He was tall and thin and
wore bow ties, and he was packing up his laptop to leave just as the hearing
started.
While counsel for
plaintiffs stood before the judge detailing obstruction of justice the
Archdiocese carried out against pedophile priest victims, the court beat
reporter from the L.A. Times was packing up to leave. And he was the only
journalist there besides me.
The judge said something
like: “So the monsignor bumped into the priest who then scampered into the woods to
hide, then a nine-year-old boy came out of the rectory with blood running down
his legs, and now defendant will not produce the monsignor for deposition?” to
which plaintiff’s attorney emphasized, “Yes, your honor.”
I grabbed the L.A. Times guy’s
arm and asked, “Why are you leaving?”
“Phil Spector!” he stage
whispered and scampered out of the courtroom to cover the celebrity murder trial up the street. ***
The Times reporter left
with his two thousand dollar laptop and I stayed at the hearing, scribbling notes into a dime store
notepad. Then came a perfect storm.
Even the cheapest laptops cost a
thousand dollars back then and I had been on unemployment for more than a year around the time of that hearing, because a writers' strike halted production. So at home all I had was a massive desktop with massive monitor. Then all of a sudden I went back to work
and somehow Unemployment owed me a thousand dollars in back payments. I didn't even know why.
So a check
for a little more than a thousand dollars showed up in my mailbox. I used the lump sum to buy a laptop and took it with me downtown to cover the L.A. Clergy Cases almost daily when I got off
work.
In those months I became
the only news source covering most of the hearings while close to a thousand
pedophile priest lawsuits against the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and San Diego
went through L.A. Superior Court in 2007.
-----
There were other perfect
storms connected to production of City of Angels Blog, so many that for a while
there, I really thought angelic intervention was making things happen.
Actually
I'm still not sure…
It was a perfect storm
connected to the other perfect storm that caused me to know how to do a blog in
the first place.
Earlier in 2006, I had tried to create one at blogger dot com and it was too difficult. Then in December that year, Google purchased
Blogger and created Blogspot with a dashboard that made blogging very easy. Also, in 2006 all those TV production
crews on strike were doing blogs, which I went to daily for updates. They already knew how to post videos, live feeds of events, links to other blogs, and were going at it during the strike, and I soon
became fascinated by how a blog could be a powerful tool as a means of
communication.
So, since Google created a new dashboard in late 2006, I was able to create Cityof Angels Blog 3 in January 2007, with a laptop I got for being unemployed during the writers’
strike using techniques I learned from striking writers, And I started going to hearings
in L.A. Superior Court downtown.
More perfect storms soon
followed.
One afternoon after a hearing, the judge overheard
me ask his clerk how to access the documents in all these lawsuits, and next
day the clerk approached me to say, here is how to access the documents. I followed his instructions, went in the
little ground floor room with my laptop, which was loaded with transcription software (I do transcription for TV shows for living). So I was able to copy at great speed the documents that had been filed in several of
the 660 cases that remained in L.A. County, the San Diego cases having split to
go south.
I really went to town in
that little room and even created the
expression “document diving,” posting some really revealing information
straight up to City of Angels Blog 3.
But within weeks the Superior Court media office decided to close off the
room, and I was never able to access the documents again. Soon the whole Clergy Case operation was
moved to a courthouse in a different part of town that was hard for me to get
to on the bus. In order to to read the
documents in that courthouse, one had to pay a good amount of dollars per page
and have them printed.
So there was just that
short period, that short perfect storm, several months at the most, where I was
able to document dive and publish all kinds of documents exposing all kinds of
crimes carried out by the Archbishop of Los Angeles in covering up the crimes
of pedophile priests.
-----
In fact there are perfect storms connected to the
entire breakthrough of the pedophile priest crime stories, going back to the
nineteen eighties.
Personally, before 1994,
I thought I had imagined the incident with Father Horne-y. For years I believed that St. Michael the
Archangel came to me in the woods when I was 5-6 years old and did this AMAZING
thing to me with his fingers between my legs.
From that age on I was determined to share that wonderful thing with
everyone I met and boy did I get in trouble.
My sexuality from age six to, well, the present got me ostracized,
hated, kids weren’t allowed to play with me, wives were gunning for me after
what I did with their husbands. To this day at age sixty eight, my sexuality is
a problem in that I'm not able to take part at all. Because until 1994 I was so dysfunctional,
today I just don’t even try.
In 1994 I found out the
incident with Father Horne (aka Father Horne-y) was not Michael the Archangel and was not my imagination, it really happened. I learned through a phone conversation
with a long estranged sister. I found
out Father Horne-y had gotten to her as well.
Probably the most important
perfect storm of them all:
In the 1990s, the home computer
came out
Then the internet got
connected to home computers
And I just happened to
live in San Francisco where the dot com bubble was imploding and lots of small businesses
were closing. Therefore, I was able to
buy a second hand computer cheap, like a hundred dollars. The dot com businessman, desperate to
liquidate and get out of town, even came over to our home in the Lower Haight to
show me how to hook up to the internet.
That afternoon I went
online and found other pedophile priest victims around the country.
In fact, in writing about
this issue, there have been so many miracles, or perfect storms, or angelic
interventions, that for a while there I started to think God arranged it all.
Arranged it so that right
after the story came out on in the late 1980s On A Few TV Shows, This Very
Democratic Communication Source had been invented, so that survivors could use it
to keep evil powers from preventing release of the truth.
Okay, maybe I am going
too far.
But think of it.
It makes sense
As soon as the first
survivor appeared on Oprah Winfrey, the church went to work creating a way to
keep the mainstream world from finding out about these crimes in their
entirety.
Thanks to the internet
the church was not able to control the release of the story, at least not able
to for that short period of time.
Since the nineties,
corporate and other powers have found ways to prevent information from being
released as easily as it was when the World Wide Web first became available to
civilians.
If survivors went online
looking for other survivors today, most of what they’d find is corporate
controlled websites.
However, in those first
years of the internet, the nineties through about 2010, the internet was just
enough of a free for all to get past the powers of the Catholic Church and get out
to the public at least some of the truth about the pedophile priests.
Enough of the story of
this epidemic of crimes against children came out to show the guilt of the
monsignors, bishops, and even popes. How
humans react to that information, not even God or any powers can control.
Another perfect storm in
my story:
There I was in 1994, bloated recovering from several addictions, in
my mid forties, fifty pounds overweight, going to A-A meetings finally sober
for more than two years, when I started remembering things and made that phone
call to my sister. That was was another part of the perfect storm for me. I was
sober for the first time in my life so able to think things through enough to
call my sister. Almost all my life I've been estranged from my sister, and today am estranged from
her again. But that one day in 1994 I was talking to her, and I called her to
ask, did anything ever happen to you with Father Horne when you were little.
And she said, Oh no, he
got to you too?
And my life changed.
And it's still changing.
With that phone call, I
knew I was not born a slut, but an evil priest had put those compulsions inside
me, probably not even knowing that by finger banging me at age five there under
the trees, he turned me into a rabid sex fiend who spent the next four decades
determined to show everyone this wonderful thing he showed me.
Yes, a little dalliance
on the part of a perverted priest with a little girl created a whore who
destroyed families everywhere she went from puberty until depletion.
There I was at age
forty-five in 1994 clean and sober for the first time in my life, my daughter turning
age five, the age I was when the molestation took place. I was feeling so
guilty in those days wondering why I did the things I did. And then with Oprah
Winfrey and a phone call to my sister, I suddenly had an explanation.
And a home computer and a
man who hooked me up to the internet for the first time
All for the first time
ever. All in a few months time.
In the early nineties, I
went online searching for other persons who’d been molested by Catholic priests
and found the first chat rooms, called a “listservs.” As a public service,
universities let ordinary people use their newly installed internet servers to
communicate, sharing this wonderful democratic new communication tool. I found a listserv for pedophile priest
victims who were members of a group called The Linkup and started chatting
every night as addicted then as people get now when they first get online.
A series of
perfect storms.
Today everything on the
internet seems to be corporate managed and the small voices are barely heard, except
for within small groups of other small voices.
However, in the 1990s, we were able to get some great things done during
that one small window of time, that perfect storm.
Without the internet, pedophile
priests probably would still be free to do what they want and the bishops would
still be hiding them. For centuries, the church was able to hide these crimes
and act astonished when victims came forward in one city after another,
insisting it was an isolated case that never happens ever anywhere else in the
church.
Could be that God, or The
Arranger, Creator, Goddess, whatever, knew there would be this one short fast
opportunity to get out the truth, get past the powers, and get as much of the
truth out as possible before the powers took control again.
The internet is not the
democratic sharing free-for-all it was in the nineteen nineties.
For that short period, we
slipped past the guards and found each other through this tool, then used this
tool to make it so public that the church could no longer deny the pedophile
priest crimes. They diverted our attention, pointed at other places, “Public school teachers do it, Baptists do it!” but the truth still came out.
So is it that weird to
think God or some Higher Power arranged for the internet and home computer to
come out just after television shows about the crimes, so humans, at least a
few of us, would grab hold of those tools and get past the guards and expose
these crimes?
I don't think so.
Posted by
Kay Ebeling
Producer, City of Angels Blog
Not just L.A., the city of angels is
everywhere
*** The guy from the L.A.
Times would only stay for five minutes into a hearing, then get up and leave
because the Phil Spector murder trial was going on up the street, where reporters
were not even allowed in the courtroom. Still the L.A. Times reporter believed that being
one of hundreds of “journalists” waiting to write down the three or four words
said into a microphone during breaks in the Phil Spector murder trial, and then
reporting the exact same words as every news outlet in town, was more important
than the thousand civil cases going through Superior Court in early 2007 about
pedophile priests molesting thousands of children in the region.
Personal Post Script: To this day
I think I was kept alive through several scenarios in my life where I shouldhave ended up dead so that I would be in L.A. the year the month and the day
that about a thousand lawsuits against the Archdiocese of Los Angeles were
going through Superior Court and no other reporter was paying attention.
I think I was kept alive to do this blog
And I'm still here.
-ke
.
