More of the Story that Won’t Go Away

This is backstory on backstory. We all have to be willing to say what is true, even if it may hurt someone we love. The truth is more important. 

Reading my own past blogs to figure out backstory I found this at CofA 2:

“In early 2009 when it seemed everywhere I looked I'd see more signs that something was wrong at a shadow level with SNAP, it even affected me physically. I started shaking uncontrollably and it lasted days. I laid in bed taking muscle relaxants to keep from flying over the edge of the balcony. Shaking. Then with time it stopped, and I went back to telling myself, it can't be true. No one could be that sinister, devious, evil.  Yes they can."

After reading that this morning, I decided, I have to elaborate on this experience.  So sat down and knocked out this segment:

I held the phone in my hand, on the other end was David Clohessy.  Something he said to me clinched it, confirmed what I had been starting to suspect.  The words came out of my mouth, “Oh my god, you don't work for survivors, you're really working for the church.”

Clohessy sputtered, but he had been sputtering in every conversation I’d ever held with him, so the only thing different about this sputtering was a tone revealing he knew he’d lost control.  Up until then, his sputtering kept me from asking anymore questions, because it was so damn difficult to ever get an answer out of him.  

Here I was again asking a totally justified question, where does the money come from that keeps SNAP going, what do you do with the money, and he's telling me that as executive director he has no idea and does not know who would know, I'm going this does not add up at all. 

And the way he is evading any question I ask, the way it's been so hard to get anyone from SNAP to communicate with me at all, even though I'd started City of Angels Blog and had been publishing stories on the pedophile priest issue that were not being published anywhere else. 

Since so many survivors I talked to around the country wanted to know the same thing, I finally felt I had to right the ask Clohessy that simple question, how his nonprofit gets its money and what they spend it on. 

And he just would not answer, not after several phone calls and emails and a lot of his dodging and tap dancing. 

Something he said at that one moment in 2009 made it all come through to me so clear, I might have even said to him, “Oh my god, you're a priest,” because the phrasing, the construction of his sentence was So Damn Catholic and rang with that damn melodic lilt that so many priests use to emphasize that further questions are moot, don't bother to ask them, they will not be answered. 

Something about what Clohessy said to me, combined with the whole experience I was having doing City of Angels Blog and things I’d been finding out about SNAP as a result. 

It Hit Me.  SNAP is really the church, there is no doubt about it.

And I had a physical reaction. 

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And SNAP even monitored me through the physical reaction. 

First I lied in bed shaking for three days.  Literally shaking. 

Just before the shaking started, I said to Clohessy, “Oh my god you're really working for the church,” and he was sputtering his protest as I set down the phone and started shaking. 

I was having trouble grokking what I had just learned. 

The word "grok" is the only word that describes it, a word from Stranger in a Strange Land, a book I read as a teenager. In it, the man from Mars had to “grok” before he understood what humans did, but once he absorbed it, he was all right.  I had to grok that humans could be so evil that the Catholic Church was running a fake support group for pedophile priest survivors and we really had received no advocacy, just damage control. 

At the time I was going to lots and lots of Bible studies, I feel a need to mention that, because it has a lot to do with why I had the balls to keep doing City of Angels Blog in the first place. 

I think those bible studies, which were very Zen Hollywood style Christianity, not the fundamentalist myopia you find in small towns, gave me spiritual strength I needed at that time.  I think those groups I went to on Sunset Boulevard at Hope Again Ministries helped me survive the whole experience, because to be honest, the physical reaction I had in that conversation with Clohessy could have caused someone weaker than me to have a stroke or a heart attack, it was that bad. 

I shook, it was a shaking that came from deep inside, and it was shaking caused by horror.  That any organization could be this evil, that the extent of these Catholic bishops’ determination to control everything that came out about these crimes was so deep, that they had created a fake support group and that group was doing a very evil thing behind the scenes while garnering endless media coverage presenting themselves as a compassionate couple of people running a nonprofit working for survivors. 

The extent of just how evil that was, the realization of how evil that was, somehow combined with the strength I was getting from those bible studies, and I was able to grok it.  But it took two or three days. 

I laid there shaking and I happened to have a prescription at the time for a muscle relaxant.  So I used that pharmaceutical to keep the shaking down to a rattle and shook there on my futon in the dining room that I had converted to my sleeping area in that apartment, because Lizzie had the one bedroom for her space.

Now and then my daughter, late teens at the time, would walk by from her room to the kitchen and back, pass me, and see me lying their shaking repeating words like, “so evil, it's hard to believe anyone could be so evil, so evil.” 

Must have been a changing moment in her life. . .

She hates me today because of all this, and what can I say, everyone hates me to this day because of the stuff I've written, so much so that I have nothing left to do but keep writing. 

Funny how that works out. 

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Because I was in a kind of confused spiritual state, back then in 2009, I turned to someone who I knew from SNAP. 

I did not call him, he reached out to me, after I posted about my conversation with Clohessy.  I'm not sure if at the time I even knew he was on the board of SNAP.  I knew Farther John Shuster, sort of, because after the SNAP conference in Chicago in 2008, Shuster had been in the car when I got a ride to the hotel where I was booked to spend the next three weeks as close to Bartlett as I could find a hotel. 

Shuster is a married priest who runs a nonprofit advocating for priests to be married along with his wife in Washington. I did not know it at the time of this episode, but he was also on the board of SNAP. 

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CUT OUT the stuff I wrote about Jeff Anderson, not relevant. Yet. 
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SHAKING

Get back to the shaking,  

After a conversation with David Clohessy where I realized, at that moment for the first time for certain, that SNAP was really working for the church, I somehow ended up interacting with Father John Shuster, married priest and board member of SNAP.  

I'm on my laptop posting on my blog, hey, guys, I'm lying here in bed shaking, because what I just found out about SNAP and the church has put my body into a state of shock, it's so evil.

I kept repeating that, I told anyone who would read me, what I just realized about SNAP was so evil it was making me shake.

And this email shows up, or maybe a phone call, from Father John Shuster, his melodic and soothing voice telling me he would intervene and get to the bottom of whatever problem I was having with SNAP.  As shaky as I was, I responded exactly the way he asked me to, and gave him the names of five other survivors who also feel that SNAP is really working for the church.

It was a mystery then to me why over the next few days, those survivors told me John Shuster did not call.  Except for one who weirdly told Shuster No I love SNAP and was later given the title of SNAP leader in his state, then a few months later, dropped out of the "movement" and was rarely heard from again. 

The other four people who had agreed to talk to Shuster told me, he never called them.

But yes, I was that stupid and still that naïve about how evil they were.  I thought by asking Father John Shuster to call these people and ask them, and hear what they said, that it would help him realize, I was not making this up. SNAP really is screwing with the survivors they claim to represent. 

Only result was now SNAP knew the names of five people in the organization who were criticizing them.

Man, they're good, they're really good.  They're evil but they're good at it.

Before giving Shuster their names, of course first I contacted my friends, and I think I was only able to find five who were willing to talk to him, of the people who had told me their weird experiences with SNAP that had caused them to stop being part of the “movement,” a phenomenon that happened all across the country in 2007-2011.

Most people I asked said hell no I won’t talk to Shuster, because they had more years of experience dealing with SNAP than I did, and knew now to trust no one.  They were not as naïve as I, still carrying residue of the flower child on me in 2009. Now in 2014 that is almost all gone, not much flower child left today. 

So naïve me, I gave those names to John Shuster, then lied back down to shake some more, thinking he’d do something about this horrible injustice to vulnerable people.  The married priest also said to me, in several of our conversations during this episode, that I should use lots of my medicine, hint hint wink wink.  He even sent me 25 dollars through PayPal so I could “buy some more medicine” meaning marijuana.  I guess he didn't realize that I buy a month’s supply as soon as I get my paycheck, always, it's what sustains me. I don't use it to get stoned, I take one or two small puffs a few times a day, just to make it all tolerable.  I'm not stoned. I do a job that requires intense concentration, a job most people can't concentrate well enough to do in TV production, and the marijuana does not impair me. 

The medical marijuana would not even help with the shaking, I was using muscle relaxants to stop the shaking.  I'm not stupid.  

Clohessy's Barking Dog. 

His barking dog.  I remember from every conversation I ever had with Clohessy on the phone, in the background was his barking dog. 

Nice way to keep people from recording your conversations. 

These people who show up in the news claiming to represent the survivors are not to be trusted.  Thousands of pedophile priest victims called them and poured out their hearts to them, and SNAP took all those stories and hid them. 

If nothing else, we should demand that SNAP turn over its files, the same way they demand the church turn over its files. 

And we’d probably get the same unwilling response.

SNAP is more secretive than the church itself and they do not care who gets emotionally damaged along the way as they barrel through and continue controlling damage done to the church in the pedophile priest crisis.

Hardened by Years of Trauma

I shook and shook for three days but recovered, because I've been through some helacious trauma in my life, and on several other occasions I’d shaken and shaken for days in that way, so I knew eventually it would stop and I would recover.

There was the time in 1969 when I was raped by nine Indians on a reservation in Mt. Shasta.  After it was over I was back out on Highway Five and a man and wife from Oregon picked me up and, concerned about my obvious emotionally messed up state, took me to their home and let me rest there for a few days, no questions asked. 

And I shook and I shook and I shook UNTIL (coming soon at CofA 16 the R rated version of that episode).

Or the time I was Taken in Paris France at age seventeen and almost sold to two Arab guys, I've written that story several times including here and here at City of Angels blog. 

On all those occasions at the end, I did this shaking thing, where I shook and shook and then after a few days it stopped and I recovered. 

That's how I reacted when I finally realized that my suspicions were true, SNAP was really working for the church. 

And nothing that's happened since then has convinced me I was wrong. 

- Kay Ebeling

I have to get to my paid job now. Meantime, please click my PayPal button with many High Fives as My Story is My Only Asset.

-ke

When I first arrived here in "the movement" in 2006, there were guys on the message board hollering SNAP is the Church, SNAP is the CHURCH and I thought they were nut cases, like Charlton Heston at the end of that movie, hollering "Soylent Green is People, Soylent Green is people."

Thing is, Soylent Green really is people. 
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Cut paragraph: 

Oh how I regret and probably will for the rest of my life how I did not contain myself enough to keep everything I went through from damaging Elizabeth, but all through it I felt like, better to let her know everything that's going on, than to leave her wondering what's going on. 

(Cut paragraph for sake of story. That's the kind of mother I am.)

Oh Lizzie, I am so sorry.

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