SHE LIED TO DESTROY A LIFE

Statue of the Rape of the Sabines by Giovanni da Bologna (1524-1608)

Here’s an interesting legal question: A woman you’ve stopped dating is so hurt by your rejection, she takes revenge by accusing you, anonymously, of raping her. She also “reveals” to the world that you have those amazing powers, which enable you to set your hypnotic gaze on any woman and she becomes putty in your hands. She also contacts your close friends and solicits, very charmingly, intimate material which she then concocts into a fantastic dish of pornographic goodies.

You wake up one morning to discover that the whole world has already classified you as a rapist and a pervert. Job prospects? Forget it, the simplest Google search will lead any potential employer to hang up the phone on your chances. Marriage matches for your children? Kiss those good bye. Even your place of worship is becoming inhospitable. Your life as you’ve known it is over.

Some months go by. Despite the anonymous allegations against you, no formal complaint is filed anywhere on the planet. In fact, in casual public correspondence, your now exposed anonymous accuser admits that she was never raped.

This was the case with one, Nancy Barkdull, who, in public debate with me over the Luke Ford website, responded to my point that she was never raped thusly:

“Yanover's letter sounds all well and good. However, there is still no accounting for those who are in rabbinical positions primarily for the ego-gratification of power-over-others, using their mentoring and supposed 'spiritual' authority as tools of seduction. Has he no concern about those who pervert and abuse Judaism in this manner?"

In other words, she backed off from a real rape accusation, and is now trying to save face by saying that her victim, my friend Rabbi Hershy Worch, is a lout of a rabbi and deserves what he got.

This, in essence, was Luke Ford’s response when I demanded that he remove the offensive, libelous and false charge of rape from his website: “I believe that the primary thing that has damaged Worch's reputation has been his own writings, in particular the murder fantasy.”

Worch maintains that he published no such murder fantasy. The piece is not under his name. Worch’s enemies have labored to prove through word analysis that the piece is his, but regardless of all that, it is now common knowledge that Worch never raped Barkdull.

The same offensive, libelous and false charge is still posted on the Awareness Center website and on JWB, adorned with other terms like predator—while it is clear that no rape has ever taken place, as attested to by the accuser herself. Why don’t you ask her yourselves? Her email is ceruleaniwa@sbcglobal.net. Perhaps Luke Ford would care to ask her, point blank:

1. Were you raped by Rabbi Hershy Worch? And rape, mind you, is defined by Webster’s as “unlawful sexual activity and usually sexual intercourse carried out forcibly or under threat of injury against the will usually of a female or with a person who is beneath a certain age or incapable of valid consent.”

2. If you were raped, why didn’t you launch a complaint against Rabbi Worch near the date of the alleged event or any time afterward?

The argument previously made by Barkdull and by her two supporters—one of whom is the anonymous JWB, the other a woman who believes the Jews of Chicago are baby-eating Satanists—is that Worch performed a kind of rape, by using hypno-eroticism.

Thank God for intimate online surveys. It turns out that Barkdull filled out one of those and even sent it around to friends with her entries. One of her statements in that survey was:

“I want to be really feeling that child aspect of myself and not just pretending or acting. Probably utilizing trance or meditation prior to our playing together would be more helpful.”

So, it turns out that more than the “Svengali” wants to hypnotize, Barkdull wants to trance. Which is fine as far as bedroom choices go, but completely breaks her argument that she was somehow forced in non-physical ways to have sex. No, she was an enthusiastic participant in a sexual relationship which was ended by Rabbi Worch. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

One of the arguments I made in my correspondence with her was that the phenomenon whereby adult women have sex with clergymen and later accuse them of abusing their office is a setback to the cause of women’s equality. I accused her of infantilizing women, implying they can’t be trusted to handle themselves sexually and should, perhaps, be chaperoned on their dates, seeing as they quiver so readily before charismatic men.

She wrote back: "Yanover wants to talk about the so-called 'infantilizing' of women, that's a crock. The minute all the women who've been abused by these cretins...speak up is the minute they stop being infantilized. For more on being infantilized, in fact, he should ask...about... 'Age-Play'.”

Well, as it turns out, Barkdull has participated in quite a bit of age-play before she ever met with Rabbi Worch.

She, in fact, wrote in the same survey:

“There’s a large part of me that still feels naturally very child-like very frequently, I like this aspect of myself pre- all my hangups and neuroses about sex and relationships... the perversity is hot... hearing nice things from my Daddy, being praised and stroked, etc., is incredibly wonderful and satisfying… seeing the pleasure he gets from being a Daddy is very very gratifying... being able to give sexual pleasure to Daddy, have Daddy take his sexual pleasure from me, seems to put me into possibly the deepest and most open part of my sexuality. Still trying to put words to it... I’d like to be able to experience a more easing into it, like perhaps with things like being cuddled and read to, a kind of ‘initiation’ of our special time together, prior to sexual activities, as a kind of easing into it to help me tap into feeling like a five year old more deeply.”

To summarize: Every single aspect of the rape accusations against Worch is now proven false, and yet Luke Ford, the Awareness Center and JWB continue to carry them as if they’re the truth. All three are counting on the difficulty in persecuting false publications online in the US under the First Amendment. Indeed, it is a costly operation. But they should also know that in business there comes a time when costs which were prohibitive in the past become acceptable in the present. Correcting injustices is pricey, but is it so pricey that our society must continue to permit anonymous scoundrels to destroy lives unmolested?