Replies to post #197533 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[Mariner*]

Hi F6, 1st off your posts in regards to setup and content are 2nd to none.
The subject matter, (although it may offend some readers) is an ongoing theme throughout our society. It has been in the spotlight unsurfacing sexual abusive patterns taken by trusted religious practioners using the power of their position for their own personal fulfillments negating the impacts it has on others under their umbrella of authority.

It's plainly and ultilmately SICK, and I am refreshed to hear that these dispicable crimes are comintg to light, with the purpetraters committing them getting punished.

Thxs for keeping me in the loop F6, pretty busy these days, and I haven't been keeping up with my online friends here at I-Hub.

Appreciate it!
Mariner*

[SPARK]

Evil --> But Mr. Hynes has attributed the lack of prosecutions on the intimidation to stay silent that ultra-Orthodox sex-abuse victims and their families often face from their own community leaders.

[fuagf]

N.Y. teen turns in librarian whose flirting went too far

Lee Higgins, The (Westchester, N.Y.) Journal News4:18p.m. EST January 22, 2013

Woman was arrested at boy's home in police sting.


(Photo: The (Westchester, N.Y.) Journal News)

Story Highlights
* Teen initially flirted with librarian
* Anton sent photos of her breasts to the student
* Teen agreed to participate in police sting after Anton said she would "slaughter" him

NEW ROCHELLE, N.Y. -- Details are emerging in the case of a 16-year-old boy who was concerned that months of teasing by a high school librarian was getting out of control and turned his suitor in to police.

After several months of verbal and text-message exchanges between the pair, Marisa Anton, 33, reportedly showed up at the student's home in April, pushed him onto his bed and asked "Is this what you want?" as she started to pull down his sweatpants.

"I thought she wanted to give me oral sex and maybe have intercourse," the teen told police in a sworn statement. "I didn't want to, so I pushed her off me."

Anton later texted him two pictures of her breasts before begging to come over again. Concerned this was all getting out of control, the boy went to police, who arrested her the next time she showed up at his house, in May.

The librarian, who, the boy said, had a fiancé, resigned in August and pleaded guilty last month to endangering the welfare of a child. She is expected to be sentenced Feb. 26 to three years' probation.

Eight pages of city police records obtained by The Journal News under the state Freedom of Information Law show how the teen became increasingly concerned after his flirting with Anton during the spring of 2012 went too far. She urged him to delete text and e-mail correspondence with her, the teen told police.

"She was concerned that she would get in trouble if anyone ever found out what was going on," the teen said. "At one point, she e-mailed me penal codes of possible crimes she could be charged with. She also sent me a link to a website where there was an article about a teacher that was arrested for having sex with a student."

The teen told police he met her in the school's library and they started sending sexually charged e-mails to each other, some of which he sent to her work e-mail address.

"At first, I was just kind of playing around with her and wanted to see how far I could take it, but she seemed to be very interested in actually having sex," he told police. "We then started texting with each other. The conversations and texts became more intense and sexual in nature."

In April, the two made plans to meet away from school and have sex, the teen told police, and Anton invited him to her home.

"She offered several times to come to my house and pick me up and bring me to her home," the statement says. "I never went because I was too nervous."

One afternoon in late April, hours before the teen's mother was to return home, Anton visited his house after he invited her. He got into her car for almost a half-hour and she gave him a back massage, which she continued inside his home. After he rejected her bedroom advances, he told police, "she seemed very offended and left immediately. Later on that day, she texted me and told me she wasn't offended."

Weeks later, she sent him "two pictures of her breasts" after he sent her a photograph of a penis that he downloaded from the Internet, he said in the statement. The teen told police that Anton kept asking to see him in late May and it made him nervous, prompting him to consult with a relative, and ultimately contact investigators.

"She told me she wanted to see me," he told police. "I told her I wasn't sure if I wanted to, but she kept asking. She said she was going to come to my house right then. I got nervous because she was talking about 'slaughtering' me. She told me she would not hurt me, but I felt the situation was getting out of hand."

Anton was arrested the afternoon of May 30 after the teen agreed to help police in a sting. He invited her to his house for sex and asked her to buy condoms, a police report said. When she rang the doorbell, an officer answered.

"Marisa appeared to be extremely nervous," the officer wrote in the report. "I asked her what she was doing at the house and she stated she was there to see a student. She was shaking and started to cry."

Police seized her iPhone and a CVS bag that contained condoms with a receipt, the report said. They later executed a search warrant at her home, seizing three computers. Police obtained surveillance video that they said showed her entering CVS and buying the condoms.

Anton declined to give a statement at police headquarters, asking to speak to a lawyer. In New York, the legal age of consent is 17.

Anton will not be required to register as a sex offender. Her lawyer, Michele Marianna Bonsignore, could not be reached for comment Thursday.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/01/18/teen-librarian-sex-case/1844585/?morestories=obinsite

[F6]

Modesty in Ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn Is Enforced by Secret Squads


Faceless heads model on Lee Avenue in Brooklyn, where women’s clothing stores have been warned not to use mannequins.
Todd Heisler/The New York Times


A poster taped up on a Williamsburg, Brooklyn, street asks [...] Jewish women not to wear tank tops.
Rob Hult

By JOSEPH BERGER
Published: January 29, 2013

The Brooklyn shopkeeper was already home for the night when her phone rang: a man who said he was from a neighborhood “modesty committee” was concerned that the mannequins in her store’s window, used to display women’s clothing, might inadvertently arouse passing men and boys.

“The man said, ‘Do the neighborhood a favor and take it out of the window,’ ” the store’s manager recalled. “ ‘We’re trying to safeguard our community.’ ”

In many neighborhoods, a store owner might shrug off such a call. But on Lee Avenue, the commercial spine of Hasidic Williamsburg, the warning carried an implied threat — comply with community standards or be shunned. It is a potent threat in a neighborhood where shadowy, sometimes self-appointed modesty squads use social and economic leverage to enforce conformity.

The owner wrestled with the request for a day or two, but decided to follow it. “We can sell it without mannequins, so we might as well do what the public wants,” the owner told the manager, who asked not to be identified because of fear of reprisals for talking.

In the close-knit world of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, community members know the modesty rules as well as Wall Street bankers who show up for work in a Brooks Brothers suit. Women wear long skirts and long-sleeved, high-necked blouses on the street; men do not wear Bermuda shorts in summer. Schools prescribe the color and thickness of girls’ stockings.

The rules are spoken and unspoken, enforced by social pressure but also, in ways that some find increasingly disturbing, by the modesty committees. Their power is evident in the fact that of the half dozen women’s clothing stores along Lee Avenue, only one features mannequins, and those are relatively shapeless, fully clothed torsos.

The groups have long been a part of daily life in the ultra-Orthodox communities that dot Brooklyn and other corners of the Jewish world. But they sprang into public view with the trial of Nechemya Weberman [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/11/nyregion/hasidic-man-found-guilty-of-sexual-abuse.html?pagewanted=all ], a prominent member of the Satmar Hasidim in Brooklyn, who last week was sentenced to 103 years in prison after being convicted of sexually abusing a young girl sent to him for counseling.

Mr. Weberman, an unlicensed therapist, testified during his trial that boys and girls — though not his accuser — were regularly referred to him by a Hasidic modesty committee concerned about what it viewed as inappropriate attire and behavior.

The details were startling: a witness for Mr. Weberman’s defense, Baila Gluck [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/06/nyregion/nechemya-weberman-testifies-in-his-own-defense-in-sex-abuse-trial.html ], testified that masked men representing a modesty committee in the Hasidic village of Kiryas Joel, N.Y., 50 miles northwest of New York City, broke into her bedroom about seven years ago and confiscated her cellphone.

The Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/11/nyregion/for-ultra-orthodox-in-child-sex-abuse-cases-prosecutor-has-different-rules.html?pagewanted=all ], who prosecuted the Weberman case, has now received allegations that members of a modesty committee forced their way into a home in the borough, confiscating an iPad and computer equipment deemed inappropriate for Orthodox children, officials say. Allegations have also surfaced that a modesty committee threatened to publicly shame a married man who was having an affair unless he paid the members money for what they described as therapy.

“They operate like the Mafia,” said Rabbi Allan Nadler, director of the Jewish studies program at Drew University in Madison, N.J.

Rabbi Nadler, who testified at Mr. Weberman’s trial, said that modesty committees did not have addresses, stationery or business cards, and that few people seemed to know where their authority originated, though it was doubtful, he said, that they could continue operating without the tacit blessings of rabbinical leaders.

“They walk into a store and say it would be a shame if your window was broken or you lost your clientele,” he said. “They might tell the father of a girl who wears a skirt that’s too short and he’s, say, a store owner: ‘If you ever want to sell a pair of shoes, speak to your daughter.’ ”

In Israel, there have been similar concerns. Though no modesty committee was overtly involved, there has been anger over ultra-Orthodox zealots who spit on and insulted an 8-year-old girl for walking to school through their neighborhood in a dress they considered immodest.

In Brooklyn, Assemblyman Dov Hikind [ http://assembly.state.ny.us/mem/Dov-Hikind ], who has represented the heavily Hasidic neighborhood of Borough Park for 30 years, said that he had never met a modesty committee member, but that “there are a lot of independent operators that believe they are protecting God and have to do this kind of stuff, and that’s sickening and gives us all a black eye.”

“If you want to advocate modesty,” he added, “do your thing, but when you stuff it down my throat physically, that undermines us and hurts us.”

Hasidic leaders contend that the modesty committees are nothing more than self-appointed individuals who, indignant at some perceived infraction, take matters into their own hands.

“These are individual people who decide to take on this crusade,” said Rabbi David Niederman, who as president of the United Jewish Organization of Williamsburg is a sometime spokesman for the Satmar Hasidim. “You see posters telling people do this and do that. It does not represent an authorized body.”

But many Hasidim say they have seen or heard how a shadowy group of men seeks to pressure parents to rein in children who wear dresses too short or stockings too thin, or who chat on cellphones with friends of the opposite sex. One family reported being harassed because the wife had stepped outdoors with a robelike housecoat rather than a long dress.

While many of the rules of conduct are announced on Yiddish broadsides posted on trees, lampposts and walls, residents of Hasidic neighborhoods say some store owners have received rough verbal warnings from a modesty committee to stop selling magazines that carry photographs considered too revealing, or articles that dispute the Satmar Hasidim’s belief that Israel should not have existed until the Messiah’s arrival.

The Central Rabbinical Congress of the United States and Canada, in addition to certifying foods as kosher and adjudicating matrimonial and commercial disputes, does at times remind the Satmar community of the community’s modesty rules. It is made up of scores of rabbis, but it has an address — it is housed on the second floor of a Williamsburg row house — and it signs every decree it issues.

“We give out proclamations,” said Rabbi Yitzchok Glick, its executive director. “We don’t enforce. It’s like people can decide to keep Shabbos or not. If someone wants to turn on the light on Shabbos, we cannot put him in jail for that.”

But Hasidim interviewed said squads of enforcers did exist in wildcat form.

“There are quite a few men, especially in Williamsburg, who consider themselves Gut’s polizei,” said Yosef Rapaport, a Hasidic journalist, using the words for “God’s police.”

“It’s somebody who is a busybody, and they’re quite a few of them — zealots who take it upon themselves and they just enforce. They’re considered crazy, but people don’t want to confront them.”

*

Related

Therapist Sentenced to 103 Years for Child Sexual Abuse (January 23, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/23/nyregion/nechemya-weberman-sentenced-to-103-years-in-prison.html [the post to which this is a reply]

*

© 2013 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/30/nyregion/shadowy-squads-enforce-modesty-in-hasidic-brooklyn.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/30/nyregion/shadowy-squads-enforce-modesty-in-hasidic-brooklyn.html?pagewanted=all ]

[Mariner*]

Archdiocese Documents Show Priests Paid To Leave

by The Associated Press
July 01, 2013 7:40 PM

MILWAUKEE (AP) — As more victims of clergy sex abuse came forward, then-Milwaukee Archbishop Timothy Dolan oversaw a plan to pay some abusers to leave the priesthood after writing to Vatican officials with increasing frustration and concern, warning them about the potential for scandal if they did not defrock problem priests, according to documents released Monday.

Dolan's correspondence with Vatican officials and priests accused of sexual abuse was included in about 6,000 pages of documents the Archdiocese of Milwaukee released Monday as part of a deal reached in federal bankruptcy court with clergy sex abuse victims suing it for fraud. Victims say the archdiocese transferred problem priests to new churches without warning parishioners and covered up priests' crimes for decades.

The documents have drawn attention in part because of the involvement of Dolan, who is now a cardinal and New York archbishop and the nation's most prominent Roman Catholic official by virtue of his position as president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The records provide new details on payments made to some abusers to leave the priesthood and the transfer of nearly $57 million for cemetery care into a trust as the archdiocese prepared to file for bankruptcy.

Victims and their attorneys accused Dolan of bankruptcy fraud, pointing to a June 2007 letter in which he told a Vatican office that moving the money into a trust would provide "an improved protection of these funds from any legal claim and liability."

Church law requires bishops to seek Vatican approval for any property sale or asset transfer in the millions of dollars. Dolan wrote in the letter that the transfer had been approved by archdiocese's Financial Council and College of Consultors.

A Vatican office approved the transfer within a month. Jeff Anderson, an attorney for many victims, compared that to the long lag in responses to defrock abusive priests.

"These documents show that if they want to move money to protect it from survivors they can act quick as a fox," Anderson said. "If they want to protect kids, if they have full knowledge of kids in peril, they keep it secret while the Vatican drags its feet and children are kept at peril."

In a statement, Dolan called any suggestion he was trying to shield money from victims an "old and discredited" attack. Jerry Topczewski, chief of staff for current Archbishop Jerome Listecki, said the money was always set aside in a separate fund for cemetery care and moving it to a trust just formalized that.

Peter Isely, Midwest director for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said he would ask the U.S. attorney's office in Milwaukee to look into the possibility of bankruptcy fraud. However, Marquette University law professor Ralph Anzivino, a bankruptcy specialist, said no criminal charges could be filed unless the bankruptcy judge determined the transfer amounts to fraud.

The documents also show that Dolan repeatedly wrote to Vatican officials, pleading with them to dismiss priests accused of abuse but often was left waiting for years for a response. One of those cases involved John C. Wagner, who was accused of making advances to students at the University of Wisconsin-Sheboygan when he was in campus ministry in the 1980s. Dolan's predecessor, Archbishop Rembert Weakland, tried in the 1990s to get Wagner to voluntarily leave the priesthood but Wagner refused.

In 2005, as settlements with clergy sex abuse victims were piling up, Dolan wrote to the Vatican office in charge of the matter and recommended it kick Wagner out.

"The liability for the Archdiocese is great as is the potential for scandal if it appears that no definitive action has been taken," Dolan wrote to Archbishop Angelo Amato, of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Wagner showed no remorse, Dolan wrote, "His only concern has been his financial status."

Dolan said that if the Vatican agreed to dismiss Wagner, an archdiocese fund could pay for his needs until he was eligible for a pension. Dolan didn't receive a response until 2008, when he re-submitted his request along with details of new allegations against Wagner.

"The liability for the Archdiocese is great, as is the potential for scandal if it appears that no definitive action has been taken," he wrote. "Our new found awareness of the severity of damage caused by sexual abuse at the hands of clergy makes it impossible for us to ignore this situation or allow any longer the unresolved nature of this case."

Amato then recommended Dolan ask Wagner to leave voluntarily, which Dolan did. Wagner's attorney rejected the request, saying the $20,000 payment that Dolan offered wouldn't cover the priest's expenses for the two years until his retirement. Wagner wasn't officially defrocked until 2012.

A working telephone number for him could not be found Monday, and he did not immediately respond to an email message.

Topczewski said the archdiocese had had a practice of paying priests leaving the priesthood for years before Dolan took over. Most of them were not accused of wrongdoing, and the money helped them transition into their new lives, he said.

At least three priests accused of sexual abuse received payments when they left the priesthood before Dolan's arrival, according to the documents. Six more left under Dolan, accepting the archdiocese's offer of $10,000 when they voluntarily agreed to leave the priesthood and another $10,000 when Vatican officials announced their decision about the priest's future.

Topczewski said the money covered the men's health care, but it also got "priests out quicker. That's what victims were asking for."

___

Associated Press writers Dinesh Ramde in Milwaukee, Rachel Zoll in New York, Michael Tarm in Chicago, Brian Bakst in St. Paul, Minn.; and Doug Glass in Minneapolis contributed to this report.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=197525959