- Bill Cosby's Wife, Camille, Deposed In Defamation Lawsuit
- Two women share accounts of forced labor and sexual abuse by prominent Christian leader Bill Gothard
- Bill Gothard, Christian counseling ministry leader with ties to TLC's Duggar family, target of sexual assault lawsuit by 10 women
- The Narco Who Died Twice - How a Mexican gangster turned a cartel into a cult - Nazario Moreno Gonzalez—also known as El Chayo
Bill Cosby's Wife, Camille, Deposed In Defamation Lawsuit
February 22, 2016 Merrit Kennedy
Camille Cosby, the wife of comedian Bill Cosby, has been deposed at a Springfield, Mass., hotel.
Seven women brought a defamation lawsuit against her husband, to whom she's been married for more than 50 years.
NPR's Arun Rath reports that Monday's deposition, which happened under tight security, comes after a legal fight:
"Bill Cosby's legal team filed a series of motions to prevent his wife, Camille, from being called to testify, but late Sunday the federal court in Springfield, Mass., rejected the last, emergency appeal.
"The plaintiffs in the civil lawsuit claim they were defamed by statements issued by Bill Cosby's representatives, with his approval.
"Those statements denied Cosby had sexually assaulted the women, and called their reliability into question.
"Cosby is also facing criminal charges in Pennsylvania for an alleged sexual assault there in 2004. Last month, his lawyers filed a motion to dismiss those charges.
"More than 50 women have come forward to accuse Bill Cosby of sexual assault."
No details have emerged about what Camille Cosby said during her deposition....
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/02/22/467706193/bill-cosbys-wife-camille-deposed-in-defamation-lawsuit
EXCLUSIVE: Two women share shocking accounts of forced labor and sexual abuse by prominent Christian leader Bill Gothard
BY Laura Bult NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Friday, February 19, 2016
Two women who are accusing an influential Christian preacher with ties to the Duggar family of sexual assault spoke out for the first time Thursday about their hellish years of forced labor and abuse in the cult-like organization.
Joy Simmons and Jennifer Spurlock are two of the many men and women who have made the horrifying accusations against Bill Gothard, who ran Institute in Basic Life Principles, saying they were deprived of an education, forced to work and were groped by the Christian leader.
“To have your education ripped from you and to have your childhood ripped from you, it’s extremely difficult. It’s just evil,” Spurlock, who spent three years as a minor at one of Gothard’s training centers, told the Daily News.
Gothard retired in 2014 as president from the IBLP after running the organization for 40 years when the sexual assault allegations first came to light....
The women’s shocking allegations describe a disturbing culture within the organization in which Gothard would take troubled young men and women under his wing at the IBLP and then target them as victims of sexual abuse, rape and free labor for the bizarre organization.
IBLP board members are also listed as defendants in the lawsuit because of their role in covering the abuse, the more than 200-page complaint reads....
Another of the new plaintiffs, a man named Daniel Dorsett, said he witnessed Gothard sexually abuse more than 150 girls between 1994 and 1996 when he worked as a personal driver for him....
Gothard has denied all of the allegations against him through his attorney, who called the women’s stories “defamatory.”....
The lawsuit seeks to get compensation of $50,000 for each plaintiff from IBLP and Gothard for unpaid labor, as well as to pay for counseling for the victims.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/women-detail-sex-abuse-allegations-bill-gothard-article-1.2536758
Bill Gothard, Christian counseling ministry leader with ties to TLC's Duggar family, target of sexual assault lawsuit by 10 women BY Laura Bult NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Thursday, January 7, 2016
Bill Gothard is the founder of the Institute in Basic Life Principles who stepped down last year amid sexual harassment allegations.
Ten women filed a bombshell lawsuit Wednesday alleging decades of sexual assault and rape by the longtime leader of Christian homeschooling ministry, Bill Gothard, who preaches modesty among women and has ties to Republican politicians and the reality TV Duggar family.
The lawsuit is the latest development after numerous women who sought counseling at Gothard’s Institute of Basic Life Principles, a prominent religious homeschooling ministry, came forward accusing the magnetic leader of sexual abuse, some of whom were minors at the time
The 81-year-old unmarried former president of the IBLP resigned from the ministry in 2014 after more than 30 women said they had been molested by him, according to the Washington Post, which first reported the story.
The lawsuit filed in an Illinois circuit court includes allegations that range from sexual harassment, inappropriate touching and hand-holding, molestation and rape, according to the complaint provided to the Daily News by the lawyers representing the women at the Texas Gibbs Law Firm.
The accounts, some of which were posted on a blog called Recovering Grace, come from the types of vulnerable women who would come to IBLP's training centers seeking bible study and counseling, many of them victims of incest by their fathers or older family members, or who had been sold into human trafficking....
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/twn-women-filed-sexual-assault-lawsuit-bill-gothard-article-1.2488543
The Narco Who Died Twice
How a Mexican gangster turned a cartel into a cult Ioan Grillo Feb 4, 2016
Nazario Moreno Gonzalez—also known as El Chayo, or El Mas Loco, the Maddest One—first died in December 2010. Mexican federal police claimed they killed Nazario, one of Mexico’s most brutal criminal warlords, during a ferocious battle involving 2,000 federal officers and about 500 gangsters. But his henchmen carried his corpse away.
A grave appeared with his name on it. (Apparently, police didn’t want to dig it up and check.) The president at the time, Felipe Calderon, trumpeted the crime lord’s demise as a grand victory in his war on the drug cartels. But after Nazario’s supposed death, his followers began venerating him like a saint, and statuettes and shrines appeared. Even more bizarrely, people reported seeing his ghost wandering around his home state of Michoacan dressed all in white. Under the leadership of this phantom saint, Nazario’s criminal organization, which took the name Knights Templar after the legendary warrior monks of the Middle Ages, became more powerful than ever....
The story of Nazario’s rise from impoverished child laborer to gangster saint, and his ultimate downfall, is a story about the shifting dynamics of Mexico’s drug war. Nazario cultivated a narco holy image, a mix of Latin America’s popular Catholicism with the bling of the drug trade. He hailed from a tight-knit community in a valley blighted by poverty, criminality, and beliefs in the supernatural. These features all helped mold the narco saint and his legend; in the end, his rule was so brutal it ultimately unleashed Mexico’s largest vigilante movement to take him down....
The memoir also details the influence the Mexican cult comic El Kaliman had on him. The adventures of the superhero Kaliman, he writes, provided him with a refuge from his violent reality; in the comic, Kaliman is a mysterious crusader who dresses all in white and whose special powers include levitation and telepathy. Nazario also believed that he had psychic powers. Later, he would claim to control people’s minds....
The government lost the ability to be the arbitrator that could control organized crime. Instead, gangsters disputed power themselves under strength of arms. Amid this bloodshed, the mobsters turned from traffickers into warlords. And rather than the police ordering gangsters about, gangsters fought over who could control police forces.
This fighting caused homicides to shoot up at some of the most alarming rates in the Americas. The number of killings by cartels or the security forces assigned to fight them would surge from about 1,500 in 2004 to 6,800 in 2008 to almost 17,000 in 2011. The ensuing conflict became known in Spanish as la narcoguerra, and in English as Mexico’s drug war....
Nazario’s tract Pensamientos, or “Thoughts,” which he distributed to his followers from late 2006 after gaining control of the Hot Land, reflects the quasi-religious character of his rule. Some phrases sound like the evangelical preachers he followed. “I ask God for strength and he gives me challenges that make me strong; I ask him for wisdom and he gives me problems to resolve,” reads one entry. Nazario also spread his message in evangelical temples and drug rehab centers he funded....
The first action the ghostly Nazario took was to rename his mob the Knights Templar after the Jerusalem-based crusaders who fought for Christendom between 1119 and 1312. The gunslingers became Templars, sacred soldiers. The red Templar cross became an identifiable graphic in safe houses and on guns, a brand symbol. The Maddest One even made up a coat of arms and introduced a pocket-sized book of codes, listing 53 commandments the Knights had to obey.
The Templar concept also allowed the Maddest One to expand his religious-warrior fantasy. He introduced ceremonies with the crusader theme, in which gangsters dressed up like knights to initiate new members or promote operatives....
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/02/nazario-moreno-knights-templar/459756/
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment