Heeeers Johnny ! ...Johnny The mystery Bethelite returns and answers many questions. .

by koolaid-man 62 Replies latest jw friends

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  Nebeska Nada

  Ricky, you are a liar! God will destroy you!

  
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  Joey Jo-Jo

  Maybe its just bethel making a joke on us evil apostates... If its too good to be true it.......
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  koolaid-man

  Any topic posted That gets close to thirty five thousand clicks obviously has some merit. What is the fasination with this subject, why so much criticism and cynicism? the passing of severe judgment is unrelenless on this thread, many admitting they did not even listen to conference call or the entire call. The lack of evaluating and properly analizing what was said on the call suggest their faultfinding critique falls short, their opinions formed prematurely were prejudicated and formed before due examination. You be the judge!

  
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  slimboyfat

  Any topic posted That gets close to thirty five thousand clicks obviously has some merit.

  I beg to differ. I don't know why people are cutting you as much slack as they are, it is obvious what sort of game you are playing.
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  lisaBObeesa

  Like I said, there are only two reasons he couldn't answer the "stipend" question.

  He said he's never gotten the stipened so he doesn't actually know the exact amount. He said that he and others from well-off families give up their stipends for others 'who need it more.'

  There was no pause when he answered. His sounded very believable and the explaination is reasonable. And he was able to come up with a ballpark amount.

  (I'm listening now.)

  He sounds totally paranoid about the vaccuum cleaner. That doesn't make me doubt that Johnny is a real Bethelite...I would expect Bethelite in this sort of position to be paranoid, and maybe/probably overly so. But he could have a big legal case for that fall on their property, couldn't he?

  To me the only part of the story that was hard to believe is when he said that Belthel said that they would only fill his perscription if he agreed to stay at Bethel. That is the only thing that really raised a red flag to me. If I could get on that call I would question him more on that. That just seems really...hard to believe. BUT, after listening back, I realize that it was Rick who said the word 'blackmail' not Johnny so perhaps what johnny was saying was missunderstood.?

  I can't get on the call because the times are all wrong for me. So Rick, next time please ask Johnny to explain this thing with the medication a bit more. WHO exactly told him he couldn't get the perscription filled and what reason did they give? WHO later told him he COULD get the medication if he stayed at Bethel? Did that person say 'you can have your perscription if you agree to stay' (<--blackmail) or were they just saying 'We are only going to pay for filling this perscription if you are actually still a Bethelite. If you are leaving in a few days we are not wasting our money on you so we won't fill the perscription' (<--not blackmail).
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  Leolaia

  Any topic posted That gets close to thirty five thousand clicks obviously has some merit.

  The Trevolinda "Funeral Arrangements" thread got 37,600 clicks and the reason why it was so popular is that the whole Trevolinda thing was a scam and had the whole board fooled for years. People love talking about scams, whether to debate whether things are really so or to express outrage and/or criticism towards the faker.

  Your statement embodies an Argumentum ad populum logical fallacy.
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  Mickey mouse

  

  Any topic posted That gets close to thirty five thousand clicks obviously has some merit.

  And 7 million people can't be wrong....right?
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  wobble

  A bit like the Pub in a nearby town that advertised "5 million flies cannot be wrong, ours is the best food in town !"

  They went out of business.

  I also think back to the time when an awful lot of people on Earth thought it was flat. Like Isaiah for instance.
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  RULES & REGULATIONS

  Tawana Brawley

  Rick: Please read the story of Tawana Brawley and how Reverend Sharpton came to her aid and was fooled until the story spun out. This might happen to your Johnny!

  On November 28, 1987 Joyce Lloray happened to look out of her apartment's sliding glass door in time to see a black girl climb into a big green plastic garbage bag and then lay still on the cold, muddy ground. Mrs. Lloray called the Duchess County Sheriff's Department, setting into motion a chain of bizarre and tragic events that made the quiet little town of Wappingers Falls, New York -- population 5,000 -- the focus of national attention. The girl in the trash bag on the grounds of the Pavillion Condominiums was 15-year-old Tawana Brawley. Four days earlier she had played hooky from school in order to visit a former boyfriend, Todd Buxton, who was incarcerated at the Orange County Jail in nearby Newburgh. That evening Tawana took a bus to the town of Wappingers, where she had lived with her mother in Apartment 19A at the Pavillion Condominiums prior to their moving to Wappingers Falls. According to Tawana, she was abducted by several white men shortly after she got off the bus; the men, one of whom wore a badge, took her to a wooded area and sexually abused her over a period of several days. When police and paramedics arrived at the Pavillion Condominiums in response to Joyce Lloray's call, they found Tawana's clothes torn, cut and partially burned. Her body and clothing were smeared with feces, and on her chest and torso the words "KKK," "NIGGER" and "BITCH" had been written with what appeared to be charcoal. Since it seemed that Tawana's civil rights had been violated, the FBI was called in. A rape kit was administered at St. Francis Hospital and sent under seal to an FBI lab for analysis. Interviewed at the hospital by a black officer from the Poughkeepsie Police Department, Tawana claimed she had been repeatedly raped by a group of white men but could provide no names or descriptions of her assailants. She later told others that there had been no rape, only other kinds of sexual abuse. Forensic tests found no evidence that a sexual assault of any kind had occurred. Nor was there any evidence of exposure to elements, which would be expected in a victim held for several days in the woods at a time when the temperature dropped below freezing at night. There were other discrepancies in Tawana's story. She was seen entering the empty apartment at Pavillion where she had once lived on the morning after the alleged abduction. Other witnesses claimed to have seen her at parties in a nearby town during the period when she was "missing." She had no bruises, contusions, scratches or other injuries except for a small bruise behind the left ear, which was determined to be several days old. Her mother, Glenda Brawley, was spotted at the apartment complex shortly before Tawana was seen getting into the garbage bag; the mother waited until that same afternoon to report Tawana's "disappearance" to the police. The investigation turned up evidence to indicate that the damage done to Tawana's clothing had occurred in the apartment. According to the grand jury report, all of "the items and instrumentalities necessary to create the condition in which Tawana Brawley appeared on Saturday, November 28, were present inside of or in the immediate vicinity of Apartment 19A." The feces had come from a neighbor's dog. The Tawana Brawley case was quickly seized upon by a trio of black activists who viewed it as a means by which to demonstrate that the police and judicial system were racist and corrupt. Attorney Alton H. Maddox had been beaten by a white mob as a teenager in Newnan, Georgia; confrontational and virulently anti-white, Maddox seemed at times less interested in justice than in the potential for conflict that high profile cases like Tawana Brawley's provided. C. Vernon Mason, another New York attorney, also used cases to drum up publicity and address wider issues. Al Sharpton was a flamboyant Pentecostal preacher who spent $2,000 a year for hair care at Brooklyn's Prima Donna Beauty Salon; his hunger for celebrity caused some to question both his motives and methods. Maddox, Mason and Sharpton had joined forces before, in the Howard Beach case a year earlier. Several black men had been accosted by a white mob and one of them, Michael Griffith, was chased out onto a highway where he was struck by a vehicle and killed. In previous cases, Maddox and Mason had used the tactic of non-cooperation, refusing to let their clients testify in an effort to facilitate a "miscarriage of justice" in which the perpetrator(s) would get off. In this way they could heighten the outrage of the black community and claim the result proved that the judicial system discriminated against blacks. The trio muzzled Tawana Brawley and claimed everyone from the local police to New York Governor Mario Cuomo was engaged in a cover-up. The Brawley camp eventually accused Harry Crist, Jr., a part-time police officer, after Crist committed suicide on December 2, and Steven A. Pagones, a Duchess County district attorney, of participating in the alleged abduction and rape. Further investigation revealed that Crist had killed himself for reasons unconnected with the Brawley case, while Pagones' testimony convinced the Poughkeepsie grand jury that he was not involved in any wrongdoing. Undeterred, Maddox, Mason and Sharpton staged numerous media events, from news conferences and rallies to appearances on television shows like Phil Donahue and The Morton Downey, Jr. Show to keep national attention focused on the case. As time went on, the public grew increasingly skeptical of Tawana Brawley's charges and the ill-advised tactics of her handlers. When Tawana's mother was subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury and failed to do so, a warrant for her arrest was issued; Maddox, Mason and Sharpton took her to the Ebenezer Baptist Church in New York City and organized a rally, hoping (in vain) that the authorities would force their way into the church and seize her. Two of Sharpton's associates quit, claiming the reverend had known all along that the case was a hoax. Other black leaders criticized Brawley's advisers -- Ray Innes of the Congress of Racial Equality and attorney Conrad Lynn among them. They feared the hoax and the antics of publicity hounds like Sharpton would prove detrimental to the cause of racial equality. After seven months of examining police and medical records and listening to the testimony of over one hundred witnesses, the grand jury determined that Tawana's charges were false and that her condition when found had been self-inflicted. The question remained: Why had she lied? One hypothesis was that since Tawana had already been grounded on the day she skipped school to visit her ex-boyfriend, she had made up the story of her abduction in order to avoid further punishment.

  The Aftermath The Brawley case resurfaced a decade later when Steven Pagones filed a defamation suit against Maddox, Mason and Sharpton; he had already won a default judgment against Tawana in 1991. By 1997, Tawana had moved to Washington and changed her name to Maryam Muhammad. She returned to New York to speak before a rally at Brooklyn's Bethany Baptist Church in support of her advisers, insisting that she had told the truth about the abduction. The court found otherwise. Her advisers were ordered to pay Pagones $345,000 while Tawana had to pay $185,000. "Tawana Brawley appears caught up in her own fiction," said New York State Supreme Court Justice S. Barrett Hickman. Unfortunately, the rest of the country had to be caught up in it, too.
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  Band on the Run

  I lived in Manhattan. The local news broke the Tawana story. I saw her curled up in a fetal postion on her mom's couch. Not only Al was fooled. I was ready to go out and kill her attacker. The adrenaline was flowing. Over the long haul, her story began to deterioate and quickly. Al Sharpton milked it for all he could. I'm glad Al has lost weight and his manner is more rational.

  Unfortunately, most New Yorkers remember him from his overweight, fat days and Pompadour hair tying up traffic so everyone in the greater NY areas suffered. Tawana Brawley will remain the spectacle that will keep him from wider influence. Everyone knew she was lying and Sharpton plowed ahead. Maybe he saw her so much as a symbol of wronged African-American womanhood that he believed when only a fool would.

  didn't the ada sue him and win?

  One of my funnier political stories is when Al Sharpton was arrested demonstrated in Peurto Rico against a munitiions target area the US used. An entire delegation of NY politicans arrived to join forces with PR politicians and get favorable press for the Latino vote. The federal distrct court judge let the PR politicos walk. The NY ers were thrown in jail. They thought they were going right home later that pm in time for a Broadway show. Sharpton lost the weight in prison.