel afflicted with Gulf War Syndrome never left the United States during the war, discrediting the popular mainstream belief that these symptoms are a result of exposure to Iraqi chemical weapons (Merritte, et al.).

President Clinton issues a formal apology to the subjects of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and their families (Sharav).

(1997)

In an experiment sponsored by the U.S. government, researchers withhold medical treatment from HIV-positive African-American pregnant women, giving them a placebo rather than AIDS medication (Sharav).

On Sept. 18, victims of unethical medical experiments at major U.S. research centers, including the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) testify before the National Bioethics Advisory Committee (Sharav).

(1999)

Adil E. Shamoo, Ph.D. testifies on “The Unethical Use of Human Beings in High-Risk Research Experiments” before the U.S. House of Representatives’ House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, alerting the House on the use of American veterans in VA Hospitals as human guinea pigs and calling for national reforms (”Testimony of Adil E. Shamoo, Ph.D.”).

Doctors at the University of Pennsylvania inject 18-year-old Jesse Gelsinger with an experimental gene therapy as part of an FDA-approved clinical trial. He dies four days later and his father suspects that he was not fully informed of the experiment’s risk (Goliszek)

During a clinical trial investigating the effectiveness of Propulsid for infant acid reflux, nine-month-old Gage Stevens dies at Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh (Sharav).

(2000)

The U.S. Air Force and rocket maker Lockheed Martin sponsor a Loma Linda University study that pays 100 Californians $1,000 to eat a dose of perchlorate — a toxic component of rocket fuel that causes cancer, damages the thyroid gland and hinders normal development in children and fetuses — every day for six months. The dose eaten by the test subjects is 83 times the safe dose of perchlorate set by the State of California, which has perchlorate in some of its drinking water. This Loma Linda study is the first large-scale study to use human subjects to test the harmful effects of a water pollutant and is “inherently unethical,” according to Environmental Working Group research director Richard Wiles (Goliszek, Envirnomental Working Group).

(2001)

On its website, the FDA admits that its policy to include healthy children in human experiments “has led to an increasing number of proposals for studies of safety and pharmacokinetics, including those in children who do not have the condition for which the drug is intended” (Goliszek).

In Higgins and Grimes v. Kennedy Krieger Institute The Maryland Court of Appeals makes a landmark decision regarding the use of children as test subjects, prohibiting non-therapeutic experimentation on children on the basis of “best interest of the individual child” (Sharav).

(2002)

President George W. Bush signs the Best Pharmaceuticals for Children Act (BPCA), offering pharmaceutical companies six-month exclusivity in exchange for running clinical drug trials on children. This will of course increase the number of children used as human test subjects (Hammer Breslow).

(2003)

Two-year-old Michael Daddio of Delaware dies of congestive heart failure. After his death, his parents learn that doctors had performed an experimental surgery on him when he was five months old, rather than using the established surgical method of repairing his congenital heart defect that the parents had been told would be performed. The established procedure has a 90- to 95-percent success rate, whereas the inventor of the procedure performed on baby Daddio would later be fired from his hospital in 2004 (Willen and Evans, “Parents of Babies Who Died in Delaware Tests Weren’t Warned”).

(2004)

In his BBC documentary “Guinea Pig Kids” and BBC News article of the same name, reporter Jamie Doran reveals that children involved in the New York City foster care system were unwitting human subjects in experimental AIDS drug trials from 1988 to, in his belief, present times (Doran).

(2005)

In response to the BBC documentary and article “Guinea Pig Kids”, the New York City Administration of Children’s Services (ACS) sends out an Apr. 22 press release admitting that foster care children were used in experimental AIDS drug trials, but says that the last trial took place in 2001 and thus the trials are not continuing, as BBC reporter Jamie Doran claims. The ACS gives the extent and statistics of the experimental drug trials, based on its own records, and contracts the Vera Institute of Justice to conduct “an independent review of ACS policy and practice regarding the enrollment of HIV-positive children in foster care in clinical drug trials during the late 1980s and 1990s” (New York City ACS).

Bloomberg releases a series of reports suggesting that SFBC, the largest experimental drug testing center of its time, exploits immigrant and other low-income test subjects and runs tests with limited credibility due to violations of both the FDA’s and SFBC’s own testing guidelines (Bloomberg).

In October 2005, the American Chemistry Council gave the EPA $2.1 million to study how children ranging from infancy to three years old ingest, inhale or absorb chemicals. Like IG Farben was for the German pharmaceutical companies of Nazi Germany, the American Chemistry Council acts much like a front group for chemical industry bigwigs like Bayer (which was incidentally also a member of IG Farben), BP, Chevron, Dow, DuPont, Exxon, Honeywell, 3M, Monsanto and Procter & Gamble. Studies have already proven that the chemicals made by these companies have long-term effects on children and adults. A short, two-year study like CHEERS would of course fail to reveal these long-term effects and the American Chemistry Council could then publicize these findings as “proof” that its chemicals were safe.

2006 - 2007

Merck begins pushing U.S. states to mandate the vaccination of teenage girls with Gardasil, a vaccine they claim prevents HPV, a sexually-transmitted virus. In February 2007, Texas Gov. Rick Perry — who was revealed to have financial ties with Merck, the vaccine manufacturer — mandates the vaccine in teenage girls (see http://www.NaturalNews.com/021572.html ). A key Merck lobbyist named Mike Toomey, it turned out, had served as Gov. Rick Perry’s chief of staff.

The Texas decision to mandate the vaccine was a notable and troubling milestone in public health policy because it is the first time a vaccine is mandated for a disease that cannot be contracted through casual contact in public schools. It also invoked “gunpoint medicine,” or the threat of arrest at gunpoint for not agreeing to receive state-mandated injections.

The Gardasil vaccinations remain a grand medical experiment being performed on children because it is not yet known what the long-term side effects of the vaccination will be, nor whether the vaccinations will actually lower rates of cervical cancer as intended.

2007

Maryland’s governor and public health officials, fed up with the unwillingness of over 2,000 parents to have their children vaccinated, invoke gunpoint medicine yet again by threatening the parents with arrest and up to 30 days of imprisonment if they don’t submit their children to state-mandated vaccinations. The children and parents are later rounded up at a county courthouse, guarded by attack dogs and security personnel, while a district Judge oversees the mass injection of schoolchildren with vaccines that contain toxic mercury. (See here)

Present day: New Jersey mandates the mass vaccination of all children with four different vaccines, stripping away the health freedoms of parents and unleashing a mass medical experiment that exploits the bodies of children and enriches pharmaceutical companies while criminalizing parents who refuse to participate.

http://eyesonthelies.com/2009/01/18/vaccines-and-medical-experiments-on-children-minorities-woman-and-inmates/

Well...I know this doesn't all relate directly to Newman and her sons, but it's the background that I want people to observe now. Where are we going in this country? What is happening to justice? Why are women like Elsa Newman in prison, although they are innocent? Why are children court-ordered into the custody of their abusers? Is there something more going on in the way of experimentation?

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More Stats from the Statisticians

2009-01-18T10:12:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I have a hard time understanding the concept, closely adhered to by some people, which says that if someone is in prison, they must have done SOMETHING wrong.

I often ask myself, "Why do folks have such a hard time believing I have actually found a woman who is innocent and in prison?"

The above concept, of course, is the answer to my question. Americans want to trust our "justice" system. But our "justice" system has proven itself unworthy of our trust.

The Innocence Project clearly shows this in the number of Death Row inmates who have been released...vindicated...proven innocent, although they may have spent literally years in prison, victims of a "guilty" verdict by a jury of their peers.

There is clearly something wrong here.

Another place where something is wrong is in the matter of gender bias in courts which place victimized, molested and/or abused children in the hands of their abusers, molesters and exploiters. And at the same time, mothers who try to protect their children are punished by the courts, right up to and including imprisonment, even though these mothers are guilty of only one crime: they have tried to protect their children.

When I came across the following blog entry, I decided to post it here to demonstrate what I have been saying: There are hundreds of innocent people in American prisons today. Only God knows how many of them.

Take a look at this, if you will:

Grits for Breakfast: Estimating false convictions: Thousands of Texas
prisoners are likely innocent--http://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com

Grits for Breakfast
Welcome to Texas justice: You might beat the rap, but you won't beat
the
ride.
Thursday, January 15, 2009

Estimating false convictions: Thousands of Texas prisoners are likely
innocent

The string of DNA exonerations witnessed in recent years has made
everyone
in the justice system aware that more innocent people are convicted of
crimes than anyone previously thought. But what percentage of total
convictions are false ones?

This is a difficult question because it's hard to find an accurate
denominator for comparison.

Nobody thinks every innocent person has been identified through DNA
testing,
and indeed no biological evidence exists to test in the vast majority
of
criminal cases. So even though we know 39 Texans have been exonerated
by
DNA, we don't know what percentage of criminal convictions overall are
false.

One of the few datasets that generates a statistically viable
denominator
comes from capital murder cases, for which a new study from Michigan
State
provides a new, national calculation:

Among defendants sentenced to death in the United States since 1973,
at
least 2.3 percentâ€"and possibly moreâ€"were falsely convicted, said U-
M law
professor Samuel Gross in a study co-authored by Barbara O'Brien, a
professor at Michigan State University College of Law.

If defendants who were sentenced to prison had been freed because of
innocence at the same rate as those who were sentenced to death,
there would
have been nearly 87,000 non-death row exonerations in the United
States from
1989 through 2003, rather than the 266 that were reported, the study
said.

"The main thing we can safely conclude from exonerations of falsely
convicted defendants is that there are many other false convictions
that we
have not discovered," said Gross, whose research has focused on the
death
penalty, false convictions and eyewitness identification.

Since 1989, nearly all exonerations in the United States fall into
three
categories: rape convictions, because of post-conviction DNA testing;
murder
convictions, and especially death sentences, which are subjected to
much
more detailed post-conviction reinvestigation than other convictions;
and a
few groups of false drug and gun possession convictions that were
produced
by concerted programs of police perjury that later unraveled.

As result, researchers know little about false convictions among
crimes of
violence other than murder or rape, even though false convictions for
robbery could greatly outnumber those for rape and murder. And
researchers
know next to nothing about false convictions for other types of
crimes, such
as property crimes, misdemeanors and white collar crimes.
The exoneration rate in Texas for capital murder convictions is
slightly
lower than in this national study.

Another dataset that lends itself to statistically valid innocence
estimates
come from DNA exonerations. In Texas, 3.3% of cases solved by DNA
evidence
resulted in exonerating convicted defendants.

So let's guess that the false conviction rate in Texas is somewhere
between
2.3-3.3%: With around 155,000 prisoners, that would mean between
3,500 and
5,000 or so current Texas prison inmates were falsely convicted.

Another 10-15,000 falsely convicted people are on the probation
rolls, this
data implies - perhaps even more since innocent people may be more
likely to
accept a plea for probation than risk incarceration for something they
didn't do.

Scott Henson, 603 W. 13th Street, Ste. 1.A-253, Austin, TX 78701-1477

"Scott Henson ... writes his terrific blog Grits for Breakfast from an
outhouse in Texas."
- To the People

Who is more likely to have abused/molested/exploited a child? His father or his mother?

2009-01-15T14:03:00.001-08:00

Male versus Female: who is more likely to perpetrate child abuse

Since I'm not good at working out my own math in a situation like this, I turn to what others have done. I am able to follow this line of reasoning, and I do hope some of my readers will follow it as well.

(When doing the math, adjust the figures as your actual study shows them.)
Assume that at any given time, 90% of all children who are in the care of one caregiver are in the actual (not "constructive") physical care of a woman (parent, grandparent, teacher, babysitter, day care provider, nurse, etc.), and that 10% are in the care of a man. (This is a conservative estimate.)

Assume that when a couple together are caring for children (e.g. married parents, grandparents, or a parent and stepparent), if the man perpetrates abuse it's extremely unlikely that the woman also will not be charged with either accomplice physical abuse or failure to protect (neglect), so these statistics are a "wash" and we are not considering them. (In reality, it's next to never that men are charged for abuse perpetrated by a woman when there is a couple caring for a child, Rusty Yates case in point, but this anomaly favors men and artificially increases the relative portion of total abuse reported as being perpetrated by women, so we will err in that direction. We also are ignoring "gang" abuse and other kinds of individual incidents of reported abuse involving two or more non-coupled adults against children, which are, at any rate, relatively rare.)

Note that each counted incident of reported abuse is per occurrence per child, and not per perpetrator. (So that, e.g. one woman caring for 4 kids who didn't send them to school or didn't take them to the dentist when she should have in the opinion of some DCF worker is responsible for four reported counts of neglect-type abuse "perpetrated by a woman," whereas one man's rape of one child would be one count of abuse in the reported statistics.)

Assume that per caregiver, when they do care for children, women on average care for 2 children while men care for 1 child. (Women are much more likely than men are to care for groups of children rather than one child, and even when men do care for more than one child at a time, women are much more likely to care for large groups, both in a parental capacity in families in which there are more children as well as third party caregiving.)

Assume that for every 80 women who routinely directly care for children alone and spend significant time with them, there are 20 men who directly care for children alone and spend significant time with them. Thus, in the population of all persons who routinely care for children on their own, of every 100 persons, 80 are women and 20 are men, or put another way, there are 4 women caregivers for each 1 man caregiver. (Do not confuse this statistical base with the 90% children figure, above, which reflects individual women caring for more than one child at a time. If you are surprised at this 80-20 figure, and assumed it should be closer to 50-50, thinking of "parents," remember that children in the active care of a couple together are being statistically eliminated as a wash -- a simplification that in these calculations will err in favor of men -- and also don't forget the vast numbers of unwed and divorced mothers who care for children without male assistance, the stepmothers who care for children while fathers are away or at work, and the sex of third party caregivers.)

Assume (without regard to kind of abuse, and without correcting for qualitative differences by removing or differentiating add-on and minor neglect charges from affirmative acts of physical abuse), that counting reported incidents of abuse shows that 70% of all incidents of abuse were committed by women and 30% were committed by men. (This is grossly skewed to err in favor of men, see below.)

Set up a ratio to compare men- versus women-perpetrated abuse. Thus:
Based on the foregoing, women abusers occur at a comparative rate of 70/80 in the population where the numerator is percent of incidents of abuse, and the denominator is total woman population caring for children; and men abusers occur at a comparative rate of 30/20 in the population where the numerator is percent of incidents of abuse, and the denominator is total man population caring for children, or, in order to more easily compare this ratio with the woman abuser ratio, making the denominators equal, 120/80.

The total abuse would be 120 + 70, or 190. Therefore, in any given population of child caregivers, adjusted to reflect greater likelihood of women being the caregiver, men represent 120/190 of total incidents of abuse perpetrated and women represent 70/190 of that total. The comparative likelihood that a man is the abuser then is represented as .63, and that a woman is the abuser as .36.

In other words, using these conservative figures, and without yet correcting for the fact that for each woman caregiver there are more children and without recognizing different kinds of abuse, in the population of all caregivers, men are nearly twice as likely to abuse children as are women.

Now adjust for actual numbers of perpetrators.

The incidents of abuse in women's 70/80 above ratio actually represent only 35 individual women caregivers (because each woman is caring for an average 2 children.) The incidents of abuse in men's 30/20 ratio above represent 30 man caregivers (because, above, they have an average of 1 child to care for compared with 2 children cared for by a women.) Because we are looking to compare perpetrator information gleaned from statistics using incident reports for each child, a different statistical population base, we need to adjust for this.
Based on the foregoing, then, individual women perpetrators actually will be represented by a ratio of 35/80 and men perpetrators will occur with a comparable frequency of 30/20, or, adjusting the denominators so that we can better compare the ratios for women and men, we have a ratio of 120/80 for men compared with 35/80 for women. Individual men then represent 120/155 of total individual abusers, and women are 35/155 of total individual abusers.

Thus, the adjusted likelihood that a man is an abuser is .77, and that a woman is an abuser is .23. In other words, the "twice as likely" calculation was premature; individual men caregivers are 2.34 times more likely (or 3.34 times as likely) as a woman is to be an abuser.

Compare the above two calculations with the National Clearinghouse statistics that "[a]mong children in single-parent households, those living with only their fathers were approximately one and two-thirds times more likely to be physically abused than those living with only their mothers."

Now adjust again to take into account time and opportunity.

While we cannot say that if an abuser cares for a child for more time, it's more likely that abuse will be perpetrated by that abuser, it does seem reasonable to suppose that it has some effect. The assumed fact, above, is that any given time 90% of children who are in the care of one caregiver are in the care of a woman, or stated another way, women are performing 90% of child care once children in the care of couples are eliminated from consideration (the statistical wash.) If there is a direct correlation, and if men perpetrate 30% of child abuse, then men perpetrate abuse 30/10 of the time, and women perpetrate abuse 70/90. Adjusting the denominators, per time men are caring for children, we get a whopping 270/90 for men. That makes men 3.86 times as likely as women to perpetrate abuse given the same amount of time in caregiving. If we now correct this figure to adjust for actual numbers of individual caregivers this represents, remembering that there are, mathematically, 4 women caregivers (above) for every 1 man caregiver, we also properly should adjust the time/opportunity ratios to account for that.
So per individual, men abusers are represented by a risk ratio of 1080/90 compared with women who are 70/90.

So what we have calculated thus far is that, IF, according to incident reports, 70% of all child abuse is committed by women, then adjusting for the different statistical populations and applying our stated assumptions, men are 12 times as likely as women to perpetrate abuse against children, or put another way, they are 1100% more dangerous to children than are women.

However, this calculation still errs on the side of being too conservative. We haven't corrected for kind of abuse, or seriousness of outcomes.

In addition, the raw figures actually don't show that 70% of all incidents of child abuse are perpetrated by women -- even when including reported "abuse" such as accomplice abuse, failure to protect, and minor neglect such as leaving a child unattended where no harm has occurred. They don't show that.

The statistics you will see from, e.g. the National Clearinghouse on Child Abuse and Neglect show that child abuse perpetrated by women represents (depending on report) between 50-70% of total abuse, usually closer to 50%. And if we remove from those reports, those minor neglect charges without notable outcomes and charges such as "failure to protect" that women -- and notably battered women -- but very few men tend to be charged with, we probably come down to something closer to 50-50, if it is even that much, if indeed women are the perpetrators of even 50% of total numbers of real abuse and neglect. Which means that in reality, men are not "12 times as likely as women to perpetrate child abuse" but some multiplier significantly greater even than that. In other words:

Children are at astronomically greater risk of physical abuse in the care of a man than in the care of a woman.

Article taken from The Liz Library

Why Might a Victim Side with His Molester?

2009-01-11T14:05:00.001-08:00

The source for this information is SECASA. For further information about the source, please see the copyright notice at the end of this entry.

I must admit here, in front of God and everybody, that I have been confounded by one main question in the Elsa Newman case: in a situation where a mother has tried to protect her children from a father about whom those children disclosed sexual molestation and other abuses, why on earth would the child dismiss the mother as “crazy” and “a hole I crawled out of”—and end up taking the side of his abuser?

Internet research brought me to this site, which contains a wealth of information on that precise question.

Any one of these effects could, it seems—in and of itself—cause a child to side with a molester. Combine them all? And you have a set of effects that might cause horrendous problems for even the staunchest and strongest of human beings of any age.

With this introduction, I leave you to the results of my research. I hope you have time to read it. It certainly offers an explanation for the confounded question that has left me confounded!

THE EFFECTS OF CHILDHOOD SEXUAL ABUSE:

· Psychological Effects
· Long Term Effects
· The Child Abuse Accomodation Syndrome
· Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
· The Stockholm Syndrome

Psychological Effects
1. Fear. The offender may swear the child to secrecy and say that if they tell something bad will happen. Sexual abuse is usually accompanied by coercion, bribery or threats. The child is afraid to tell because of what the consequences might be. e.g. punishment, blame, abandonment or not being believed.
2. Helplessness/powerlessness. Children in this situation often feel that they have no control over their own lives or even over their own bodies. They feel that they have no choices available to them.
3. Guilt and Shame. The child knows something is wrong and blames him or herself not others. The offender will often encourage the child to feel that the abuse is his or her fault and sometimes s/he will feel that s/he is a "bad" person.
4. Responsibility. The offender often makes the child feel responsible for keeping the abuse a secret. Sometimes the child also feels responsible for keeping the family together and the burden of this responsibility interferes with experiencing a normal childhood.
5. Isolation. Incest victims feel different from other children. They must usually be secretive. This even isolates them from non-offending parents and brothers and sisters.
6. Betrayal. Children feel betrayed because they are dependent upon adults for nurturing and protection and the offender is someone who they should be able to love and trust. They may also feel betrayed by a non-offending parent who they feel has failed to protect them.
7. Anger. Not surprisingly this is one of the strongest feelings which many children have about their sexual assault. Children may feel anger against the perpetrator and also against others who they feel failed to protect them.
8. Sadness. Children may feel grief due to a sense of loss, especially if the perpetrator was loved and trusted by the child.
9. Flashbacks. These can be like nightmares which happen while the child is awake. They are a re-experience of the sexual assault and the child may experience all the feelings again which they felt at the time.

In The Long Term The Child May Also Experience A Number Of Effects As An Adult. These May Include:

1. Depression, anxiety, trouble sleeping.
2. Low self esteem.
3. "Damaged goods" syndrome. i.e. negative body image due to self-blame. This may be intensified if physical pain was experienced during the abusive incidents.
4. Dissociation from feeling.
5. Social isolation.
6. Relationship problems such as an inability to trust, poor social skills or a reluctance to disclose details about themselves.
7. Self destructive behaviour such as substance abuse or suicide attempts.
8. Sexual difficulties such as fear of sex or intimacy, indiscriminate multiple sex partners or difficulty in reaching orgasm.
9. Parenting problems such as fear of being a bad parent, or fear of abusing the child or being overprotective.
10. An underlying sense of guilt, anger or loss.
11. "Flashbacks" and/or panic attacks.

The Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome

The Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome was developed by Roland Summit, M.D. It is a simple and logical model which can be used to help in understanding and accepting the ways in which many children react to sexual abuse. The syndrome classifies the most typical reactions of child sexual abuse victims, dividing them into five categories.

It is worth noting that children are often put through a "grooming process" before the sexual abuse commences. They are initially chosen for being compliant and therefore unlikely to complain or tell anyone. The offender may then go to considerable lengths to build up the child's trust, for example the child may be given presents or told that they are "special".

The five categories of the syndrome are:

1. Secrecy.
Abused children tend to keep the abuse a secret. They do so for a variety of reasons. They may be afraid of the abuser who may have threatened the child or someone whom the child loves. Physically abused children may be afraid of being beaten again. The abuser may have promised safety to the child or child's loved ones if the child keeps quiet. Neglected or emotionally abused children long for their parents' approval and affection - they may keep silent for fear of losing the parents' love.
2. Helplessness.
Children are inherently helpless and subordinate. They are small, dependent, and emotionally immature. For all of these reasons, they cannot escape from a dangerous situation. Children who try to protect themselves are usually overridden by more powerful adults. When their attempts to protect themselves fail, these children come to believe that they are helpless. Eventually they stop trying to protect themselves overtly. Instead they may withdraw, go physically limp or dissociate.*
* "Dissociation" is a way in which some children survive abuse by escaping mentally while the abuse is happening. The body and the mind seem to separate. While the body is being hurt, the child no longer feels it because the mind manages to escape to a safe place. Different children may dissociate in different ways. One example is "leaving" the body and floating on the ceiling over the bed where the abuse is occurring. The child may even watch what is happening but it is as if it were happening to someone else. The child feels nothing.
3. Entrapment And Accommodation.
Children who keep their abuse a secret and continue to feel helpless inevitably feel trapped. However, they learn to accept the situation and survive. The helpless child faced with continuing victimisation must learn to somehow achieve a sense of power and control. The child may eventually come to blame him or herself, believing s/he has provoked the abuse. Physically abused children may refer to their bad behaviours as reasons why their parents must punish them. Emotionally abused or neglected children may imagine unacceptable traits in themselves. Physically, sexually and emotionally abused children may also employ defensive mechanisms (e.g. dissociation or blocking out the memory) in an attempt to accommodate to the abuse.
4. Delayed, Conflicted And Unconvincing Disclosure.
Adults who ask a child to disclose abuse must recognise that this request may precipitate an acute crisis for the child. Initial disclosures may be fraught with anxiety, retractions and inconsistencies. Therefore it may sound unconvincing. Because the child has used various defensive mechanisms to cope with the abuse, memory may be fragmentary, perceptions may be altered and information may be scattered and sparse.
5. Retraction.
Children who do disclose abuse may be flooded with guilt, fear and feelings of betrayal or confusion. The adults' immediate responses may frighten them further. For example, the child may be removed into foster care, the parent may be put in prison and members of the child's family may suffer. All this may make the child retract the disclosure. Children gravitate towards the safety of a familiar situation, no matter how painful it is. Most abused or neglected children remain loyal to their families and, if given a choice, frequently want to stay with their abusive parents.
It should be noted that this is a "model" describing reactions, not an absolute. Like all models it does not mean each child will show all aspects of this syndrome. There have been some problems reported in the U.S. with courts taking the model so literally that if children don't demonstrate all the features they are under suspicion of lying.

Post-traumatic Stress Disorder

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is used by psychologists and psychiatrists as a framework for the treatment of sexually abused children. It is valuable in identifying the existence of specific behaviours that should be addressed in therapy. PTSD describes symptoms which are characteristic in many cases of sexual abuse but it is important to note that it does not apply to all sexually abused children. PTSD can sometimes appear many years after the original event. A diagnosis of PTSD is often used in court reports e.g. for applications for Criminal Injuries Compensation. The criteria for a diagnosis of PTSD are:
1. The person has experienced an event that is outside the range of usual human experience and that would be markedly distressing to almost anyone.
2. The re-experiencing of the trauma in at least one of the following ways:
a. Recurrent and intrusive recollections of the event.
b. Recurrent distressing dreams of the event.
c. Sudden acting or feeling as if the event were recurring e.g. "flashback" episodes, hallucinations, illusions.
d. Intense psychological distress at exposure to events that symbolise or resemble an aspect of the traumatic event.
3. A numbing of responsiveness or reduced involvement in the external world some time after the trauma, indicated by:
a. Diminished interest in activities and/or
b. Feelings of detachment or estrangement from others and/or
c. Constricted affect e.g. unable to have loving feelings or to feel anger.
4. In addition, at least two of the following sets of symptoms must be present:
a. Hyperalertness or being easily startled.
b. Sleep problems.
c. Guilt about surviving or behaviour required to survive.
d. Problems with memory or concentration.
e. Avoidance of activities that arouse recollection.
f. Intensification of symptoms if events symbolise or resemble the traumatic event.

The Stockholm Syndrome
The Stockholm Syndrome was originally developed to explain the phenomenon of hostages bonding with their captors. The name refers to a bank holdup in Stockholm, Sweden in 1973 when four people were held hostage for six days by two men. The hostages and their captors bonded with each other and the hostages actually came to see their captors as protecting them from the police. One was even reported as later becoming engaged to one of the captors.
Subsequent research found that such a reaction had occurred in allthe "hostage" groups studied, including cult members, battered women, incest victims and physically or emotionally abused children. Researchers have concluded that this seems to be a universal phenomenon which may be instinctive and thus play a survival function for hostages who are victims of abuse.

There is no universally accepted definition of the Stockholm Syndrome but it has been suggested that it is present if one or more of the following is observed:
a. positive feelings by the captive towards his/her captor.
b. negative feelings by the captive toward the police or authorities trying to win his/her release.
c. positive feelings by the captor towards his/her captive.

It has been found to occur in circumstances where there is:
a. a perceived threat to survival and a belief that the captor is willing to carry out that threat.
b. a perception by the captive of some small kindness from the captor within the context of terror.
c. isolation from perspectives other than those of the captor.
d. perceived inability to escape.
The following explanation has been put forward for the phenomenon.
The abuser (or captor) terrifies the victim, who cannot escape, by threatening his or her physical or psychological survival. As a result of being terrified the victim needs nurturance and protection. Being isolated from others, the victim must turn to the abuser for this if s/he turns to anyone. If the abuser shows the victim some small kindness this creates hope in the victim, who then ignores her rage at the terror-creating side of the abuser (because this rage would be experienced as overwhelming) and bonds to the positive side of the abuser. With the hope that the abuser will let him or her live, the victim works to keep the abuser happy. In trying to determine what will keep the abuser happy, the victim's own needs, feelings and perspectives must take second place and s/he unconsciously takes on the world view of the abuser. The victim sees the abuser as the "good guy" and those trying to win his/her release (e.g. police or therapists) as the "bad guys", as this is the way the abuser sees things. Over a period of months or years, the victim's entire sense of self may come to be experienced through the eyes of the abuser. The victim may have extreme difficulty leaving the abuser, if the opportunity arises, because s/he no longer sees a reason to do so.
For victims of sexual abuse, their families and therapists, the Stockholm Syndrome is useful in explaining the victim's experiences, current "symptoms" and the relationship between victim and abuser. It can help remove the tendency of the victim to blame him or herself for "allowing" the abuse to continue or for "causing" the abuse. It can also help to make sense of the ways in which the victim's perceptions of themselves and the abuser can be distorted, by explaining those distortions in terms of the Syndrome and making clear their origins as an instinctive survival function.

The following are some common ways in which the victim's view of their situation can become distorted, with the corresponding explanations in terms of the Stockholm Syndrome:
a. The victim denies the abuser's violence against him/her and focuses on his positive side.
o Explanation: An unconscious attempt to find hope (and thus a way to survive) in a situation in which s/he would otherwise feel powerless and overwhelmed.
b. The victim feels shame for abuse done to him/her.
o Explanation: Reflects the victim having taken the abuser's perspective (namely, that s/he caused the abuse and therefore it was deserved).
c. The victim resents outsiders' attempts to free him/her from the abuser.
o Explanation: The victim knows that the abuser is likely to retaliate against him/her for any disloyalty shown, so s/he resists others' attempts to free her or to hold the abuser accountable for the abuse.
d. The victim identifies with the "victim" in the abuser.
o Explanation: This represents the projection of the victim's own victim status onto the abuser. It enables the victim to feel sympathetic and caring towards the abuser.
e. The victim believes s/he deserved the abuser's violence.
o Explanation: This represents an attempt to feel that s/he controls when and whether the violence/abuse is done and thus permits him/her to believe s/he can stop the abuse.
f. The victim rationalises the abuser's violence against him/her.
o Explanation: An attempt to maintain a bond with the abuser (and thus hope of survival) in the face of behaviour (abuse) that would otherwise destroy that bond (hope).
g. Victim uses abuser-as-victim explanation to account for the abuse.
o Explanation: This represents an effort to see the abuser in a positive light so as to maintain the bond (since the bond provides the victim with the only hope of surviving).
h. The victim feels hatred for that part of him/her which the abuser said led to the abuse.
o Explanation: To improve chances of survival, the victim internalises the abuser's perspective, including the reasons given for the abuse.
i. The victim fears the abuser will come to get him/her, even if he is dead or in prison.
o Explanation: The victim knows the abuser is willing to "get" him/her because he has done so at least once before. The victim remains loyal in anticipation of his return.

Copyright is owned by SECASAEnquiries should be addressed to SECASA on 61 3 9928 8741 or via email at secasa@southernhealth.org.au

Mothers Talk About Losing Children to Abusers

2009-01-08T21:30:00.000-08:00

An "Aha" Moment

2009-01-05T16:00:00.000-08:00

An “aha” moment—
brought on by reading answers to an online question.

The questions and responses upon which this verbal meandering is based is found below said verbal meandering:

So…if a young man of 14 or older (not the young man this questioner is asking about)—or 12 or 10 or so develops problems paying attention in school and to homework, this is most likely NOT AD/HD. Hmmmmmm.

But it could be caused by anxiety. And anxiety could easily stem from having a mother unjustly imprisoned…from living with a father who molests him sexually, as well as abusing him in other ways—physically (punching him in the stomach or the crotch, for example), verbally (telling him the father will burn down his mother’s house, with him and his mother in it), emotionally (depriving him of love and respect), or in any other way the father can think of.

In short, a child older than 7 who develops symptoms of AD/HD “needs an evaluation by a mental health professional who specializes in evaluating adolescents.” [See below]

“Developmental strain, depression, drug use, family issues all should be considered before medication is prescribed.” [See below]

Or, life being what it is, and an abusive father being what he is—what the heck—go ahead and give the kid amphetamines, whether he needs them or not. Tell people he has been diagnosed ADD or AD/HD.

A teenage boy has enough stress in life as it is—“The normal developmental anxieties of a 14-year-old relate to peer concerns, body and sexuality issues, and separation from parents as leaving home and going out into the world comes closer. Performance related to school or sports may be a worry. Identity issues related to divorce or other losses may show up at this time.” [See below.] Add in a few things like molestation and a variety of abuses, and difficulty concentrating would seem quite logical.

The question:

My 14-year-old son has recently developed difficulty paying attention in school. He is actually quite bright, but his grades are beginning to suffer. His teachers believe he has Attention Deficit Disorder and suggest I ask for medication from his doctor. We have not seen any of these problems until quite recently. I have heard that anxiety can also cause difficulties with concentration. Is this true? If so, how do we figure out what the problem is?

Two answers—that say essentially the same thing:

You are correct that attention problems that belong in the Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) category show up at a much earlier age, specifically by age 7. ADD is sometimes diagnosed after the symptoms have been present for a number of years. ADD is officially called Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or AD/HD. Symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity or impulsivity must persist for at least six months and be maladaptive and inconsistent with developmental levels. Symptoms are present in at least two of the three areas of school, social and family functioning. You are also correct that anxiety can cause difficulties with concentration. Anxiety disorders are the most common mental illnesses in the country with more than 19 million people affected each year. The normal developmental anxieties of a 14-year-old relate to peer concerns, body and sexuality issues, and separation from parents as leaving home and going out into the world comes closer. Performance related to school or sports may be a worry. Identity issues related to divorce or other losses may show up at this time. Your son, with the problems you mention, needs an evaluation by a mental health professional who specializes in evaluating adolescents. Developmental strain, depression, drug use, family issues all should be considered before medication is prescribed.

Kaye Bock, MSW, BCDChild and Adolescent PsychotherapistBrentwood, MO314-961-2312

Poor concentration can result from many factors. Although Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (AD/HD) is found more often in boys than girls (affecting 3% to 5% of school-aged children, with inattention symptoms present for at least six months), it usually is diagnosed much earlier than age 14. Therefore, a complete physical and emotional evaluation is recommended. Assuming the child is in good physical health, the therapist sees if symptoms fit with AD/HD, depression, anxiety or adjustment. For example, has the child been sad, lost interest, shown sleep/appetite problems? In considering anxiety, has the child been distracted due to excessive worrying? Also, a family history reveals genetic or biochemical predispositions to mental disorders. The therapist assesses the child’s overall adjustment. How is he relating to the family? How is his adjustment to early adolescence and sexuality issues? Are there stressful situations affecting the child such as moving or switching schools? Has the child shown signs of drug or alcohol involvement? Has the child’s peer relations changed (including bullying or violence)? Once these questions have been answered, the therapist will be more equipped to make a correct diagnosis of the problem and then suggest a treatment plan to address the specific source of the concentration difficulties.

Donald F. Sloane, LCSWDirector, Center for Cognitive Behavioral TherapySt. Louis, MO314-432-3166

The Missing Element: Coercive Control--Naming the Unnameable, by Evan Stark

2009-01-03T17:25:00.000-08:00

In the years when work in the field of education was at a premium, I worked instead in shelter homes for battered women and their children.

Just how in the world could all of us who worked in the field overlook this concept, presented below by Evan Stark, I do not know. But one look at this article tells me that the author is spot on. There is, indeed, a vicious element of coercive control in every battering and abuse situation. And it is, indeed, far worse that the physical abuse itself. This article by leaves me aghast at the things I knew--but did not notice.

Read it and weep for the women and children who suffer from this problem--a horror which only now has a name, given it by Evan Stark.

Are Elsa Newman and her sons the ultimate victimes of "coercive control?"--the mother unjustly imprisoned and her sons still in the physical custody of the father about whom they have disclosed virtually unspeakable abuses.

(Please read the article below. Then go to this site and add your name--in full or anonymously: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/Free-Elsa-Newman)

Coercive Control

Coercive control is a model of abuse that attempts to encompass the range of strategies employed to dominate individual women in personal life. Alternately referred to as coerced persuasion; conjugal, patriarchal or intimate terrorism; emotional or psychological abuse; indirect abuse; or emotional torture, it describes an ongoing pattern of sexual mastery by which abusive partners, almost exclusively males, interweave repeated physical abuse with three equally important tactics: intimidation, isolation, and control.

The easiest way to understand coercive control is to contrast it to the widespread equation of partner abuse with “domestic violence.” Domestic violence laws and most research in the field take an incident-specific focus and weigh the severity of abuse by the level of force used or injury inflicted what I call a “calculus of harms.” In marked contrast, the coercive control model relies on evidence that most battered women who seek help experience coercion as “ongoing” rather than as merely “repeated” and that the main marker of these assaults is their frequency or even their “routine” nature rather than their severity, a fact that gives abuse a “cumulative” effect found in no other assault crime. Physical harm and psychological trauma remain important in the coercive control mo del. But its theory of harms replaces the violation of physical integrity with an emphasis on violations of “liberty” that entail the deprivation of rights and resources essential to personhood and citizenship. In this view, the psychological language of victimization and dependence is replaced by the political language of domination, resistance, and subordination. . In the coercive control model, what men do to women is less important than what they prevent women from doing for themselves.

In the forensic context where I work, women’s right to use whatever means are available to liberate themselves from coercive control derives from the right afforded to all persons to free themselves from tyranny not from the proximate physical or psychological means used to do this

The domestic violence model emphasizes the familial, cultural, interpersonal and psychological roots of abusive behavior. The coercive control model views the dynamics in abusive relationships from the vantage of the historical struggle for women’s liberation and men’s efforts to preserve their traditional privileges in personal life in the face of this struggle. The incredible strides women have made towards full equality, particularly since the l960’s, have been widely documented. These gains make it increasingly difficult for men to ensure women’s obedience and dependence through violence alone. In the face of this reality, millions of men have expanded their oppressive repertoire to include a range of constraints on women’s autonomy formerly imposed by law, religion, and women’s exclusion from the economic, cultural and political mainstream, in essence trying to construct a “patriarchy in miniature” in each individual relationship, the course of malevolent conduct known as coercive control. Although the aim of this conspicuous form of subjugation is to quash, offset or coopt women’s social gains (taking the money they earn, for instance), this strategy relies for success on the persistent inequalities based on sex that remain, including the huge gap in job opportunities and earnings that continues to advantage men.

Coercive control shares general elements with other capture or course-of-conduct crimes such as kidnapping, stalking, and harassment, including the facts that it is ongoing and its perpetrators use various means to hurt, humiliate, intimidate, exploit, isolate, and dominate their victims. Like hostages, victims of coercive control are frequently deprived of money, food, access to communication or transportation, and other survival resources even as they are cut off from family, friends, and other supports through the process of “isolation.” But unlike other capture crimes, coercive control is personalized, extends through social space as well as over time, and is gendered in that it relies for its impact on women’s vulnerability as women due to sexual inequality. Another difference is its aim. Men deploy coercive control to secure privileges that involve the use of time, control over material resources, access to sex, and personal service. A main means men use to establish control is the microregulation of everyday behaviors associated with stereotypic female roles, such as how women dress, cook, clean, socialize, care for their children, or perform sexually. These dynamics give coercive control a role in sexual politics that distinguishes it from all other crimes.

The coercive control framework does not downplay women’s own use of violence either in fights or to hurt or control men or same-sex partners. Numerous studies in the United States indicate that women of all ages assault male and female partners in large numbers and for many of the same reasons and with much the same consequences as men. However, there is no counterpart in men’s lives to women’s entrapment by men in personal life due to coercive control.

The Origins of the Coercive Control Model

The coercive control model reflects two concurrent realities, that the domestic violence is stalled and that our current predicament can be traced to the gap that separates how abuse is understood and the actual experiences of battered women with abusive men.

Nothing in the coercive control model is meant to discount the enormous gains achieved by the domestic violence revolution since we opened the first battered women’s shelters in the l970’s. Nor, as some critics of our movement have argued, do I want to turn back the clock by retreating from the important protections we have won for women in the legal, criminal justice, health or mental health arenas. Hundreds of thousands of women and children owe the fact that they are alive to the availability of shelters and to criminal justice and legal reforms. What is less clear is whether women as a group are safer today or are less likely to be beaten, controlled, or killed by their partners than they were before the domestic violence revolution began.
Partner violence against women is no longer just life. But anyone with reasonable sympathies and a passing acquaintance with interventions to stem men’s abuse of woman will sense the failure of a range of systems to mount an adequate response, the justice system included. Among the most dramatic facts are these:

• Partner homicides have dropped precipitously. But this change has benefited men far more than women. The number of men killed by female partners has dropped dramatically since we opened the first shelters, particularly among blacks. But the number of women killed by male partners has changed very little. While severe violence by men against women has dropped, the so-called “minor” violence that makes up the infrastructure of coercive control has increased sharply. Women as a group are not appreciably safer today than when the domestic violence revolution began.

• Though domestic violence is an ongoing crime and is almost always complemented by acts of intimidation, humiliation, isolation and control, in most communities abuse is treated as a second-class misdemeanor. While victims repeatedly insist that “violence isn’t the worst part” and mounting evidence points to structural constraints on independence and personhood as the most devastating aspects of abuse, these dimensions remain officially invisible. Millions of men may be arrested each year for domestic violence. But the chance that a perpetrator will go to jail in any given incident is just slightly better than the chance of winning a lottery.

• Batterer intervention programs (BIPs) are widely offered as an alternative to incarceration. But these programs are little more effective than doing nothing at all. Regardless of intervention, the vast majority of perpetrators continue their abuse.

• Shelters are the core response to abused women and so they should remain. But in hundreds of communities, shelters today are indistinguishable from the traditional, paternalistic service system they arose to challenge.

. Perhaps the key fact is that the domestic violence revolution appears to have had little or no effect on coercive control, the pattern evidence shows characterizes between 60-80% of the relationships for which women seek outside assistance. Refocusing on coercive control would be a giant step toward changing this situation. The domestic violence movement began with a vision, to provide women worldwide with a safety net that protected them against harm in personal life. Such a net is in place in most countries. But long-term protection still eludes us.

The limits of current interventions can be directly traced to a failure of vision, not of nerve. Conservatives attack the advocacy movement for exaggerating the nature and extent of abuse. In fact, because of its singular emphasis on physical violence, the prevailing model minimizes both the extent of women’s entrapment by male partners in personal life and its consequences.

Viewing woman abuse through the prism of the incident-specific and injury-based definition of violence has concealed its major components, dynamics, and effects, including the fact that it is neither “domestic” nor primarily about “violence.” Failure to appreciate the multidimensionality of oppression in personal life has been disastrous for abuse victims. Regardless of its chronic nature, courts treat each abuse incident they see as a first offense. Because well over 95% of these incidents are minor, in that the physical assault involved is not injurious, almost no one goes to jail. In custody or divorce cases, because abuse is framed as incident specific or as only involving injurious violence, when women or children present with claims based on the ongoing, multidimensional and cumulative nature of abuse, these are often treated as fabricated. Worse, a protective mother may be blamed whe n her expressed level of concern or fear is at odds with evidence of assault: in the dependency court, her children may be placed in foster care; in family court, she is alleged to be engaged in alienating her children from the “good enough father.” As calls to the police or visits to the emergency room are repeated over time, the helping response becomes more perfunctory and may actually contribute to making abuse routine, a process called normalization.

Coercive Control

The coercive control model is built on earlier work that has remained marginal to mainstream intervention, a mountain of data that contradicts every major tenet of the domestic violence model; and a growing body of literature documenting the prevalence of tactics to isolate, intimidate and control women in abusive relationships. But its major source is the real-life experiences of perpetrators and victims of abuse

As I’ve suggested, the most important anomalous evidence indicates that violence in abusive relationships is ongoing rather than episodic, that its effects are cumulative rather than incident-specific, and that the harms it causes are more readily explained by these factors than by its severity. Among these harms, the dominant approach identifies two for which it fails to adequately account, the entrapment of victims in relationships where ongoing abuse is virtually inevitable, and the development of a problem profile that distinguishes abused women from every other class of assault victim. The prevailing view is that women stay and develop a range of mental health and behavioral problems because exposure to severe violence induces trauma-related syndromes, such as PTSD or BWS that can disable a woman ’s capacity to cope or escape. In fact, however, only a small proportion of abuse victims evidence these syndromes. Most victims of abuse do not develop significant psychological or behavioral problems. Abused women exhibit a range of problems that are unrelated to trauma, the vast majority of assault incidents are too minor to induce trauma, and abuse victims can be entrapped even in the absence of assault. The duration of abusive relationships is made even more problematic when we appreciate that abuse victims are aggressive help seekers and are as likely to be assaulted and even entrapped when they are physically separated as when married or living together. Thus, whatever harms are involved can cross social space as well as extend over time and appear to persist regardless of how women respond. If violence doesn’t account for the entrapment of millions of women in personal life, what does?

The answer is coercive control, a strategy that remains officially invisible despite the fact that it has been in plain sight at least since the earliest shelter residents told us in no uncertain terms that “violence wasn’t the worst part.” Cognitive psychologists in the late 1970s and 1980s tried to capture what these women were experiencing by comparing it to “coercive persuasion,” brainwashing, and other tactics used with hostages, prisoners of war, kidnap victims, and by pimps with prostitutes. Largely ignored by researchers, the understanding of abuse as coercive control was developed in popular literature and incorporated at least implicitly into how various practitioners approached the problem. Working on men’s control skills has provided one template for batterers programs since the founding of Emerge in Boston . Prosecutors are increasingly charging batterers with stalking, or harassment as well as domestic violence, crimes that typically involve a course of intimidating and controlling conduct as well of violence. Scotland and Canada are examples of countries that now define violence against women or abuse from a human rights perspective that includes a range of coercive and controlling behaviors in addition to assault. The most widely used graphic representation of abuse is the Power and Control Wheel introduced by the Domestic Violence Intervention Project (DAIP) in Duluth , Minnesota . Although violence is the hub of the original wheel, its spokes depict isolation, economic control, emotional and sexual abuse, and other facets of coercive control. This attention is merited. The several dozen studies that attempt to measure control and psychological abuse suggest that victims have been subjected to multiple control tactics, among which the denial of money, the monitoring of time, and restricted mobility and communication are prominent.
Despite these inroads, coercive control remains marginal to mainstream thinking. It is rarely acknowledged in policy circles, has had almost no impact on domestic violence policing or criminal law, and commands no special funding. Although providers and advocates may ask about elements of coercive control, I know of no programs or interventions that address it. Everyone acknowledges that domestic violence is about power and control. But we have yet to incorporate this truism into our understanding of abuse or our response.

The major source for the model of coercive control are the victims and perpetrators of abuse with whom I and others have worked. The women in my practice have repeatedly made clear that the most serious harms they have suffered involve how their partners have kept them from fulfilling their life projects by appropriating their resources; undermining their social support; subverting their rights to privacy, self-respect, and autonomy; and depriving them of substantive equality. This is the evidence on which I base my claim that coercive control is a liberty crime. Preventing a substantial group of women from freely applying their agency in economic and political life obstructs overall social development .

The new model is rooted in the same tenets that gave birth to the battered women’s movement—that the abuse of women in personal life is inextricably bound up with their standing in the larger society and therefore that women’s entrapment in their personal lives can be significantly reduced only if sexual discrimination is addressed simultaneously. In the early shelters, the interrelatedness of these tenets was grounded in the practice of empowerment, whereby the suffering of individual victims was mollified by mobilizing their collective power to help one another and change the institutional structures that caused and perpetuated women’s second-class status, an example of women doing for themselves. Our challenge is to resurrect this collective practice and broaden its political focus to the sources of coercive control.

Control: Invisible in Plain Sight

The victims and perpetrators of coercive control are easily identified. Many of the rights violated in battering are so fundamental to the conduct of everyday life that is hard to conceive of meaningful human existence without them. How is it possible then that it has attracted so little attention?

I have already pointed to the prominence of the domestic violence model. Another explanation is the compelling nature of violence. Once injury became the major medium for presenting abuse, its sights and sounds were so dramatic that other experiences seemed muted by comparison. The radical feminists who led the fight against rape and pornography also inadvertently contributed to the invisibility of coercive control. Placing so much political currency on violence against women as the ultimate weapon in men’s arsenal made it a surrogate for male domination rather than merely one of its means. It was a short step to replacing the political discussions of women’s liberation with the talks of “victims” and “perpetrators.” Another explanation for why coercive control has had such little impact is that no one knows what to do about it.

The entrapment of women in personal life is also hard to discern because many of the rights it violates are so basic—so much a part of the taken-for-granted fabric of the everyday lives we lead as adults, and so embedded in female behaviors that are constrained by their normative consignment to women—that their abridgement passes largely without notice. Among my clients are women who had to answer the phone by the third ring, record every penny they spent, vacuum “till you can see the lines,” and dress, walk, cook, talk, and make love in specific ways and not in others, always with the “or else” proviso hanging over their heads. What status should we accord to a woman’s right to have toilet paper in the downstairs bathroom or to the right of a woman I will call Laura who had to beep in periodically so her boyfriend would know her whereabouts or who could not go to the gym without being beeped home? Given the prominence of physical bruising, how can we take these little indignities seriously or appreciate that they comprise the heart of a hostage-like syndrome against which the slap, punch, or kick pale in significance? Most people take it for granted that normal, healthy adults determine their own sleep patterns or how they drive or laugh or make love. The first women who used our home as her safe house described her partner a tyrant. We thought she was speaking metaphorically.

Violence is easy to understand. But the deprivations that come packaged in coercive control are no more a part of my personal life than they are of most men’s. This is true both literally, because many of the regulations involved in coercive control target behaviors that are identified with the female role, and figuratively, because it is hard for me to conceive of a situation outside of prison, a mental hospital, or a POW camp where another adult would control or even care to control my everyday routines.

What is taken from the women whose stories I hear almost daily—and what some victims use violence to restore—is the capacity for independent decision making in the areas by which we distinguish adults from children and free citizens from indentured servants. Coercive control entails a malevolent course of conduct that subordinates women to an alien will by violating their physical integrity (domestic violence), denying them respect and autonomy (intimidation) , depriving them of social connectedness (isolation), and appropriating or denying them access to the resources required for personhood and citizenship (control). Nothing men experience in the normal course of their everyday lives resembles this conspicuous form of subjugation.
Some of the rights batterers deny to women are already protected in the public sphere, such as the rights to physical integrity and property. In these instances, law is challenged to extend protections to personal life. But most of the harms involved in coercive control are gender-specific infringements of adult autonomy that have no counterpart in public life and are currently invisible to the law. The combination of these big and little indignities best explains why women suffer and respond as they do in abusive relationships, including why so many women become entrapped, why some battered women kill their partners, why they themselves may be killed, or why they are prone to develop a range of psychosocial problems and exhibit behaviors or commit a range of acts that are contrary to their nature or to basic common sense or decency.

In the late 1970s, we reached into the shadows to retrieve physical abuse from the canon of “just life.” Now it appears, we did not reach nearly far enough.

And one more time: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/Free-Elsa-Newman

My thanks to Evan Stark, Eds203@juno.com for an eye-opening, although also gut-wrenching and heartbreaking piece of work in this article.

Evan Stark
Eds203@juno. com

They Don't Really Put Innocent People in Prison! Do They?

2008-12-30T16:17:00.000-08:00

Americans seem somehow to live with an "if-they're-in-prison-they-must-have-done-something-wrong" philosophy. Perhaps that is why it is so difficult for me to convince people that I have found one of the innocent ones and work on her behalf--because she has no access to the internet on her own.

Here is another example:

Another Wrongful Conviction in Houston
By TChris, Section Innocence Cases Posted on Sat Dec 20, 2008 at 03:38:59 PM EST

Houston Police Chief Harold Hurtt insists his department bears no responsibility for Ricardo Rachell's wrongful arrest, conviction, and incarceration. When the police arrested Rachell for sexually assaulting a minor, they recovered physical evidence that could have been tested for DNA. The department's notoriously unreliable crime lab had been closed, so the evidence wasn't tested. Prosecutors didn't order DNA testing and nobody told the defense that the evidence existed.
While Rachell was in jail, the officers involved in his arrest investigated a string of similar assaults in their district. If that fact caused them any concern for Rachell's innocence, they did nothing about it.
[more ...]
Jurors sentenced Rachell to 40 years in prison in a case built largely on eyewitness testimony from the victim and one of his 8-year-old friends. More than five years later, DNA evidence — available but never tested before Rachell's trial — cleared him of any involvement in the attack. ...
Eventually, DNA evidence linked registered sex offender Andrew Wayne Hawthorne to at least one of those assaults, and he pleaded guilty in three cases. He is serving a 60-year prison sentence.
There's plenty of blame to distribute, but the Houston Police Department deserves a large slice.

What Ever Happened to My Little Boy?...What Ever Happened to My Son?

2008-12-29T14:53:00.000-08:00

by Aine O’Brocken
written for Elsa Newman, as I think she might say it, if she had access to the internet
©2008, Aine O’Brocken

He was such perfection at the moment he was born. I knew I held someone special in my arms. I named him Herbert. Herbert Ian Newman Slobodow.

Herbie loved everyone and was afraid of no one. He would grow, I knew, to be like his grandfather—my father, who never came across a stranger—only friends he was meeting for the first time.

And, to my great delight, he bonded wonderfully with me. We delighted in each other.

Herbert would come to love the violin. By the time he was eight, his skill was extraordinary for a child that age. At one of his lessons, his teacher called the previous student back as the older boy was leaving—a high-school boy of no small skill himself—to look at Herbie’s bow hold. The child held the bow like an adult.

And he played—to use a trite expression—like an angel. As a child he had begun playing classical music. His concentration was superb. I have photos of him playing, his face displaying the peace and serenity of a mini-virtuouso who had found his calling. He was happy and content with himself and his instrument.

Here I must add that no ADD child, no ADHD child could play that way, play so well. I know this from violin teachers; I know it from violinists themselves. Playing the violin takes focus…love…dedication…and concentration. Herbie had them all, even at the age of seven. This thought is crucial to the question of ADD/ADHD—which Herbie’s father insists that he has. Herbie’s father sees to it that my son uses amphetamines to control a disease—which he doesn’t have. Strange behavior.

Herbie was a child deeply committed to kindness. When he was very young and in school, the teacher put his locker right next to the locker of a little girl with a hearing problem—because that teacher knew Herbie could be depended on to help her, without suggestions from adults.

The child Herbie loved life and loved living. He was a good boy, seldom needing discipline of any kind. And a part of his joy in life and loving was the joy of loving me—his mother. And I loved him in return with a love equaled only by my love for his younger brother, Lars.

Some of my dearest treasures from where I sit now—in a prison cell I did nothing to deserve—are my memories of my sons and their joyful exuberance in the simple things of life as well as the monumental moments.

Oh…the little-boy joys of climbing into a hollow tree and having your picture taken. Herbie is on the right, Lars on the left—or you might say, in a manner of speaking, Lars is extended from one side to the other.

Herbie and Lars both loved going to camp. When he was living with me, Herbie would come home from day camp dirty from the top of his head to the soles of his sandals. When he was living with his father, he came home as sparkling clean as when he had left in the morning, as if he were terrified of creating dirty clothes—or a less-than-squeaky-clean Herbert.

The clothes, of course, although possessing a distinctive potential to bring out his father’s wrath, were a personal problem for Herbie, since as I understand it, his father—although the boy was too short to reach the buttons at the back of the machine--made Herbie do the family laundry. “What do you do,” I once asked, “if you can’t reach the buttons?”

“I jump,” answered Herbie.

“But what if you miss?” I went on.

“Then Dad hits me,” replied my son, eyes downcast.

That last paragraph introduces a new element into my view of Herbie’s life. When Herbie was seven-ish and Lars five-ish, their father and I began the process of separation, divorce and custody decisions.

I wonder if any mother ever believes that the man she chooses to marry and father her children might molest and abuse those children.

I suppose not. I suppose every woman expects the man of her choice will be the ideal husband to her and ideal father for her children, should children be in the couple’s future.

I know the thought never entered my mind…not when I met Arlen Slobodow…not when I married him…not when I brought our two sons into the world.

And yet, when we filed divorce proceedings and the question of custody raised its head, a horror virtually beyond belief began for my sons and me.

When the disclosures first started, they were couched in such symbolic language that I failed to understand what the boys were trying to tell me. For just one example, Herbie, coming home from a visit to “Dad’s”, spoke of a snake there that bit him. Another example: teachers reported that Herbie, after a rain, walked the playground at school in search of worms—and then either ate or pretended to eat them, saying, “Mmmmm. These are really good.”

Only after the disclosures began in earnest and I began a written record, did I understand what was going on. The father I had chosen for my sons was molesting them sexually. And he was abusing them in every other way he could think of mentally, emotionally, physically, verbally and spiritually.

When their father would come to get them for a visit, Herbie would hang onto a table, screaming, “Mom! Mom! Don’t let him take me.” But the courts had spoken. I had complete faith in the justice system of the United States to protect my children. At every step, I trusted and tried to work through that system.

I should not have done so. The system failed me and my sons in every way. Herbie warned me: “Mom, you’ve got to do something! Dad is going to take us away from you.”

But I knew he was wrong. The American justice system could not possibly be so corrupt that it would order children into the custody of their abuser. Yet when the length and frequency of their father’s visits were increased by the court? Lo and behold, the frequency and seriousness of the disclosures likewise increased.

“Aha!” gloated the father’s attorney. “See? Elsa Newman is making this up, so that she will gain custody. It’s all made up! More visits, more complaints from the mother!”

Except I was not the one making the complaints. The victims of their father’s unspeakable abuses were speaking. And of course the more time they spent with him the more abuses there were to disclose. Duh!

Meanwhile, my sons struggled frantically to tell the truth and find someone besides me to believe them. I had taught them to tell the truth. They believed in the truth. They believed that if you told the truth, people would believe you.

They were wrong. And how far did their struggle go? Let me give you just one example. During an interrogation by law enforcement authorities in DC, the boys emerged, glowing—knowing they had held to the truth to the very end.

What that end was emerged only when, on the way home, the boys asked me, “Mom? What’s kids’ prison?”

The burly law officer who had questioned them had apparently informed them that if they refused to tell the truth—that is to say the version of “reality” he wanted to hear—they would be sent to “kids’ prison.”

Herbie found what he thought would be a solution. In conference with Lars, during an unguarded moment on the part of law enforcement, Herbie suggested that they should tell the officers that their dad was “neece.” They would not say “nice,” and thereby lie. They had too much integrity, even at such an early age. Rather they would pronounce dad “neece.”

So, at the end of this interrogation, the boys announced to law enforcement that their father was, indeed, a “neece” man. Law enforcement heard what they wanted to hear, which was “nice,” and released the boys for me to take them home.

Thus do children learn that telling the truth is a pointless activity.

For nearly a year, the boys were in treatment with a psychiatrist, who in fact, reported abuse early on. Nothing came of the report. The abuse continued. Now, although I have repeatedly asked Dr. Jill Scharff, that psychiatrist, to release the boys’ records to me, she refuses to do so.

Again, it is thus that children learn to devalue truth.

Herbie once asked me, “Why won’t the courts listen to me? I tell them what happened, and they won’t listen.” I had no explanation.

Thus do children learn to devalue themselves.

Remember the child who played the violin so beautifully? That was Herbie. He had had three different teachers. During visits to his father, he did not do well in the violin. At length, the third teacher called me, practically in tears. “Please,” she said, “don’t let his father bring him anymore. He was here today. He was dirty. He was unkempt. He was unprepared. He tried to play, but couldn’t do it.”

Herbie had an explanation as to why he did not do well when he was at dad’s. “When I try to play, he hits me in the crotch.”

Thus do children learn to devalue what they had once loved.

When the boys visited their father, they were often invited to the workroom in the basement for drawing sessions. They were made to draw according to their father’s instructions: nice pictures of dad; ugly, scrawled pictures of mom; nice pictures of the guardian ad litem; ugly pictures of mom’s attorneys.

Thus do children learn to despise where once they loved and bonded.

Their father would also practice correct speaking with them. There were many sessions like this one: “Who is nicer?” he would ask, “mom or dad?”

Herbie would answer, “You are both nice,” hoping to escape punishment.

Lars would answer, “You are, Dad.”

And Dad would say, “Lars has the right answer.”

Thus do children succumb to the forces of brainwashing, simple forces with a child lacking age and wisdom—no matter how great his integrity.

And then came the crime which sent me to prison, although I had neither foreknowledge of the event nor any form of participation in it.

A family friend, Margery Landry—godmother of my two sons, and called “Aunt Margie” by both of them—broke into Arlen Slobodow’s house on a night when he had visitation with the children. I was out of state to attend my niece’s wedding. Margery, she says, was hoping to find evidence of child abuse…of molestation…or of child pornography, which the children had disclosed that their father used them to make.

The events which followed, the struggled between “Aunt Margie” and the children’s father; the accidental shooting of their father, the subsequent 9-1-1 call, in which Arlen Slobodow virtually set up a case for the prosecution against me; the criminal trial in which I was convicted of attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder [despite the fact that both these charges were null prossed against Margery Landry]; the appeals court reversal of the jury decision in the criminal trial; the retrial, so that Doug Gansler would not have a blemish on his record when he ran for state office, all of these things had a clear effect on both my sons.

Thus do children learn that the so-called “American justice system” is nothing but a fraud.

Thus do children come into the complete and terrifying control of a man who fathered them, but later said, “I don’t care if the kids grow up f***** up.”

Thus do children change. Thus has my older son has seemed to turn against me.

And thus, a woman I barely know has begun writing this story for me, hoping for publicity that will set me free from a prison I have not deserved—and will set my sons free from the prison of molestation and abuse their father has crafted for them.

Finally, thus it is that this woman has been receiving comments of the following nature on her blogs and citizen journalism sites. The writer variously claims to be my son, Herbie or someone else—using a variety of other names.

[Note from Aine: I publish these because I want readers to have an opportunity to evaluate what this young man is saying about and to me--if it is in fact Herbie who is writing. As you read, please keep in mind that I have researched this case for myself. I have not taken Elsa Newman's word. I have read documents. I have found witnesses. I have no reason to fear the kind of foul-mouthed language and accusations this person uses in his/her comments. The errors belong to the individual. I copied and pasted the comments, to be sure I got them right.]

December 29, 2008: herbie!!! has left a new comment on your post: OOOOOOOOH the fake list of names you put in everyday because it lets you sign it with your internet adress once a day wowow your blood god must be pleased

December 29, 2008: herbie has left a new comment on your post: And who the fuck said anything bad about women, i love women, but you are a disgrace to the gender

December 29, 2008: Herbie!!!!!!! has left a new comment on your post ": ok first off i got nothing to do with ashan i dont even know who the fuck that isi asked my dad, its not himSeccond Im trying to make sure people understand the amount of bullshit you "spew" into your crazy fucking rants.What am i doing? I am telling people the reality of your crazy fucked up blogs.Seriously i know your moms payed writer, but god damn what youwrite looks like some crazy fucking blood god cultist propaganda to make every female in prison look innocent.Just skimming through your wierd bullshit i can tell eather you or mom is sexist against all men.And yes this is herbiedidnt i show you that through argueng with you on my youtubeor do i have to fucking make a video to prove im meyour an ignorant, sexist, lier, cultist, paranoid, skitzophrenic, sellout, easily manipulated, pathetic, responds to your own blogs pretending to be a viewer, obsessed, delusional, and idiotic little old lady from washington who thinks shes never wrong when she always is.p.s. im fucking 15 of course i make grammer errors on the interwebs, dont tell me thats unusual to you

December 25, 2008:

Please remember i do not approve of any of this shit
I dont need help im doing fine, this is just a blog my mom pays her to write so she can get out of jail

December 25, 2008:
… annie post a blog about why you choose to copy and paste stuff mom writes to you on the internet.
Thats right, this person is a payed writer for mom, these are the words of my crazy mom.

December 25, 2008…this is just a sick sellout my mom pays to write articles for her.
These bs blogs come from my mom who thinks lying about my dad will get her out of jail.

December 25, 2008:
… as for being a musician, i only knew 2 songs, twinkle twinkle little star and some other song, and i wasnt to good at them

Ann brocken is just moms hired writer and so all theese articles come from my mom …

December 20, 2008: Shut the fuck up and leave my dad aloneWhat about Washington dc, a bitch named anne cyber bullying, libel, and slander

December 20, 2008: i love you Katherine WinfreeMom go to hell Kathrine Winfree helped me get a way from a lyng manipulative bitch who calls herself mom

December 20, 2008 herbie has left a new comment on your post

Mom and her toolBoth of you are fucking discustingOf course none of that shits real to anyone dumbenough to question "really"Mom i wish my fetus came from some one elsa you nasty whore

December 20, 2008 herbie has left a new comment on your post "AN OPEN LETTER TO DOUG GANFREE: AG OF MARYLAND--AN...":
you people are discusting, stalking dads friends now???Now that im telling the truth all you want to do lately is discredit me and insult me, but doesnt bother me coming from a psychopathic sexist working for a manipulative insane bitch with a nasty hole i escaped from. And dont lie about your self, your not little, you fat hell!your not working for anyone but yourself and mom. Your in no way shape or form a reporter, just a hired blogger And your one sick shit … look at what your writing!Its fucking discusting You know none of that shit exists

December 20, 2008 herbisism has left a new comment on your post

…your are a sexist nutjob who has some crazy ideas of female supremacy and see this case as an oppertunity to promote itor just moms hired writer, eather way your a discusting person

December 19, 2008
"I BELIEVE YOU, ELSA NEWMAN! YES, I DO! (updated)": …because she pays you to write this shit

December 19, 2008
herbie has left a new comment on your post: Mom your fucking discusting

December 19, 2008
herbie has left a new comment on your post "NAZI FASCISM IN THE US?": This woman is …some one my mom hired to lie about my dad, why?because all she cares about is herself and getting out of prisonAnd just incase you didnt notice...my dad is jewish and so am i, …

December 19, 2008

herbie has left a new comment on your post: … my mom is …fucking crazy …

December 19, 2008
herbie has left a new comment on your post "ASHAN--ARE YOU TRYING TO "BLOW SMOKE" ON PRESENT R...": Shut the fuck up mom… you are a crazy bitch and you need some help, but your to crazy to get it, yeah make theese bullshit blogs

December 19, 2008
herbert slobodow has left a new comment on your post: Mom, thats it, final straw, when i confront you on the phone about this, you ignore me and scream at me. Im pretty sure all you do is write these in prison in order to try to justify the way you treated me mom. Making me lie about my own father is a pretty fucked up thing to do.Having your best friend shoot my dad is manipulating your own friends and attempting to kill an innocent man for your own greed.You wanted to be rich, you wanted his money, his house, his children, and then... his life.God stepped in, and in pure luck, she missed a sleeping man, and hit his leg, he managed to fight her off with a shot leg.And what do you do then? you turn on your best friend and say its her fault.Then you have your mom steal from her grandchildren, because she doesnt want to spend her millions of dollers on her own daughter.I got that money back in my collage account, lol another fail for you.So what do you do, isolated in your cell?You hire some one to lie about my dad me and the trial just to prove your innocence.Your not my fucking mother, just a nasty place i crawled out of, thats all you are to me now mom. And real jews dont mention gods name

December 19, 2008
herb bert has left a new comment on your post: She doesnt fucking own me, get that in your head, mom means i came from her, not are owned by her.I find it highly pathetic to make a blog lieng about your self, and have somebody else post it.Mom doesnt stand shit,she acts like a 5 year lies about other people to make it look like its their fault, and sends you to blog about it.

What happened to my little boy? What happened to my son? What happened to the little boy who loved his mother and loved life and loved his brother and loved the violin.

His father happened to him. I suspect that’s what.

Stockholm Syndrome perhaps?

Or just that a molested child sees that a father is strong, because he can get away with whatever, while the mother who tried to protect her children failed. Is my son becoming his father?

I don’t know. All I want to know is what happened to the little boy who loved me. Where did he go?

Two Questions for the Readers

2008-12-25T21:33:00.000-08:00

I could use a good solid opinion or two here, or even more.

I’ve begun receiving “hate” mail in the form of comments on my blogs and citizen journalism articles. The writer of this mails refers to himself—I assume the person is of a masculine persuasion—variously as “herbie,” “ herbster,” “herb ert,” “herbisism,” “ashan,” “proceed with caution,” “herbert slobodow,” and “herbie the jew,” among an assortment of other things.

The writer—sorry, but the seventh-grade teacher in me can’t help noticing this—seems unable to spell or capitalize his way out of a paper bag! Now that fact would make me consider the possibility that the writer is not Herbie Slobodow--Elsa Newman’s intelligent, kind, loving, gentle, musician and athletic son, now fifteen years old--but some other person who pretends to be “Herbert” or “Herbster.” I don’t know.

However I cannot imagine any son speaking thus about his mother: “Your not my fucking mother, just a nasty place i crawled out of….” or “Shut the fuck up mom….you are a crazy bitch and you need some help, but your to crazy to get it, yeah make these bullshit blogs…,” “…my mom and her hitler way of the world….” And these are not the only such things he says. Nevertheless the person who leaves comments for me under these names, says these things about Elsa Newman. If this is indeed a child speaking about his mother, it is a strange thing indeed.

The only possibilities I see are these:

1) Herbert Slobodow has grown to hate his mother and does, indeed, spew such filth about her without conscience and without concern for the picture of himself that he is creating around the world;

2) the material is written, not by Herbie, but by his father, Arlen. Now you understand, Arlen Slobodow is a man who would very possibly consider himself well justified in referring to his former wife as a hole out of which his son had crawled. In addition to that, I have a certain feel for a writer that comes from all those years of teaching language arts. After years spent grading well over a hundred student papers per week, I find myself noticing small mannerisms, points of style, spelling techniques and inconsistencies, punctuation (or lack thereof) capitalization (or lack thereof), a certain turn of phrase typical of a particular writer—whether said writer is a student or a literary personage. And here are some things I know of Arlen Slobodow: he is a writer of scripts, which means that he is quite familiar with the process of putting words into other people’s mouths; is it just possible it could be this father himself, the accused pedophile, who is doing this writing? Arlen tends to write without capitals, without particular concern for punctuation and with little care for correct spelling. That is the second possibility I see.

3) Or there is a third possibility: the material could be written by some friend of Arlen Slobodow or some member of his family other than his older son. I have no particular reason to think this. However, I must acknowledge it as a possibility.

Soooo…what I’m asking here is that if you have read any of these comments, lend me a response. Tell me who you think is writing this garbage about Elsa Newman.

Garbage? Perhaps that is too high-class a name for what this person is spouting--as if Newman did not have enough suffering to do on her own, unjustly imprisoned for a crime committed by someone else, and partly for believing her sons when they said they were being molested by their father…for believing the physical signs of abuse physicians found on their young bodies. When a boy’s anus is stretched and broken and bleeding, Herbie, Herbster, Ashan, Herbie the Jew or whoever you are, it is a clear and documentable sign of sexual molestation, whether or not you choose now to admit that.

And at the time that doctors verified this abuse, you, yourself, were clinging to tables or doorways or your mother—begging not to have to go visit your father, and being forced to leave your mother and go to your father anyhow. People who supervised visits can bear witness to that, Herbster or Herbert or sheepsunion, whoever you are.

And now…although I hate to break it to my readers…I have to tell you that that whole shebang above is merely a lead in to a different question. And that question is about slander.

If the person who calls himself by many names , also calls me many names, is that slander? Let me give you some examples, straight from comments left by the (young?) man(?) of many names.

1. “Ann brocken is just mom’s hired writer and so all these articles come from my mom and her hitler way of the world….” [Gee, I hate it when he says that! I have spent hours virtually every day for the past year working on getting to the truth of the matter, and the kid(?) says I’m being paid to write this.] As if Elsa Newman had some source of money when Arlen Slobodow has a judgement against her for something like two million dollars. Guess again, folks! Besides that, you couldn’t pay me for all this work. I write because I believe in Elsa Newman, because I believe Elsa Newman, because I believe the two little boys who said their father was molesting them and abusing them in other ways, because I believe the physical evidence from these boys’ past, and because I believe that this whole mess has been a horrible miscarriage of justice.

2. [Aine O’Brocken] “is just a sick sellout my mom pays to write articles for her. Oh, that’s a name for me, all right—sick sellout. Ptooie!

3. “by the way annie post a blog about why you choose to copy and paste stuff mom writes to you on the internet.” I can hardly do a blog on that, since your mother/ex-wife (or whatever she is to you, depending on who is writing this crud) has no access to the internet and cannot write to me except by snail mail.

4. “Shut the fuck up and leave my dad alone What about Washington dc, a bitch named anne cyber bullying, libel, and slander.” Bullying, libel and slander—hmmmmm. Sound more like I’m the recipient than the bullier.

5. “You are fucking discusting.”

6. [You are] “a psychopathic sexist working for a manipulative insane bitch.”

7. “ And don’t lie about yourself, your not little, you fat hell!” This, I suppose as a response to my calling myself a little, old lady. And as virtually anyone knows, being a little, old lady has absolutely nothing to do with being little or old or a lady; it’s a state of mind. I’ve been here for years.”

8. “Your one sick shit, no matter how much she pays you, look at what your writing! It’s fucking discusting. You know none of that shit exists.” Quite the contrary, actually. The more time I spend on this case, the more I believe Elsa Newman is telling the truth about everything.

9. “you are a sellout and a sexist…your are a sexist nutjob who has some crazy ideas of female supremacy.” Naw. Anybody knows that women are just a hole for the real humans to crawl out of, don’t they? NOT!

Anyhow, to sum it all up, I am asking two questions of my readers, if any of you will be so kind as to comment.

Question one: who do you think is writing this abusive material about Elsa Newman?

Question two: has herbie/herbster/ashan/herb ert/herbie slobodow (or whoever this writer is) has this person yet crossed the line into slander in his/her name-calling and vicious approach to this writer.

Thanks. I'll be waiting to hear from you.

INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW:

2008-12-20T15:48:00.000-08:00

An open letter to Herbie...or Herbster...or Herbeest...or Her bee... or canadarm2...or sheepsunion...or however you choose to name yourself today.

I have a few questions that I’d like to ask you. Since you have not yet written using my email address, which I sent you via a comment on a variety of blogs and such, I thought perhaps this would be the best way to get these questions to you, since I know you are reading this particular blog now.

1. How did your mother make you lie?

2. To whom did she make you lie?

3. What kind of lies, exactly, did she make you tell?

I am interested to know exactly what she did to accomplish this. Maybe if I could hear some of your point of view, I could understand better, and I might not be so convinced by the documents I have read.

Beyond that, I would like to say again that I am glad you are expressing yourself. However, I suppose I fall short of complete appreciation of some of the things you say to me and the way you say them, since I had understood from people who know you that you are quite a nice young man, thoughtful and courteous. Aside from that, I do understand that you have had many difficulties in your young life. And if swearing and name-calling makes you feel better about yourself and the vagaries of that life, then go for it.

Since I, of course, was not there, I do not know what really went on when you were younger. But I do know that there have been many, many doctors, pediatricians, social workers, teachers, psychologists and psychiatrists who expressed concerns about you and your brother when you were younger because of many things you told them about feeling unsafe.

Believe it or not I have read through all of the materials myself and made my own decision. While I cannot say exactly what was going on, I can say that something terrible was happening to you when you were younger, some of which had nothing to do with your mom. It is obvious from reading what I have read. One day when you are older, I hope you will get a chance to review some of this and decide for yourself.

What I believe and what many, many intelligent and informed people believe is that your mother is unfairly imprisoned, and that she is innocent of wrongdoing. I do know her friend brought a gun to your house and struggled with your father. I do believe that woman was guilty. I believe she was brought to such a crazy action because she adored you and your brother; you were telling her terrible, terrible things were happening, and she desperately wanted to save you.

Unfortunately, what ended up happening is the worst chain of events possible:, your father’s being shot in the leg, and as for your mother: wrongful conviction, separation from you, and inability to be there for you in your life. I do hope the terrible things that you were mentioning when you were younger are no longer happening, and am truly happy if that has stopped or was misunderstood by all the professionals.

I want to keep my websites going, not to harm you, but to see if one day the public can better understand what has happened to your mother. What happened to your mother is not unique. There are many women all over the country—there are, in fact, thousands of women--who try to get help for their children and end up in jail, or are otherwise blamed. This is very sad.

Would you be interested in talking or writing to other children whose mothers were taken from them when they asked their mothers for help? There are many children out there this happened to. This is a real tragedy. But the reality is that many of them have grown up and are now speaking about what happened to them and to their mothers.
.
Out of all of this, there many things I do not know. What I do know for sure is that your mother loves you very, very much. She talks and writes frequently about how smart and brave and talented you are, and all the good things she wishes for you. I hope that you can feel that love even if your mom and you disagree right now about what really happened when you were younger.

Sincerely and with great hope and best wishes for you and your brother,

Aine of Brocken

2008-12-18T14:04:00.000-08:00

Question: What kind of man sues a 95-year-old woman and sends his attorney to threaten her?

Answer: That would be the kind of man who sued Rose Newman for $120,000. Just in case you question the numbers, here is the sum in letters: one hundred twenty thousand dollars.

Let me explain a thing or two here about Rose Newman. She has led a difficult life. Her mother died when Rose was born. She lost a son in a freak accident that took his life when the boy was a pre-teen. As most women who have lost children in death can attest, the death of a child is one of the most difficult and emotionally crushing of events any mother can experience.

Newman’s husband died before her, leaving her a widow.

But life was not done with Rose Newman. Events that she has called “even worse” were yet to come. The first of these were disclosures by her two precious grandsons, Elsa’s sons, who insisted that their father was abusing them sexually, as well as physically, mentally, emotionally, verbally and spiritually. The abuses disclosed by the two boys at that time were literally unspeakable. The boys’ treating psychiatrist, Dr. Jill Scharff, not only heard their disclosures, but put enough stock in their veracity that she reported the abuse. The boys also disclosed to family friends, to physicians, to police officers and to others. Nobody was able—or willing--to help them. The abuses apparently continued, worse than ever. When the boys were taken for visits to their father, they would leave screaming and begging their mother not to force them to make the visit.

Enough already! Someone finally listened and came to the assistance of these boys, right?

Wrong!

Living with the knowledge that her grandsons had revealed unspeakable abuses should have been enough torment for Rose Newman. But life was still not finished with her.

Newman’s daughter, Elsa, the younger of her two daughters, was arrested. Eventually, this daughter would be unjustly incarcerated for a crime that did not even exist: there was no murder attempt, although Elsa was convicted of attempted murder. Elsa was also convicted of “conspiracy to commit murder,” despite the fact that the “conspiracy” charge had no co-conspirator.

Huh? How could that be?

The woman who committed the actual crime, Margery Landry, although she plead guilty to other aspects of that crime--such as breaking and entering and use of a gun in commission of a crime—refused to plead guilty to crimes she insisted she had not committed, attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder. These latter two charges were null prossed in the case of Landry.

In the case of Elsa Newman, however, these charges were brought full force against the defendant. She was tried in Montgomery County Maryland, with Katherine Winfree prosecuting.

Rose Newman searched franticaly for a means to help her innocent daughter stay out of prison and free to raise her sons.. Said frantic search took her to an account she had established for these two grandsons.

I do not know precisely. how much this account contained at the time. I do know that all the monies in this account had been placed there either by Rose Newman or her daughter, Elsa. In the first year of each boy’s life, Rose placed $10,000 in the account for the child. In addition, she added $10,000 for each of the following three years of the child’s life. Thus, each child started life with a sum of $40,000. Her daughter Elsa added some monies of her own and, in addition, made some wise investments on behalf of her sons.

As I said before, I do not know the exact amount in this fund at the time of Elsa’s arrest. What I do know is that Rose Newman, believing that justice for and the welfare of her grandsons depended in part on their mother’s having a solid defense team that could return her to her sons, looked to this fund as one source of defense for Elsa. She followed appropriate procedures…she checked every possible legal avenue…and she was informed that the fund was, in fact, available for use to pay attorney’s for the children’s mother. And this is what Rose Newman did.

She used about $70,000 an a vain attempt to help her grandsons keep their mother.

To no avail: Elsa Newman was tried and convicted of the very crimes that Margery Landry said did not exist, the very crimes that were null prossed in Landry’s case.

Upon appeal to Maryland’s highest court, Rose Newman’s daughter was released and the verdict in her case was vacated. The court opined in their majority opinion that there was nothing to connect Elsa Newman to the crime committed by Margery Landry.

And yet...again Rose Newman’s daughter was arrested. Again she was tried. Again she was convicted. She now resides, unjustly imprisoned, at Maryland Correctional Institution at Jessup.

Her children reside in Tampa, Florida, in the custody—by default—of the father they had said abused them so horribly.

And now may we return to the first question that began this story: What kind of man sues a 95-year-old woman and sends his attorney to threaten her?

Answer: that would be the same kind of man who abuses his children…who assaults family friends…who batters his wife to the point she needs to take out protective orders against him…a man who ignores those protective orders and shoves his wife to the sidewalk, stepping over her prone body to enter her house and take whatever he wants.

Holding that this elderly woman had no right to take money from a fund she, herself, had established for her grandsons, in an attempt to protect their mother for them, this man filed a lawsuit against Rose Newman for $120,000.

Hey! Wait a minute! What’s up with that, Aine? You said she used $70,000 for her daughter’s attorney’s fees. Don’t you mean he sued her for $70,000?

Nope…nope…and nope!

Apparently this man and his attorney—one Stacey Blondes Talbott, practicing in Maryland—decided that this 95-year-old woman not only needed to repay what she had used from the fund, but needed to be punished as well. So they set the amount of their lawsuit at $120,000. And they won.

Rose Newman realized she was going to have to come with considerably more money than she had expended. She went right to work on it, realizing, possibly, from her daughter’s experience what happens to people who dare to say the court is wrong.

And that, at last, was the whole story, right? Rose Newman raised the money, and there was an end to it?

Nope…nope…and nope!

Rose Newman didn’t move quite fast enough for “the man” and his attorney. So said attorney proceeded to threaten Mrs. Newman—if she didn’t hurry…if she didn’t come up with the $70,000, plus, of course, the $50, 000 added by the court for a total of $120,000…rapidly enough to suit the plaintiff and his attorney, then the plaintiff and his attorney would “take everything she had.”

Frightened, Mrs. Newman awaited contact from her unjustly incarcerated daughter, to help her understand what had happened. [You may already know that placing a phone call to a prisoner is impossible. You must wait and hope and pray for the prisoner to call you.] Eventually, the phone call came. There is not, however, a lot that an unjustly incarcerated daughter can do for her frightened, 95-year-old mother.

So, Rose Newman has set about putting together enough of her assets to satisfy the judgement against her. Meanwhile, she lives with the fear that she won’t move fast enough to suit the man’s attorney, and she will lose everything she has—and possibly even be forced into the streets.

And we are back to the question which with which I began: What kind of man does this to a 95-year-old woman?

Wow! Don't Know When Anything Has Pleased Me This Much!

2008-12-12T21:56:00.000-08:00

Wear the Colors Black and Blue--So Children Don't Have To!

Forwarded to through a protective mothers organization I belong to. According to Jennifer [remember the story of Holly Collins? Jennifer is her daughter, returned to the US to speak out about the horrors of "Court Appointed Child Abuse"] you are free to forward and re-post on blogs, websites, or wherever.

Thus I am proud to repost this item on this blog. The only comment on my own? Go with God and God go with you.

Peace…blessings…

Aine O’Brocken: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/Free-Elsa-Newman

Note: Please direct all questions to: mailto:myrainbowkids@orange.nl
Hello, this is Jennifer. It has taken me a month to get everything up and running. Please excuse the delay.
Today November 1 2008 (All Saints Day) is a very special day for me. I would like to introduce my own organization!CA3 Children Against
Court Appointed
Child Abuse
CA3 is an organization founded by adult children who suffered "Court Appointed Child Abuse" also known as "CA-CA"
Mission Statement of CA3:
1.) CA3 will be the voice of every child who is a victim of "CA- CA" Court Appointed Child Abuse!
2.) CA3 will find a way to hold the family court authorities accountable for their "Failure to Protect" children from abuse.
3.) CA3 is determined to stop the "CA-CA"
Court Appointed Child Abuse "CA-CA"1.) The Court was made aware that there had been abuse to the child.2.) The Court ignored or minimized the abuse to the child.3.) The Court ordered the child to be alone in the hands of her/his abuser.
Are you the victim of "CA-CA" Court Appointed Child Abuse?- Your own parent abused you.
- The court was told about the abuse.
- The court ordered you to continue to go alone with your abuser.
- You were abused again with the court knew and basically approved of the abuse that was happening to you.
- You are traumatized from the abuse from your own parent who was supposed to love you.
- You feel betrayed by the United States justice system who was supposed to protect you.
- You are hurt, betrayed and angry and you do not know where to turn for help.
- You are the victim of "CA-CA!" ** Even though "CA-CA" is not acknowledged by any professional board, kids who suffered this abuse know that it exists and we are giving a name to it!Come join us!
We will help you find your voice and together we will try to heal from the CA-CA, Court Appointed Child Abuse.
Dedication:Dedicated to all the children who are still being abused and for those who did not make it out alive…
Disclaimer:
Please be advised that CA3 is an organization of traumatized kids who have suffered horrendous abuse and we are trying to find our voice. We already intend on being direct, confrontational and vocal. If you are uncomfortable with what we are saying, then you should go root of the problem and Stop the CA-CA (Court Appointed Child Abuse)
Adult Child Board of Directors:Non-Executive Director: Jennifer TveterProblematic Director: Zachary TveterVocal Director: Position Available
Professional Advisory Board Members:President: Dr. Joyanna SilbergSecretary: Connie ValentineTreasurer: Dara Carin
Supporting Organizations:
Courageous Kids
(We will really appreciate it if your organization will stand behind us.)

http://www.ca3cacaca.blogspot.com/Contact: mailto:caca3cacaca@hotmail.com
The CA-CA stops here

SEE THIS WOMAN????

2008-12-09T13:09:00.000-08:00

BACKGROUND INFORMATION: Her name is Rose Newman; she is the mother of Elsa Newman, unjustly incarcerated at Maryland Correctional Institution for Women at Jessup. Elsa was charged and convicted of a crime committed and admitted to by someone else. This someone else was one Margery Landry. Both Landry and Elsa Newman have said repeatedly that Elsa had nothing to do with the crime. In fact, Elsa Newman was out of the state at the time Landry broke into the house of Arlen Slobodow, Elsa Newman’s then-husband.

One of the most fascinating and at the same time judicially reprehensible aspects of the Elsa Newman case is the fact that Landry refused to plead guilty either to attempted murder or to conspiracy, saying neither charge was valid. The court accepted Landry’s statement and allowed her to plead to lesser charges.

In the trial of Elsa Newman, however, attempted murder and conspiracy were exactly the things she was charged with and convicted of. Thus the jury found Elsa Newman guilty of attempted murder—although she was out of state at the time of the incident, and there was, in fact, no "attempted murder," only an accidental shooting; they also found Elsa Newman guilty of conspiracy, although there was no recognized co-conspirator. Strange….stranger…strangest—to say the least.

ON TO THE SUBJECT OF ROSE NEWMAN—AND HER PERSECUTION BY HER DAUGHTER’S FORMER HUSBAND AND THE FORMER HUSBAND’S ATTORNEY:

The woman you see pictured above is 95 years old. She lives alone and on her own, her husband having died years ago. She had three children, one of whom is Elsa Newman, now unjustly incarcerated. Rose Newman also has another daughter, older than Elsa. And she had a son who died in an accident.

According to Rose Newman herself, in a conversation with me, the loss of her son was devastating, as those of you who have lost a child in death will doubtless attest. However, this grand elderly woman met, some years ago, with a tragedy she says is even more devastating: her younger daughter was accused of a crime committed by someone else; this daughter was convicted—although innocent—and was unjustly imprisoned. In addition, the grandchildren involved in this case were effectively stolen from her, as they were, by default, committed to the custody of a father of whom they had revealed unspeakable sexual abuses, as well as virtually every other form of abuse.

And now? Now comes the persecution part. When Elsa Newman’s sons were born, Rose Newman and her daughter started a fund for each of the children. Nobody—that would be nobody at all—except for these two women, the mother and the grandmother, contributed to the funds for the children. As I understand it, Rose Newman contributed $10,000 per child for each of the first four years of each child’s life, for a total of $80,000. Elsa Newman invested the money for her sons, added some additional monies of her own, and the total climbed.

When Elsa Newman was falsely accused of someone else’s crime, Rose Newman carefully checked with attorneys and the court—and upon being assured that she had the right to do so, based upon the best interests of her daughter’s children—Rose Newman put a portion of the children’s funds toward legal assistance for her daughter. The premise here was that keeping their innocent mother out of prison was in the best interest of the two children.

Now, another disaster has struck Rose Newman. The father of the boys, with the assistance of his attorney, Stacey Blondes Talbott, has sued Rose Newman for the money she removed from the account to use on behalf of her grandsons and for their mother’s defense.

The father’s lawsuit was more than successful. Although Rose Newman had used only $70,000 of the money for the defense of the boys’ mother, the court has ordered her to pay $120,000 to the father, supposedly on behalf of the boys. However, since the father somehow managed to have himself appointed as guardian of the funds, it isn’t too difficult to see who is going to end up with both the original $70,000 and the additional $50,000 added by the courts—minus attorneys fees, of course.

So now we have a 95-year-old woman, frantic and scurrying about, trying to gather $120,000 in order to meet the demands of the father, his attorney, and their friends at court.

Not only that, but apparently the father’s attorney has begun harassing Rose Newman, informing her that if she does not come up with the money—immediately, if not sooner—then she will lose everything she has: home, bank account, investments, everything.

I am only 68, although I sometimes stoop to adding a year or two and calling myself seventy-ish. I own my own home, but my bank account is minimal and I have no investments at all. I can barely imagine what it must be like for a woman of 95 to be so threatened—so terrorized (is that too strong a word?)—by this injustice…by this former son-in-law...by this court…by this attorney.

What is it like to be 95 years old and thus threatened? Are these people trying to turn Rose Newman into a bag lady?

My congratulations to Stacey Blondes Talbott! First you help put Rose Newman’s daughter behind bars, despite her innocence. [What do you mean you had nothing to do with that? Remember that wild race to the police station with your box of files when first you heard of Margery Landry’s crime? Practically fell all over ourselves in the rush, didn’t we?]

Then you defend a man accused by his own sons of unspeakable sexual and other abuses.

Then you take on an elderly woman in a seeming attempt to deprive her of everything she has and turn her into the streets.

I stand in stunned awe of such chutzpah!

Read and Listen: I Dare You

2008-12-03T23:12:00.000-08:00

But prepare yourself to listen to some of the most horrendous abuses imaginable--no, these are beyond imagining.

THE CHILDREN OF ABUSERS ARE GROWING UP AND THEY REFUSE TO BE SILENT:

http://ca3cacaca.blogspot.com/

I respect these courageous young people more than I can ever say. Go, Jennifer! And I pray God that those who refused to believe your mother will see the truth at last--through you.

A Message for Herbie...

2008-12-01T12:17:00.000-08:00

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2008-11-21T09:44:00.001-08:00

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Please view the slide slow--site below.
Please sign one or both of the petitions, sites given below.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2237419391973437495

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/Free-Elsa-Newman
http://www.gopetition.com/online/23338.html

Sign this! Please!

2008-10-22T18:07:00.001-07:00

The time has come for action! If you have been following my research and writing about Elsa Newman, now is your chance to join in an attempt to find justice for this woman.

Elsa Newman, if you will remember, is the mother unjustly imprisoned in the state of Maryland. She believed her sons when they disclosed to her that their father had been sexually molesting them. But she was the one who ended up accused of a crime and who was imprisoned--despite the fact that Maryland's highest court decided on appeal that there was nothing to connect Newman to the crime.

If you want to read the petition before you sign, just click on the link "Free Elsa Newman," and your computer will take you to the original petition page. On that page you can read the petition and sign--and you can also leave a message, if you choose to do so.

Here is your opportunity to help right a terrible wrong.

Thank you.

Aine

Petition powered by ThePetitionSite.com

Elsa Newman--Who Will Come to the Rescue?

2008-10-10T17:01:00.000-07:00

Who will come to the rescue has been removed from this site.

Friends tell me that it comes across as pro-Palin. OMG! And now I suppose they will blame me in the disastrous eventuality that she actually were to become vice president! OMG.

As desperately as I want vindication and justice for Elsa--all I want for Palin is for her to go back to Alaska and let them deal with her there!

Want to know how I really feel about Palin? Try this site:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DIc8jdra0o

HEY! Elsa Newman Is Innocent! What Do You Say About That?

2008-10-10T11:43:00.000-07:00

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How to Conduct a DCF Investigation in Tampa, Florida, USA

2008-10-09T21:23:00.000-07:00

HOW TO CONDUCT A DCF—DEPARTMENT OF CHILDREN AND FAMILIES—INVESTIGATION IN TAMPA, FLORIDA:

NOTE FROM WRITER OF THIS ARTICLE: All comments by the writer are in bold-face type.

Below and in bold-face, you will find a record of significant items that the investigator and the deputy Sheriff either did not notice, chose not to notice, or did not consider as part of this investigation.

Please note that many of the items below are highly significant in view of the fact that Arlen Slobodow has been accused of sexually molesting his sons, as well as abusing them in a wide variety of other ways: physically, mentally, emotionally, verbally and even spiritually.

So…on to the methodology of investigating an allegation of child abuse by social services folk in Tampa. If you were the employee involved, your venture might go like this:

1. Park your car on the street near the house of the suspected abuser.

2. Slip quietly up the front walk, ring the bell and/or knock timidly, hoping the perpetrator will not answer.

3. When no one responds, return very quickly and quietly to your car.

4. Return to your office.

5. Call home of abuser…leave message: “This is Ms. Marvil, of DCF. I will be stopping at your house on Wednesday afternoon, about 4:00 to investigate an allegation of sexual abuse that has been filed against you. Please acknowledge this call, and verify that you will be available during this time.”

6. When abuser fails to acknowledge your call, you make another call a week later, offering a different time, and once again asking for verification.

7. When abuser again fails to acknowledge your call—after another week has passed-- report to your supervisor that no one seems to be present in the home. Ask if you have the correct address.

These are children who should have been in school. Where were they during this time?

8. Having verified that you do, indeed, have the correct address, and the correct phone number, attempt another contact. This is your third call, and two weeks have passed since your original attempt to schedule an interview with this alleged abuser about his alleged sexual abuse of his two sons. You may now begin to worry a bit about the children involved. You have in hand an abuse report from a local person—right in the Tampa area, whose identity must remain confidential, and yet you cannot seem to locate either the children or the alleged perpetrator.

These are children who should have been out and about with friends. Where were they during this time?

9. Just for the sake of your own peace of mind, you drive past the residence once more. There is no sign that anyone, children or adults, are present in the house. Very Strange. It has now been three weeks since your original attempt to schedule an interview with this man and his abused children.

These are children who surely would have been seen in their swimming pool—or at a window.

10. Finally, after a full month, you call again, and a friendly, pleasant gentleman answers, (said gentleman offering in his tone and attitude no hint of the sociopathic tendencies you might have expected in a pedophile who subjects his own children to a wide variety of sexual and other abuses.) Why of course! He would be happy to have you drop by for an interview.

Please note that a full month has passed since the investigator tried to begin her investigation

A month would more that provide time for signs of sexual abuse to vanish. In addition, bruises or welts—which I understand to be among other abuses that were reported—would have time to heal.

And so the interview—after a month of waiting and wondering if the house is actually occupied--is scheduled as suggested: On a Wednesday afternoon, about 4:00—only a month later than originally requested.

11. At just before 4:00 on the newly-designated Wednesday, meet with Deputy from the Hillsborough Country Sheriff’s office, on the street outside the home of the suspected abuser.

12. Walk boldly to the front door with the Deputy. He has a gun, after all. You can now feel safe—just in case this Arlen Slobodow fellow actually turns out to be a child sexual abuser.

13. Knock firmly on the door, emboldened by presence of said Deputy and the aforementioned gun.

14. Enter house. Interview children in the presence of the father, the accused sexual predator. This, of course, will make certain that the children, with the support of their father will be a simple interview, and they will be sure to disclose any abuses—sexual, physical, mental, emotional or verbal that they have suffered at the hands of this “grow-your-own-victims-style” predator.

[Yes…of course I’m being sarcastic! No way were these children going to speak the truth about their father’s abuse when they knew full well that if they spoke the truth, they would get the s*** beat out of them when the investigator and the Deputy departed.
These kids are manipulated and terrified by this man. There is no way they are going to be able to help themselves. They are too far lost in what might be called a “jungle of child abuse.” If they ever escape, then escape will happen through the efforts of someone else. Only there doesn’t seem to be much of anyone else. Except me—and who the hell is going to believe an obnoxious, little, old, lady retired teacher from the back woods of Washington State?]

Let me emphasize again the difficulty of conducting an investigation after the alleged abuser has interfered with the time factor of the investigation—and caused said investigation to take place a month or more after it was originally planned.

Let me emphasize again that signs of sexual abuse could heal in a month.

Let me emphasize again that the bruises and welts reported by someone in the Tampa area would no longer exist, after a month has gone by.

Let me emphasize again that the month this father bought for himself by whatever means—a trip?
Pretending to be absent? Locked doors and windows to give the appearance of absence?—meant time for him to whip his sons into line and be sure the investigation turned out in his favor.

15. Take note of two or three toys carefully set out, to prove that the children have toys to play with.

What I know that the investigator did not know, is that these children are allowed to have virtually no toys. Toys they receive from their mother are routinely broken because “These are not good toys. They come from ‘bad Mom.’”
I know also that there are two drawers of toys—one which the father calls “good toys,” which can be used in his particular form of sexual abuse. These toys will fit easily into a child’s anus, as the father bites or otherwise assaults the child’s penis.
The other drawer contains “bad” toys—gifts from Mom or toys which are not useful to a father bent on sexually using his sons.

16. Take note of the television, carefully turned to age-appropriate children’s programming.

These children are seldom, if ever, permitted to watch television. It always goes on if someone from social services is scheduled to visit, however

17. Take note of food in the kitchen and in the refrigerator, to prove that the children are adequately fed.

Yes…there is plenty of food in the house. Yes…there is plenty of food in the refrigerator and the pantry and other storage places. What the investigator does not know and has no way to learn, however, is that there are times when this father takes great delight in seating himself and one of the boys at the table with a full and tasty meal—while the other boy will actually face a plate with perhaps a single French fry and a drop of catsup—or a single bean, which is all he will be allowed to eat that night.

18. Note the clean house as well as the number of bedrooms—to prove that the children have satisfactory surroundings, and each have their own room.

Of course the house is clean. What kind of man do you think this is? Child sexual abuse in unclean surroundings is no fun at all. And unless the area is clean, he cannot use it as a suitable background for snapshots and videos of child pornography.

19 . Ask the children a few questions: Does your father ever punish you? You know the difference between good touch and bad touch. Does anyone ever touch you with a bad touch? Do you always have plenty of food? Is the house always nice and clean like this? Do you like to play with your toys? What are your favorite TV programs?

20. Listen carefully to the children’s answers and record them.

Child #1: Sometimes he punishes me by making me go to my room and stay there for a while. Then he comes to my room and talks to me about why whatever I did is wrong.

Child #2: That’s right. Sometimes he punishes me by making me go to my room and stay there for a while. Then he comes to my room and talks to me about why whatever I did is wrong.

Child #1: Oh, yes. I know the difference between good and bad touch.

Child #2: Oh, Yes. I know the difference between good and bad touch.

Child #1: Oh, no. Nobody ever touches me with bad touch.

Child #2: Oh, no. Nobody ever touches me with bad touch.

Child #1: Yes, we always have all the food we want.

Child #2: Yes, we always have all the food we want.

Child #1: Oh, yes. Our house is always clean.

Child #2: Yes…our house is always clean.

Child #1: Yes. We have lots of toys. And we like to play with them.

Child #2: Yes. We have lots of toys. And we like to play with them.
Child #1: I don’t really have a favorite. I like cartoons.

Child #2: I don’t really have a favorite, either. I like cartoons, too.

Notice the similarities in the answers provided by the children. Could these answers be the product of forced memorization?

These similarities are quite obvious here in my theoretical presentation of the answers. My purpose here is to assist you in noticing that the same almost uncanny similarities appear in the investigator’s report. Could these children have been coached? Could they have been made to memorize responses? Are they afraid, in front of their father, to vary from the memorized script he has prepared for them?

16. Say good-bye to the alleged pedophile and the children. Return to your office and write the following report:

Child protective investigator met with Hillsborough Deputy Lavallee who wrote Report #06-182223. As child protective investigator and [Deputy] arrived to…residence a van pulled up dropping off one of the sons. Family friend stated she took some kids to Adventure Island and was dropping off [child].

Face-to-face with father, Arlen. Father stated he resides in the home with his two sons. Currently [the other child] is at a friend’s house for a sleepover. Father agreed to pick up [child] and bring him to the home for interview. Re: allegations. Family has lived in Florida for about three years. They previously lived in Maryland & Washington D.C. Father stated that biological mother, Elsa is currently serving a 20 year sentence for conspiring to commit murder against him & accused him of sexually abusing their two sons.

Notice that this father—who has been accused of sexual abuse by his sons themselves, rather than by the mother—neatly links the unjust imprisonment to the claim of child abuse and ties the two ideas into one tidy little package, although the two have nothing to do with each other. Notice here, as well, that Elsa Newman has never been the one who reported abuse. Doctors have reported. Police have reported. Friends, acquaintances, neighbors have reported. Teachers have reported. The children’s guardian ad litem—their attorney—reported. The head of the supervised visits center reported— during a time when Arlen Slobodow was allowed only supervised visits.

Father stated mother had her best friend...

This is blatant falsehood. In the first place, Margery Landry was a family friend, rather than just the mother’s friend. In the second place, Elsa Newman, the mother of the two boys, knew nothing of Landry’s plans. Newman was trying every possible avenue of working within the system. Landry was the one who decided, on her own, to step outside the system.

...try to kill him in front of his children in 2002. He was shot twice in the leg.

Further, Landry had no intention of and made no attempt to try to kill him. Landry had a gun because she had previously been assaulted by Slobodlow and was afraid of him. It seems that Slobodow saw the gun when Landry apparently tried to pull him away from his son, whom she believed him to be actively sexually abusing at the time.

Slobodow tried to turn the gun on Landry. During their scuffle it discharged, and he was struck by one of the two bullets Landry had loaded in the clip. Burn marks on his hand seem to indicate that he may actually have shot himself. Although there were both entrance and exit wounds, Slobodow’s pajama bottoms, covered with blood, had no sign of bullet holes. I guess Landry was right about his state of undress—nude from the waist down.

Another blatant falsehood: although one son—the son in bed with him—may have witnessed this incident of accidental shooting, the other did not.

Yet another item of note: Had Elsa Newman known what was going on, she would never have allowed a gun in the same house with her children.

Father stated that out-of-state abuse allegations were unfounded and

No, out-of-state abuse reports were NOT unfounded. Abuse reports had been made by such authorities as Dr. Jill Scharff, who was the treating psychiatrist for the boys for nearly a year—and who filed an abuse report. Others who filed reports included doctors, teachers, police, the GAL—or attorney for the children—and others.

Father stated he has no criminal record history.

Slobodow’s claims that he had no criminal record in Maryland are false. He had been accused of assault by Margery Landry, and he had more than once violated protective orders taken out by Elsa Newman to protect herself and her sons from this violent father.

Father states he has full custody5 of both boys.

No, Slobodow does not have full custody. He has physical custody by virtue of the fact that his ex-wife is unjustly imprisoned. Since the criminal trial interfered with family court hearings, she was never deprived of custody. The two parents actually share legal custody. In addition, Newman has religious custody, which means that the father should raise his sons as either conservative or orthodox Jews. This he refuses to do.

and is court-ordered to take the boys three times per year to visit mother in prison in Maryland. Father stated sexual abuse allegations all began after divorce/custody issues began. Family has a Maryland appointed [guardian ad litem], Mr. Alan town….

[One child] stopped counseling about 6 months ago (Dr. Mark Prang, Psychologist),

Father stated both children are doing very well in school

The boys may be said to be doing well in school if one ignores such things as wild fluctuation in grades over a period of time: anything from A’s to B’s to C’s to D’s— or if an investigator does not notice that one boy turns himself virtually into a recluse during his first period class, a clear sign that something is bothering him.
Might it be that sexual abuse just before he leaves home each morning would cause such behavior?

& he has no concerns for their well being at this time. Father stated children’s pediatrician is Michael Gaynor.

Father stated there are no court restrictions as far as him taking the children out of state.

I believe this is untrue. I believe Slobodow was not supposed to remove the children from the Maryland/DC areas—but he did, anyhow.

The children were born in Washington D.C. But family lived in Maryland then moved to Florida. Both children went to Essrig Elementary.

L. moved to Muller Magnet School & H. went to Ben Hill for one year then Williams M.S.

Notice the frequent changes in schools the boys attended. Such changes are typical of an abusive parent who does not want teachers to have an opportunity to observe a child or children over an extended period of time.

NOTE [from DCF investigator]: While investigator was conducting the interview father contacted G.A.L. attorney Alan Town by phone who requested to speak to investigator. Investigator advised a current abuse report has been received in Florida and department is aware of on-going history with family. Investigator advised he will be contacted at a later date as collateral.

Interesting timing for this call. Could it have been pre-arranged so the GAL—the attorney supposedly looking out for the children’s interests—would have been forewarned and available to take a phone call and become involved in the investigation at this time?

NOTE [from investigator], F/F with one child. Child stated he is 10 years old in 4th grade at Muller M.S. Child stated he lives with brother, father, 2 geckos & 1 hamster . He takes care of the hamster and his brother takes care of the 2 geckos.

All these pets seem to have died sudden, horrible and inexplicable deaths. The hamster was crushed behind a dresser. One of the geckos was also crushed. I don’t know what happened to the other gecko, but he seems also to have been disappeared. This is typical of what happens to the pets of an abused child or children.

Investigator established [understanding of] good and bad touch. Re: allegations—child denied any type of bad touch by father or anyone else.

On the other hand, before the boys left Maryland and before their mother was unjustly imprisoned, they had disclosed abuse not only to their mother, but to a variety of other people, including Dr. Jill Scharff, who actually reported the abuse.

Child stated he likes Florida a lot. He stated the weather isn’t as cold as Maryland. Child stated he likes playing on the computer, playing with his hamster or going swimming in his pool. Child stated he has a lot of friends who come over to his house or he goes to their house. He stated he has family like his paternal grandparents who live in Florida and come to visit them. Discipline – Child stated father tells him to go to his room for a while then he will come in his room and talk to him about why whatever he did was wrong. Same for brother. Child presented as an articulate white male with no visible marks of abuse.

Well damn! Of course there were no visible marks of abuse! This father had a month’s warning of the pending investigation! In addition to that, I find it difficult to believe that this investigator would have looked for blood in the underwear from rectal bleeding…or for bite marks on genitals…or for rash on the buttocks…or whatever else would testify to sexual abuse. The hardest abuse in the world to prove seems to be abuse by a member of the victim’s family. A neighbor accused as Arlen Slobodow has been accused would find himself quickly imprisoned and the abused children placed in the custody of their mother.

Child was polite & answered all questions. Child’s facial expressions made an impression to investigator that he has been through this type of questioning numerous times.

Or that he was hiding the truth, for fear of his abusive father’s wrath.
Or perhaps he really had been through it many times, as this allegedly pedophile father had taken them through repeated simulated interviews.

Somehow I have a picture in my mind of this man setting his two sons on a couch and seating himself in front of them with a coffee table between him and them. On the coffee table is a knife—a very sharp knife.

And somehow I can hear him saying, “Boys,”—only he would use their names—“Boys, you see this knife? You see how sharp this is? There’s a woman coming to talk to you sometime soon. We need to be sure to have the right answers for this woman, so I don’t have to use this knife on any portion of your anatomy, if you see what I mean?”
And I can see two young heads bobbing vigorous and terrified assent, clearly aware of what portion of their anatomy Daddy Dearest has in mind.

“So let’s practice a little. Why is this woman coming to see us?”

“H” responds first. “I dunno.”

“L” follows. “Mom has been telling bad stuff about you again.”

“Ahhhhh,” says Daddy Dearest. “L” has the right answer.” His hand moves a little closer to the knife. “Now…the woman will probably ask you about good touch and bad touch. Do you know the difference between good touch and bad touch?”

“Yes, sir,” say the two in unison.

And on and on the questioning goes, with the knife staring the two boys square in the eye, hour after hour or perhaps day after day and week after week—until Daddy Dearest is sure that they have the answers he wants ready on the tips of their tongues.

Not only did this alleged abuser take them through how to talk, but he also worked with them on how to draw. He would take them to the basement and have them draw pictures: bad pictures of “bad mom,” and nice pictures of “dad.”

F/F with other child. Child stated he is 12 years old in 7th grade at Williams M.S. He stated he lives with father, one brother, 3 geckos and one hamster. He stated he takes care of the geckos. Investigator established [understanding] of good and bad touch. Re: allegations – child denied any type of bad touch by father or anyone else.

Child stated all this must be connected to his mother who is “kinda weird.”

RED FLAG! RED FLAG! RED FLAG! This not what Daddy Dearest has told him to say (which, of course, I know, but the investigator would not have known). It is hedging on the part of the child. Does this kid perhaps hope that the investigator will pick up on the red flag and ask some questions about what he means when he says his mom is “kinda” weird? If so, the investigator missed an opportunity. Her miss could have been a deadly mistake for these children.

He stated he has asked his mother in the past why she does these types of things but she never answered him.

Another red flag! Having taught 7th graders for years before I retired, I can say unequivocally that this is an unusual turn of phrase for a kid in 7th grade: “…why she does these types of things

Child stated she has said that his father does all kinds of things that he hasn’t.

Actually, it was the children themselves who made these disclosures of abuse—to a treating psychiatrist, Dr. Jill Scharff, who then reported the abuse; to a police officer who interrogated them for hours in an attempt to force them to recant—and who was finally successful; to a police officer who escorted one of the boys to a restroom, but who said nothing, as well as to many others.

Child says he likes living in Florida because it isn’t cold.

The truth is that when the children lived in Maryland this child loved winter sports such as ice skating.

He stated he has a lot of friends that he spends time with either he goes to their house or they come to his house. He stated his grandparents who live in Florida come to visit and spend time with them. He stated he likes to play video games, tag outside with friends at night or use the computer. Discipline- child stated his father will make him go to his room for a while then he’ll come back and talk to him about it. He stated if that doesn’t work, his father will ground him by not allowing him to play with his video games for about a week or two. Same for his brother.

He stated that his brother gets punished more than he does.

Red flag! If one child is being “punished” more than another, this is one of the signals teachers and others required by law to report abuse of children are taught to watch for.

Again, please notice the similarities in the responses of the two boys, as recorded by the investigator.

He thinks it’s because he [the other child] is just younger. Child’s facial expression made an Impression to investigator that he has been through this type of questioning numerous times.

Sure has—during practice sessions with Daddy Dearest.

Residence is a 4 BD/2BA home with no visible hazardous conditions, adequate food & furnishing. Both children have their own bedrooms.

And you will never notice that as soon as you depart, the toys are put away or broken, especially any that might be gifts from their mother…the television is turned off...the computer goes back on, so the father can go back to work on his child pornography collection…the doors and windows are locked…the food disappears to be doled out at the whim of the father.

How in the name of heaven does anybody prove anything about a man like this?

An Irony of Shalom

2008-10-03T13:39:00.000-07:00

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PETITION: FREE ELSA NEWMAN!

2008-10-01T21:54:00.000-07:00

Although Snopes says online petitions are virtually worthless, I can tell you one thing this one will do: IT WILL ENCOURAGE ELSA NEWMAN, the Maryland mother who now sits in prison while her sons remain in the hands of their abusive father.

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/js/widget.js?petitionID=260097654

Please sign this petition

2008-09-28T08:20:00.000-07:00

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/stop-court-ordered-child-sexual-abuse

If you care at all about the very problem I have been writing about, civil/family courts that with the help of psychologists unwilling to report abuse or allowing their personal bias to interfere with correct assessment of participants; attorneys that are looking for wins, instead of looking for truth and justice; witnesses that lie; children's attorney's that choose a side and stay on it, regardless of the reality of the abuse a child or children may be suffering; please go to the site above and sign the petition.

You have nothing to lose. The abused children of the United States have everything to gain.

Wanted by reason of injustice

2008-09-27T20:26:00.000-07:00

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Another Case of Court-Ordered Child Abuse

2008-09-25T20:44:00.000-07:00

Please remember that these photos were not taken by a professional photographer. But if you look closely, you can see where the arrows point--to places where this child's fingernails were cut below the quick, so that the fingers were bleeding when the child walked into the visit with her mother.

Again, remember that these photos were not taken by a professional. Some of the injuries to Sophia can be difficult to see. In this photo notice the bruising around the eye. This kid has a black eye.

Johanna vonGeldern and Sophia Grace:

With These Pictures, We Come to the Story of a Mother Who Must Pay to See the Daughter Born of Her Own Flesh…and of the Three-Year-Old Child Who Pays a Price of Her Own in Order to be Allowed to Spend Time with Her “Mommy"

This is a picture of a younger Sophia, Johanna vonGeldern's little daughter. Notice the rashy, sort-of-bruised scrape on her face, plus the slightly swollen area around her eye. This injury occurred compliments of Sophia's father and Johanna's one-time boy friend.

Here is how the story began:

Once upon a time there was a mother who gave birth to a beautiful little girl. This little girl had a father, too, since that seems to be one of the rules governing how such things must proceed. If a woman wants to have a beautiful little girl like this one, she must also have a man person willing to provide the sperm, so that she can choose one of said sperm, join it to an egg she has produced from her own body, and begin the process of creating the child of her own flesh and blood. The sperm donor has little to do with the process thereafter, although many a sperm donor proves quite adept at disturbing the process.

As a matter of fact, when Bennett Tocci first learned that Johanna was creating a child, he became furious and demanded that she have an immediate abortion. Johanna refused. Tocci’s fury increased and he became more aggressive and threatening: “If you have this baby, plan on spending every dime you’ve got fighting me for custody. I will use my money, my connections and influence to take this baby away from you. I will take you down, Johanna. I will not share ‘my’ child with anyone. My mother will move in with me and raise the baby. I have already talked to my parents about it.”

When Johanna still refused to give in to Tocci’s demands, he began a legal attack beyond belief, suing for paternal rights over the unborn fetus. This suit occurred in Saratoga County, New York, Family Court in March of 2005.

When Johanna was six months pregnant, January 1, 2005, she filed a Domestic Incident Report with the New York State Police, documenting in detail physical abuse, emotional abuse, and repeated threats from Tocci that he would murder the mother of “his” child. That filing is not the only record of the abuses claimed by Johanna. Other documentation exists in the form of witnesses, obstetrician’s records, pediatrician’s records, shelter records and sworn statements.

Sophia Grace was born later in 2005, and by November 9, 2005, Johanna was still living in fear of Bennett Tocci. On that day, she was forced to call 911 after Tocci completely lost control of himself and shoved Johanna repeatedly back and forth across a living room—while Johanna held seven-month-old Sophia in her arms and tried to protect her baby from the abuse being inflicted. A Jackson County Deputy arrived and removed Tocci from the home.

Then came what Johanna terms “a fatal error on my part.” The pastor of her church, a man named Jack Hollis, arrived almost immediately, with a word of advice: Johanna must not press charges against Tocci for the domestic violence, because—among other things—Tocci would then lose his license to teach. It was this advice and Johanna’s decision to follow said advice and refrain from pressing charges that kept the abuse out of legal records. And it was this advice that turned the whole situation around and turned it against Johanna vonGeldern.

After the 9-1-1 call when Sophia was just seven months old, Johanna allowed Tocci to have daily visitation with the baby. But the results were unexpected. The visits had a clear negative impact on the child. Sophia began hitting herself in the head. She began screaming for no apparent reason. She began crying if someone said the word “no.” She demonstrated an extreme fear of men. Her reaction to any form of confinement was dramatic. And Sophia became hysterical at the mere sight of Tocci’s parents.

Then came further details—more clues that there was something terribly wrong with Sophia’s emotional and physical well being. Every visit brought some new negative: neck injuries; leg injuries; bruises; sullen, withdrawn moods; stretched labia; specks of blood in the child’s diaper; and a persistent anal rash and redness. Johanna was doing her best to cooperate with the Tocci’s. One of the major problems for mothers trying to protect their child or children is that the mother is sometimes literally unable to realize the true horror of what is happening to her offspring. Despite what would seem in retrospect to be obvious signs of abuse, this was part of Johanna’s mind-set: Nobody, but nobody did the things she suspected Tocci and his family were doing . Did they?

Before long, Bennett Tocci began stalking Johanna. Over the next few months, he entered her house unannounced, tampered with her belongings and destroyed her mailbox. The final straw for Johanna, however, was when Bennett Tocci returned Sophia to Johanna with the entire side of her face bruised, scraped and raw.[ See the photo above.] The child was only eleven months old. Tocci handed the child, in her car seat, to Johanna; then he turned and walked away without a word. Johanna looked at the baby and asked, “What happened to her face?” From several feet away, Tocci half turned and said, “Oh…she fell. She’s fine.” And he got into his car and drove away.

Through that incident, Johanna came at last to realize that she needed to go far beyond what she was already doing. In the middle of the night, she moved herself and her daughter to a domestic violence shelter, driving two states away. Behind her she left everything of life as she knew it—except for her baby. She left a beautiful home, her teaching position, her church, her friends and all of life as she had known it.

Since there was nothing in Johanna’s background to give Bennett legal grounds to sue for custody of Sophia, he began to search for a back door to custody. To date, he has “manipulated” she says, people in high places in the state of Florida—Jackson County. He has persuaded these people to prosecute her on “bogus criminal charges.”

“As a consequence,” says Johanna, “of his legal warfare and criminal charges, I am not able to work in my career as an elementary teacher. I am only allowed four visits a month—which I pay for—and I also pay my ex-boyfriend for gas money to transport her to and from visits. It costs me close to $500.00 a month to see my own daughter.

No more than four months after Johanna made her escape from Tocci’s grip, his most devastating act of abuse occurred. He managed to create a criminal charge against Johanna, based on a complaint filed by Tocci’s friend, Jackson County Deputy Rusty Booth. The charge read to this effect: “…violating a court order on March 5, 2006…removing child from jurisdiction contrary to a court order.”

However, there was no court order until the created and illegal “order”suddenly appeared on June 20, 2006. Johanna has a letter stating that her entire family was at the Domestic Violence Shelter in March. Even if there had been a court order in place, leaving for safety reasons is an exception to the law.

But it was not over. On August 15, 2007, Johanna was arrested on this trumped-up “violating a court order” charge, near the shelter where she and Sophia had been staying. The police threw her into the car, as if she were a hardened criminal. She spent the night in a freezing cold cell, hungry and sobbing as if her heart would break over the pain of not knowing what was happening to her daughter. Every breath she took was agony about the pain and fear she imagined the child must be experiencing. Johanna had had no opportunity to say good-by to Sophia or try to explain what was happening.

The police were no help. Detectives advised Johanna that the baby was hysterical and inconsolable and wanted to know if “she had had a nap,” as if a simple thing like a nap would solve the problem of a mother who had suddenly been disappeared from her sight. Johanna tried to explain that the hysteria and panic were quite natural for a child who was still nursing, and who had never been away from her mother for more than four hours at a time, never left with a sitter or a stranger.

Suddenly, like some lost soul, the child was ripped away from her mother and placed in a foster home with total strangers. And the following day, Sophia was handed over to Johanna’s abuser—who was also Sophia’s abuser.

At the time that Johanna left Florida, paternity of Sophia had not even been legally established. No custody order existed. Johanna seems to have been well within her legal rights—as set forth in Section 742 of Florida Statutes to maintain custody and control over her daughter. Yet Johanna feared that Bennett Tocci would follow through on his continual threats to use family money and family influence, as well as “mob connections” he seemed to be constantly boasting about—to hunt Johanna down and kill her as his solution to the problem of gaining control of Sophia.

The first death threat was made in August, 2004, when Tocci sneered at Johanna, “I’ve got our solution. If you are out of the way, I can have total control of her.”

In addition to that charge of violating a court order that didn’t exist, Johannna was to be arrested again—a mere three days before her first scheduled contact with Sophia in over two months—this time for “making a false report of child abuse.”

There was nothing false about the report. Johanna was deathly concerned for her daughter’s safety. Her report was made the day that Sophia was handed over to Tocci.

On that day, Johanna called the abuse hotline, as directed by her attorney, and made a simple, truthful statement about her concerns for Sophia’s safety. Johanna has a sworn statement, taken from a friend, Ruth Hansen, by the lead detective, Rusty Booth, in which Hansen stated that Tocci had been violent, both with Johanna and the baby, during 2005. Hansen further stated that Tocci had been taking baths with Johanna’s infant daughter when Johanna was not at home. It was Hansen’s opinion that these “baths” had caused the baby to “act strangely.”

In December, 2006, before Johanna felt forced to flee with her daughter, the pediatrician’s report shows that Sophia had anal irritation and an anal tear. On the basis of that report, DCF conducted a superficial investigation, concluding that since Sophia’s hymen was intact, Johanna could not be telling the truth. Thus Rusty Booth and the state prosecutor, with the help of DCF, proceeded to charge Johanna with “false reporting of abuse.”

Bennett Tocci is a charming, gregarious elementary school teacher. Behind closed doors, however—where Johanna and Sophia know him well—there is a Tocci that few people have met.

This Bennet Tocci is violent, with a history of drug and alcohol abuse, and has been arrested for driving while intoxicated. He has attempted suicide and displayed impulsive and erratic behavior. He has a special method of achieving climax during sex—the only way he can achieve climax—by fantasizing that he is overpowering and sodomizing a young girl.

Also extremely distressing to Johanna are Tocci’s bouts of paranoid delusion and manic mood swings. During one such episode, Tocci’s father explained to Johanna, “When Bennett gets upset like this, he doesn’t respond because he can’t hear anyone talking to him.” The father’s solution to the problem was to “grab Bennett by the elbow and whisk him out of the house whenever his son ‘lost it’.”

Likewise, there are other examples of mental difficulties in the household. The father, Anthony Tocci, is diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and his mother, Natalie, with clinical depression. Both control their illnesses with medication. Two of Bennett Tocci’s uncles committed suicide within the last three years.

Such is the story of Sophia Grace, three-year-old battered child, trapped in her father’s attempt to steal the child from her mother. Legal files show that since Sophia was handed over to her abuser, she is withdrawn, she hits herself in the head, she throws her stuffed puppy on the floor and punishes it, she is emotionally shut down. During visits, she plays a game where her stuffed bunny is sad because he can’t find his mommy.

The first time Johanna managed to see Sophia after two and one-half months, she bent down close to the child and asked the question that choked her throat with tears, “Do you know who I am?” Sophia nodded and smiled softly, but at the same time she appeared dull and lifeless. It is as if, says Johanna, “the sweet, curious, vibrant, joyous little girl I raised has been reduced to a hollow shell.” During visits, Johanna adds, “she revives in my presence, and I catch glimpses of the pure spirit inside her. It is unforgiveable what her ‘father’ and his parents are doing to this child.”

For nearly a year, this problem has been dragged out—intentionally, Johanna believes—by opposing counsel. Tocci is so intent on keeping Johanna out of her daughter’s life that he even found a way to have the judge who granted Johanna visitation removed from the case.

Today, visits consist of Johanna's reminding Sophia how much she is loved. During visits Johanna showers the child with tender care, hoping against hope to make up for some of the tragedy Sophia endures with her father. Johanna shows her photographs, feeds her homemade cookies and gives her homemade cards. And all the time these things are going on, Johanna is asking herself, “What kind of a father wants his child to suffer like this?”

Every visit closes with the same question from Sophia. “Do you have to go bye-bye? I want to stay with you!” How do you explain to a three-year-old where her mommy went—and why? And besides, Johanna is not allowed to discuss any facts about the case, so she must simply smile and pretend everything is fine—when both of them know their hearts are broken.

Sophia was born a free citizen of the United States, but the United States “justice” system has failed to protect her and her mother. Bennett Tocci has filed for sole custody. Johanna has hired five attorneys to combat attempts to convict her of crime. She is still waiting for some of the charges to be dismissed, so she can be Sophia’s mommy once again. She has spent her life savings. She has been forced to file bankruptcy.

And Sophia? She continually cries and asks when she can go to “mommy’s house.”

If we heard about such legal contortions as this in another country, we would shake our heads and declare, “What a shame! What a damn shame!” But it is not taking place elsewhere. It is taking place in the United States of America. It is happening to thousands of women and children. And it is the United States of America and our justice system that is the subject of the head shaking and the shame.

Where is the person—or persons—with authority who will put an end to this kind of gender bias in the courts? An end to this torment of mothers and children?

A "Why" Blog--questions about the Elsa Newman Case

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TO THE SONS OF ELSA NEWMAN:

THE FIRST LEG OF THE COAST-TO-COAST TRIP!

Plans Proceed Apace

Journal--day three

Journal--day two

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A BLOG FOR AS[S]...

The coast-to-coast/border-to-border campaign begins

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CHILDHOOD LOST...

TRANSCRIBED: material from flyer

Elsa Newman is innocent--please sign the petition

A LETTER TO ELSA NEWMAN'S SONS...

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WHERE ARE THE ETHICS IN THE COURTS OF THE STATE OF MARYLAND?

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WHAT IS A MOTHER TO DO?

Courageous Kids....a message for ******** and ****

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Oh, my dear young man!

With the help of the evil one?

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The Children of Elsa Newman ARE NOT ALONE!

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Why Aren't People Signing This Petition?

Why Did the Sinsiter Grinch Steal Christmas?

Before the Elsa Newman Case--What?

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Why Might a Victim Side with His Molester?

Mothers Talk About Losing Children to Abusers

An "Aha" Moment

The Missing Element: Coercive Control--Naming the Unnameable, by Evan Stark

They Don't Really Put Innocent People in Prison! Do They?

What Ever Happened to My Little Boy?...What Ever Happened to My Son?

Two Questions for the Readers

INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW:

Wow! Don't Know When Anything Has Pleased Me This Much!

SEE THIS WOMAN????

Read and Listen: I Dare You

A Message for Herbie...

Sign this! Please!

Elsa Newman--Who Will Come to the Rescue?

HEY! Elsa Newman Is Innocent! What Do You Say About That?

How to Conduct a DCF Investigation in Tampa, Florida, USA

An Irony of Shalom

PETITION: FREE ELSA NEWMAN!

Please sign this petition

Wanted by reason of injustice

Another Case of Court-Ordered Child Abuse

Courageous Kids....a message for **** and