Newman and Fulani's All Stars Project: Bad for Kids

Special Report:

 

FRED NEWMAN, LENORA FULANI AND THE ALL STARS PROJECT:  WRONG FOR NEW YORK’S CHILDREN AND TEENS

 

Why the City’s Industrial Development Agency should reject Newman and Fulani’s application for $12.5 million in bond financing.

 

 

To the Board and Staff of the Industrial Development Agency:

 

The All Stars Project, a youth charity controlled by radical activist Fred Newman and his sidekick Lenora Fulani, has applied to the IDA for $12.5 million in tax-free municipal financing, of which $8.3 million will go for refinancing All Stars’ 2002 IDA bonds, and $4.2 million for improvements to All Stars’ W. 42 St. theater, offices and youth performance center. The new bond is scheduled for approval at the IDA’s September 12, 2006 meeting. 

 

I urge the IDA to take a step back from this deal and perform the kind of in-depth due diligence that should (on moral if not legal grounds) be mandatory before granting public funds to a controversial organization that works with vulnerable children and teenagers.

 

The report I am presenting to aid in such due diligence raises harsh questions about the leaders and staff of the All Stars Project, and whether they should be working with children and teens at all, much less whether they should receive public financing to do so.  The questions relate to Newman’s “social therapy” and the collectivist cult that has evolved from the interactions of social therapists and their clients, the peculiar beliefs and practices of this cult (e.g., friendosexuality) and the cult’s history of exploiting and manipulating children, teens and parents through a variety of dubious programs dating back to the early 1970’s.

 

All Stars evades the questions

 

I presented an earlier, shorter version of this report to the Department of Youth and Community Development in opposition to a 2005 contract bid by All Stars to run an after-school program for middle- and high-school kids. The DYCD, which also received complaints from other sources, presented All Stars with a series of questions about the finances and living arrangements--and connections to social therapy--of the charity’s officers, staff and board of directors.

 

Rather than answer these questions (which were perfectly reasonable given the seriousness of the allegations and the fact that All Stars’ contract was for a program that would work with children), the charity’s president, Gabrielle Kurlander, sent a letter to the DYCD withdrawing the charity’s application. She cited as her reason the “abusive” and “intrusive” nature of the questions, which she said “read like an inquisition from [sic] Senator Joseph McCarthy” (Village Voice, Aug. 23, 2006). Apparently, Kurlander knew that it would be impossible to answer the questions truthfully without being rejected for the contract and suffering negative media coverage (which would inevitably cut into the millions of dollars All Stars raises from philanthropists and corporate giving departments each year).

 

Kurlander’s response to the DYCD inquiries raises an important question regarding the current bond deal. If the IDA decides to authorize a serious investigation of whether All Stars’ brand of youth work is a possible threat to the emotional development of children and teens, would the charity’s officers once again evade the questions? And if they did, would there remain then any possible justification for giving them $12.5 million in public financing at the expense of New York City’s taxpayers? There is only one way to find out--postpone the vote on the All Stars bond and authorize the thorough investigation that should have been, but wasn’t, undertaken prior to the first All Stars bond issue in 2002. Demand that the All Stars leadership answer the questions raised by this report, by the six-part NY1 News series on Newman and All Stars that aired last fall, and by the many former members of the Newman cult who say they were lied to, manipulated and exploited in the most egregious ways.

 

Newman still in control

 

Some members of the IDA board may resist further investigation of All Stars because of the statement by Stu Loeser, a spokesman for Mayor Bloomberg, that Fred Newman has “distanced” himself from All Stars (Village Voice, Aug. 23). Loeser was referring to Newman’s announcement in December 2005 that he was resigning as artistic director of All Stars’ Castillo Theatre--a move apparently triggered by the negative reaction of wealthy All Stars donors to Newman’s remarks on NY1 News the previous month defending therapist-patient sexual relationships.

 

The notion that All Stars has somehow been sanitized by Newman’s resignation ignores the fact that Newman is basically a cult leader rather than a conventional not-for-profit executive. Given his unusual degree of influence over his followers, any titles or positions he holds or ceases to hold at All Stars (or at any other entity within his network) are irrelevant to his control of the entity in question, since his power basically flows from the loyalty (some would say the mindless obedience) of his followers. Here’s how it works at All Stars:

 

*Ms. Kurlander, Newman’s chief confidante and the number one woman in his informal harem since the late 1980s, is the president of All Stars.

 

*Robert Levy, All Stars board chairman, and Jeannine Hahn, All Stars CFO and COO, have both been loyal followers of Newman for over 15 years.

 

*Gail Elberg, All Stars director of volunteers, has been one of Newman’s “wives” for over 30 years.

 

*Pam Lewis, All Stars director of youth programs; Chris Street, director of development; Roger Grunwald, director of communications; Gloria Strickland, New Jersey All Stars director; and Lenora Fulani, co-director of All Stars’ Development School for Youth--all have followed Newman for 15 years or more.

 

*Diane Stiles, managing director of the Castillo Theatre, and Dan Friedman, the artistic director of Castillo’s youth drama program, both reside with Newman, Kurlander and Elberg in Newman’s townhouse on Bank Street. (So much for Newman’s “resignation” as Castillo’s artistic director--he has two housemates to be his surrogates.)  Friedman and Stiles have been with Newman since the mid-1980s.

 

*Most other All Stars officers and staffers--and at least half of its 24 board members--are longtime Newman followers. Three of the board members, including another Newman “wife,” reside in the Bank Street household.

 

Lawsuits against the City?

 

The decision regarding the All Stars bond should not be based on political spin from the Mayor’s office but on what’s best for the city and its kids. As the history of bizarre and manipulative behavior by the Newman cult indicates, the All Stars’ youth programs are an accident waiting to happen--and IDA approval of the All Stars bond will put the City of New York at risk of serious court action. When the first multimillion dollar lawsuit is filed by outraged parents on behalf of a child or teen allegedly victimized by All Stars, the plaintiffs will be able to point to this report and say that the City was forewarned and should have rejected the All Stars bond application but instead willfully and knowingly put children and teens at risk.

 

* * * * * *

 

About the writer of this report:  Mr. King has tracked the Newman organization and other political cults since the mid-1970s as a journalist, advocacy writer, and activist. He is the author of Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism (Doubleday, 1989), the first book-length study of a U.S. political cult. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The New Republic and other national and local publications. More of his findings and comments on the All Stars Project and other Newman enterprises can be found at https://lyndonlarouchewatch.org/ and http://denniskingblog.typepad.com. In preparing this report, Mr. King frequently consulted, and strongly recommends to IDA board members and staffers, the vast web archive on the Newman cult at http://ex-iwp.org.


 

 

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

I. THE PEOPLE WHO CONTROL ALL STARS ADVOCATE RADICALLY UNCONVENTIONAL VIEWS ON THE FAMILY AND SEXUALITY--AND THEY PRACTICE WHAT THEY PREACH.  GIVEN THE SPECIFIC NATURE OF THESE BELIEFS AND PRACTICES, ALL STARS SHOULD NOT BE RECEIVING PUBLIC BONDS TO FACILITATE ITS WORK WITH CHILDREN AND TEENAGERS. 

 

A. Destroying the “bourgeois family” and replacing it with the “development community”

1. Fred Newman says:  The bourgeois family’s as bad as apartheid

2. Personal relationships versus the “group mind”

3. Fred:  Monogamy is bourgeois selfishness

4. What is the “development community”?

5. All Stars and other Newmanite programs for kids are part of the development community

B. Fred Newman’s doctrine of  “friendosexuality”

1. How Fred explains it

2. How Fred practices it

3. Fred’s sexual relationships with his therapy patients

4. Friendosex is polymorphous sex

5. Friendosex among the Newmanite “grunts”

6. Friendosex, revolutionary organizing and IWP “office politics”

7. Friendosexual art

8. Friendosex (and Catholic-bashing) on the 8 stage

9. Friendosexual gate receipts

C. Exposure of kids in Newmanite-run programs to friendosexual propaganda and role models

1. Failure to maintain appropriate boundaries between the All Stars youth programs and the sexually explicit adult programs

2. Inviting kids to sexually explicit theater performances

3. Newmanite sex advice for teens

4. Newmanite sex advice for primary-school children

5. Newman and his friendosexual housemates totally control All Stars

D. The Newman organization’s opposition to its own members starting families or accepting responsibility for the children they already have

1. Mother urged to put her child in foster care for sake of the “revolution”

2. Abortion a revolutionary duty?

3. Rationalizing child abandonment

4. Social therapy devalues parenting

5. Kids regarded as a “nuisance” by party leaders

6. A father says: The cult almost killed my infant son

 

II. RECENT ALLEGATIONS OF ABUSE AND BIZARRE BEHAVIOR AT ALL STARS ARE ONLY THE SURFACE OF THE ICEBERG:  THE PEOPLE WHO CONTROL ALL STARS HAVE A LONG HISTORY (BEGINNING IN 1971-72) OF MANIPULATING AND INDOCTRINATING TEENS (AND EVEN PRIMARY SCHOOL CHILDREN) WHILE EXPLOITING PUBLICLY AND PRIVATELY FUNDED YOUTH PROGRAMS ON BEHALF OF A HIDDEN AGENDA.  IT WOULD BE WILDLY IRRESPONSIBLE TO PROCEED WITH THE PROPOSED BOND WITHOUT FIRST CONDUCTING A FULL, NO-HOLDS-BARRED INVESTIGATION OF ALL STARS, ITS RELATED ENTITIES, ITS FOUNDERS, OFFICERS AND STAFF, AND ITS BOARD.

 

A. Overview by a former IWP leader and All Stars Talent Show Network activist

B. Programs for kids from the 1970s through the 1990s

1. Centers for Change and “Grand Central High”

2. The Barbara Taylor School

3. The SCAP Head Start program

4. The All Stars Talent Show Network (1980s and 1990s)

5. Social therapy for teens? One mother’s scary experience

C. The All Stars Project and other current Newmanite youth programs

1. Recent allegations of emotional abuse and bizarre behavior at All Stars

2. Social therapy and promotion of friendosexuality continue to be part of the All Stars experience

3. All Stars, social therapy and Newman-style sex education

4. All Stars pedagogy:  Down with knowledge!

5. Are All Stars performers still just “poster kids” for fund-raising purposes (and for a hidden political agenda)?

6. Does All Stars seek to recruit kids to the “development community”?

7. The Castillo Theatre and the Youth Onstage! Community Performance School

8. The “Let’s Talk About It” social therapy program

9. The CUIP student internship program

 

III. THE PEOPLE WHO CONTROL ALL STARS HAVE EXPRESSED CALLOUS VIEWS ON CHILD ABUSE, AND HAVE A HISTORY OF PROVIDING POLITICAL AND LEGAL DEFENSE FOR CHILD MOLESTERS AND CHILD ABUSERS.  THESE VIEWS AND ACTIONS SUGGEST THAT ALL STARS IS INCAPABLE OF PROPERLY SCREENING AND MONITORING THE HUNDREDS OF ADULT VOLUNTEERS WHO PURPORTEDLY WORK IN ITS PROGRAMS, WHICH OFFER SERVICES TO CHILDREN AS YOUNG AS FIVE.  IN EFFECT, ALL STARS IS AN ACCIDENT (AND AN EXPLOSION OF LAWSUITS) WAITING TO HAPPEN, AND ITS APPLICATION FOR FURTHER MUNICIPAL FINANCING SHOULD BE DENIED.

 

A. Newmanite views on child abuse

1. Fulani says: Child abuse a “liberal myth”

2. Fulani says: Abused child and abusing adult are both the “victims”

B. Political, legal and public relations defense of notorious child abusers

1. The North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA)

2. Kodzo DoBosu

3. Sue Simmonds

4. Tony Alamo

5. The Branch Davidians

 

IV. THE PEOPLE WHO CONTROL ALL STARS ARE PART OF A POLITICAL/PSYCHOTHERAPY CULT THAT PRACTICES A BLATANTLY UNETHICAL FORM OF THERAPY IN PURSUIT OF SELF-STYLED REVOLUTIONARY POLITICAL GOALS.  GIVEN THE FACT THAT THIS THERAPY IS PRACTICED ON YOUNG PEOPLE, AND THAT SOCIAL THERAPISTS WORK CLOSELY WITH ALL STARS PROGRAMS, THE APPLICATION OF ALL STARS FOR FURTHER MUNICIPAL FINANCING SHOULD BE DENIED.

 

A. Overview--Boundaries-free therapy

B. Sex between therapists and patients is regarded as permissible

1. New York Times interview with Lenora Fulani

2. Observations of a former social therapy patient

3. Therapist-patient romances used as mechanism to break the patient away from the outside world

4. Fred Newman and his CFC patients

C. Therapists aggressively steer patients into sexualized situations, make inappropriate sexual remarks to them, or give them inappropriate sexual advice

1. Newman’s former newspaper unabashedly described such manipulation

2. Inappropriate sexual advice

3. The experience of a Philadelphia social therapy patient

D. Social therapy as an instrument of political recruitment and control

E. Social therapists betray the confidences of their patients

F. Social therapists solicit volunteer work from their patients on behalf of Newman’s political, charitable and artistic programs

G. Social therapy is a tool for financial exploitation of patients

H. Social therapy as boot camp

I. Social therapy:  the cult of Fred

J. Fred says it’s all for the revolution

K. Social therapy aims at total control of the individual personality

1. The 1974 version

2. The year 2000 version (the change, if any, is for the worse)

L. The psychological results of having a “proletarian ego”

M. The practical results of having a “proletarian ego”

 

V. A SIMPLE QUESTION FOR THOSE WHO WILL MAKE THE FINAL DECISION ON THE ALL STARS BONDS:  WOULD YOU WANT THE PEOPLE WHO RUN ALL STARS TO SERVE AS MENTORS FOR YOUR KIDS?

 

A. Fred Newman, founder of All Stars

B. Gabrielle (“Rie”) Kurlander, President of All Stars

C. Lenora Fulani, co-founder of All Stars

 

VI. CONCLUSION

 

APPENDIX.

I. THE PEOPLE WHO CONTROL ALL STARS ADVOCATE RADICALLY UNCONVENTIONAL VIEWS ON THE FAMILY AND SEXUALITY--AND THEY PRACTICE WHAT THEY PREACH.  GIVEN THE SPECIFIC NATURE OF THESE BELIEFS AND PRACTICES, ALL STARS SHOULD NOT BE RECEIVING PUBLIC BONDS TO FACILITATE ITS WORK WITH CHILDREN AND TEENAGERS.

 

To fully comprehend what follows it is necessary to understand first that the All Stars Project is controlled by a psychotherapy/political cult led by Fred Newman, a former philosophy professor, with the help of Lenora Fulani, a developmental psychologist. Their cult embraces a network of interrelated organizations, including social therapy clinics, All Stars and other youth charities, and political fronts such as the New York County Independence Party. At the core of this network is a secretive Marxist group known as the “International Workers Party” or “IWP” (and referred to euphemistically as the “tendency,” the “cadre,” or the “core”).

 

All of the entities within this “development community” (as Newman calls it) work together as one machine. The social therapy clinics shuttle patients into the youth charity work and from thence into the party; likewise, the youth work shuttles both adult volunteers and teens into social therapy and from thence into the party. Most social therapists are party members and regard themselves first and foremost as recruiters for the revolution. The entire network, including the IWP, is completely dominated by its founder, Mr. Newman. Although his chief public spokesperson, Ms. Fulani, is African-American, over three-quarters of the members are white and middle class, including Mr. Newman.

 

In this Part I we will examine how Mr. Newman’s strange group and its belief system place children and teens at risk of abuse, exploitation, indoctrination, and recruitment. Readers who are familiar with how cults operate can start in immediately on this section. Those who are unfamiliar with the nature of cults may find it useful to first read Part IV, which documents the typical cultic features of the Newman group’s social therapy.

 

A. Destroying the “bourgeois family” and replacing it with the “development community”

 

1. Fred Newman says:  The bourgeois family’s as bad as apartheid

 

The reorganization of intimacy (serious therapists can speak of nothing less) has as a precondition the collective destruction of the network of institutions which prevent intimacy. When Reagan (like Hitler) calls for the return to old family values, it is plain that what is really being asked for is a great leap forward into deadly fascism. Hence the destruction of the bourgeois family is in fact the progressive act of smashing an institution which has evolved more and more over recent decades into a tool of political and social reaction. Destroying the bourgeois family is no more negative than destroying the U.S. nuclear arsenal or capital punishment or apartheid. It is, indeed, a distinctly positive act.

 

--Fred Newman, “So How’s the Family?” The New York Alliance, Oct. 17, 1983 [emphasis added]. [Earlier in this article Newman repeatedly referred to the bourgeois family as the “modern” family, which suggests he aims not just at replacing nuclear families of a supposedly reactionary character but the nuclear family, period.]

 

“How do we solve the problem [of the supposedly reactionary and bourgeois family],” continued Dr. Newman, “without accepting the family arrangement? Social therapy does that every day by insisting that we not revert, in our way out of the problem, to the authority and bogus legitimacy of the bourgeois family. Now that’s an extremely hard thing to give up. Even in times such as these, our tendency--we have been socialized this way--is to look for the more conservative solution. This is true of masses of people as it is true for family units. But if we don’t actively challenge the authoritarian family, if we do not attempt to create new kinds of social arrangements that allow both for human intimacy and for the progressive social advancement of our society, then we will wind up overdetermined down a very unhappy, unintimate, and ultimately reactionary road.”

 

--“Family In Crisis? Time for a ‘Revolutionary’ Cure,” unsigned, The New York Alliance, Oct. 17, 1983 [emphasis added].  [Note that Newman calls not for new kinds of families but for new kinds of “social arrangements.”]

 

2. Personal relationships versus the “group mind”

 

The antifamily philosophy was reinforced over and over by [social] therapists. Patients were taught to resent all personal relationships (with therapists denouncing partners as engaging in “coupling”); the idea obviously being that one or two people could present a threat to the “group mind”….As such, I alienated myself from relatives and old friends and the cult became my total existence.

 

--Marina J. Ortiz, “Slave to a Dream: Inside the International Workers Party,” ex-iwp.org, 2003. [Note that in the Newmanite lexicon the word “coupling” does not refer merely to sexual intercourse but is a pejorative term meaning those in or around the IWP who attempt to pair off in loving relationships (either married or unmarried) as opposed to giving most of their energy and devotion to the political collective. Ms. Ortiz was a social therapy client and member of the Newman cult in the late 1980s and early 1990s.]

 

3. Fred:  Monogamy is bourgeois selfishness

 

“If I’m invested in that being my lamp, then if you fuck with it and take it for your room, I’m jealous because it’s my lamp. If it’s my fuck, it doesn’t have to do with sex, it has to do with my. That’s mine. You touched my sex object!…

 

“That’s what bourgeois sexuality is all about. It’s so childlike and fundamentally possessive. It’s like saying, ‘How could you dare touch that person’s vagina or penis when you touched mine?’ Why not?”

 

--Fred Newman, quoted in Freda Rosen, “An Interview on Love and Sex with Dr. Fred Newman,” The National Alliance,” Feb. 16, 1989.

 

4. What is the “development community”?

 

If you want to talk about social change, if you want to talk seriously about revolution, we have to deal with how we’re going to get people to desire to make one. That raises the “personal” issues of desire, of attraction, of what people need and want, and why.

 

A lot of leftist friends of mine say you don’t have to deal with that. They say that somehow historic necessity swoops down upon us and we go out and make a revolution. I don’t think that’s ever happened anywhere. I think that what actually happens is that a community is created wherein people can not only transform their desires, attractions and wants as many of us did in the ‘60s, but can transform their very understanding of attractions, desires, wants and needs so that they come to be expressive of a class-for-itself and not a class against, or worst still, not against, capital. We have to be sure that we do not disregard that critical intermediate step.

 

--Fred Newman, quoted in Phyllis Goldberg, “Newman Speaks Out on the Political and the Personal:  Organizing Desire, Building a Freedom Movement,” The National Alliance, November 1, 1985.

 

5.  All Stars and other Newmanite programs for kids are part of the development community

 

Over the past 20 years, this developing development community and its independent institutions has grown dramatically, from one apartment complex in New York City to social therapy centers in several U.S. cities, from a handful of people to tens of thousands. Its work is now multifaceted and includes a research, training, and education center (the East Side Institute for Short Term Psychotherapy and its Center for Developmental Learning); the largest community-based cultural organization for inner-city youth in the country (the All Stars Talent Show Network); a highly respected multicultural off-off-Broadway theater (the Castillo Theatre); a small alternative press (Castillo International); a Vygotskian-influenced laboratory elementary school (the Barbara Taylor School); teen pregnancy and abuse prevention programs in preschools and public schools; and more.

 

--Lois Holzman, Schools for Growth: Radical Alternatives to Current Educational Models, Mahway, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997, p. 12. [Holzman, a development psychologist, All Stars consultant and member of the IWP, has been Newman’s chief theoretical collaborator for over 20 years. Her claim that the Newmanite community embraces “tens of thousands” of members is preposterous.]

 

B.  Fred Newman’s doctrine of “friendosexuality

 

1.  How Fred explains it

 

“There are people I love dearly and we have sex. What’s critical is not that we have sex, but that I love them dearly, and they love me dearly. What’s critical is that we’re dear friends, that we’re there for each other. If they’re being friends with other people and if part of those friendships includes physicality, I don’t have a problem with that. I have too much love for the people I’m intimate with to degrade those relationships by transforming them into possessions….

 

“When I sometimes raise the issue of people having sex with friends, frequently they say, ‘Oh, no, I wouldn’t want to mess up that friendship by having sex.’ That’s very revealing about where sex and friendship are at in this culture. The message is, I don’t want to have sex with a friend because what sex is about is being abusive….

 

“My commitment is to sleeping only with friends. Sleeping only with friends isn’t the same as sleeping with all of one’s friends. A friendosexual only sleeps with friends, but not all friends. I’m a friendosexual!”

 

--Fred Newman, quoted in Freda Rosen, “An Interview on Love and Sex with Dr. Fred Newman,” The National Alliance,” Feb. 16, 1989. [Ex-members of the Newman cult say that this was all calculated to get the maximum number of women for Fred himself at the expense of the wimpy men in the group, and to steer members away from living as couples or getting married and having children, which would result in his not being able to control them as easily or get them to work such long hours for such low stipends.]

 

2. How Fred practices it

 

a. Kellie Gasink’s recollections

 

Gasinke [sic] said part of Newman’s indoctrination is he frequently makes passes at women whom he favors in NAP. “He made a pass at me,” she said. “He just started kissing me. Newman believes in ‘Friendo-sexuality.’ When I was in the organization he had taken on his sixth wife. He has communist weddings where he would have non-legal ceremonies. They are also told not to associate with their families. You are told not to ‘do family’ and you’re supposed to [not believe] in being a couple. That relationship is considered bourgeoisie. The only social life is NAP and the therapy group.”

 

--Lucas Rivera, “Political Guru: Fred Newman Exposed,” The City Sun, Sept. 15, 1993. [Gasink was one of several members of Newman’s underground revolutionary party who quit in disillusionment in the early 1990s and went to the media and law enforcement with their complaints. “NAP” in the above quote is the New Alliance Party, an electoral front which Newman’s cadre group disbanded in order to infiltrate the New York Independence Party.]

 

b.  Fred boasts to a reporter

 

He [Newman] lives in an ivy-covered brownstone in Greenwich Village, which he co-purchased with a female friend for $920,000 in 1993. Mr. Newman lives in a unit with Ms. Kurlander. The rest of the place is occupied by two men and nine women, some of whom Mr. Newman has been involved with over the years.

 

“I feel very good and proud about it,” he said. “I think it’s disgraceful the way people who have intimate relationships break up and then hate each other for life. I find that very offensive.”

 

I said his living arrangements sounded like every man’s dream.

 

“These are my dearest, dearest friends and colleagues, co-workers,” he said, “who’ve invested millions of hours to build the All-Stars Talent Show Network. That’s who we’re talking about here, and many of these people are women, and in the case of some of them, but not all of them, we’ve been close in all kinds of ways, including physically, and I feel thrilled about that.”

 

--George Gurley, “Therapy Guru Fred Newman Charms Loyal Followers and Pat Buchanan,” The New York Observer, Dec. 6, 1999 [emphasis added]. [NOTE:  The “female friend” who helped Newman purchase the brownstone is Dr. Susan Massad, a member of the All Stars board of directors and, until the fall of 2005, its chairperson. For more on Newman’s peculiar household, see I.C.5 below.]

 

c.  Fred’s rationalization

 

Women have saved my life and made my life. I have no wives. But I am terribly, terribly in love and empowered by all the women I live with.

 

--Fred Newman, “Women I Live With,” Practice, Winter 1990.

 

3. Fred’s sexual relationships with his therapy patients

 

Fred Newman lives by his own rules. He says monogamy and marriage aren’t for him.

 

“I don’t think it’s any of the state’s business who my dearest loves are and how I relate to another human being and give to them and receive from them,” he says.

 

Newman calls them his dearest loves, the women he lives with in his West Village townhouse. He admits some of the women initially came to him for psychological help. Newman treats patients in Social Therapy, his self-created field of psychotherapy.

 

“Some of them were in therapy, yeah,” he says.

 

But mainstream psychologists say it’s unethical for therapists to have sex with their patients because it violates personal boundaries and trust….

 

“I think that people’s sexual relationships should be something very personal between the people who are engaging in it, and I think if people love each other, care for each other, are attracted to each other and decide together that that they want to have sex, they should,” he says. “[Does it matter that it’s a patient and a therapist?] I think sexual relationships are relationships between human beings, not human beings under certain descriptions or in certain categories. I believe that people should fall in love as they so desire, and if they want to include in that sexuality, they should include that.”

 

--“Psychopolitics”:  Inside the Independence Party of Fred Newman, Nov. 2, 2005 (Part Three of a six-part NY1 News series produced by Rita Nissan) http://ny1.com/ny1/content/index.jsp?&aid=54694. [NOTE:  According to IWP defectors, Newman has been seducing female social therapy patients for almost 40 years. Newman has kept some of them close, the ex-IWPers say, in order to use them as political or business flunkies who turn over their incomes to the collective and receive modest stipends in return. Among Newman’s patients-turned-lovers are All Stars President Gabrielle Kurlander and several other All Stars board members and top staffers.]

 

4. Friendosex is polymorphous sex

 

Rather than regarding homosexuality as being determined mostly by biology and the pre-natal environment, the Newmanites regard it chiefly as a political phenomenon--a willful rebellion against bourgeois society that can and should be encouraged through ideological indoctrination. To Newman’s party cadre (including the social therapists, who are supposed to function essentially as political organizers of their patients), the framing of homosexuality as a political phenomenon means it’s okay to encourage recruits/patients to change their sexual preference artificially (from straight to gay or from either straight or gay to bisexual).

 

When Newman’s theory of sexual preference as politically grounded was initially raised in his publications in the late 1980s, it elicited strong criticism from gay and lesbian journalists, who regarded the Newmanite outlook as similar to the conservative Christian view of homosexuality as a willful engagement in sinful behavior that can be corrected through prayer and Bible study.

 

For the new recruit to Newman’s IWP, preference switching is a means of fitting into and being accepted by the collective. It is also a step in the process by which recruits sever their ties with their past lives, discard their old individualistic identities, and become reborn as units of the collective’s “group mind.” One might add that, for veteran IWP cadre, the ability to “perform” homosexuality and then to turn around and “perform” heterosexuality (like an actor in a Castillo Theatre play) could be useful in the individual organizer’s work with lonely or disoriented outsiders, enabling him or her to flirt with or seduce targeted persons as the first step in recruiting them and/or raising donations from them or using them as pawns in the IWP’s political maneuvers.

 

Artificial preference switching is not unique to the Newmanites--the Weather Underground leaders encouraged it in the 1970s to keep their followers isolated from the outside world and to bond them with each other as a select band. Newman, however, adds a utopian dimension. Those who embrace preference-switching or bisexuality within his development community are acting as the vanguard of the largely bisexual lifestyle that Newman believes will prevail in the “freer” society to come (i.e., his “postmodern” version of Marxist-Leninist class dictatorship), blocking any return by society to the “reactionary” capitalism-breeding lifestyle of the nuclear family.

 

a. Sexual preference as an extension of revolutionary politics

 

One of the consequences of the social and political destabilization of late twentieth century capitalism is a protest against social crisis and the extreme oppressiveness of social relations. This is what, in our view, homosexuality is.

 

--Mary Fridley, “Homophobia and the Rise of Neo-Fascism in the United States,” Practice, 1985.

 

“We do not believe that [homosexuality is] genetic,” concurs Legal Service Director of the New Alliance Community Services (NACS) in New York City, Alvaader Frazier, “because we think that that is the Right Wing’s position, and they have used that to call for our extermination….So our position--get it clear!--is that it’s a radical political choice that makes a very radical, political social protest.”

 

--Masha Gessen, “‘Radical Social Protest’:  NAP and the Gay Community,” Next Magazine, Aug. 31, 1988. [Alvaader Frazier was a ranking member of the IWP expressing the party line.]

 

b. Cult-induced bisexuality and preference-switching  

 

Another issue is how so many women (and men) who’d been “straight” all their lives decided to “come out” as lesbian or gay after a time in the cult. Many of them swung back and forth, while some never looked back at the opposite sex.

 

--Anonymous posting on the ex-iwp.org Forum, August 26, 2003.

 

The IWP constantly organizes and reorganizes sex and intimacy among its cadre and sympathizers, including “sex” that does not involve two individuals sleeping with each other. I saw it as a potentially wonderful tool of empowerment.…My disappointment was that it was more of what I later identified as the shell game, the “bait and switch.” Because the IWP cadre(s) in command of a given organization or activity are who called the shots as to what was “preferred.” Anyone not so inclined is then prey to badgering, ridicule, isolation. Democratic centralism in the bedroom? No, thank you!

 

--Anonymous posting on the ex-iwp.org Forum, August 28, 2003. 

 

Most gay- and lesbian-identified NAP activists state that they came out before getting involved with NAP--making the inherent political choice unconsciously. For some, like NAP New York City Medical Director Dr. Susan Massad, the choice was a conscious one, which followed their initiation into NAP. “When I came out,” recalls Massad, “was basically when I said, I just don’t want to do the family stuff any more…I had absolutely no connection with being a lesbian before that.”

 

--Masha Gessen, “’Radical Social Protest’:  NAP and the Gay Community,” Next Magazine, Aug. 31, 1988. [NOTE:  Dr. Massad brought her two young daughters into the cult with her, presumably so that they, too, would no longer have to “do the family stuff.” One of these IWP-raised daughters would later become a member of Fred Newman’s personal staff. Dr. Massad today is a member of the All Stars board of directors and served as its chairperson prior to the fall of 2005.]

 

c. All Stars child development expert finds it all “playful”

 

In 1992, the National Alliance asked various Newmanites to comment on the campaign slogan “Fulani for Prez:  She’s a Sexual Preference,” which was celebrated by All Stars Talent Show Network teens in a Gay Pride Parade float that year. Lois Holzman, the developmental psychologist who is Newman’s closest theoretical collaborator and serves as a consultant for All Stars on how to work with children, replied as follows:

 

I really love the slogan:  I think it is very playful. And it’s also serious. Like Dr. Fulani. It plays with traditional categories and boundaries. Saying that she’s a sexual preference is odd--how can an individual be a sexual preference? For who? Gay people? Straight people? It embodies the movement that she is leading because we won’t settle for the traditional understanding of preference, which means choosing among choices you already have. 

 

--“Fulani for Prez:  She’s a Sexual Preference. What Does It Mean?” The National Alliance, July 2, 1992.

 

d. The result:  Beyond weird

 

I too noticed bizarre behavior around sex and gender roles. One thing that struck me was that many of the “in” people who claimed to have been heterosexual when they met the group would now “go either way.” I also found it weird that my main social therapy contact started asking me personal questions to “feel me out” about my previous sexual history, and to see if I felt a certain way about “the other way.” My responses led to them probing further, wanting to dig deeper into my reactions, as if they needed to be deconstructed. I also saw [social therapy] clients who claimed to be openly gay now due to social therapy. This could be good, if they indeed were conflicted before, but I worry about the influence that environment exerts on people’s sexual choices. There was definitely a feeling there that it didn’t matter, one should be open minded and go either way, not ascribe to any identity. Fine for people who choose to do that but like everything else around there, subtle kinds of manipulation, “milieu control” may foster changes in people they didn’t set out to make in the first place. I too noticed my main social therapy “friend” changing back and forth, acting one way with me in private, with the public another. I saw them interacting in so many different ways depending on who they were with, I felt like I would never truly know that person. Probably it started to become automatic, but I feel it was a behavior that was developed as part of the “social therapy seduction act.” Be whatever you need to be to attract that person and get them in.

 

--Anonymous posting on the ex-iwp.org Forum, August 27, 2003.

 

e. “Performing” homosexuality

 

[I]n line with the tendency’s [IWP’s] demand for money, straight men assigned to raise money in the West Village or at gay events were often counseled (i.e., pressured) by their political superiors to don earrings, skimpy tee-shirts, and spandex biker shorts (which accentuated their genitals), so that they could “pass” for gay--all the while sneering at the gay community because the party doesn’t believe you’re really “gay” unless you support the NAP (IWP, etc.).

 

--Robert Cohen, letter submitted to the New York Amsterdam News, Sept. 12, 1993, full text at ex-iwp.org.

 

f. Bisexual communism?   

 

“I think in a freer society you’d have people being attracted to and living with and making friends with whoever--same sex, different sex. That’s a society I’d like to see happen some day. A point I’m trying to make is that homosexuality is in some sense more exciting and advanced sexually precisely because it is a challenge to the existing social arrangement. That’s not to imply that if there weren’t the existing social arrangement there wouldn’t be homosexuality. In fact, if the existing social arrangement didn’t hold there’d be many more people who’d be having sex which is now identified as homosexual. Hopefully in that world you’d no longer define it as homosexuality but simply human beings having sex and hopefully they’d be friends.”

 

 --Fred Newman, quoted in Freda Rosen, “An Interview on Love and Sex with Dr. Fred Newman,” The National Alliance, Feb. 16, 1989. [In spite of the above rhetoric, Newman hastens to repeat no less than three times in the interview that he himself is not, not, not gay.]

 

5. Friendosex among the Newmanite “grunts”

 

The sexual lives of cadre members were also degraded. Like most figures who arose from the sexual revolution of the 1960s, Newman preached free sex. With a few half-digested quotes from Engels’ writings on the bourgeois family and a little feminism thrown in, he fashioned a moral line within the IWP that attacked couplings--heterosexual or gay--as “oppositional” to the Tendency. Marriages of new cadre were regularly broken up through “couples counseling.” IWP members were encouraged to have sex, but to avoid forming lasting emotional relationships. The pressure was placed upon cadre to live as sexual atoms, seeking physical gratification whenever desired and convenient.

 

--William Pleasant, “Fred Newman:  ‘Communism Is Dead, I Killed It!’” 1993, available at ex-iwp.org.

 

6.  Friendosex, revolutionary organizing and IWP “office politics”

 

[W]hat people are not talking about is how often sex is used to “organize” people new to the cult. I remember seeing women “leaders” flirting whenever they encountered well-known political leaders and businessmen. It’s a known fact that the “newbies” were all pounced on by the lifers when they arrived at Castillo for “training.” These people are so starved for real intimacy and attention so it’s not surprising.

 

--Anonymous posting on the ex-iwp.org Forum, August 26, 2003.

 

Sex was also used as a means of recruiting new cadre and gaining influence over high status males--particularly men-of-color. For example [a former NAP leader] was recruited by a team of IWP women….Seduction became a chief tactic in the Rainbow Lobby’s international liaison work with progressive foreign government officials and revolutionary representatives. For lower status males and females, sex was viewed as a tool for rising in the party hierarchy. By copulating with the appropriate high status cadre, they could get “closer to Fred.” Their role models were the women who serviced Newman.

 

--William Pleasant, “Fred Newman:  ‘Communism Is Dead, I Killed It!’” 1993, available at ex-iwp.org.

 

7.  Friendosexual art

 

When you walk out of the elevator into the lobby (which doubles as a gallery) of the Castillo Cultural Center these days, you’re surrounded by sex. Collective Sex, to be precise. Collective Sex is a series of large, brightly colored paintings with provocative titles--“Nancy Shows Her Tits to the Sanitation Workers,” “Sex For Itself,” “Sexercise”--produced by Nancy Green, Judy Penzer, Elena Borstein and Dr. Fred Newman, all members of the Castillo Collective. The artists--Green, Penzer and Borstein traditionally trained painters, Newman taught by them--have developed what they call “performance painting,” a “dialectical synthesis between painting (the activity) and performance (the activity).” And the show is exactly what you’d like to think “good sex” is all about…open, uninhibited, joyous…as the paintings invite you to jump in and join the marvelous sexual jumble of naked bodies that come alive on the giant canvasses.

 

--Mary Fridley, “Sexy pictures sold here,” The National Alliance, November 8, 1990. [In the page layout of this issue, the New Alliance Party’s “Youth and Democracy Campaign Calendar,” aimed primarily at All Stars talent show kids, is directly underneath the “Sexy pictures” article.]

 

8.  Friendosex (and Catholic-bashing) on the stage

 

What are three nice girls like Nancy Green, Janet Weigel and Dawn Friend doing in a place like this (“this” being the Kit Kat Club, a not-quite-reputable striptease club in a play called The Store: One Block East of Jerome that opens at the Castillo Cultural Center on March 8)?

 

Taking it all off for the working class, that’s what.

 

And while all three members of the Castillo collective are looking forward to their nightly performance, they will be the first to tell you that it doesn’t come naturally. Green, a painter and the curator of the Castillo gallery, grew up “very religious” in a white working class-heading-into-lower-middle-class Catholic family in Pennsylvania. Weigel, an actress, was also brought up Catholic in a “very repressed” small midwestern town. Friend, a working class lesbian who works for the Castillo video team, was the daughter of upwardly mobile Black parents in an isolated New Jersey suburb. In short, they know from repression.

 

Not just any repression--working class repression. The very particular, historically specific repression of a class that, because of its loyalty to the church and family (and other like-minded institutions), has rarely challenged the perverse thing known as “morality” (yet another cruel invention of those who rule this sick and corrupted society)….

 

“Taking off your clothes is hard,” agrees Green. “How could it not be? The Catholic Church is anti-sex. The message is ‘deny your sexuality and all joy of living.’ I did. And when you do, you become very spaced out about sexuality, which Paula [Green’s character] is--she can’t even handle a conversation with a man. She’s so repressed that she’s crazy. She doesn’t know what’s going on. There’s a lot of pent-up rage, which I turned against myself. So taking my clothes off is an expression of wanting to go all the way, which for me means taking seriously how repressed I’ve been and doing everything I can to change that.

 

“We discovered a lot of things in our work,” continues the 37 year old artist/activist. “For example, we discovered that there is actually a very small difference between having your clothes on and not having your clothes on--between showing your tit and not showing your tit….

 

“It took a long time to learn how to say ‘dirty’ words,” Green said. “There are enormous prohibitions--for example, sex is supposed to take place in the bedroom, under certain conditions.…[I]t became clear that if we were going to engage sex, we would have to talk to each other about parts of bodies. So we started looking at certain parts of the body--what do you call them? Once we got started, all of us knew the dozens and dozens of words that you don’t hear except on the street or in private. Words like cock, pussy, tits, boobs, snatch, dick”….

 

But why nudity? “Because it’s there,” Weigel states very firmly. “It’s on everyone’s minds and no one can talk about it. We have to take it on and open up sex and our sexual repression and our sexuality. We’ve got to get dirty”….

 

And that’s what’s so powerful and sexy about Janet Weigel, Nancy Green, Madelyn Chapman, Diane Stiles, Dawn Friend, Fred Newman--six revolutionaries who are taking it all off for the class. Because if you’re not willing to strip for the class, how are you gonna make a revolution?

 

--Mary Fridley, “Working class sex, part I: What turns on the working class?” The National Alliance, Feb. 28, 1991 [emphasis added].

 

9. Friendosexual gate receipts

 

When I saw a postcard [in 2002] advertising a Fred Newman play as part of the Unfiltered Fringe, I was extremely upset….The play is called The Store: One Block East of Jerome and bills itself thus: “Thirty years after the sexual revolution, feminism meets striptease.” It’s a no-brainer for the Newmanites: Nudity will bring ‘em in, and Fred Newman’s manipulative philosophy will handle the seduction.

 

--Liz Spikol, “Boycott This Play! We should not support Social Therapy in any way,” Philadelphia Weekly, Sept. 4, 2002.

 

C.  Exposure of kids in Newmanite-run programs to friendosexual propaganda and role models

 

Much of the Newmanite sex-o-talk is just downright silly from an adult point of view, and much of the behavior that accompanies such talk could be dismissed as merely the typical self-expression of bohemian radicals, except for two things: (1) it is being elicited artificially by psychotherapists and a cult leader from patients and followers who probably otherwise would have eschewed such behavior; and (2) it occurs in close proximity to the cult’s youth programs (which work with children as young as five) and thus inevitably influences some of the kids in these programs.

 

1.  Failure to maintain appropriate boundaries between the All Stars youth programs and the sexually explicit adult programs

 

In January 1991, the Castillo Center became the “producer” of the All Stars Talent Show Network, which even then worked with children as well as teenagers. In an article in June of that year, The National Alliance stated that since Castillo took charge of the youth program “between 60-80 young people meet every Saturday morning at the center on Greenwich Street before going out to do community service. Many go out on the street with adult volunteers [this would include Castillo volunteers--DK] to raise money.” The article quotes Newmanite developmental psychologist Lois Holzman as saying: “The All Stars is Castillo.” (Mary Fridley and Dan Friedman, “New Yorkers Give It Up For All Stars,” The National Alliance, June 20, 1991.)

 

But the adults at Castillo who now shared the facility with All Stars and were now apparently mentoring All Stars kids were also aggressively promoting their highly sexualized agenda on the premises. For instance, in March of 1991 kids coming to volunteer on weekends might have encountered, in the entrance area, the art exhibit “Collective Sex Again,” a continuation of the adult exhibit displayed the previous fall (see I.B.7 above). A reviewer in the March 21 issue of the National Alliance described how Newman and the other painters “created…a swirling mass of bodies and sensuous shapes--right in front of our eyes. And more important, they invited us to join them (I went for the ass myself).” Meanwhile the Newmanites were trying to whip up audiences for Fred’s raunchy new Castillo play “The Store: One Block East of Jerome.” For instance, Mary Fridley followed up her Feb. 28 review (see I.B.8 above) with an utterly bizarre article the following month:

 

C’mere. I want to tell you something. Can you come a little closer? After all, we’ve been pretty intimate these past few weeks, so I wanted you to be the first to know. I had great sex this weekend. So did a lot of my friends and colleagues. So did a lot of their friends. We had some great sex this weekend and I’d really like to tell you all about it. Or better yet, I’d like to show you. I’d like to show you all the ways we did it, all the places we did it in, and the women and men we did it with. I’d like to show you the passion, the excitement, the love, the tenderness, the pain, the embarrassment, the awkwardness, the nakedness, the compassion, the humiliation, the humanity and much, much more. But it’s not so simple. In fact, it’s pretty damned hard. When you’re taught to look through emotional peepholes and call that living, it’s pretty scary to fling the door wide open.…

 

C’mere. I’m going to show you how Fred Newman, and the revolutionary tendency he has led for over 20 years, are doing sex.

 

--Mary Fridley, “Working class sex, part III: The Show Must Go On,” The National Alliance, March 21, 1991.

 

[NOTE:  This hypersexualized article in the Newmanites’ free weekly would have been readily available to the All Stars children and teens who passed in and out of Castillo’s then headquarters on Greenwich Street; and, since the article was graced by a photo of two nude social-therapy actresses, a large percentage of the teenage boys doubtless read it avidly. (And then they went out on the streets to raise money with mentors who advocated this stuff???) Over the next few years “The Store” and other sexually explicit plays by Newman became part of the standard repertoire of the Castillo Theatre, while at the same time Castillo became more and more closely integrated with the All Stars youth programs through youth theater projects.]

 

2. Inviting kids to sexually explicit theater performances

 

Once [in 2001] I was at a meeting with several social therapists where they were discussing the issues of their recent “street performance” (where they and some of their social therapy patients would ask passers-by for money for Newman’s plays or other Newman related projects like All Stars). The issue was raised about how to relate to people with kids or young people who might go by (whether or not to invite them to an upcoming Newman play) and I expressed deep concern since the play and many of his others clearly contained explicit, totally inappropriate, adult material that I certainly would not want to expose to kids (it was offensive enough for many adults as it was!!!).  The social therapists looked offended that I would say such a thing and a heated argument ensued. One of them used to repeat to me a quote she liked from Fred Newman, something to the effect that “we were raised in a pond and today’s kids were raised in an ocean... and we are trying to teach them to swim!”  Basically, they wanted us to think that youth today don’t need protection, that they have seen it all. I wasn’t yet completely aware at that point what the Newman political agenda was so the quote made sense when they were talking about incredibly streetwise kids who had endured incredible hardships, but in fact we were talking about exposing this to everyday families out walking on the weekends in friendly parts of town with pedestrians, or to little kids with their mothers!  They [the social therapists] are zealous supporters of Fred Newman and I don’t think they will stop at anything when it comes to raising money for Newman events or recruiting people. They just don’t see kids as in some sort of category where they need to be sheltered. I believe that kids who don’t already have strong advocates at home are likely to be very vulnerable to Newman’s program because the social therapy trained staff can be very intimidating and convincing and the bottom line about social therapy is that it is about organizing people into Newman’s Marxist-Leninist social movement.

 

 --Erika Van Meir, email to Dennis King, August 16, 2005 [emphasis added].

 

3. Newmanite sex advice for teens

 

a. The “Sexually Speakin’” column

 

The cult’s attitude regarding sexual advice to teens goes back many years. A teacher at a Bronx high school wrote to The New York Alliance, the NAP newspaper, in 1983 suggesting that the paper’s “Sexually Speakin’” column was having a “detrimental effect” by encouraging “impressionable youth…to be sexually promiscuous.” The teacher suggested that “young people are not prepared (either developmentally or economically) to face the outcomes of their premature sexual indulgence” and referred to the “fragility” of their “as-yet-to-be-consolidated egos.”  The Newmanite columnist replied as follows:

 

Who are these youth whose sex life you find of such pressing “concern”? They are the youth you work with, for whom “get a good education to get a good job” is meaningless, since both are increasingly impossible for them….[W]hy aren’t you concerned that all they’re allowed to have is sex! Feeling sexy and attractive, being attracted, and having physical contact and sexual intimacy is the most pleasurable and fulfilling activity that your students can make happen. In fact, it’s one of the only fulfilling things they can make happen….

 

[T]he lives of you and your students are more closely linked than you would care to think. After all, if you spend each day in a place where what’s going on (creatively speaking) is sex, and your posture is to “stand above” it all and make pronouncements about the decadent tragedy of it all, you are not in a very potent position, either at work or at home…It can’t be that you are so “out of it” in your work and then so “in it” in bed.…

 

Obviously you and your students are not able to do much of anything (much less change anything) together, given how your relationship is currently organized. This column can help to create a climate where students and teachers, working class and professionals, can change their relationships to one another. For you and your students, my column could be a vehicle for all of you to move closer by talking about what is going on--namely SEX!

 

--Freda Rosen, “A Touch of Class,” The New York Alliance, May 16, 1983.

 

b. Recent promotion of the friendosexual ideal among teenagers

 

(1) The All Stars Project has published, and promotes among teens as well as adults, Newman’s Let’s Develop!, a book that advocates friendosexuality, comparing it to the sandbox play of toddlers

 

In social therapy, we help men and women to do sex quite differently. I sometimes, playfully, call this activity friendosexuality. It’s a game that everyone

--men and women, gay people and straight people--can play.

 

Friendosexuality means playing the sex game with a good friend instead of engaging in getting behavior with someone who is, effectively, a stranger (even if you’ve been sharing the same bed, and the same name, for the last 15 years).

 

The way that very young children play is the model for friendosexuality. Three-year-olds and four-year-olds create contexts for playing with their friends in which what they do--like rolling a ball back and forth to each other or spilling sand on one another--isn’t guiltily perceived, morally overdetermined, or rooted in humiliation….[T]he social therapeutic approach helps people do sex how the youngest children do playing.

 

--Fred Newman with Phyllis Goldberg, Let’s Develop! A Guide to Continuous Personal Growth, New York: Community Literary Research Project (previous name of the All Stars Project), 1994, p. 72. [NOTE:  I personally witnessed this book being hawked aggressively to adults and teens in the lobby of Town Hall in Manhattan after a free lecture by Fred Newman in 2003 attended by dozens of teenagers who apparently had been brought to the event by the All Stars Project. Also in the early 2000s, a researcher working for me obtained entrance to a Development School for Youth luncheon for teens, their parents and wealthy donors at which Let’s Develop! was promoted for sale. Recently the book could be seen on display in the window at the new All Stars center on W. 42nd Street in Manhattan; a friend of mine purchased a copy there in December 2005. --DK]

 

(2) Newman’s Let’s Develop! has been included in the curriculum of All Stars’ Development School for Youth

 

DSY trolls for participants…in the high schools of these low status communities, many of them schools with the worst achievement records in the city. The initiation of this program shows great promise. The curriculum, a continually developing entity, still lacks some of the incremental building of skills one upon another that would enhance its already effective delivery….In addition, while some students indicate that they benefited from reading the text Let’s Develop, others had difficulty identifying with the characters and contexts used for illustration. We suggest that the organization write its own text, with input from the young people who have come through the program.

 

--Edmund W. Gordon, Carol Bonilla Bowman and Brenda X. Mejia, “Changing the Script for Youth Development:  An Evaluation of the All Stars Talent Show Network and the Joseph A. Forgione Development School for Youth,” Institute for Urban and Minority Education (Columbia University Teachers College), June 2003, pp. 97-98.

 

c.  A school psychologist’s opinion on Newmanite sex education for teens

 

Social therapists have in the past conducted, and apparently continue to conduct, a form of “sex education” that is every parent’s nightmare:  an ideologically driven attempt to undo years of parental proscriptions at the most vulnerable time in an adolescent’s development. In effect, the social therapist becomes a role model and substitute parent who panders to the most chaotic tendencies in teenage life in hopes of finding new recruits for the Newmanite life style.

 

--Statement by New York school psychologist/family therapist, August 20, 2005.

 

d.  Recent All Stars production on patient-therapist sex was wildly inappropriate for a theater/youth drama program where social therapists interact with teens

 

In May-June 2006, the All Stars Project’s Castillo Theatre, which shares facilities with the charity’s youth programs and is closely integrated with its teen drama program, produced a play about a friendosexual affair between a therapist and one of her patients. Castillo publicity described the play as follows:

 

The Castillo Theatre presents a love story, Sapphire’s Kiss, by Maggie Zarillo-Gouldin. Set in New York City in the 1990s, this fantasy-drama follows the tender relationship between a white social worker, Diana, and her “crazy” African American client, Cypris (who claims she knows Diana from another life). In the midst of madness, Diana and Cypris pursue an unconventional love affair that touches them both in unexpected ways.

 

--Taken from the Castillo Theatre web site, June 27, 2006.

 

The Castillo Theatre is wrapping up its 2005-2006 season with a Five Points Productions… premiere of Sapphire’s Kiss by first-time playwright, Maggie Zarillo-Gouldin. Sapphire’s Kiss is an intimate play about two women who “shouldn’t” fall in love, but do:  a white social worker and her troubled, African American client. Audiences are finding themselves touched in unexpected ways by the piece.

 

--All Stars Project eNewsletter, June 29, 2006.

 

[COMMENT:  The theme of a therapist and patient developing a personal relationship should not be off bounds to the theater world. But it becomes troubling when a play on this subject is produced as propaganda by a psychotherapy-oriented cult that regards such relationships as a normal part of therapy, and when the play is co-directed by a therapist who has initiated sexual relationships with many of his own patients and publicly boasts of the fact. Indeed, the choice of such a play for production by Castillo in mid-2006 can only be viewed as a deliberate defiance of, and nose thumbing at, the various persons (including certain All Stars donors) who strongly expressed their disagreement with Fred Newman’s defense (on NY1 News, Nov. 2, 2006) of therapist-patient sexual relationships.

 

The Castillo production of  “Sapphire’s Kiss” should not only be criticized because it appeared to indirectly defend Newman’s repulsive behavior, but also because the play could have had a disorienting and upsetting effect on many teens or children who participate in the charity’s programs (and would either have seen the play or heard it talked about during All Stars activities which mostly occur on the same premises as the theater). Indeed, the sponsorship of this play by All Stars should never have been allowed by Henry Louis Gates and other non-cult members on the charity’s board, because, along with the reasons cited above:

 

* social therapists work as volunteers at the All Stars Project or participate in its theatricals,

 

* social therapy is constantly discussed in All Stars programs for kids, and

 

* social therapists run teen therapy groups that serve as a means of recruitment to, or encouragement of continued participation in, All Stars.

 

Furthermore, “Sapphire’s Kiss” can be regarded as a dubious endeavor for All Stars to be associated with because many All Stars youngsters, after noting that the therapist in “Sapphire’s Kiss” is white and the patient is African-American, would instantly connect the dots with the real-life All Stars/social therapy community, where most of the therapists are white women and most of the teen therapy group participants are from minorities.

 

Dubious projects attract dubious people. In this case we must mention not just Newman but also his co-director, social therapist Mary Fridley, who was the author in the early 1990’s of raunchy articles in The National Alliance apparently designed to attract teens as well as adults to the milieu of friendosexuality (see I.B.7, I.B.8 and I.C.1). This is the same Fridley who is alleged, in Marina J. Ortiz’s account of life in the Newman cult, to have engaged in a romantic relationship with a client. (Ortiz participated in a Fridley-led therapy group along with the client in question, and says she watched the emotional turmoil develop; see excerpt at IV.B.3 and full text at http://www.ex-iwp.org/docs/Ortiz-Others/Slave%20to%20a%20Dream.htm.)

 

The situation imagined in “Sapphire’s Kiss” by playwright Zarillo-Gouldin, who has been active with Newman’s theater since the 1990’s, is more extreme than that in Fridley’s real-life therapy group. Although the Castillo website describes “Sapphire’s Kiss” as part of a series about “strong, independent women,” the story line depicts a white therapist taking advantage of a black patient who suffers from delusions. In the real world such a relationship would be more likely to involve exploitation and unequal power than strength and independence. The All Stars eNewsletter, however, describes the therapist’s behavior not as flat-out wrong but merely as “unconventional.” All Stars board member Henry Louis Gates should ask himself what sort of message this sends to All Stars’ teens.--DK]

 

4. Newmanite sex advice for primary-school children

 

Dear Readers,

 

Ever notice how much fun sex can be when you do it a little different? Well, talking about sex is like that too. This week Phyllis and I were invited up to Harlem to talk sex with some of the boys and girls, aged 7 to 11, enrolled in the summer program of the Barbara Taylor School….

 

Q [by one of the children]:  Is sex really fun to do? I think it’s crazy.

 

A [by Freda or Phyllis]:  Well, sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. Sex is like a lot of other things you do. Take going to the movies. If you go with someone you like to see something good, if the popcorn is hot and the seats are soft, you can have a wonderful time….

 

--Freda Rosen, “Something Different” (“Sexually Speakin’” column), The National Alliance, Aug. 8, 1986. [NOTE:  Ms. Rosen, in answering the above question, does not speak in terms of adult (or even teen) behavior. She uses the word “you” as if this were advice for the seven- to eleven-year-olds in the room. She also gives them the adult advice that “if you’re doing it because you want to, in a way you like, then it can be lots of fun.” Other topics of the discussion include the difference between “fucking” and “humping.” The article displays a photo of Rosen with three of the girls, whose full names are given in the photo caption. Also included are signed drawings by several of the kids. At least one of these drawings should have been grounds for immediate notification of Child Protective Services, but apparently the Newmanites preferred to unite abused child and abusing adult in a joint political struggle against the bourgeois family (see III.A.2 below).]

 

5. Newman and his friendosexual housemates totally control All Stars   

 

In 1999, The New York Observer described Newman’s lifestyle in the town house at 60 Bank Street in Greenwich Village that he had purchased with the help of a woman supporter (see I.B.2.b above). Newman told the Observer that he shared the house with nine women and two men. He called them his “dearest friends” and stated that he had been sexually involved with some but not all of them over the years (in fact four of the women, one of whom has since died, were part of his longtime personal harem).

 

It’s a free country, but we have to ask: Do these friendosexual living arrangements have any significance for evaluating the All Stars Project, where adult staff serve as mentors for kids from age five up through the teen years?

 

We were able to identify all ten of Newman’s surviving housemates through campaign finance filings, voter registration rolls, real estate records, telephone street directories and a NEXIS search. Each of the ten has listed the house as her or his address within the past three years, although it is possible (but not likely, given current rents and co-op/condo prices in New York) that one or more has moved out. The individuals identified by our records search include:

 

*Gabrielle Kurlander, Newman’s number one paramour and the President of All Stars;

 

* Dr. Susan Massad, who signed the house purchase papers with Newman, is a member of the All Stars board of directors and was its chairperson prior to the fall of 2005; and

 

* Lois Holzman, Newman’s co-thinker on therapeutic issues, who does consulting work for All Stars and is the director of a social therapy institute to which All Stars has disbursed large amounts in consulting and training fees.

 

Other residents of this peculiar household include the artistic director of the All Stars youth theater program, the managing director of All Star’s Castillo Theatre, the All Stars director of volunteers (a Newman “wife”), a recent director of the All Stars capital campaign, a top social therapist who does training and consulting for All Stars along with Holzman, and a businesswoman (another Newman “wife”) who serves on the All Stars board with Dr. Massad. Then there’s Newman himself (listed on the All Stars website until December 2005 as Castillo’s artistic director and as All Stars’ “co-founder” along with Lenora Fulani, who has the sense to live elsewhere) and Jacqueline Salit, the New York County Independence Party power broker who helps to keep the patronage flowing to All Stars from the mayor and other politicians.

 

In other words, the All Stars youth charity (a) is a “family” enterprise in which each of the 11 known recent occupants of Newman’s friendosexual household plays an important role and (b) is totally dominated by these individuals operating as a team under the patriarchal direction of their dear leader.

 

D. The Newman organization’s opposition to its own members starting families or accepting responsibility for the children they already have

 

1. Mother urged to put her child in foster care for sake of the “revolution”

 

The final straw was when Newman and his therapists “suggested” that I forsake my rights, obligations and love as a mother and send my young daughter to live with relatives or in a state-sponsored foster care home. My daughter had begun having a lawful response to my neglect by cutting school and “acting out” around the house. In June of 1990, a few Social Therapists (including Deborah Pearl and Linda Young) then attended several household meetings to help “resolve” the problem. “Suggestions” included asking whether I had relatives with whom I could send my daughter to live. Fred Newman personally inquired whether I would consider sending my daughter away to a private school (which he was willing to pay for). The last “suggestion” was that I consider putting my daughter in a foster home because she was “getting in the way” of my “work” as a “revolutionary.” I considered that for about 10 seconds (then thought “What the hell are you doing?”). I couldn’t believe this was happening. I had dedicated my life to this organization, I thought, for the sake of my children and future generations, and this is the way they treat children? I left the cult one week later, in July of 1990.

 

--Marina J. Ortiz, “Slave to a Dream: Inside the International Workers Party,” ex-iwp.org, 2003.

 

2. Abortion a revolutionary duty?

 

Indeed, the IWP was hostile to parenting. Through social therapy brainwashing, female members of the IWP were encouraged to seek abortions if they were pregnant, so that their “development” would not be hindered--i.e., they could work for the party. The International Workers Party (IWP) does not/did not support youths.

[A highest level party leader’s] son, whom I cared for as a child, is a prime example. He grew up to be an angry and confused young man. He learned nothing because he was taught nothing by [his mother] and the IWP. Home comes first. I will say no more.

--William Pleasant, email to Dennis King, August 21, 2005.

 

3. Rationalizing child abandonment

 

Lenora and I have discussed how Black and Latina women feel very protective of their boy children. We often feel that if they know about what’s going on in the world they will only get into trouble, that if we keep the world away from them they will grow up innocent and safe. That being a mother means spending almost all your time with your children or they will think you don’t love them, that you have neglected them. Well, I’m glad there will be a Barbara Taylor School…and a Dr. Lenora Fulani at the Harlem Institute challenging these oppressive--with a capital O--myths and building a political community where children can grow up with the tools they need to be powerful.

 

--Emily Carter, “To Our Youth,” The National Alliance, August 2, 1985. [NOTE:  Carter had been ordered by the IWP to move to Mississippi the previous year as an organizer and leave behind her 9-year-old son in New York to be raised by Fulani, who as a top IWP leader did not have the time to adequately meet such an obligation. Carter’s statement is clearly a self-deluding rationalization of her abandonment of her son. Carter subsequently left the IWP.]

 

4. Social therapy devalues parenting

 

a. Statement by a mother of two small children

 

One of the therapists made comments to me such as, “it’s strange how mothers who decide to give up their kids to work or devote themselves to causes get such a bad rap in our society.” She brought this up with me twice during discussions about children and motherhood….In retrospect, I feel she may have been trying to begin to shift my paradigm about my role as a parent…and pave the way for furthering separation of me from my family.

 

--Email to Dennis King, Sept. 1, 2002.

 

b. Motherhood is “bourgeois”?

 

Social Therapy sessions were places where political revolt was crushed by a process of manipulation….Since the therapist is familiar with the histories of the patients, then she/he can easily attack the vulnerabilities of the rebel. For example: A group member voices that she is feeling guilty about the fact that she is not spending enough time with her child. But of course, spending time with a child is time not spent serving Newman. That’s a no-no!  In response, the therapist charges that the woman is organized by motherhood and not the Tendency [the IWP]. Motherhood is bourgeois! Her relationship with her child has to be organized around supporting her very, very important “political” work. The therapist will then employ the rest of the group in the attack on the rebel, who proceed to “kick her ass” around not supporting the therapist’s position. Fearing ostracism from the group, the rebel capitulates. She has “gotten some help” with her “emotional issues.” In short, her objections to how her time is being used by Newman are silenced.

 

--William Pleasant, “Fred Newman:  ‘Communism Is Dead, I Killed It!’’’ 1993, available at ex-iwp.org.

 

5. Kids regarded as a “nuisance” by party leaders

 

Within the IWP, kids weren’t really wanted. They prevented the members from working for Fred. At NAP, there were lots of poster kids. In the IWP, kids were regarded as a nuisance.

 

--Summary of notes from a 2002 interview by Dennis King with Kellie Gasink.

 

6. A father says:  The cult almost killed my infant son

 

Jim R. was active in the community organizing efforts of Newman’s Centers for Change (CFC) in 1971-74. “Mary,” Jim’s partner and the mother of their infant son, “Sam,” was a patient of Newman’s and thus much more deeply under his influence. When Jim quit in protest over Newman’s alliance with the violent Lyndon LaRouche organization, Newman retaliated by breaking up Jim and Mary’s relationship, showing no concern for the effect this sundering would have on the infant.

 

While blindly following one of Fred’s sudden tangents as a self-appointed medical practitioner/“healer,” this group almost killed my infant son in 1974. [Sam] had suffered several bouts of minor respiratory problems and, at six months of age and in the court-ordered temporary custody of his birth mother, [Mary], a longtime Newman follower, Newman intervened in his treatment for a minor ear infection, replacing the physician-prescribed antibiotics with a diet consisting solely of herbal teas and vitamin supplements. While my son’s condition worsened, I was being denied the right to see him.

 

Sensing that something was wrong I went to the judge and won a visitation agreement. When I at last was able to be with Sam, I was horrified! He was emaciated. He was so weak that he couldn’t lift his head. He was running a very, very high fever (almost 105), and I saw no evidence that the group present had been taking measures to bring his fever down. He looked like one of those Somalian babies pictured in hunger relief charity advertisements. And his birth mother was not around--she was “working”--but a group of Newmanites was present to “monitor” my visit.

 

I immediately called our pediatrician to schedule an emergency visit and told the “observers” what I had done, inviting any or all to join me in the cab ride downtown. I carefully gathered Sam’s blankets and dressed him in something warm, then carried him toward the apartment door. They blocked my path! I again invited them to come. Still they refused to allow me to leave. I found a back door, exited down a back stairs, and out an alley door into the street where I hailed a passing taxi.

 

By then the Newmanites had called in reinforcements from nearby communal apartments; a throng of them surrounded the taxi, refusing to let it pass. Thus I was not able to take my son for desperately needed medical care. Instead I had to go back to court, which I knew would delay medical treatment for perhaps days. Rather than let this sordid matter go before a judge, the cult wisely agreed out-of-court to a doctor visit on the condition that his birth mother and another cult member was present.

 

Our pediatrician, one of the most respected children’s doctors in the country, examined Sam and found that he had a severe systemic infection bordering on meningitis caused by neglect of the original minor ear infection and substandard diet. The doctor also wanted to know what happened. He listened to Mary’s completely incoherent attempt to explain the obvious lack of competent medical care, learned from me about how her group had blocked the scheduled emergency visit a few days earlier, and called Child Welfare to report the birth mother for child endangerment.

 

With the court and Child Welfare now breathing down their necks, the Newmanites had no choice but to allow me to direct my son’s medical care and recovery. This was for me one of those defining personal moments: I had to confront the sobering realization that my son’s birth mother--our relationship severed not because of personal conflicts or compatibility issues but abruptly truncated, overnight, by Fred Newman’s directive--might allow our son to die rather than to question this demagogue’s absurd posturing as a health expert and unlicensed medical practitioner. At that moment I made a commitment to save my son’s life.

 

--Jim R., email, Nov. 22, 2002. [NOTE:  Jim took his son and fled the state rather than have the infant placed in foster care with the possibility of being eventually returned to the birth mother and Newman. As a single parent he successfully raised Sam in a city far from New York. Jim observed in another 2002 email:  “I lived, worked, and paid Social Security taxes, providing easy access to my location, [but] his birth mother waited seventeen years--until Sam was a senior in high school--to track down our location. I find that almost as curious as the fact that she allowed him to become critically ill in 1974.”]

 

II. RECENT ALLEGATIONS OF ABUSE AND BIZARRE BEHAVIOR AT ALL STARS ARE ONLY THE SURFACE OF THE ICEBERG:  THE PEOPLE WHO CONTROL ALL STARS HAVE A LONG HISTORY (BEGINNING IN 1971-72) OF MANIPULATING AND INDOCTRINATING TEENS (AND EVEN PRIMARY SCHOOL CHILDREN) WHILE EXPLOITING PUBLICLY AND PRIVATELY FUNDED YOUTH PROGRAMS ON BEHALF OF A HIDDEN AGENDA.  IT WOULD BE WILDLY IRRESPONSIBLE TO PROCEED WITH THE PROPOSED BOND WITHOUT FIRST CONDUCTING A FULL, NO-HOLDS-BARRED INVESTIGATION OF ALL STARS, ITS RELATED ENTITIES, ITS FOUNDERS, OFFICERS AND STAFF, AND ITS BOARD.

 

The following is a chronological record of the Newman cult’s work with children and teens, as told largely in the words (published or unpublished) of actual participants, both pro-Newman and anti-Newman. Some of the incidents recounted here may have been the result more of naivete than of malicious intent. Some of the Newmanite statements quoted herein may have reflected theories that were only imperfectly realized in the cult’s day-to-day youth work. But viewed in its totality, the history of the Newman cult’s work with children and teens is nothing short of appalling.

 

A. Overview by a former IWP leader and All Stars Talent Show Network activist

 

Fred Newman and Co. have had a long history of exploiting the legitimate aspirations of Black and Latino youths and their parents for quality education and cultural expression. The All Stars Talent Show Network is simply Newman's most evolved and financially lucrative manifestation of that activity.

Going back to the mid-1980s and the failed Barbara Taylor School, which supplied school children for pro-Khadafi demonstrations in Washington, DC (buses financed by the Libyan Government), to using the All Stars Talent Show Network, which charged fees to aspiring inner-city artists, to fund IWP activities, Newman has consistently employed poor youths as mere props in his campaign to milk donations from corporations and charities.

I opposed this activity as a member of the IWP, and I oppose it now. I believe that Mayor Bloomberg should join me in saying no to the under-service and exploitation of poor youths. The Mayor should certainly refrain from making public funds available to advance Fred Newman's longstanding financial strategy.

--William Pleasant, former Central Committee member of Newman’s International Workers Party (IWP), 1986-1992. [Mr. Pleasant played a major role in the All Stars Talent Show Network (now part of the All Stars Project) in its early years.]

B.  Programs for kids from the 1970s through the 1990s

 

1. Centers for Change and “Grand Central High”

 

a.  Declaration of Dennis King

 

In 1977 I conducted interviews with a number of former members of the Newman group originally known as Centers for Change. The accuracy of the article I published has never been seriously disputed and my findings have been reconfirmed over and over by investigative journalists and public-interest researchers [see Part VII of https://lyndonlarouchewatch.org/nyt.htm]. In 2002 I re-interviewed the same people and also several more former CFC members that I had been unable to contact in 1977.

 

The stories I elicited were remarkably consistent, both between the first interviews and the second interviews, and between the original (doubly interviewed) sources and the new sources. These people had all left the group on their own steam and had not received “exit counseling” (which did not exist at the time) nor had any of them become active to my knowledge in any anti-cult group. Some of them had been out of contact with the others for decades. Therefore I am reasonably sure that their memories were not artifacts of a post-cult counter-indoctrination process. The following is a summary of what I learned via these interviews:

 

Newman aggressively recruited teenagers into his cult using social therapy (then called “proletarian ego” therapy), idealistic-sounding community action projects, and “group” sessions--and by steering the kids into a bogus private high school he had conjured up. This unlicensed school was given the name “Grand Central High,” probably meant ironically. Newman asked tuition from well-to-do parents of $2500 a year (in 1972 dollars) that he claimed would include “three hours of therapy weekly.”

 

But GCH had no textbooks, no teachers, no blackboards, no classes. Essentially the kids were warehoused in a single apartment where they were often unsupervised and spent their time in sexual experimentation. The educational process consisted of “hanging out” at the CFC (Centers for Change) headquarters, participating in group therapy and political organizing projects (first of a Maoist nature and later following the ideology of Lyndon LaRouche), and selling the CFC newspaper on the street.

 

The kids also participated along with adult CFC members in quasi-therapy sessions of the CFC collective, where adult “stuff” was discussed that was not appropriate for them to hear and that could only encourage them to emulate the bizarre behavior of the adult members. For instance, the group sessions would discuss the polymorphous sexual practices of Fred Newman and his mistresses, who were also his therapy patients (as were some of the teens) and one of whom was the mother of an underage girl in the group.

 

There is no evidence that underage teens participated in the adult nude therapy sessions along with the adult patients and therapists, or that anyone under 18 participated in the famous patient-therapist oral sex “orgy” that occurred during one of these sessions. Likewise, there is no evidence that Fred Newman engaged in sexual activity with underage kids, whether patients of his or not. What Newman did do, was emotionally seduce--through his “caring” personality, his political ideology, and the power of the transference relationship in psychotherapy--several teenage girls into his cult. Three of these girls (two of whom were under 16 when recruited) are still with him today as devoted followers, their lives destroyed.

 

--Dennis King, declaration, August 16, 2005.  

 

b. Newman documents his own emotional seduction of a 16-year-old female patient

 

In 1990, Newman wrote a boastful article “Women I Live With” about his control over several women in his inner circle. The women thus honored were expected to write articles about how much they loved Fred and the young actress, Gabrielle (“Rie”) Kurlander, whom he had recently chosen to be his new number one, replacing the older women in his informal harem. What follows is Newman’s description of how he, a man in his mid-thirties, used boundaries-free psychotherapy in the early 1970s to emotionally seduce into his cult a 16-year-old runaway girl, Cathy Sadell; plus Sadell’s reply almost two decades later about how grateful she is to have been recruited and how much she “wants” Fred and Rie. (“Wanting,” in this context, relates to Newman’s concept of how sexual desire is transmuted through social therapy into revolutionary political action.) Any legitimate mental health professional will recognize immediately just how unethical Newman’s behavior was, both in the 1970s and in 1990.

 

Cathy Sadell was a child of 16 in the early 70’s when I met her. A poor, working class runaway from New Jersey, she was living in the East Village on a strange (though at the time commonplace) mixture of drugs and politics. In the waning days of “the ‘60’s” Hazel [Hazel Daren, the 19-year-old college student whom the former CCNY philosophy professor had picked from among his students to be his mistress and muse--DK] and I had somehow created a successful left wing radically humanistic therapy project called Centers Clinic and Sadell came for help….Orphaned as an infant, a product then of her adopted mother’s suicide and her adopted father’s brutality, Sadell was at once fragile and terribly tough. It seemed to me she trusted no one over 20.

 

Centers Clinic was more than a therapy office; it was a therapeutic community and a political hangout. And so I came to know Sadell not merely as a “patient” but as a young political woman in “our community”….I remember so many walks and talks and therapy sessions (frequently, as Sadell observes in her wonderful article, they were one and the same)--but most of all I recall Sadell’s extraordinary presence in those days.…[S]he was always checking everyone out--and rightfully so! Once in an “office session” she became outraged at something I said (or didn’t say) and she jumped up from her chair, charged to the window sill and angrily swept the 20 or so books…to the floor. Her statement was clear. “Take your goddamn books and shove ‘em!” We fought. Not often, but on some occasions….Cathy Sadell, whom many still think of as a madwoman, has taught me that “sanity” can be just another form of hypocrisy.

 

--Fred Newman, “Women I Live With,” Practice, Winter 1990.


Dearest Fred, do you remember our long lunches and walks around the Upper West Side over 15 years ago? (These were our therapy sessions.…) How you taught me what the working class was, and who I was in it? You did it so tenderly and carefully, since I had surrounded myself with protective illusions which are still being smashed. I remember how angry you were when I wanted to go away. I couldn’t believe someone wanted me….

 

Fred and Rie: Thank you--for leading us in this difficult, passionate, sexy process of learning how to touch you and be touched, want you and be wanted, want the revolution and be wanted by it.

 

--Cathy Sadell, “The Anti-Women’s Club Club,” Practice, Winter 1990.

 

c. Newman’s “high school”

 

GCH is a school. It’s different from any public school. There are no bells, no attendance, no structure. There are no bullshit courses you have no desire to learn….One of the most important parts of GCH is therapy….The relationship between my therapist and myself is not just a couch and notebook relationship. It’s one of friendship. One which grows as I grow.

 

--BK (a GCH student and member of the CFC collective), 1972. [The author of this mimeographed statement was not recruited into the inner cult nor were any other male GCH students. Newman focused his recruitment efforts on the girls.]

 

2. The Barbara Taylor School

 

The Barbara Taylor School was a private elementary school run by the Newmanites in Manhattan and later in Brooklyn in the 1980s and 1990s.  Its final director, Lois Holzman, Ph.D. (a development psychologist who is Newman’s chief theoretical collaborator), often described it as social therapy’s “laboratory school.”

 

a. Politicizing of primary school children

 

On the first day of classes, the students of the Barbara Taylor School--four small classrooms in an apartment in Harlem--learned the rules of the school: No fighting, no running, listen to the teacher, respect one another, and…

 

“Be political,” the students in Gayle Weintraub’s class yelled out in unison.

 

“What does ‘being political’ mean?” Weintraub asked her eight students, all but one veterans of the school, all 9 and 10 years old….

 

How the Barbara Taylor School differs from a traditional private school may be most evident in its class trips. Students went to Poughkeepsie to march in a demonstration in support of Tawana Brawley….Students and some parents also went in busloads to a demonstration in Washington D.C., “memorializing those who suffered in the bombing of Libya.” This is one school where the students are not required to pledge allegiance to the flag….

 

While the curriculum for social studies is “adapted” from a traditional seventh and eighth grade syllabus established by the Board of Education, there is a noticeable twist. “The basic foundation of the curriculum is the perspective of historical materialism,” the introduction begins.…

 

--Jonathan Mandell, “Her School, Her Views,” Newsday, Oct. 6, 1988. [According to former IWP central committee member William Pleasant, the Barbara Taylor School’s bus trip to Washington was paid for by funds received from the Libyan government; see II.A above. Pleasant also recalls that Newman and his mistresses hoped for, but ultimately never obtained, much larger subsidies on the scale of those Libya paid during the 1980s to Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam. But if the Libyan government proved too cagey for Newman’s scam, the IWP chairman would later, in the year 2002, find a more naïve backer: the New York City government as represented by the IDA.]   

 

b. Social therapy for children

 

The school touts as its innovations a “school-wide campaign against abusive and anti-social behavior of all kinds,” “social therapy groups” for children, an emphasis on writing, an experimental unit in economics, a teaching staff that is trained to respect the students, and be responsive to them.

 

--Ibid.

 

Marx’s methodological approach as it has been developed over the past 20 years by Fred Newman into the clinical and educational psychology called social therapy is the basis of the pedagogy practiced at the Barbara Taylor School.

 

--Christine LaCerva, “Talking About Talking About Sex: The Organization of Possibilities,” in Sexuality and the Curriculum:  The Politics and Practices of Sexuality Education, James T. Sears (ed.), New York: Teachers College Press, 1992, p. 130.

 

Every teacher at the BT School is required to be trained in the approach [social therapy] by the East Side Institute for Short Term Psychotherapy, where clinicians are taught to help patients “be” in a new way--one which complements the “new way of seeing” that is produced by the Castillo Cultural Center across the floor at 500 Greenwich Street in Manhattan’s Soho, bastion of New York’s avant garde arts community.

 

--Phyllis Goldberg, “The Barbara Taylor School: ‘A model for the country and, in fact, the world,’” The National Alliance, July 5, 1990. [For the “new way of seeing” at Castillo, read I.B.8 and I.C.1 above.]

 

c. Educational philosophy of the Barbara Taylor School

 

(1) Knowing bad, performing good

 

We have constructed an approach that is post-epistemological, by which I mean a practice that rejects the modernist belief that knowing (of any sort) is the path to a better life and/or a better world (or progress or growth). Developmental learning is an attempt to give up the alienated activity/institution of knowing in favor of the noncognitive, nondualistic activity of performing.

 

--Lois Holzman, Ph.D., Schools for Growth: Radical Alternatives to Current Educational Models, Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997, p. 126.

 

(2) Development, collective farm-style

 

When the group develops, everyone learns. When individuals learn, no one develops.

 

--Holzman (describing the Barbara Taylor School’s philosophy), Schools for Growth, p. 117.

 

d. Marina Ortiz:  My child was “hiding in a closet with a paper bag over his head”

 

I got a call saying that my son was “acting out” in school. When I got to the school, he was in fact hiding in a closet with a paper bag over his head after having been terrorized (and beaten) by other students. I yelled at the administrator about their labeling him a trouble-maker when in fact he had been the victim. When I took him out of their school, I was harshly asked if it was due to “political” conflicts. They never asked me how he was doing.

 

--Marina J. Ortiz, ex-iwp.org Forum posting, May 18, 2003.

 

e. Even an IWP central committee member withdrew his daughter


Even as an IWP member and central committee officer, I could not entrust the care and education of my daughter to the “education” fraction of the party. Like most IWP members with children, I withdrew my daughter from the Barbara Taylor School and kept my child away from Newman’s so-called “developmental” tactics. My basis for doing so was grounded in my observation that the children of the IWP were being exploited as sloganeers, and vital educational services they needed were third-rate at best under the IWP. As a consequence, my child was educated in the NYC public schools system. She has since gone on to be an honors graduate of Antioch College.

 

Where is the Barbara Taylor School, that I supported until I saw it as a sham? BTS was the IWP’s “developmental” flagship. Where is it?

 

--William Pleasant, email to Dennis King, Aug. 21, 2005. [NOTE: The Barbara Taylor School’s enrollment plunged from about 100 to less than 20 over the decade of its existence, in spite of social therapy academics touting it to build their reputations. The IWP replaced Barbara Taylor, the school’s putative founder, who had a legitimate background as a teacher and private-school director, with cadre who had little experience with kids. Newman was unwilling to devote more than minimal resources from the IWP’s growing income to the BT School, not even to maintain the most basic educational standards. The “laboratory” school moved several times, from one small cluttered apartment to another on unsafe blocks in Harlem, finally ending up in a Brooklyn storefront. It closed its doors forever in 1996. Its last director, Lois Holzman, who wrote extensively for academic circles about her and Newman’s supposedly brilliant pedagogical innovations at the school, casually dismissed it in a June-July 1997 article in Special Children as just “one of our development stages.”]

 

f. The sexualizing of the Barbara Taylor School

 

(1) Sex lessons for first graders

 

Freda: Children have all kinds of notions about sex, about what it is, who does it and who should; they have all kinds of attitudes and beliefs that are very difficult to challenge. Where do you begin teaching them about sex?

 

Strickland: What we really teach is sexuality--that people are sexual all the time and do sex all the time even when they think they’re not doing it, and that going to bed with someone isn’t the bottom line. We teach that sex is this ordinary activity that goes on, although it gets used in very negative ways….

 

--Freda Rosen, “Kids, School & Sex:  Lesson I,” The National Alliance, Sept. 18, 1987 (interview with Barbara Taylor and Gloria Strickland, identified as co-founders of the Barbara Taylor School). [NOTE:  Ms. Strickland also led workshops on Newman-style education at the SCAP Head Start program in New Jersey that year. These presentations   apparently were one of the factors that prompted the mass resignation of the outraged SCAP teaching staff (see II.B.3 below). Today Ms. Strickland is the director of the All Stars Project’s Newark, N.J. program.]

 

(2) Social therapy at the Barbara Taylor School

 

Below is a social therapist’s description of a parent-teacher meeting at the Barbara Taylor School. To those familiar with the Newman cult’s doctrines and practices, this was apparently an attempt to recruit parents into the friendosexual “development community” so they could be proper sexual “role models” for the children. Former members say that although some of the parents were already in the Newman group when they sent their kids to the BT School, few if any non-IWP parents were recruited via parent-teacher meetings such as the one described here (in fact, most parents eventually pulled their kids out of the BT School, preferring even New York’s substandard public school system to Newman and Holzman’s “laboratory”).

 

The question on the table was how could we--as a collective of parents, students, and teachers--promote a progressive, nonabusive sexuality for children. Rafaella, a Latina whose daughter is 3, put her head in her hands laughing. She said she had just realized that if we wanted to help the kids break out of these social roles and have a more progressive sexuality, then the parents would have to do so as well!…

 

At this point, the group took stock:  parents and teachers would have to be role models in order to support the children working on these issues. Could we, the Barbara Taylor School Collective, do it? What would we need to build in order to support each other as role models? Tameka’s father said the parents needed to know more about social therapy. Rafaella suggested that the parents would need to learn more about each other’s histories, as they barely knew each other. The parents decided to write their histories so they could learn about each other and use their diverse racial and cultural traditions to create a multicultural reader for their children. This would help establish the conditions for more intimate and powerful relationships with each other. They would follow the children’s lead by creating the conditions they, as parents, needed.

 

--Christine La Cerva, “Talking About Talking About Sex: The Organization of Possibilities,” in Sexuality and the Curriculum: The Politics and Practices of Sexuality Education, James T. Sears (ed.), New York: Teachers College Press, 1992.

 

(3) Developing “powerful sexual people”

 

Freda: Why are you having this workshop [for parents and teachers on] “Children and Sexuality”? Who is it for? What are you expecting to do there?

 

Strickland: We want to talk about what they don’t know, and continue developing tools to address these issues in the communities. We want to take the school out to the community and bring the community into the school. Developing powerful sexual people is going to make our communities healthier. We can’t do it ourselves and people in the community can’t deal with it themselves either. We don’t have to be constrained by the issues of marriage, sex and so on. We don’t need or want the right wing to dictate to us how our kids should develop as sexual beings. No way!

 

--Freda Rosen, “Kids, School & Sex:  Lesson I,” The National Alliance, Sept. 18, 1987 (interview with Barbara Taylor and Gloria Strickland, identified as co-founders of the Barbara Taylor School). [“Powerful sexual people” can be regarded as a buzzword denoting friendosexual IWP members.]

 

g. Seventh graders as therapists for their teachers?

 

“Coming from New England, I was very repressed,” says the Massachusetts-born Lucia, who teaches the upper (7th and 8th grades) class. “I’ve learned from the kids how to be unrepressed--it’s been very joyful. I’ve shared my conflicts with the kids. Not only did I get support from them, it clearly was a way to have more intimate relations with them.”

 

--Phyllis Goldberg, “The Barbara Taylor School: ‘A model for the country and, in fact, the world,’” The National Alliance, July 5, 1990. [NOTE:  “Intimate relations” should NOT be interpreted here as meaning a physical, sexual relationship. Even the cult’s strongest critics among ex-members have never alleged that the Barbara Taylor School was the scene of sexual abuse of children by teachers. However, the Newmanites do sexualize the English language in line with their theories, so that even mundane statements become vaguely suggestive (as when a sex education session with children is described as “doing it” with the children). It’s bad enough, in the incident recounted above, that an adult teacher should try to use her seventh grade pupils as a sounding board for her emotional and sexual problems.]

 

h. Children as lab rats?

 

[T]he BT School has become a laboratory school for the social therapeutic approach to education; it is viewed by its practitioners as a prototype for the education of all children and they work actively to bring it into public school systems around the country….

 

--Ibid.

 

3. The SCAP Head Start program

 

The teaching staff resigned after being called back to work in September. Teachers mailed copies of their resignations to the national OHAD office in New York City in an attempt to alert the federal agency to “inappropriate activities” at the Head Start facility.

 

--Ann Haver-Allen, “Federal agency probes Head Start,” The Franklin News-Record, Oct. 8, 1987.

 

“We’d gotten ideas from the Barbara Taylor School in New York City,” continued Staton [Lavern Staton, President of the SCAP Head Start’s Policy Council], “We liked their educational philosophy and how they prepared their kids for the world. So we invited Barbara Taylor and her staff down here to do workshops for our teachers and parents. The ones who resigned didn’t like that.”

 

--Dan Friedman, “Community Controlled Head Start Program Under Attack,” The National Alliance, Oct. 16, 1987.

 

Last month five federal agents of the Department of Health and Human Services, including newly appointed Regional Director Carolyn Woodward, a Black Republican, barged into the SCAP building where Head Start services 98 children, mostly Black and poor.…

 

The invasion followed on the heels of a teacher walkout on the first day of school that has left Moore with the kind of staff shortage that plagues inner city schools across the country. The teachers were apparently angry over innovations in SCAP’s educational philosophy and practice, which has included the introduction of workshops for parents and staff on such “touchy” subjects as Racism and Education, Children and Sexuality, and Being Poor in America.

 

--Phyllis Goldberg, “SCAP Fights for Kids,” The National Alliance, November 20, 1987. [Although Goldberg tries to suggest in this article that the teachers who were horrified by the cult’s takeover of SCAP Head Start were somehow racists, against poor people, etc., what probably was the key factor in the teacher revolt was the insistence by the SCAP management on adopting the Barbara Taylor School’s brand of sex education (see II.B.2.f above).]

 

Gloria Strickland, educational psychologist and the co-founder of the Barbara Taylor School, has led a number of workshops at SCAP and worked intimately with many of the teachers who resigned. At first she was surprised at the mass resignation because, she says, the staff participated in a lot in the workshops and seemed interested. “But they were clearly conflicted,” reflects Strickland….

 

--Dan Friedman, “Community Controlled Head Start Program Under Attack,” The National Alliance, Oct. 16, 1987. [For Strickland’s comments on the ideas underlying a “Children and Sexuality” workshop she led in September 1987, see II.B.f (3). The Friedman article also quotes the Newmanite director of SCAP, Mamie Moore, who described the opponents of the cult’s takeover of the SCAP Head Start program (e.g., the teachers) as “nightriders” and “crossburners.” Friedman, who purveyed this drivel, is today the director of All Stars’ youth drama program.]

Gloria Strickland, a co-founder with Barbara Taylor of the BT School [is] now the executive director of New Jersey’s Somerset Community Action Program--where the social therapeutic model of education is also practiced.…

 

--Phyllis Goldberg, “The Barbara Taylor School: ‘A model for the country and, in fact, the world,’” The National Alliance, July 5, 1990.

 

4. The All Stars Talent Show Network (1980s and 1990s)

 

When the ASTSN began in the 1980s, it was a vigorous, brilliantly conceived program. Large numbers of kids were involved, but former IWP members claim that Newman ultimately turned it into just another fundraising gimmick. (One of the ASTSN founders, William Pleasant, says it “morphed into a ghetto rip-off, promising aspiring Black and Latino teens fame and fortune for an entrance fee.”) Given the differences between the ASTSN of the early 1990s (when gate receipts were the main way of milking the program) and the ASTSN of today (a Potemkin Village within the All Stars Project that is used to dazzle and guilt-trip wealthy liberals), I am putting information about the earlier ASTSN activities here rather than in the section on current Newmanite youth outreach programs.

 

The All Stars Talent Show Network [is] the cult’s most appealing and palatable scam because it claims to give youth an opportunity to express themselves and “build a community” in a constructive way, while keeping them off the streets and away from drugs and crime. Keep in mind, however, that each contestant must pay a hefty registration fee in order to be a part of this “wonderful” experience (which remains unrecognized by most legitimate entertainment companies and agents), while the proud and loving relatives of these youth guarantee that the cult will sell up to a dozen talent show tickets per child.

 

--Robert Cohen, former IWP member, letter submitted to the New York Amsterdam News, Sept. 12, 1993 (see ex-iwp.org). [Cohen worked as a volunteer with ASTSN, chiefly as a street fundraiser and as a security guard at the talent shows.]

 

The children’s parents had to pay to register and had to sell a dozen tickets. Cadre also had quotas of tickets to sell.  Parents were told talent scouts would be present, but this was not true.  If talents scouts were there it was by accident. All our energies went into sell, sell, sell. If you didn’t meet the quota, you had to buy the tickets yourself. The kids were talented, sang their hearts out, but were used as a money making tool….

 

When Newman dismantled the [New Alliance Party] fundraising system, [ASTSN] became the main thing. It was raise money--and Fred shifts it around. The 1992 Fulani campaign raised five times as much as it spent. Only a very small handful of women knew where the money was. We’d go out and table for the [ASTSN]….All of us bought tickets and went to the shows. There was no ongoing work with the kids. If kids wanted private lessons, they had to pay. We weren’t really developing young people, just running talent shows.

 

--Summary of Robert Cohen’s remarks in interview with Dennis King, Fall 2002.

 

5. Social therapy for teens? One mother’s scary experience

 

In 1985 I consulted a former coworker about my problems with my teenage daughter--age 15 at the time.  He suggested that I take her for counseling at a therapy center in Harlem run by Ms. Fulani, whom he described as progressive. 

I called the therapy center for an appointment and accompanied my daughter for the first visit at a Harlem center that only had signs describing it as a therapy or counseling center. 

Together with my daughter I met with Ms. Fulani and the discussion was limited to the problems we were having at home, counseling sessions and fees I would be required to pay.

My daughter began individual therapy sessions with Ms. Fulani and she was very enthusiastic about the sessions and Ms. Fulani.  I was encouraged by this and looked forward to my daughter continuing counseling. 

After just a few weeks I learned that my daughter was being moved into adolescent group therapy sessions.  I contacted Ms. Fulani and asked her why my daughter could not continue a little longer in the individual therapy sessions with her.  Ms. Fulani advised me that their format was to move the adolescents quickly into the group therapy sessions. 

I learned from my daughter that the facilitators of these adolescent therapy sessions were in fact leaders from the New Alliance Party, a political organization.  She also told me that nine of the ten adolescents in the sessions were members of the New Alliance Party.

Simultaneous to this period of time my daughter was receiving aggressive telephone calls from adolescents and adults from the New Alliance Party people trying to lure her with free tickets to participate in their boat rides and other activities. The New Alliance Party was using other adolescents to put peer pressure on my daughter to get her to agree to participate.

When I again spoke with Ms. Fulani about the adolescent group therapy sessions, she confirmed that the facilitators were in fact from the New Alliance Party.

I was never advised that the Harlem therapy center was run by a political party nor that my daughter would be required to participate in group therapy sessions run by political party leaders, or that there would be aggressive outreach to bring my daughter into their political party activities.

During the time that my daughter was in the individual therapy sessions I saw that she identified strongly with Ms. Fulani and that there was clearly a bonding between Ms. Fulani and my daughter that made me an outsider. I attributed this to being perhaps an early stage of the counseling process. However, when I realized that Ms. Fulani’s strong influence over my daughter was actually part of a mechanism to incorporate my daughter into her political party I began to panic thinking that this was more in keeping with practices used by cults to recruit vulnerable people into their organizations. 

I was sickened when I realized that my daughter was being manipulated and preyed upon by a cult that was exploiting her vulnerability as a youth and troubled teenager. 

I was outraged and fearful for the future of my daughter, who was in need of professional counseling. I decided that I had to remove my daughter totally from the grip of Ms. Fulani and her cult/political party, which was targeting needy and desperate families and their children who were genuinely seeking professional counseling.

I didn’t know how to approach my daughter to tell her that I didn’t want her to see Ms. Fulani or participate in what I viewed as phony group therapy sessions set up for the sole purpose of targeting young people for recruitment into their cult/political party.  I was scared that my daughter, who was in a rebellious period, would do the opposite of what I wanted because she was in a period of acting out. 

I sought out the advice of my friends and family and I remember I cried a lot and was overwhelmed with fear for our situation. It is one of a parent’s worst fears--to lose your child to a cult. 

I sat my daughter down and asked her to trust my judgment and to never visit with or have contact with Ms. Fulani or her organizations again.  To my surprise, my daughter agreed, without any resistance.  I think she was also tired of the aggressive telephone calls she was receiving urging her to participate in their activities.  Also, although my daughter was going through a difficult adolescence, I think she was grounded enough to recognize how concerned I was and also I think she realized something was wrong with the adolescent group therapy sessions.  After all, she was the one who had alerted me to the fact that the sessions were facilitated by political party leaders. 

I telephoned the Harlem therapy center and advised them that my daughter would not be returning. After that I received a couple of hostile and intimidating telephone calls from Ms. Fulani insisting that she speak directly with my daughter, which I refused.

I do want it to be clear that I would have had no problem with my daughter being involved in a political organization.  This, however, was different.  This was the calculated exploitation, manipulation and coercion of vulnerable children for the benefit of a cult or political party. 

--Email from MK to Dennis King, August 21, 2005. 

 

C. The All Stars Project and other current Newmanite youth programs

 

1.  Recent allegations of emotional abuse and bizarre behavior at All Stars

 

I witnessed emotional and verbal abuse of teenagers who were brought to New York [from Oakland, Calif.] under the auspices of being “program leaders.” They were put up in a flop house, verbally intimidated and abused by Lenora Fulani and worked from 6 a.m. until 11:00 p.m. or later that night. They also pan handled on the streets to earn money for the trip. I also witnessed an All Stars show in the Bronx and saw children turned away in tears because they didn’t have the $5.00 entry fee (even though only 11 children showed up--they were expecting 300 and had over 50 volunteers present).

 

--Molly Hardy, complaint filed with New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, January 17, 2005.

 

I hadn’t known some of the stuff X emailed about her involvement, but it only intensifies my own feelings of how ‘wrong, wrong, wrong’ this is…Many of the kids they give ‘awards’ to in the All Stars are kids who have been compliant, or are easily manipulated but who have done very little with the group. I witnessed three of them from Oakland who seemed as astonished as anyone when they were told they were ‘leaders’ of the All Stars, panhandled for their plane trip and shipped off to New York, only to work 18 hours a day and be put up in a flop house.

 

I actually did hear the mother who brought 3 little girls with her to the All Stars show in New York yelling at a woman named Joyce, upset that she was told they would not be allowed to perform because they didn’t follow the instructions. The mother explained that three 6 year olds had traveled by subway from Queens to the Bronx and rehearsed for two weeks (as the children stood there wailing) and that she was going to report them. So there are parents and kids who have experiences to share, but then they are in the same predicament as we are, maybe worse. After all, the parents of these three teens from Oakland let them go across country with Joyce Dattner [Bay Area social therapist] and her lover with obviously very little investigation. But again, it’s all understandable, look at their website! Look at the mayor of the city! Who wouldn’t just feel excited and grateful to be a part of it?

 

--Molly Hardy, email, June 5, 2005.

 

2. Social therapy and promotion of friendosexuality continue to be a part of the All Stars experience

 

At All Stars headquarters, Newman writes and directs plays at the Castillo Theatre. His books are everywhere, and volunteers have been invited to social therapy events.

 

“It’s cool,” says Loretta Martin.

 

NY1 met Martin at a campaign rally for Mayor Michael Bloomberg. She works for Newman’s Independence Party and volunteers for All Stars.

 

“We hear it all over the place, Social Therapy,” Martin says.

 

A 2003 evaluation of All Stars shows some high school students read his book, “Let’s Develop.”  In it, Newman explains what he calls “friendosexuality.” He writes that sex is best when “performed” the same way children play, with friends as equals.

 

Former patients say they were advised to have sex with their friends, without forming emotional bonds. Mainstream psychologists say that leads to unhealthy relationships.

 

Here’s how former patient Marina Ortiz describes what happened when she went to Newman for help with a relationship: “Fred Newman in therapy suggested that maybe I should go have a relationship with someone else and bring it back to the therapy group and see if there were any problems and then we could discuss it. That was his advice to me regarding a personal relationship. He said I should go sleep around.”

 

--“Psychopolitics”:  Inside the Independence Party of Fred Newman, Nov. 2, 2005 (Part Three of a six-part NY1 News series produced by Rita Nissan) http://ny1.com/ny1/content/index.jsp?&aid=54694.

 

3. All Stars, social therapy and Newman-style sex education

 

The [East Side] Institute’s developmental approach [to youth sexuality] is practiced at ten Social Therapy Centers around the country, which see hundreds of children, adolescents and adults in group, individual and family therapy.  It is, as well, the foundation for several successful school-based and after-school youth programs, in which we promote teens’ active involvement and participation in personal/social decision-making processes that affect their lives as becoming adults. In these environments, they discover and decide on sexual issues and learn how to do sex developmentally.  [emphasis added]

 

-- “Development, Sex and Developmental Sex” (unsigned) in Development News (newsletter of the East Side Institute for Short Term Psychotherapy), Winter 2000.

[The article goes on to state that the All Stars Talent Show Network and the Development School for Youth, core programs at the All Stars Project, are among the programs where youngsters encounter the above-described type of sex education. The term “developmental sex” in the title can be interpreted as a euphemistic reference to Newman’s friendosexuality as performed within the so-called development community.]

 

4. All Stars pedagogy:  Down with knowledge!

 

If, as Holzman, Newman, and I argue, knowing has outlived its usefulness and actually gets in the way of growing, then efforts to create better knowers are doomed to failure. What should schools be in a culture where development has stopped? We need to transform schools into environments where developmental activity dominates. We need, above all, to teach development—a nonknowing performatory activity.

 

--Lenora Fulani, “Race, Identity, and Epistemology,” in Postmodern Psychologies, Societal Practice, and Political Life, Lois Holzman and John Morss (editors), New York: Routledge, 2000, p. 162.  

 

5. Are All Stars performers still just “poster kids” for fund-raising purposes (and for a hidden political agenda)?

 

My social therapy supervisor did not seem to be doing too well raising money for the Castillo/Atlanta Independent theater stuff here (it stages Newman plays). One day he told me that he thought we would stop doing street performing for that and instead get people to go out and street perform for All Stars and do that work. When I asked why, his response was this: “Because people have an easier time giving to youth than to political plays.” That comment has never left me and basically says it all!!!

 

--Erika Van Meir, former social therapy trainee (2000-2002), email, June 5, 2005.

 

For the past five years, the youth of All Stars have produced the annual Phyllis Hyman Phat Friend Awards, in which they honor adults in government, education, entertainment, sports, and other fields whose work supports the development of young people.

 

--Lenora Fulani, “Race, Identity, and Epistemology,” in Postmodern Psychologies, Societal Practice, and Political Life, Lois Holzman and John Morss (editors), New York: Routledge, 2000, p. 159.  [The Phat Awards have been described by some ex-Newmanites as a scam to get donations out of naïve rich people.  If so, All Stars kids who participate are essentially being used as unpaid fundraisers.]

 

I also witnessed an All Stars show in the Bronx…only 11 children showed up--they were expecting 300 and had over 50 volunteers present. I was told that the All Stars talent show is cover for what is really a mental health program with Marxist ideology and the talent show is a way to get their beliefs into schools and communities….I think with some investigation you will find that this group does not in fact have what they claim is “tens of thousands” of inner city children participating in this program (they advertise Los Angeles where they did a talent show once for about 30 children at the cost of over $17,000, money which was not funded for the program). As a person who has worked with nonprofits and inner city children for over 15 years, I find it appalling that they are allowed to continue to take money, abuse the most vulnerable of our children and continue to perpetuate their Marxist ideology and promote something called ‘social therapy’, a way to get the volunteers in the All Stars Program involved with their ideology.

 

--Molly Hardy, complaint to New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, Jan. 17, 2005.

 

6. Does All Stars seek to recruit kids to the “development community”?

 

I had opportunity to watch several hip-hop cabaret rehearsals. I took that
opportunity to talk to six of the cast members. I was taken aback when I
asked them how long they had been in All Stars and how old they were. Of the
six, 2 females and 4 males, all had started at or around the age of 13
in the All Stars Talent Show Network in the early 90s. They [are] all in their mid-twenties or older.

 

--August 16, 2005 email from an adult volunteer at All Stars. [NOTE:  At least one former All Stars teen from the 1980s is now part of the disciplined core collective and in charge of an All Stars regional program; another, from the 1990s, is now a talent-show producer at the All Stars headquarters in New York. Several other veterans of the All Stars teen programs are now active with the Newman faction of the New York Independence Party or participate in All Stars fundraising work or Castillo Theatre performances. At least one has become a social therapist.]

 

7. The Castillo Theatre and the Youth OnStage! Community Performance School

 

a. Does the All Stars youth drama program promote anti-Semitism?

 

Last year, they [the youth of All Stars] cowrote and coproduced with the Castillo Theatre a play entitled Crown Heights, which brought black and Jewish youth together to reexamine the disturbances that took place in 1991 in Crown Heights, Brooklyn….

 

--Lenora Fulani, “Race, Identity, and Epistemology,” in Postmodern Psychologies, Societal Practice, and Political Life, Lois Holzman and John Morss (editors), New York: Routledge, 2000, p. 159. [NOTE:  The play Crown Heights blamed the 1991 anti-Jewish riots (referred to by Fulani as “disturbances”) on the Jews. The same play became notorious when performed again in 2004 by All Stars’ YouthOnstage! at the new All Stars center on W. 42nd St.]

 

Crown Heights, directed by Dan Friedman and co-authored by Friedman and Fred Newman, is the first production of Youth Onstage!--and the first production at the new $12 million, 31,000 sq. ft. All Stars Project performing arts and learning center….

 

--All Stars Project website, Feb. 9, 2004. [Note that the website’s attribution of authorship conflicts with Fulani’s claim in her 2000 article that All Stars youth “cowrote” the play.]

 

The play is designed to engage young people in the legacy of their city’s recent history and to encourage conversation about its future. It can help enrich Social Studies, History, English or Theatre curriculum--and help students to become more aware of their responsibilities as active builders of our city and our history.…

 

You can produce the play…in your own school….The authors of Crown Heights, Fred Newman and Dan Friedman, charge no royalties to schools that want to produce the play, and Youth Onstage! can provide assistance to your school--including performance training, discussion groups, and special classes in Jewish and African American history and culture.

 

--All Stars Project website, March 14, 2004.

 

b. The adult All Stars theatrical program serves a far-left pseudo-revolutionary agenda

 

Dan [Dan Friedman, theatrical director for All Stars] came to Atlanta and came to my house with my supervisor in social therapy who brought a handful of his various social therapy patients/clients. These were people they seemed to be working on bringing further into their political activism/community work. In my home he read a paper about how the charities, etc. were not about aesthetics, performance, so much but rather the essence was revolution and that due to the changing political climate the Marxist revolution had to take place in a new way, sort of a cultural infiltration of sorts.

 

--Erika Van Meir, former social therapy trainee (2000-2002), email, June 5, 2005.

 

I would like to begin by reminding us that we are revolutionaries. That may seem an odd thing to say at a theatre meeting, but I think it’s important to let in. Whether we come to this work as artists, or social therapists, or community organizers or whatever, the activity we are engaged in is first and foremost revolutionary, not aesthetic.

 

--Dan Friedman, “Why We Do Cultural Work,” unpublished report, circa 2001.

 

In his marvelous performance as the barefoot and bedraggled Lenin, Fred Newman quite literally (or more accurately, since we are here in history and have no need of language, practical-critically) resurrects this working class hero by resurrecting his revolutionary practice. The Lenin of the play organizes his motley crew of failed revolutionaries to burst out of the historical cul-de-sac into which revisionism has led them, using the same revolutionary methodology that the “real” Fred Newman uses in organizing these “real” performers to build a new culture that makes it possible for the [working] class to see beyond this dead society.

 

--Deborah Green, “Lenin and the open door of history: A review of The Collected Emotions of V.I. Lenin,” The National Alliance, June 21, 1990 [emphasis added]. [NOTE:  This Castillo play was co-written, directed and starred in by Fred Newman.  The reviewer, Ms. Green, one of Newman’s four “wives,” is a current member of the All Stars board of directors. For more on her worship of the supposed successor to Lenin, see IV.L.]

 

c. The adult All Stars theatrical program has a long history of anti-Semitism

 

From the West Bank to the West Side of Manhattan, international Jewry [in the 1960s] was being forced to face its written-in-blood deal with the capitalist devil. In exchange for an unstable assimilation, Jews under the leadership of Zionism would “do-unto-others-what-others-had-done-unto-them.” The others to be done unto? People of color. The doing? Ghettoization and genocide. The Jew, the dirty Jew, once the ultimate victim of capitalism’s soul, fascism, would become a victimizer on behalf of capitalism, a self-righteous dehumanizer on behalf of capitalism, a self-righteous dehumanizer and murderer of people of color, a racist bigot who in the language of Zionism changed the meaning of “Never Again” from “Never Again for anyone” to “Never Again for us--and let the devil take everyone else.”

 

--Fred Newman, No Room for Zion (A Kaddish by a Communist Jew), first performed by the Castillo Theatre in Oct. 1989. [NOTE:  The dialogue above is for the character “Fred Newman” played in the original production by the real Fred Newman. Basically the play is a long agitprop tirade by Newman and his chief paramour Gabrielle Kurlander (also playing herself) in which various references are made to the alleged spiritual dirtiness of contemporary American Jews (whom Newman berates for having chosen life in the suburbs and support for the state of Israel over his own revolutionary fantasies). The quote above is from the text of the play as published in Newman’s Still on the Corner and Other Postmodern Political Plays, Dan Friedman (ed.), New York: Castillo Cultural Center, 1998.]

 

The play attempts to be many things…but ultimately it is a portrait of the Jew as a physically despicable, capitalistically exploitative creature who has literally sold his soul to the devil….We are also told that Jews are to blame for the present-day Holocaust of minorities, and for their own Shoah as well.

 

--1992 Forward review of Dead as a Jew, a play by Newman performed at the Castillo Theatre; quoted in A Cult by Any Other Name: The New Alliance Party Dismantled and Reincarnated, Anti-Defamation League report, 1995.

 

d. “Pizza and a play”

 

The Castillo Theatre is a creative outlet that knits together the staff and participants of the various sister organizations. The work of producing, directing, and presenting the plays involves a cross-section of participants from all the sister organizations. ASTSN/DSY [All Stars Talent Show Network/Development School for Youth] participants are encouraged to attend the performances. They are periodically invited to “Pizza and a Play” matinee performances. Many shows, such as Crown Heights, involve All Stars performers in their casts. Play readings are sometimes part of the youth activities that young people initiate. Thus, Castillo strengthens the ties between members of the large All Stars community and supplies a laboratory for experimentation with performance development theory.

 

--Edmund W. Gordon, Carol Bonilla Bowman and Brenda X. Mejia, “Changing the Script for Youth Development: An Evaluation of the All Stars Talent Show Network and the Joseph A. Forgione Development School for Youth,” Institute for Urban and Minority Education (IUME), Teachers College, Columbia University, June 2003, p. 7. [NOTE: The majority of the plays produced by Castillo are by Fred Newman and/or his followers. Apart from the explicitly revolutionary and anti-Semitic content of these productions, they often include profanity and adult sexual content.  Some are extremely raunchy (in an “anything goes” spirit), including the often produced “The Store:  One Block East of Jerome” (see I.B.8 and I.C.1 above).  All Stars, which purportedly encourages its charges to see these plays, works with children as young as five.] 

 

8.  The “Let’s Talk About It” social therapy program

 

a. Article by social therapy advocates at Erasmus High School in Brooklyn

 

[S]everal students have emerged as leaders of the group program. In addition to recruiting and orienting new students to the group, they serve as spokespersons for the program within the school, and co-present with us at conferences, grand rounds, etc. Their active participation in all phases of the program is both empowering for them and enhances the impact of our presentations to colleagues.

 

--Barbara Silverman, CSW, and Kim Barra, RPA, “Let’s Talk About It: A Model for Youth Involvement,” Center for School Based Mental Health Assistance newsletter. [The article describes the social therapy program at Erasmus High School in Brooklyn. Ms. Silverman is identified as the school’s Director of Mental Health Services and Ms. Barra as the Erasmus Teen Health Center clinic manager. It would appear that, among other things, the authors were taking the youngsters from their therapy group to various social-therapy related conferences to display them as poster kids (in the manner of Lenora Fulani with talent show children and youth). After NY1 News exposed the Erasmus High School “Let’s Talk About It” program as a social therapy front in November 2005, the Department of Education announced that Brooklyn Hospital, which runs the Erasmus clinic, would monitor Silverman’s work more carefully, and that Silverman would begin to practice a more conventional type of social work  However, neither the Erasmus administrators nor the Department of Education nor the hospital was willing to fire Silverman, who continues to practice social therapy on the side through Newman’s Social Therapy Group.

 

This laxadaisical attitude of the city’s educational bureaucracy regarding social therapy and cult recruitment in the public schools apparently has encouraged Newman’s East Side Institute for Group and Short Term Psychotherapy to announce a “Developing Teachers Fellowship Program” aimed at enhancing the “group building skills” of New York City public and charter school teachers. According to the ESI website, this program will include “ongoing training and classroom supervision by Institute faculty” [emphasis added] and will strive to “provide schools with model classrooms.” Teachers will be paid a stipend of $2500 to participate.

 

If ESI is allowed to obtain a toehold in the public schools through this scheme, City Hall will not easily be able to argue (as the mayor’s office did in putting the spin on the new All Stars IDA bond) that Fred Newman has “distanced” himself from the program in question. ESI’s online faculty directory (as of Sept. 5, 2006) lists Newman at the top of the page as the institute’s “Founder and Training Supervisor” along with ESI director Lois Holzman and ESI training director Bette Braun (both housemates of Newman in his Bank Street commune); Lenora Fulani; and Ms. Silverman, who, according to her faculty bio, is still on the job as “Director of Mental Health Services, Erasmus High School Student Health Center.”]  

 

b. Statement by a former social therapy trainee

 

In 2002, I received an email from former social therapist trainee Erika Van Meir about Barbara Silverman and a “program they [the Newman group] are trying to push which involves talking to teens about sex.” In 2005 I asked Van Meir to elaborate and received the following response that describes how the director of Erasmus High’s “Let’s Talk About It” took a group of teens to Atlanta on what appears to have been a political organizing trip for Newman’s IWP. One wonders if any of the parents knew what this trip was about—or does the Newman network carefully select for recruitment kids whose parents are ignorant of the danger of cults and/or lax in their parental duties?

 

Sometime in 2000 Barbara Silverman and an assistant from NY came to the Atlanta Center for Social Therapy with some of the kids from NY. I have no idea which youth program of Newman's the kids were from but they appeared to be a mixture of younger and older teens and I definitely recall at least one girl with them. They knew Barbara Silverman well and talked about their relationship with her. Barbara Silverman gave the kids time for testimonials and a more general discussion ensued about the Newman development community that the other social therapists helped facilitate.  The kids from NY were also going to participate in a conference in Atlanta dealing with youth issues.  My impression was that the evening was an attempt to do a commercial for Newman and all of his activities, because someone participated who had been involved for many, many years and the conversation ended up delving into the history of Newman and other topics unrelated to the kids at hand. If there was one message I got from the kids and their work with Silverman it was that we adults see kids as being fragile and we are afraid to talk to them about sex and difficult issues. I think the gist was that, as Newman supposedly says, “We were raised in ponds and we are trying to teach kids to swim in the ocean.” Basically kids aren’t afraid to talk about sex, but we are. I think social therapists don't view kids as fragile or in need of protection and don’t try to shelter them from what most people see as harmful outside influences.

 

--Erika Van Meir, email to Dennis King, August 21, 2005.

 

c. Statement by Hunter School of Social Work graduate

 

[A]nother true believer, Barbara Silverman, already is the director of mental health services for a large public high school in Brooklyn, Erasmus Hall. She has been there for more than a decade, recruiting teens for the cult. The kids going to that school are nearly entirely poor, black and immigrant children, so no one seems to care that Silverman is recruiting them for Newman….I know about this because Silverman came to Hunter Social Work [School] at least twice while I was there to make presentations to students. She brought some of her students from EHHS to demonstrate the social therapy techniques she uses. One of my fellow students at Hunter had been recruited while at Erasmus, and she intends to work with Silverman once she gets her professional credentials.

 

--Cheryl Moch, email, July 14, 2005. [Ms. Moch has filed a complaint with the Hunter College administration regarding the classroom influence of social therapy.]

 

d. Does the Erasmus program shuttle kids into other “development community” activities?

 

FD is an alumna and founding member of “Let’s Talk About It” and has worked at Erasmus Hall High School’s student health center as a peer counselor…and co-group leader of the “Let’s Talk About It” youth development group. This fall she will enroll in an M.S.W. program at Hunter College School of Social Work with an interest in pursuing group work and social therapy. In addition, FD has recently completed a customized training program at the East Side Institute.

 

--Performing the World presenters’ biographies available on the Internet as of mid-August 2005 at performingtheworld.org (an organization of the Newmanite development community). [NOTE: The East Side Institute is the national center for social therapy training. A “customized training program” would inevitably include indoctrination aimed at eventual cult recruitment. Furthermore, it is virtually impossible to be a social therapist  (within the framework of the institutionalized social therapy movement in New York City) without being a member of the cult and its “development community.”]

 

9. The CUIP student internship program

 

 We took surveys on the streets, which we were not told about before the internship started, and we then were assigned to different groups. We also did paperwork for the Independence Party of New York, which we were not even associated with. That was the interns’ biggest problem. The program dwindled from 29 to 13 within 4 weeks, and it is now down to 11 this week…It’s only June 22nd. There are major problems with CUIP, it is too closely tied to an extremely biased political organization only a minority of people find themselves agreeing with. In other words, the interns were duped from thinking that they would be working towards an independent movement, to doing slave labor for an independent party in New York. I STRONGLY ADVISE NOBODY TO TAKE THIS INTERNSHIP!

 

--“Gary” (a student intern at the Committee for a Unified Independent Party (CUIP), 2002); http://internships.wetfeet.com/InternProfileDetail.asp?ExperienceID=250. [NOTE:  CUIP operates as a think tank and resource center for the Newman faction of the New York Independence Party and other third party movements around the nation that the Newmanites are associated with. The chairperson of CUIP is Lenora Fulani (also the co-executive producer of the All Stars Talent Show Network and the co-director of All Stars’ Development School for Youth), while CUIP’s political director is Jacqueline Salit, a top Newman follower since the late 1970s. The internship program in question was for both college and high school students. The remarks by “Gary” are on the website of a group that monitors internships.]

 

III. THE PEOPLE WHO CONTROL ALL STARS HAVE EXPRESSED CALLOUS VIEWS ON CHILD ABUSE, AND HAVE A HISTORY OF PROVIDING POLITICAL AND LEGAL DEFENSE FOR CHILD MOLESTERS AND CHILD ABUSERS.  THESE VIEWS AND ACTIONS SUGGEST THAT ALL STARS IS INCAPABLE OF PROPERLY SCREENING AND MONITORING THE HUNDREDS OF ADULT VOLUNTEERS WHO PURPORTEDLY WORK IN ITS PROGRAMS, WHICH OFFER SERVICES TO CHILDREN AS YOUNG AS FIVE.  IN EFFECT, ALL STARS IS AN ACCIDENT (AND AN EXPLOSION OF LAWSUITS) WAITING TO HAPPEN, AND ITS APPLICATION FOR FURTHER MUNICIPAL FINANCING SHOULD BE DENIED.

 

A. Newmanite views on child abuse

 

1. Fulani says:  Child abuse a “liberal myth”

 

“In fact it’s liberals who invented categories like ‘child abuse’ to channel people’s moral outrage into the socially acceptable form of blaming the victim or the meaningless and therefore safe form of blaming ‘society.’ So they end up covering up what’s really outrageous, which is how the family as a social institution is organized to be abusive. It’s not an anomaly, it’s the norm.”

 

--Lenora Fulani, as quoted by Phyllis Goldberg, “Dr. Lenora Fulani at Harlem Child Abuse Conference Locates the Problem. Where? ‘ALL IN THE FAMILY,’” The National Alliance, Jan. 31, 1986.

 

2. Fulani says:  Abused child and abusing adult are both the “victims”  

 

“At the Institute [the now-defunct Harlem Institute for Social Therapy], we’re not into blaming the victim--parents or children--but we do blame the very particular social institution of the family as it is organized and used. We are very forthright in saying that what a family has to be doing now, if it is not to be an institution of abuse, is to work together to overthrow the institution of the family as currently organized.”

 

--Lenora Fulani, as quoted in ibid.

 

B. Political, legal and public relations defense of notorious child abusers

 

1.  The North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA)

 

“Boy returns from Hell” and “Sex club clue in hunt for Soho boy” headline the New York Post [a reference to the case of six-year-old Etan Patz, believed to have been murdered by a pederast]. With his right hand, publisher Rupert Murdoch sensationalizes; while his left hand (via Howard Smith…in the Village Voice) trivializes the complex issues of sex between adults and minors. The debate which has stirred controversy in the gay community for over two years--is it man-boy love or child molestation--is now rocking the press throughout the country, with all eyes and daggers aimed at the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA).

 

NAMBLA was founded in December, 1978, as a support organization for men and boys involved in consensual sex. To quote from their statement of purpose: “NAMBLA is strongly opposed to age-of-consent laws and other restrictions which deny adults and youth the full enjoyment of their bodies and control of their lives…”

 

…It is not surprising that the more established lesbian and gay organizations, concerned as they are with legitimacy, would have denounced NAMBLA. Nor is it surprising that as NAMBLA became more and more isolated from the organized gay community, the FBI started moving in….

 

It is particularly shocking to watch the liberal press follow the lead of the FBI to confuse and incite the public.…

 

The FBI has clearly engineered the trumped-up connection between the Patz kidnapping and NAMBLA, by leaking information on the confiscation of a photograph found in a NAMBLA member’s possession, a photo which resembled the child, even before a positive identification could be made (which it wasn’t--in fact, it was later proved not to be a photo of Patz at all). [COMMENT: What was a NAMBLA member doing with a photo of any six year old?--DK] The deliberate maneuvers of the FBI have served to foster a growing allegiance among liberals toward right wing “morality.” The fanaticism engendered by the sensationalist-type coverage…of the heroic actions of the FBI in their save-the-children campaign has brought out the beast in liberal ideology….

 

Neither the gay movement nor the North American Man-Boy Love Association can define morality as much as both would like to, but the FBI can. And regardless of what may emerge in the courts, the state has reaffirmed its dictatorial control of sexual relations. “Sex should be free,” claims a NAMBLA brochure. “The State should get out of private bedrooms. As long as sexual activity is engaged in by mutual consent, it should be no one else’s business.” What is desirable (what should be) is not always what is possible--apparently the FBI knows this better than NAMBLA. What has been possible is that the federal authorities have been able to fabricate a complex re-emergence of the old homosexuality-child molestation-perversion scheme with the full support of the liberals and the gay liberationists alike. The FBI has no need to protect children, nor to differentiate between good homosexuals and bad homosexuals. Their job is to infiltrate the private lives of our citizens so as to serve the status quo and, to the extent they can get away with it, they will continue to conduct and intensify their maneuvers.

 

--Nomi Azulay, “NAMBLA on Trial,” The New York Alliance, Jan. 10, 1983 [emphasis added].  [NOTE:  A page image of the original article can be viewed at https://lyndonlarouchewatch.org/iwp-nambla.pdf. Former IWP members say an article this controversial would never have appeared in what was then the chief organ of the Newmanite movement without the explicit approval of Fred Newman. It was the most strongly worded of several articles friendly to NAMBLA that appeared in The New York Alliance in 1983; the articles ceased once the NAMBLA story disappeared from the major media. The author of the article quoted above was the head at that time of the gay and lesbian caucus of the New Alliance Party, the public electoral arm of the IWP.]

 

2.  Kodzo DoBosu

 

a.  Knee-jerk support from the Newmanites

 

DoBosu took to the steps of the Manhattan Family Court building Monday morning with Dr. Lenora Fulani, his newly appointed political advisor, to launch a counterattack against the sudden assault that found him accused of child abuse….

 

“I have walked across 139th Street where Mr. DoBosu lives with his children,” Fulani noted. “Every neighbor asks the same question: How can it be that a man, so highly honored for his devotion to children, is suddenly scorned as a molester, a poverty pimp, a welfare cheat and a menace to the community? That is a very smart and a very serious question, and I believe that question must be answered.…

 

“I call…upon the mayor of this city, David Dinkins, to immediately establish an independent panel to investigate the conduct of city agencies, the police, the district attorney and the courts with regard to Mr. DoBosu….”

 

Attorney Harry Kresky…charged that the removal of the children and the barring of DoBosu’s sister Bernice Nelson from visiting the children was in violation of the Family Court Act and the United States Constitution….

 

--“Fulani calls on Dinkins to investigate agencies’ handling of Dobosu case as attack continues,” unsigned, The National Alliance, Aug. 22, 1991.

 

Flanked by two sons, family adviser Lenora Fulani and one of his lawyers, DoBosu nodded in agreement when Fulani accused New York Newsday of “peddling smut and trying to sell newspapers” in its coverage of the case.

 

--Gale Scott, “DoBosu, on TV, Denies Sex Abuse,” Newsday, Sept. 5, 1991.

 

b. The other side of the story

 

“The young man is Kekeletso DoBosu, 20, one of the adopted children. In recent Family Court hearings involving the sexual abuse charge, allegations of further abuse within the home made by Kekeletso and a 19-year-old sister prompted the judge to order DoBosu to leave the home and have no contact with his 19 children who are under age 18….

 

[H]e told of beatings that he said he had witnessed or been subjected to in the family. And very reluctantly, in seeming pain, he gradually talked about the sexual abuse he says he endured from his father for years….

 

“He [the father] did the beatings,” Kekeletso said. “That’s when he’ll be, he’ll hit you, you fall on the floor, you cry. He’ll tell you to get up. If you don’t get up, he just starts swinging. I mean, you know, he’ll keep on doing it until he sees blood or until he got tired.”

 

What seemed much harder for Kekeletso to talk about was the sexual abuse he told the New York detective he suffered….

 

Much later during the interview, Kekeletso said the abuse happened “numerous times.” He said it happened “most all the time when I was sick.”

 

--Rita Giordano, “Son’s Tales of Abuse Tell of Secrets, Love,” Newsday, Aug. 19, 1991.

 

Kodzo DoBosu, the Harlem man who was once named Father of the Year for his willing adoption of dozens of handicapped and hard-to-place children, listened quietly yesterday as a Manhattan judge lambasted him for abusing children and the trust of the American public….

 

DoBosu, 51, was sentenced yesterday to 500 hours of community service….He will have no contact with children.

 

Early last month, DoBosu pleaded guilty to three counts of endangering the welfare of a child and one count of petty larceny in satisfaction of two indictments charging him with sexual abuse, endangerment and grand larceny. As part of the plea, DoBosu also was required to surrender custody of his 17 minor children….

 

The plea was necessary, prosecutors said at the time, to avoid a lengthy trial at which the young children would have had to testify against their adoptive father.

 

Among the allegations were that DoBosu molested one of his adopted daughters; that he poured scalding tea onto a son’s genitals; that he struck his children with paddles and bed slats; and that he allowed the oldest adopted children to sexually and physically torture the younger children….

 

As part of the deal, DoBosu also will not be permitted to adopt children anywhere in the United States.

 

--Emily Sachar, “DoBosu Gets Judge’s Ire,” Newsday, July 22, 1992.

 

3. Sue Simmonds

 

a. The Newmanite version

 

Sue Simmonds, respected Brooklyn-based operator of an independent child-rearing/education center accused of child abuse and put out of business through the efforts of the Catholic Church and several city agencies, will begin proceedings in federal court today, charging violations of her constitutional rights as a black woman and the rights of the African-American community to choose how its children are raised….

 

According to Simmonds’ attorney, Harry Kresky of the Harlem-based firm Frazier & Kresky, “This case cries out for federal intervention to prevent the continued attack on Sue Simmonds and the black community in the city of New York. The only ‘crime’ committed by Sue Simmonds was to provide decent and loving care and education for the children this city and this country systematically neglect and destroy.”

 

--PR Newswire, press release issued Dec. 16, 1988. [NOTE:  The public relations firm Gardner Levy & Levine, which issued the release, was an in-house PR outfit for Newman’s IWP. One of its principals was Robert Levy, who is today the chairman of the All Stars Board of Directors. Simmonds attorney Kresky was a founding member of the IWP central committee in 1974 and his law firm essentially has been the in-house counsel for the IWP and its controlled entities since that time. He represented All Stars during its 2000-2002 application for IDA financing.

 

Neither Levy nor Kresky, nor their respective firms, would have helped Ms. Simmonds without the explicit approval of Fred Newman. In the case of Kresky this is made crystal clear by the transcript of a 1983 internal IWP meeting at which Newman stated: “I think it’s very important to identify that the legal practice is not to be understood merely as a law firm, but as the legal arm of the pre-party [he means the IWP--DK].” Newman then added: “The legal department of the pre-party will hence forth, with a modest amount of time for implementing this, have no financial problems--period.” Kresky was present at this meeting and enthusiastically supported Newman on the need for party “discipline” to guarantee that the party’s legal bills would be paid. <http://ex-iwp.org/iwp_024.php>]

 

b. The other side of the story

 

In 1988, a judge ordered the shutdown of an unlicensed child-care facility that Simmonds and Thomas Davies ran…; the pair was permanently enjoined from running child-care centers in the city. According to court records, city inspectors found that the school, where about 75 children attended and 13 lived with Simmonds and Davies, was overcrowded and lacked proper permits, fire equipment, medical reports, or staff credentials, among other things….

 

The closure prompted a family court proceeding in which Simmonds and Davies were charged with neglecting and sexually abusing five children. Medical evaluations found, among other things, that two girls, aged three and four, had vaginal chlamydia and that the four-year-old had gonorrhea of the throat….

 

--J.A. Lobbia, “Home Improvement?” The Village Voice, March 9, 1999.

 

4. Tony Alamo

 

Tony Alamo is the leader of a pseudo-Christian religious cult. He and Fred Newman have much in common: both are anti-Catholic, both are anti-Semitic (but were born Jewish), both have multiple “wives,” both add the wives of male followers to their harems, both have exploited their followers as unpaid (or virtually unpaid) labor, both like to hobnob with big-city mayors and celebrity entertainers, and both have enjoyed alliances with the fascist Lyndon LaRouche organization.

 

In 1996, while Alamo was serving a six-year sentence for tax fraud, an in-house PR firm for Newman’s IWP--Ross & Green (run by two of Newman’s inner-core women, Nancy Ross and Deborah Green)--prepared a report designed to sanitize Alamo’s reputation regarding child abuse and other issues, while in-house IWP lawyer Harry Kresky handled Alamo’s effort to win early parole. It was the Sue Simmonds case all over again--the IWP legal team and an IWP public relations arm joining to defend an extreme child abuser. (Kresky argued Alamo’s case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (No. 96-5259), January 21, 1998.)

 

As with the Brooklyn child-care case, it is unthinkable that IWP resources would have been expended on defending Rev. Alamo without the explicit approval of Fred Newman. In representing Simmonds in Brooklyn, the IWP had blamed everything on racism. In assisting Alamo, the IWP claimed that his legal problems were the result of a conspiracy orchestrated by the “anti-cult” movement (thus ignoring the substantive charges as well as the overlapping investigations of Alamo conducted by federal, state and local law enforcement agencies for more than a decade).

 

a. The Newmanite view of Alamo

 

CAN [the Cult Awareness Network] went after Mr. Alamo and his ministry in the worst tradition of the Salem witch hunts, the 19th century attacks on the Mormons, and other examples of religious intolerance….

 

Several qualified religious scholars have studied Alamo’s church, and have regarded it as a legitimate fundamentalist religion. However, these scholarly opinions have been drowned out by the “cult hysteria” whipped up and unlawfully manipulated by CAN….

 

[P]hony psychologists were allowed to peddle their bogus theories against Alamo in court. They portrayed him as having total control over his congregation, and compared church workshops to sweat shops whose workers were forced to hand over all their earnings….The successful and good work of the church, of helping people overcome crime, drug and alcohol problems, of providing stable livings and jobs, and of giving people faith in God and a reason to live, were completely ignored….

 

In January of 1988, Tony Alamo was accused of child abuse, of allegedly directing--over the telephone--the beating of 11 year old Jeremiah Justin Miller. At the time, the child was at the center of a custody battle between his mother, a member of Alamo’s church, and his father…who had left the church and joined CAN. Miller had abandoned the mother and the child, and according to the church, had embezzled church funds. Nonetheless, the father’s accusations prompted a March of 1988 raid on the Saugus community.…The raid turned up no evidence and the prosecutors initially declined to file charges. However, the charges were reinstated in April of 1989, when father and son, under the guidance of [a] CAN-associated attorney…agreed to testify against the church….

 

--“The Tony Alamo Story,” report by Ross & Green, 1996, available on the Internet at talk.religion.misc (use Google’s newsgroup search button). [NOTE: One of the two principals in the now-defunct Ross & Green was Deborah Green, a current member of the All Stars board of directors and for many years its treasurer.  For Ms. Green’s role in Newmanite defense of the Branch Davidians, see III.B.5.a below.]    

 

b. All a big conspiracy? Let’s see what law enforcement and the media said….

 

Tony Alamo, leader of an unorthodox Christian sect…has been charged with felony child abuse in the beating early last year of an 11-year-old child in the group’s commune….

 

The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office filed the charges in October against Alamo and five of his followers, but had the arrest warrants sealed in hopes of apprehending the six, who have disappeared [Alamo would remain a fugitive for three years until apprehended in Florida--DK]….

 

Alamo, 54, in a telephone interview from an undisclosed location, called the Lancaster prosecutor part of a “legal mafia” that is trying to divert his attention from winning souls….

 

“I favor spanking children, you know that,” Alamo said. “It says so in the Bible. People have to decide whether to do what the Lord says or the state.”

 

…Authorities contend the child was beaten on the buttocks 140 times with a three-foot paddle in January, 1988, at the commune….

 

The beating was encouraged by Alamo, who was in a bungalow next door and issued instructions over a speaker phone, Foltz [the prosecutor] said. After each of the child’s transgressions were read aloud, Alamo allegedly told the man administering the punishment how many times to hit the child….

 

Foltz said the boy had to sit on a pillow for two or three weeks because of pain from the assault.

 

“Two months later, there was still deep tissue bruising. The swats actually brought body fluid to the skin surface. The child had a bloody butt,” Foltz said….

 

The district attorney’s office decided last spring not to bring criminal charges after concluding there was not enough evidence. Since then, however, a former Alamo church member who saw the attack has cooperated with authorities, Foltz said….

 

--Lynn O’Shaughnessy, “6 in Sect Charged with Child Abuse,” Los Angeles Times, April 15, 1989.

 

A Los Angeles hearing on child abuse charges was postponed Thursday for evangelist Tony Alamo, who remained in jail in Memphis, Tenn., where a federal prosecutor accused him of marrying eight of his followers, including married women and 15-year-old girls….

 

Alamo, 59, was convicted by a Memphis federal court jury Wednesday of falsifying his income tax return for 1985 and failing to file returns the following three years. The marriage accusations were made by a federal prosecutor arguing against allowing him to go free on bail to await sentencing….

 

“He threw the husbands out of the church and took the wives,” Belcher [the prosecutor] said. One of the teen-agers was told that her family would be expelled from the church if she did not marry Alamo, Belcher said.

 

Belcher said such offenses would fall under state laws against statutory rape in Tennessee and Arkansas, but state prosecutors have filed no such charges against Alamo.

 

--Julie Tamaki, “Child abuse hearing for evangelist delayed,” Los Angeles Times, June 10, 1994.

 

Tony Alamo is greatly opposed to abortion, and in the summer of 1982 his group began actively recruiting unwed mothers, mostly young and poor….Alamo’s offer: “We will pay for the delivery of the child and raise the child….”

 

The project attracted the attention of the Arkansas social services authorities, who came to investigate. After being turned away by Alamo gate guards, officials obtained a court order and entered the Foundation compound with the state police. They found a child-care center--with no children. Arkansas Assistant Attorney General Robert Waldrum, who went in with the police, said, “Tony [Alamo] had said that there were at least 70 children. There were none. We found 17 little beds and four cribs and two potty chairs and one commode….We believe the women were to have their babies in Memphis. Then they would come to [the compound]….The mother gives the child to Tony. At first we thought it might be a black market adoption racket. Now we think he’s raising workers.”

 

--“The Tony and Susan Alamo Christian Foundation,” Anti-Defamation League Research Report, Summer 1984.

 

5. The Branch Davidians

 

a. Lenora Fulani’s version

 

April 19, marked the one-year anniversary of the FBI’s murderous assault on the Branch Davidian religious community outside Waco, Texas….

 

The chain of events at Waco began when the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) spent months planning and rehearsing a violent assault on this reclusive community of devoutly religious Americans--supposedly because they had some unregistered guns….

 

The excuse for this violation of the U.S. Constitution and the most basic rights supposedly granted every American? It’s a simple four-letter word--“cult.”

 

The democratic and human rights lobbying firm of Ross & Green, with which I have worked closely for years, marked the anniversary of the massacre by bringing…two of the attorneys of the surviving Branch Davidians, to Washington, D.C. to lobby for a Congressional investigation of the Waco massacre. They insist that those in Congress responsible for overseeing federal law enforcement look into the clear abuse of government agencies. In particular, the Cult Awareness Network (CAN) and the American Family Foundation (AFF) [the leading anti-cult groups in the early 1990s--DK] demonized the Branch Davidians.

 

These two organizations label as “cults” religious and political groups which they don’t like, and claim that membership in these “cults” destroys and [sic] individual’s free will and rationality, inevitably leading to crime. As Deborah Green, a partner in Ross & Green, points out, “The Cult Awareness Network has played a major role in propagating an atmosphere of intolerance, fear and violence against new, smaller, non-mainstream religions.”

 

--Lenora Fulani, “Branch Davidian Disaster Should Still Be Investigated,” The Philadelphia Tribune, May 17, 1994. [NOTE:  Ross & Green, a now-defunct IWP front group run by Nancy Ross and Deborah Green, played an active role in forming a coalition of mostly far-right groups that concocted excuses for Koresh’s crimes and spread anti-government conspiracy theories regarding the Waco tragedy. Deborah Green currently serves on the All Stars board. Fulani nowhere mentions in her 1994 article that it was Koresh who rigged the compound to turn into a fiery maelstrom, and that Koresh’s followers had killed several federal agents in cold blood--the incident that resulted in the siege. The claim that anti-cult groups instigated the siege or the use of tear gas is totally without foundation.]

 

b. The reality of child abuse in the Branch Davidian cult

 

Nearly 10 years to the day that the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, went up in flames--killing 75 people, including 25 children--ABCNEWS’ Charles Gibson interviews seven children who escaped the horror in an hour-long report on this week’s Primetime Thursday….

 

Brought together for the first time, they share stories of the bizarre world created by cult leader David Koresh and discuss living with the realization that their parents were willing to abandon them to follow Koresh to their graves….

 

Primetime will also air never-before-seen footage of the children’s disturbing therapy sessions from 1993, which demonstrate the eerie effectiveness of Koresh’s brainwashing techniques.

 

The seven survivors tell Gibson life in the compound was horrific. Physical abuse was a common occurrence, and there was no running water or indoor plumbing, they say. No attempt was made to provide the children with an education….

 

In fact, Koresh made sure they were completely isolated from the outside world. Koresh brainwashed the children into thinking everyone outside of the cult was evil, and he prepared them for what he described as a final battle that would end the world and bring them eternal glory. Koresh threatened to kill the children after his resurrection if they helped the “bad guys.”

 

Kiri Jewell, now 22, says she was sexually abused by Koresh when she was 10 years old and groomed to be his youngest wife--with her mother’s consent.

 

The memories of life with Koresh are still vivid in her mind. “He never was very specific, but at some point we were gonna have to die for him,” Jewell, now a student at Michigan State University, tells Gibson. “I didn’t expect to live past 12.”

 

--ABCNEWS release, April 15, 2003.

 

IV. THE PEOPLE WHO CONTROL ALL STARS ARE PART OF A POLITICAL/PSYCHOTHERAPY CULT THAT PRACTICES A BLATANTLY UNETHICAL FORM OF THERAPY IN PURSUIT OF SELF-STYLED REVOLUTIONARY POLITICAL GOALS.   GIVEN THE FACT THAT THIS THERAPY IS PRACTICED ON YOUNG PEOPLE, AND THAT SOCIAL THERAPISTS WORK CLOSELY WITH ALL STARS PROGRAMS, THE APPLICATION OF ALL STARS FOR FURTHER MUNICIPAL FINANCING SHOULD BE DENIED.

 

This section relates to how the cult manipulates its adult followers. It also gives a picture of what could be in store for All Stars teens targeted for recruitment.

 

A. Overview--Boundaries-free therapy

 

In most forms of psychotherapy, the therapist does not enter into a personal relationship with the patient outside of the therapeutic sessions and keeps a careful distance even within the sessions. There are good reasons for this. The therapeutic relationship triggers strong emotions in the patient that are projected onto the therapist (a process known as transference). So powerful are these emotions and so vulnerable does the therapeutic environment render the patient that the potential for abuse and exploitation is very great, especially if the therapist is working with teenage patients whose identities are still in flux.

 

Social therapists, however, argue that there is nothing special about transference and that rather than maintaining distance, the therapist should ignore boundaries between himself/herself and the patient (no matter what the patient’s age) and provide strong direction to the patient’s life. Social therapy is basically a form of political organizing, and thus therapists practicing this approach may attempt to (a) recruit their patients into the various front groups of the Newman cult, (b) obtain large money donations from them for Newman’s causes, (c) orchestrate drastic changes in their personal lives, (d) play them off against one another in group therapy, and (e) enter into sexual relationships with them—all with the goal of transforming as many patients as possible into communist revolutionaries serving the strategy and goals of  Fred Newman, founder of social therapy and chairman of the secretive International Workers Party.

 

B.  Sex between therapists and patients is regarded as permissible

 

1.  New York Times interview with Lenora Fulani

 

One thing frequently noted about Fred Newman, whom you’ve described as your mentor, is that he sees nothing wrong in sleeping with patients. Is that correct?

 

What he’s challenging there is the traditional assumption of how therapy works, that there has to be some distance in order for it to be helpful. And we disagree with that, not just from the vantage point of whether or not you can sleep with somebody you’re doing therapy with, but also just in how close and how open you can be. It just gets sensationalized.

 

--Mim Udovitch, “Odd Bedfellows,” New York Times, July 9, 2000. [For Fred Newman’s views on patient-therapist sex in his own words, see I.B.3 above.]

 

2.  Observations of a former social therapy patient

 

Social therapy should be slammed, damned and outlawed because out of all the front-groups it comes closest to replicating IWP cadre discipline in an “ordinary” environment, and especially on the subject of sex.

 

If the “therapist” is sleeping with a “patient,” then the rest of the group, especially newcomer patients, is brought into line behind that. The therapist orders the group to use the relationship “to build off of,” asking rhetorically why the other patients would NOT want to “build” with what the therapist and patient are so “lovingly” “offering.” After an uncomfortable (and expensive, $75-125/hour) silence, other patients begin to discuss their sexual/emotional crap in terms of the therapist/patient-lover’s relationship, and the therapist commands a headlock grip over his/her “power and authority.” Dissent is purged during the ensuing collectivization/discussion and the therapist’s current affair is then immortalized in the eyes of its beholders.

 

--Anonymous posting on the ex-iwp.org Forum, August 29, 2003.

 

3.  Therapist-patient romances used as mechanism to break the patient away from the outside world

 

One day, my therapist…decided we would work on a woman in our group who was having difficulty with her jealous lover. But the problem wasn’t just jealousy, we learned. The fact that the patient had developed a relationship with our therapist was incidental to her involvement in the Institute’s Social Therapy Training Program. Her lover’s hostility, in fact, was a “typical, white, middle class, liberal” reaction to the patient’s “political development.”

 

This was often the case with traditional familial relationships, the therapist explained, because they tended to “alienate” and “retard” human growth and development. After the group had “analyzed” the situation, we determined that the patient should move out. The group then personally helped her to do so. As for her lover, our former “friend” was then relegated to a role later termed “disaffected nonentity” and we never heard from her again.

 

--Marina J. Ortiz, “Slave to a Dream: Inside the International Workers Party,” ex-iwp.org, 2003.

 

4.  Fred Newman and his CFC patients

 

He had no compunction about sleeping with patients. His attitude was, “Some therapists can’t handle that, I can.” What he did was develop dependence on himself but then not work to resolve it. He encouraged people to see him as essential to their lives. You might say he was the Chairman Mao of the Upper West Side. He joked, “I had to cure Sema to get her money.” [Sema Salit, now deceased, was a patient Newman was sleeping with who turned over her divorce settlement to the collective--DK.]  He talked about doing it [sleeping with patients] in group therapy sessions or my individual sessions.

 

--Summary of notes from a 2002 interview by Dennis King with a former CFC member. This individual quit the group in the 1970s and today is a Ph.D. clinical psychologist.

 

That he was sleeping with patients was well known. I recall him discussing it and NOT in hushed tones. They [the women] were all patients of his….He would have a different partner each night.

 

--Summary of notes from a 2002 interview by Dennis King with a former CFC member who, at the time of the interview, was the executive director of a health-care foundation.

 

Fred talked about sleeping with [H] and [G]--these were considered “deep relationships.” During the nude sessions he “would talk about H’s breasts and the bodies of other women in the room.” There was “every kind of violation [of boundaries], but he was not licensed so he couldn’t get into trouble.”

 

--Summary of notes from a 2002 interview by Dennis King with a former attendee of CFC group therapy sessions. This person, who was never a member of the cult, today is a psychotherapist in private practice.

 

C.  Therapists aggressively steer patients into sexualized situations, make inappropriate sexual remarks to them, or give them inappropriate sexual advice

 

Although these examples do not involve actual sex between patient and therapist, any ethical therapist will recognize instantly that the behavior described represents an appalling violation of boundaries and could be devastating to a vulnerable person undergoing treatment.

 

1. Newman’s former newspaper unabashedly described such manipulation

 

“Fred and I began working together over a year ago,” explains Weigel. “He wanted to develop a major cultural statement on sexuality and even though we had no idea what that might look like, I knew I wanted to work with him on the project. We had worked together on other plays and in therapy, where he was always asking me how I could be so sexy and passionate when I was acting and not all the time?”

 

--Mary Fridley, “Working class sex, part I:  What turns on the working class?” The National Alliance, February 28, 1991 [emphasis added]. [NOTE:  The “project” referred to by Weigel was a play in which she, two other women patients and therapist Newman all took their clothes off with the intent (as Newman put it) of showing their “collective Tits” to the working class. The play was written and directed by Newman and was performed at the Castillo Center, which at that time was the official “producer” of the All Stars Talent Show Network (today both the ASTSN and Castillo are programs of the All Stars Project).]

 

2.  Inappropriate sexual advice

 

When I started social therapy I was a virgin. My therapist suggested I have sex…for the sake of having sex. They had a whole big thing way back when regarding “friend-o-sexual”…i.e. having sex with friends was [a] good thing to do. They believed this was growthful and intimate.

 

--Anonymous posting on the ex-iwp Forum, August 26, 2003.

 

3.  The experience of a Philadelphia social therapy patient

 

It was the spring of 1999 and R.A. Friedman was looking for group therapy….Then 39, the Center City resident was referred to the Philadelphia Center for Social Therapy….

 

Friedman says the mood of the sessions was adversarial, with Hechtman  [Elizabeth Hechtman, Friedman’s therapist and the director of the center] judging his behavior and trying to convince him to “get with the Fred Newman program.”

 

“I didn’t have a girlfriend at the time. [Hechtman] brought it up. She said, ‘So you really want to find someone you can have sex with? Why don’t we have sex--right here, right now?’”

 

Friedman recognizes that Hechtman was not making a pass at him. “She was trying to goad me on to say that this kind of verbal interaction is like sex. It was very uncomfortable.”

 

--Liz Spikol, “Group Hug,” Philadelphia Weekly, June 2002.  

 

D.  Social therapy as an instrument of political recruitment and control

 

Social therapy, Newman’s creation, is considered the “backbone of the tendency.” Every member [of the underground IWP] is required to attend at least one social therapy (i.e., psychotherapy) session weekly, led by Newman’s hand-picked, hand-trained therapists. (In most cases, Newman’s top therapists are also his top spokespersons.) Although the therapy is mandatory, members must still pay for the sessions….

 

Some attend twice a week or, at times, even daily. Particular “patients” were targeted in sessions. The entire group then generally converged on the victim who generally broke down in tears. They are then forgiven, accepted, and praised. Topics range from the most personal aspects of one’s life to the failure to give enough of oneself to the organization.  

 

--Dennis L. Serrette, “Inside the New Alliance Party,” Radical America, Winter 1988. [Serrette is a former IWP member. He was the Presidential candidate of the IWP’s public electoral arm, the New Alliance Party (now defunct), in 1984. Shortly after the  campaign, he severed his association with the Newman network.]

 

E.  Social therapists betray the confidences of their patients

 

[W]hat I thought was a private, confidential relationship [with a therapist-supervisor at the Atlanta social therapy clinic], seems to have become a tool to manipulate me. Much of what I said and struggled with, personally and professionally, was discussed by my supervisor and other members of the community, yes…including Fred! When some of it got back to me, and I confronted my supervisor, he typically denied it or made me feel bad for not trusting his intentions. I was even given a social therapist--an unlicensed, long time supporter of Newman--to discuss my “issues” with. I paid her for this “over the phone service,” but found it extremely uncomfortable. Her entire approach was not about me and what I needed but about how to get me to work better “as a political woman” in the community.

 

--Erika Van Meir, Letter to Political Research Associates (a human rights watchdog group), 2003, posted at ex-iwp.org.  Ms.Van Meir was a therapist-trainee at the Atlanta social therapy clinic from 2000-2002.

 

F.  Social therapists solicit volunteer work from their patients on behalf of Newman’s political, charitable and artistic programs

 

He [Castillo Center theatrical director Dan Friedman, during a visit to the Atlanta social therapy clinic] also spent a day with the group that they had raising money on the streets and he told them how to get more, how to suck up better to passersby. These were therapy patients. Some of them got out [but] some are still in, sinking in the quagmire.

 

--Erika Van Meir, email, June 5, 2005.

 

I was a social therapy patient for over 4 years. The majority of that time was spent in a state of confusion, conflict and turmoil. These emotional struggles were not related to the issues I had originally sought help for; but were directly related to the volunteer work I did for several of their community programs (Independent Theatre, All Stars, Social Therapy Center, and political work).

 

I’d like to mention a few points that, in hindsight, were red flags I had chosen to ignore: the lack of professional boundaries between therapists and patients; and the confusion regarding my relationship with my therapist; the manipulative manner in which volunteer meetings were conducted; frequently raising issues and stirring emotions that resulted in Social Therapy sessions; the constant interjection of politics into almost everything in a most confusing manner. Political literature was displayed in the reception area of the therapy center; intimidation and humiliation by therapists in group therapy sessions and volunteer meetings; and the cultivation of intimate relationships, which created dependency between therapists and volunteers/patients.

 

--Phyllis Shulman, “Response to New Therapist Article on Social Therapy,” May 2003, ex-iwp.org. [emphasis added]. [NOTE:  I was told by one former Atlanta social therapy client in a 2002 telephone interview that her therapist had encouraged her to perform hundreds of hours of unpaid labor for him as an office worker and to make promotional phone calls from her home to boost his therapy practice. This therapist is currently under investigation by the Georgia Department of State.--DK.] 

 

G.  Social therapy is a tool for financial exploitation of patients

 

[I]f it is known to Newman or one of his operatives (therapists, etc.) that a particular cultist has a large sum of money, then he/they will calculate and conspire as to the best way in which to secure the money from the “withholding” member.

 

But, if Newman has reason to believe that making the attempt to grab the money will “polarize” the member and cause them to defect from the cult, then Newman may make a decision (based on knowledge about the member acquired through his/her therapist, leadership, lovers or “friends”) to “settle” for what the “under-developed” IWPer is “willing” to give. Of course, Newman will hold off on his demand, if only to wait until such a time that the member has “developed” or “lives with Newman in history,” at which time the “doctor” will then make his move and go for it.

 

--Robert Cohen, former IWP member, letter submitted to the New York Amsterdam News, Sept. 12, 1993 (see ex-iwp.org for full text of this shrewd account).

 

Judy Penzer…comes from a first generation upper middle class Long Island Jewish family. A bourgeois trained painter and textile designer, Judy has literally given over all that she was given (obtained by the exploitation of working people) to our people. She is truly a gem!

 

--Fred Newman, “Notes to Collective Sex: Collective performance paintings by Elena Borstein, Nancy Green, Fred Newman and Judy Penzer,” The National Alliance, Nov. 8, 1990. [NOTE:  Newman obtained at least one million dollars from Penzer and from Penzer’s mother. He also induced Penzer to name, as executor of her estate, social therapy theoretician (and All Stars consultant) Lois Holzman. After Penzer died in the crash of TWA Flight 800 over Long Island in 1996, Holzman sued Penzer’s brother in an attempt to gain control of assets that Ms. Penzer (who had distanced herself from the cult in the months prior to her death) had turned over to him for safekeeping.]

 

The same year [1990], my other “therapist,” Hazel Daren, told my “women’s group” members that if we wanted to continue to see her we would each have to provide two prospective “patients.” Daren said that her time was “valuable,” that we were “exploiting” her and that we should therefore make it up to her by bringing in new recruits. This was when I began to realize the insidious nature of the Social Therapy practice.

 

--Marina J. Ortiz, “Slave to a Dream: Inside the International Workers Party,” 2003, http://ex-iwp.org/. [NOTE:  Ms. Daren, now deceased, was the first woman recruited in 1968 into what would become Newman’s informal harem. She was also the first therapist trained by Newman. She continued as number one among his “wives” until 1989, when Ms. Kurlander, a young actress who had entered therapy with Newman, supplanted her.]

 

H.  Social therapy as boot camp

 

This reluctance to submit 110% is recognized by the cult as “oppositionalism,” and/or a combination of racism, sexism, classism or homophobia (depending on the “social” identity of the “resistant” member, as well as that of the superior who has issued the command). In more drastic cases, “unsupportive” members are accused of the dreaded “right-wingism” in order to whip them back in line.

 

“Oppositionalism” is often dealt with in a coercive and controlled environment, including Social Therapy sessions, secret “cell” meetings, or “political” meetings lead by “leadership” personnel who offer “support” to the “rebel” to help him/her reject his/her “conflict” by confessing to and denouncing the “problem,” and embracing the group’s pro-IWP ideology.

 

--Robert Cohen, letter submitted to the New York Amsterdam News, Sept. 12, 1993; full text at ex-iwp.org.

 

I.  Social therapy:  the cult of Fred

 

In the intimate little colloquia I attended with Fred I remember being struck by how a young female member would dote on him, bringing him drinks and catering to his every whim. It was noticeable. I thought, “who is this king-being?” I was also shocked that I could not ask questions unless I turned them in the day before to one of the top women associates, like Betty Braun, for approval. Freethinking was not encouraged and the colloquia were very staged, something Robert Lifton talks about in his criteria for thought reform dealing with cultic environments and totalitarianism.

 

--Erika Van Meir, email, June 5, 2005.

 

Clinically, the moment I realized how destructive the group was, occurred in NY at the annual summer institute. A patient from our group [a therapy group she was co-leading] was “invited” to come without my knowledge or consent. I felt that this was extremely dangerous to do, not to mention exploitative. The person had mentioned financial troubles and this trip was very costly for all. At the institute, Fred sat up on the stage inviting long time followers to come up and say whatever they would like to say…One by one, members went up with emotional testimonies about how Fred “saved their lives.” One person, a professor who was very involved, shouted emotionally, “I want in, I have been on the fringe too long, I want in!!”

 

--Erika Van Meir, Letter to Political Research Associates, 2003; posted at ex-iwp.org.

 

The leader of the [IWP] is Fred Newman, who in 1989 came back from a trip to Europe with a new, much younger bride, and who told us how this young woman “wanted” him. Her “wanting” him was the most progressive thing that had happened to him. Her “wanting” him was “wanting the revolution.” She [also helped] him realize how much he had been used by members of the IWP--which actually wasn’t true because he needed us and our slave labor in order to live the way he did. Then everything [turned] from making a revolution and changing the world to “wanting” Fred Newman, because he was the only person who could realize a revolution in the United States of America. He was the communist leader….We literally had to think Fred Newman day and night. We had to dream Fred Newman--he had to be our whole being.

 

--Rhonda Robinson, former IWP member, “Friday Talkback,” WBAI, April 23, 1993 (producer/host Marina J. Ortiz).

 

J.  Fred says it’s all for the revolution

 

Our world is filled, sadly, with people who have serious psychological problems.  I am suggesting that traditional psychology has done precious little, if anything, to deal with them. I am saying that we must find some new paradigm (or anti-paradigm)--a new way--to deal with the psychological problems of our species. The paradigm or anti-paradigm? The new way? Revolution!

 

I think revolution needs to be the substitute for psychology. I think we should change the name of our psychological association to the “Interamerican Congress For Revolution.”

 

--Fred Newman, “The Psychopathology of the U.S. Left,” talk delivered at the Congress of the Interamerican Society of Psychology at the Karl Marx Theater in Havana, Cuba, June 1986. Reprinted as “The Patient as Revolutionary” in Newman, The Myth of Psychology, New York: Castillo International, 1991 (quote is from p. 12).

 

K.  Social therapy aims at total control over the individual personality

 

l.  The 1974 version

 

In Power and Authority (1973), Newman first outlined his theory of “social therapy,” although at that time he called it “proletarian” (or sometimes “proletarian ego”) therapy. The accounts of former social therapy patients strongly suggest that the practice of social therapy has continued over the years to reflect Newman’s 1973 conception of the therapist as a revolutionary organizer who leads the patient in overthrowing the patient’s  “bourgeois ego” and replacing it with a “proletarian ego” (an ego subservient to the “group mind” of the Newmanite revolutionary collective).

 

The proletarian or revolutionary therapist is likewise a leader. Proletarian therapy is not leaderless. To say the leader is non-authoritarian is not the same as saying it is leaderless….The revolutionary leader leads the suffering and struggling worker from the bourgeois ego to the proletarian ego, through an authoritarian act of violent overthrow….Revolutionary therapy involves an act of insurrection; of overthrow. The therapist is not a substitute conscience; the therapist is another worker who has been through the insurrection and is still working and struggling during the long period of the withering away of the proletarian ego. The revolutionary therapist leads by listening and then synthesizing with political understanding what she or he has heard in order to lead the struggling worker in her or his personal though not private act of insurrection.

 

--Fred Newman, Power and Authority: The Inside View of Class Struggle, New York: Centers for Change, 1974, pp.112-113.

 

Dialectical political analysis can be of value at a later stage of proletarian therapy….But this too must be practiced rather than seen at a distance. The therapist and patient must plainly be doing revolutionary work together before this method is applicable.

 

--Ibid, p.119.

 

These carefully explicated ideas [Lenin’s State and Revolution] lay the groundwork for the long final process of revolutionary therapy which becomes more and more indistinguishable from revolutionary organizing. For one thing it makes plain that the therapy must be divided into three steps (1) the insurrectional overthrow of the bourgeois ego; (2) the takeover by the proletarian ego (the dictatorship of the proletariat); and (3) the gradual withering away of the proletarian ego. Any attempts to short circuit this process is nothing more than bourgeois opportunism.

 

--Ibid, p. 123.

 

2. The year 2000 version (the change, if any, is for the worse)

 

My earliest therapeutic/analytic work brought to light the critical distinction between power and authority [here Newman footnotes the book of that title “for early articulations of this distinction”], where power is the creative capacity of the group by the exercise of its emotional labor to generate new environments, and authority is the societally overdetermined predisposition of the individual members of the group to accept passively class-dominated, patriarchal, emotive environments. In the vortex of the conflict between power and authority, the social therapist is at once the organizer (facilitator) of the group’s emotive laborpower and the potential (or even actual) repository of the group members’ authoritarian “instincts”….

 

In a word (a Vygotskian word), the group is consistently organized as an emotive “zone of proximal development,” or ZPD….The various members, each at a different level of emotional development, are encouraged to create a new unit (the emotional group) with a new level of emotional development, that is, the group’s level of emotional development….

 

[T]his process requires nothing less than totally (qualitatively) changing the focus of the therapy group from the individuated self discovering deeper insights into his or her consciousness to the collective activity of continuously creating a new social unit (the emotional ZPD). “How well is the group performing its activity?” not “How is each individual doing?” becomes the overriding question….

 

The ongoing group in its ongoing ensemble performance creates its own culture. In this developmental work, everyone is not equal because there is no every one. The group creates the revolutionary performance, meaning that the group appeals to nothing other than the group activity itself….

 

--Fred Newman, “The Performance of Revolution (More Thoughts on the Postmodernization of Marxism),” in Postmodern Psychologies, Societal Practice, and Political Life, Lois Holzman and John Morss (editors), New York: Routledge, 2000, pp. 171-175. [Newman’s evocation of the name of the famous Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky is highly misleading--Vygotsky was a research scientist in the field of early childhood development and never practiced or wrote about psychotherapy.]

 

L. The psychological results of having a “proletarian ego”

 

Since I met you, Fred,

I’ve been happy to be

an appendage of this machine we’ve been

building.

Daughter of an engineer,

granddaughter of a machinist,

I was down for the job!

I went to work

in the factory of our love,

and together, comrade,

we made many useful things

that bore our class’ stamp, it’s true,

but also the stamp of necessity.

 

And of necessity I made a virtue,

And of myself I made a machine,

And this virtuous machine

was an asset to the revolution!

And that was enough for me, Fred!

But not enough for you.

And not enough for Rie

It’s not enough for the comrades,

now that we have this BEAUTIFUL LOVE.….

 

And I tell you

with all my heart

that I will learn to want you

to want you.

I want to be more

than an asset to the revolution,

more than cannon fodder,

more than a sacrifice (Jesus, till now, that was truly enough for me!)

I want to want you.

And I will!

 

--Deborah Green, “Manifesto for FN and GK [Fred Newman and Gabrielle Kurlander],” Practice, Winter 1990. [NOTE:  This poem is one of the testimonials Newman solicited from the women he named as notches on his belt (politically speaking) in his article “Women I Live With.”  No other Newmanite document is as revealing as Green’s poem of what it is like to be trapped in Newman’s web.  It is a harrowing confirmation (if unwittingly so) of the late psychotherapist Frank Touchet’s often-quoted statement that Newman’s patients have been “criminally tampered with in the deepest fibres of their being.”]

 

M. The practical results of having a “proletarian ego”

 

Most members join “the organization” via politics or therapy. Once an individual has been drawn close, s/he is met by two lieutenants and told that there is a secret underground organization, the International Workers Party (IWP)….Membership in the organization requires that you reveal all your resources, and that you turn over everything to the organization. (Even personal relationships are said to belong to the organization, so it is common for a member to report on his/her partner.) Mandatory bimonthly dues are assessed, and anything may be demanded at any time.

 

--Dennis L. Serrette, “Inside the New Alliance Party,” Radical America, Winter 1988.

 

Members are kept busy from sun-up, way past sun-down. Members no longer have time to call family, to visit, even to attend funerals, holidays, or other special events. When members do visit their families, more often than not another IWP member accompanies them….Members generally share apartments, living communally, and often invite new recruits to move in with them. Members and potential members were often encouraged to quit their pre-IWP job, unless their job position could be exploited.

 

--Ibid.

 

As a working class lesbian, I thought I had finally found a political movement which included me. What I found instead was an oppressive, disempowering, misogynistic machine. All my decisions were made for me by someone else. I was told where to go, when to go, and who to go with. I worked 7 days a week--16 to 20 hours a day. (I had 2 days off in 2-1/2 months.) There was an incredible urgency in the people working for the campaign, an urgency which overrode any personal needs or considerations, an urgency that meant complete self-sacrifice….I felt more oppressed by NAP than I have every felt in the outside world.

 

--Loren Redwood, “A New Alliance Story,” Coming Up! Jan. 1989. [Ms. Redwood worked on Fulani’s New Alliance Party (NAP) Presidential campaign in 1988 and attended social therapy sessions that same year before breaking away.]

 

Six months into my involvement in the IWP, I was “invited” to move into a large apartment with another parent to support my “political development.” I promptly gave away all my furniture, and then fully subjected my two children to this new bizarre lifestyle by enrolling them in the cult’s Barbara Taylor School. I was asked to fill out a membership form, which involved listing my social security number, and ordered to turn over any and all assets (car, property, trust fund, tax return, etc.). Luckily, I had none.

 

--Marina Ortiz, “Slave to a Dream: Inside the International Workers Party,” ex-iwp.org, 2003.

 

V.  A SIMPLE QUESTION FOR THOSE WHO WILL MAKE THE FINAL DECISION ON THE ALL STARS BOND:  WOULD YOU WANT THE PEOPLE WHO RUN ALL STARS TO SERVE AS MENTORS FOR YOUR KIDS?

 

A.  Fred Newman, founder of All Stars

 

Our challenge, as revolutionaries, is to the more culturally conservative working class elements of our population. For it is precisely this section of our people--the working class (properly understood not economically, but historically, culturally and politically)--which must lead the way. Hence our (Collective Sex’s) activity of revolution attempts to provoke the culturally conservatized working class by showing it our collective Tits….

 

The middle class treatment of sexism has invariably stopped at the bedroom door…Collective Sex is a tactic in the making of the revolution; it is a provocation of working people; it is showing our Tits and Pricks and Pussies to our people, to our class, to challenge not “the domination of the patriarchy” but the coercion of the Cock!

 

--Fred Newman, “Notes to Collective Sex:  Collective performance paintings by Elena Borstein, Nancy Green, Fred Newman and Judy Penzer,” The National Alliance, Nov. 8, 1990.

 

B.  Gabrielle (“Rie”) Kurlander, President of All Stars

 

We want you Fulani

lead us Fulani

people are dying

you lead us

Fulani we want power

Fulani all our love

Fulani people are dying

and we want life

Fulani.

 

--Gabrielle Kurlander, “We want you Fulani,” The National Alliance, July 20, 1989.

 

C.  Lenora Fulani, co-founder of All Stars

 

Independence Party leader and psychotherapist Lenora Fulani doesn’t pull any punches--even with a group of tired teenagers. That was the vibe in June of last year when Fulani met with a group of teens from Oakland, California, and lectured them about life, white people, and her mentor, Fred Newman. The account was provided by Molly Hardy, a theater producer hired by a Fulani-tied group in Los Angeles and dispatched to New York for training, and who later filed official complaints against the organization.

 

Fulani, introduced to the kids as “one of the most important women in the world,” told the puzzled youths about Newman, whom she called ”the most influential person in my life,” according to Hardy. Fulani said Newman changed her life when she was a young graduate student. He had asked her if she wanted “to end up just another poor black woman” in the field of education.

 

How did she feel about a white man telling her that? one teen asked. “Well, first of all, if any of you think that white people care about you, think again. They don’t,” Fulani said, according to Hardy.

 

The teens had arrived the day before on a red-eye flight, so one girl began to doze. Fulani snapped at her: “You’re performing tired. Get up and go put some water on your face and get back here and perform differently.” When the embarrassed teen returned, Fulani insisted that she ask her a question. “The poor girl didn’t know what to say,” said Hardy. “She looked like she was going to cry.” Fulani then turned to Hardy, “How about you? Do you have any questions?” Hardy said she just smiled and said,  “’No, no questions.’ I was thinking, ‘Wow, I am so out of here.’”

 

--Tom Robbins, “Tough talk from party boss,” The Village Voice, June 22, 2005.

 

VI. CONCLUSION

 

The evidence is massive, on a variety of grounds, that the cult/revolutionary party/psychotherapy collective that runs the All Stars Project is dangerous to the psychological health and educational and sexual development of children and teens in its care. Its programs in years past succeeded in recruiting a number of teens directly into the adult group, condemning them to decades of exploitation by Fred Newman. Its programs today appear also to be attempting to selectively recruit youth into Newman’s orbit (focusing, tragically, on some of the best and brightest in the target communities). The cult has also caused harm by diverting public and charitable resources intended for the legitimate needs of children and teens into extraneous activities serving its own cryptic politico-financial goals. Newman, who totally controls All Stars through his cult followers, is a deeply disturbed narcissist and emotional predator, as abundantly revealed by his writings and actions. He and his friendosexual core collective have not built transparent programs aimed at serving the health and educational needs of children, but rather have constructed via deceptive tactics a funding network that exists primarily to serve an anti-family, anti-child, anti-Jewish, anti-Christian and pseudo-revolutionary agenda. Newman and his cult should not be provided with a single penny in public financing for their manipulation and exploitation of the children, teenagers, and adult volunteers at All Stars.

 

APPENDIX

 

Apart from articles and documents included in the attached exhibits, many others quoted in the above report are available at http://www.ex-iwp.org/ and other websites, or via commercial databases such as NEXIS. Some were obtained from research library archives. If you need a particular article, contact me. I will provide photocopies of originals to city officials, prosecutors, and media representatives. My postal mailing address is DENNIS KING, P.O. BOX 508, LENOX HILL STATION, NEW YORK, NY 10065.

 

An annotated guide (with web links) to most of the in-depth investigative reports on the Newman cult published over the past 30 years can be found at https://lyndonlarouchewatch.org/nyt.htm (click on Part VII).

 

I have taken the liberty of including in my report several anonymous postings from the ex-iwp.org Forum on the topics of “friendosex” and the role of sex in social therapy sessions. Although I do not know the identities of the people who posted these remarks, I am convinced from my many years of research on the Newmanites that the contents of these postings are an accurate reflection of the cult’s behavior. Given the fact that the IDA is poised to grant the All Stars Project $12.5 million in public financing to facilitate its work with children and teens, it would be irresponsible not to call attention to such allegations (just as Child Protective Services takes seriously anonymous telephone tips). I encourage IDA board members and staffers to go to the ex-iwp.org Forum and decide for themselves what is credible and what is not.