After starting City of Angels Blog, I learned that “prolonged PTSD with re-traumatization" is not unusual in stories of pedophile priests and their victims. This is my story.
From Behind a Nearby Tree Emerged Krishna...
I don't remember what brought me into the backyard of the Integral Yoga Institute ashram in Burbank, California, that day. Did I do something subconsciously to seduce the man called Krishna, or was it just a coincidence we both ended up in the hidden gazebo? Did he seduce me? That part of the memory is gone. It was spring 1970 and I’d moved in around eight weeks earlier to the IYI “ashram,” a quasi commune in a Hollywood Hills mansion. Yoga classes in the living room were free to residents, we held evening sessions of chanting and prayer. While living in the Burbank Ashram I was so full of reverence I took Sanskrit classes so I could one day read ancient texts. I was learning a new way to pray, in pursuit of a new religion.In reality, I was in pursuit of the priest because of being molested by Father Horne when I was preschool aged. But I didn't figure that part out until I was forty-five years old.
Now at 22, on a quiet afternoon in Burbank, I was wandering in the backyard of the ashram, past the landscaped area where we held outdoor events. I walked right up to the gazebo.
From out of a nearby tree emerged Krishna. Yes, his name was really Krishna, newly arrived in California from New York to teach Yoga to movie stars.
He pushed me up against the garden structure, ran his hands all over my body, pushed his penis up against me and within seconds, he ejaculated, exhaled, straightened his clothes and scampered back to the ashram to change into a fresh pair of “whites” so he could continue his work expanding the spiritual consciousness of Southern Californians.
When he ran off, I was left behind stunned, the same person as that five year old girl left behind in the woods after Father Horne molested me and scampered off. Both the priest and the Yogi had to clean themselves off after being with me.
That day in 1970 I stood in the trees leaning against the gazebo, listening to the hum of the freeway below, stunned, then eventually I went back inside the old mansion made now into a commune full of former hippies turned yogis. Over the next few days Krishna was shockingly cold to me, wouldn't look me in the eye, left me out of events. Then other Yogis and yoginis living in the ashram seemed to turn their backs on me, like they somehow knew something had happened.
I was sullied.
I quit Sanskrit class.
Soon I moved out and hitchhiked up Highway 101 on my way to Alaska, and ended up in Dallas, Texas…
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At age 45 I was diagnosed as having PTSD since age five with 40 years of re-traumatization, which means after the incidents with Father Thomas Barry Horne at St. Peter Damian Church in Bartlett Illinois when I was five years old, for the rest of my life, over and over again, I put myself in situations that mimicked what happened with the pedophile priest in the trees.
Later, after starting City of Angels Blog in 2007, I found out that “prolonged PTSD with re-traumatization is not all that unusual in the pedophile priest stories.
A pattern for my life started at age five-six and repeated itself for decades. Whenever I joined a group, got a job, started classes, things would go great until I acted out sexually, and I always inevitably acted out sexually. Then doors would slam in my face, and I’d have to move on.
Take the incident with Krishna at the IYI Ashram in Burbank, Spring 1970. I learned about the group while I was recovering, sort of, at my parents’ house. I’d spent the previous summer at a commune outside the Timothy Leary ranch near Laguna Beach, again pursuing a charismatic man in high places with a connection to religion. (Read Pages of Timothy Leary's Book of Psychedelic Prayers) now back in L.A., a friend told me when we met on the street. “People live in this old mansion in the Hollywood Hills, you share a room, go to your job, and at night learn the asanas.”
Within a week after a beginner's Yoga class, I’d moved in.
I think Krishna taught that first Yoga class. When I saw his curly red hair and electric eyes, his bony body in the loose white clothes worn by the Yogis, I was immediately dazzled. But I must have been doing something with my eyes or body language that was completely unconscious. I mean, all the girls in the ashram had crushes on Krishna, and he was reverently ignoring all of them. But then there I was, Dazzle Eyed and putting out pheromones, some extra thing that was pulling him in, so no matter how much I tried to be a serious and studious and bury myself in Sanskrit letters, Krishna came after me.
From the moment I first encountered him, as he was interpreting some obscure reading from the Baghavad Gita with great insight and charisma looking like a red-haired version of Berger in HAIR! the compulsion was set in motion. The incident in the backyard at the gazebo was inevitable, it was just a matter of time. And then I was out the door.
Something sexual inside me bloomed and transported up my spine like a Kundalini snake, and we were going to connect sexually. It was a compulsion that sprouted inside me, I didn't have any control of at that young age. In fact I didn't even realize these impulses were strange and had a sick origin deep inside from sexual things done to me by Father Horne when I was age five in 1953.
It was just something I did, inevitably, once there was that click, I’d find a way to be banging the preacher in the backroom.
I have to stop a minute and describe what I must have looked like, how I must have appeared, to people who met me, like Krishna, a who was really just a nice Jewish boy from Manhattan who had been initiated and named Krishna by Swami Satchidananda, (pictured). The guru from India started Integral Yoga Institute in the late 1960s, after opening the Woodstock festival with a group meditation.Krishna was not in Hollywood to connect with blondes. He told everyone he was in training to become Brahmacharya, where Yogis renounce all pleasures of the body, including sex.
Krishna had not counted on encountering me.
You have this unkempt curvy girl, probably not wearing a bra as that was a fashion statement in the 1960s that I embraced enthusiastically, so I was jiggling. My eyes must have still had a bit of kaleidoscope going on from a few months earlier when I’d been tripping with Timothy Leary followers in Laguna Canyon.
I know this sounds like a rape victim blaming herself, but truth is, I did something unconsciously, I moved my body, dressed, held myself in a way that made the male target of my compulsions pretty much helpless to stop me. A lot of this acting out, the flirting, was done unconsciously.
And if a man I encountered had a connection to God or the sky? Forget about it, I’d be so all over him, he’d have no defense against me.
In the case of “Krishna” I must have been relentless, so he felt he had no choice but to give up his “brahmacharya” vows for a quick romp in the woods with me.
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Thing is, I was still only 22 years old, so I was not even aware that I was doing something different from what other girls were doing in regards to sex.
In fact, the only other person I know who was compulsive in the same way as I was with sex was my sister, Patricia, who was also aroused at preschool age by Father Horne.
This is going to be a long story, to be written out over next three years here at City of Angels Blog 15 (2015)
A quality of the PTSD that drove my life for forty years was speed. That's why Faster Than the Speed of Life is the title of this writing project.
If you always go real-real fast, you never have to stop and see what you have just done.
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I had a kind of sleazy slutty aura after the way I’d been carrying on pretty much from puberty until a few years back, in fact, I may still have it. It's not easy being in your mid-sixties, as I am today, and just now realizing the long term effects of that one series of events that took place when I was five, where a Catholic priest brazenly put his fingers in my pubic area then watched with amusement as I responded to his touch. For decades after that I believed that St. Michael the Archangel himself had come to me in the woods and aroused me as a child.
I believed my sexual aggression had been put in me by God himself, having sex with lots of men was what I was on this planet to do.
It was one of the sexual fantasies Father Horne taught me in First Communion Class.
This is going to be a long story.
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Today in my sixties, writing my story is the only recompense I have for a life of destroyed careers and personal rejection. I know, after the story of the pedophile priest epidemic came out last 15 years, that I'm just one out of a hundred thousand victims of pedophile priests in the United States today. We've only begun to find out all the damages these priests and their bishops who aided and abetted them caused.
Look at how much damage I must done myself as a result of just one of these holy men’s crimes. (And there are more than six thousand pedophile priests identified from last sixty years or so in the bishop accountability database.)
I was a sexual predator, pretty much from age six on, when I’d take kids aside to show them what Father Horne had showed me.
On New Year’s Day 1969 I made a resolution to have sex with 69 men that year and somewhere in May passed that number and lost count. I performed in the new porn films that were casting all over the city (never really had sex on camera, we did simulated sex in those first films in the mid 1960s. Then they came up with the X rating and people started really doing it on film. I freaked when they started really doing it, I mean, I was a good Catholic girl deep down inside). So I’d been in the middle of the sex industry as it was coming to life in and around Hollywood and carried whatever residual grease that put into my aura. I was only 22 years old, so even though I battled the same Polish plumpness I battle today, the battle was happening on a smaller tighter perkier body. I was raised in Southern California, a natural blond. Then add the sexual automaton qualities. You have this unkempt curvy girl, probably not wearing a bra as that was a fashion statement I embraced enthusiastically in that era as well, so bouncy. With eyes that may have still had a bit of kaleidoscope going on from those months tripping with Timothy Leary, I’d look up and snag into contact with the most available and willing male present as soon as I entered a room.
In that state I moved into Integral Yoga Institute, just above the Hollywood Freeway at the Barham exit.
So from age five with neighborhood kids until age 40 when I forced myself on my daughter’s father, I was a sexual predator. I wreaked havoc on people’s lives and it was all a result of being mishandled by a priest when I was five years old and there are about a hundred thousand victims of pedophile priests in the USA today, all of us acting out in aberrant ways as a result of the crimes.
If only one tenth of the victims turned into predators like me, imagine the damage we've done.
I didn't even connect my sexual weirdness with what happened with the priest until I became a single mother at age 40, so had to clean up my lifestyle. I got sober, and stopped having sex with anyone at all for fear of releasing that monster in front of my daughter.
When Lizzie turned five years old, the age I was at the time of the abuse, thanks to a perfect storm of events, I reconciled the crime of the priest with the sexual insanity of my life.
Now it's long past the statute of limitations in Illinois for child sex crimes, so there’s no chance of getting even a small settlement from the church to make up for the damages to my life. The Catholic Church only compensates its victims when forced to by law and in Illinois the Church owns the law.
Today as an old lady, the only asset I have is my story.
So here I write.
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In the end, the only other woman I knew who was sexually compulsive in the same way as me was my sister, who was also molested at preschool age by Father Horne.
Father Horny.
Apparently both of us went through life re-traumatizing ourselves, which means we put ourselves repeatedly in the same situation as we’d been in with the priest. Being sexualized by a priest at age five- six caused me to go through life in a kind of trance, much like post hypnotic suggestion, so when a combination of circumstances presented themselves, I’d Snap, then go into automatic response and become a sexual predator.
I was a sexual predator from age six to forty-six, I forced men to do things with me that they really didn't want to do. I have to live with that for the rest of my life.
It was like Father Horne’s black robed presence was always on my back, enveloping me.
Since I started writing City of Angels Blog I've met grown survivors, who still live in this kind of sexual dysfunction, even as old as in their fifties, driven by similar compulsions. And I've met other survivors who have marrried and raised families and are not like me at all.
There are too many survivors to make any genuine blanket statements about us, I can only write about myself for now.
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When I was reading case files from pedophile priest cases in 2007-8 in L.A., I noticed phrases that came up in brief after brief, written by dozens of different plaintiff attorneys. Words that came up often to describe damages caused by pedophile priests were “sexual dysfunction” “confusion about sexual identity” “inability to be intimate” and “promiscuity” in the 510 lawsuits that settled for $660 million in 2007, the L.A. Clergy Cases.
I was only five to six years old when Father Horne was handling me. Details of what happened have intermingled in my mind today with things that I know are imaginary, and some things that I'm not sure if they are imaginary or not. If I hadn’t had the memory confirmed by a sister in 1994, who volunteered that she also was molested by Father Horne six years earlier than me, I don't know if I’d know anything happened, with this much certainty.
I'm still not sure exactly what did happen. I hope someday to figure it out.
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In a way I'm grateful that the way Father Horne touched me at age five excited me and made me overly enthusiastic about sex, because at least I thought I was enjoying myself during 40 years of sexual dysfunction. Today I look at all the altar boys who grew up and committed suicide, or I look at survivors of pedophile priests I've met who are so badly damaged they can barely communicate, or so addicted to alcohol and drugs they barely function, and I realize that in a sick way I'm fortunate.
Like Little Annie Fannie with angel wings, I began my pursuit of the priest at age five-six, and it kicked into overdrive when I became a teenager.
The compulsion took me to to NASA in Houston where I got a high profile job in Public Affairs, and ended up having to leave in scandal, in fact, the reason I worked so hard to get that job was so I could pursue astronauts, you know, dynamic men with a connection to the sky, as well as to the Timothy Leary ranch inland from Laguna in 1969, to a Yoga ashrams in Hollywood and Dallas, My compulsion took me to Austin where I begged a Mormon family to let me be one of the sister wives because their connection of sex to God turned me on so much.
When the pedophile priest story broke, I slowly realized there were thousands, nee hundreds of thousands, of other people who shared the experience of being crime victims of pervert Roman Catholic clergy, and I joined a “survivor movement.”
Then I started City of Angels Blog.
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More to Come of this story here at City of Angels 15 “Faster Than the Speed of Life” a novel to be published online between now and 2015.
Next Entry: Why would a 13 year old girl go into profound mourning at the death of Marilyn Monroe?
-By Kay Ebeling
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