You Say Karma, We Say Avoidable Harm
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Human Rights, Child Abuse, Free Speech and Targetization
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A Warning to Parents
20 years ago today, David Gilmour of Pink Floyd was interviewed in The Telegraph: “We Don’t Need No Steiner Education”.
Even though the piece was only about substandard teaching prejudicing the learning of his children, with minor reference to the “rigidity” of the curriculum, he got a lot of flack for speaking out, and was thereafter unwilling to “stick his head above the parapet”, according to anecdotal reports.
Gilmour's certainly not the only one to have spoken out about this alternative education movement. There's even a worldwide group of people who refer to themselves as "Steiner/Waldorf critics", with some very influential and vocal people attached to it, who claim to know how the touchy-feely reputation is achieved in direct juxtaposition to the toleration and production of collateral damage to children and families.
Due to the effort of this group, with affiliations to the British Humanist Association - now Humanists UK - the subject was even aired on Newsnight in 2014, with Humanists UK chief executive Andrew Copson being interviewed on the subject.
Yet even after all that time, David Gilmour remains the most prominent person to have spoken out, and Steiner is still globally the fastest growing alternative education movement.
Since our own experience of Steiner, we wondered many times… how exactly is it that a system with so many detractors, and decades of apparent ‘criticism’ for pseudoscientific beliefs and practises, can be viewed so positively by so many, including the media, and is going from strength to strength?
How can that movement still have a reputation for being ‘kinder and gentler’ when there are so many anecdotal reports of authoritarian and controlling behaviours towards children and their families from all over the world?
GATE KEEPING LIKE THE PROS
Gilmour may be the most prominent, but we remain the only family to have achieved a landmark settlement with a Steiner school through a Human Rights process, mediated by the Human Rights Commission of New Zealand. The 10 month long process culminated with the settlement statement, which simply describes the exact mechanism of the main problem reported worldwide of Steiner education, which is quite simply, ignoring bullying, sometimes pretending to deal with it while doing nothing, and turning against bullied children and their families.
This covert type of behaviour to make their collateral damage go away, is why it’s possible for the movement to keep growing in spite of the awful stories of degradation practised in the name of Rudolph Steiner that keep appearing.
Take this example we were very recently sent, of members of a Steiner school community stalking, infiltrating and harassing a family who stood up to bullying of their child:
“We discovered one of the mothers who we thought was fighting with us turned out not to be and was deceiving us and leaking back to the School!”
Once the Titirangi Rudolf Steiner School went back on its commitment to address bullying to expel not just our bullied child, but her siblings as well, we began to see the sophistication of the Steiner PR machine: things that must remain hidden do, and a false impression is created by devious force if necessary that ensure the safe gentler side is believed by the uninitiated, and the school community as a whole justify the abuse, as it’s much easier to want to believe the lies the staff are spreading than accepting that this pretty school could ever treat children and families in such an abhorrent manner…
As previously widely documented, most notably in our Open Letter, these cult harassment techniques are nowhere decried more forcefully than by the self-styled ‘critics’ themselves, who ardently and endlessly denounce this “deceitful” cult of Steiner, and the dynamics, deviousness and obfuscation practised by the movement to achieve this sleight of hand.
The schools’ advertisements of being natural, and offering more freedom and a chance to grow up in an gentle environment, disguise rigid pseudoscientific policies and beliefs which hurt children and families. And yet the resulting mess is always turned around and projected back onto those families, thus hiding both the original damage and any complaint.
And this is where the answer lies to the question of why David Gilmour’s eventual disgust has led nowhere: our research has conclusively demonstrated that the supposed “critics” do exactly the same.
Where the schools promise a better education experience for children, by removing a tick-box culture, the critics’ publicly promise rationality, and a rejection of pseudo-science. Both promises are just as empty and exist in juxtaposition to their own private adoption of the same, and even worse, cult harassment techniques, which we have also had the misfortune to document.
Just as with the schools, any dissent, or even polite disagreement is soon dealt with by deceitful aggression, stalking, the employment of mental health smearing, and in the critics’ case, paedophilic slurs, to turn their own mess back onto children.
In this way, this research illustrates the awful truth, that the critics can’t make inroads in exposing and finishing the “cult” of Anthroposophy, because they are actively involved in supporting and even protecting it.
And due to the extent of the stalking and harassment by the critics, we have also been forced to document that the protection of Anthroposophy even reaches beyond this second line of gate-keepers.
But how did we end up finding all of this out? It happened when Melanie Byng, a highly influential critic working at the time under the Twitter pseudonym @ThetisMercurio, found our work on Steiner education online and sought to contact us. Most of the information that follows was gleaned from the release of private communications between her and other critics, following legal action we eventually had to take against her and another critic, Andy Lewis of the Quackometer.
GROOMING
Melanie Byng was lucky in that as well as dealing with the school, Angel’s mother had received a shock diagnosis of cancer that killed her within months. It was perfect for grooming us with her many assurances of her husband’s superior understanding of stress due to him being a mental health professional. Added to that, she showered Angel with compliments about our handling of the Titirangi school, and offers of help.
For instance she wrote to Angel in February 2011, “Watched your films again & they’re so impressive and Angel - you are a genius! Love it.” And, “Your work is so good and Angel, you're so talented. Not to ignore Steve! It does deserve a wider audience and of course to get a more international one re this subject it has to be wider than NZ politics…. I think it would be brilliant to have somewhere people could congregate, read and share stories publicly, bearing in mind the subsequent behaviour of the Movement's goons.”
Over the next few months, before and during our visit to the UK, we corresponded and even visited the Byngs, who seemed to support us on all these levels, and Melanie Byng couldn’t do enough, inviting us to look at her local democratic school, which her son had attended after a similar experience to the Gilmours in terms of educational standards. She fostered communication on the subject between her son and our daughter “Perhaps [she] would like to correspond with [him] and [a friend] about Sands?”
We were overwhelmed and tried to offer to return the hospitality, which she couldn’t do, but she suggested her son might come and stay with us in France in August, “to help” and hopefully improve his French.
Angel’s mum was fading so fast, that things kept changing. We kept having to move from country to country with our three young children, as we could not afford to stay near Angel’s mum, but Melanie made sure we knew the offer of her son’s help still stood: “[He] is v keen to come”, she told us in July 2011. In August, “Just let me know if it's still a good idea and if he could be useful. It may depend of course on the situation with your mother.”
Angel’s reply was “[He] is still very welcome. I probably won't be here as I feel I must go to mum who was in hospital over the weekend and is in sharp decline. actually that makes [him] even more valuable as Steve has a lot to do as we'll all have to come over probably around the end of the month.”
Of course we fell for it. Stress is stressful. But her offers weren’t only for her son to help out, she was speaking to journalist Francis Gilbert about Angel writing something for the Local Schools Network about unchecked bullying in Steiner schools: “Tell them New Zealand matters”, sugared Melanie Byng about the fact that unlike the UK, New Zealand had already gone down the path of integrating Steiner into the public system decades ago. “Horrible to be lied about” she cooed to the grieving mother of the family that had recently received the classic Steiner ‘treatment, and on the 8th of April “Don't feel too discouraged about schools - it's you that's most important.”
When the son realised that our warnings about our place being in the middle of nowhere were absolutely true, he suddenly wanted to leave after a week, and didn’t communicate honestly with Steve at all leading to a situation in which the pressure was put on Angel and unbelievably, on Angel’s dying mum, to change their plans, meetings, and appointments to accommodate his sudden desire to leave.
Suddenly the Byngs mysteriously had no understanding of the effects of grief whatsoever, or of the effects of being attacked by a cult, and absolutely none of the effect of their own behaviour in offering help and then making it all about themselves and their family. They ignored that their son’s intransigence (and, we found out later, lies) was causing not the promised help, but even more stress for Angel’s dying mother.
Melanie did not even bother to send her son the one email in which she had drafted a reminder to her son that “Steve can't get through to Angel - she might not come back at all if her mother is really ill. Try to be compassionate if you can. You will be the last thing on her mind.”
This bit of reality and rationality shows that she knew perfectly well that it is normal for the whims and desires of a teenager who had offered to help and then bailed, to be the “last thing on someone’s mind” when their mother was actually dying. But the email was never sent. Instead of holding on to reality, she became irrationally and illogically incensed by all the things she had freely offered, including that her son, who was 17 at the time, should help, as over-advertised.
In dumping reality, Melanie immediately began to operate on two different levels. She wrote to us on the 13th of August 2011 that “we’re still here for [your daughter] and yourselves if you do look at Sands. Let me know if I can be any help.” But she told her son the next day, before he left, “it’s a shame about the phone we ordered” and “don’t borrow any money”.
Her son got exactly what he wanted, and was driven to the airport to catch the flight he had refused to change, even going as far as lying to Steve about other travel arrangements to make sure he left that day.
THE SWITCH
It was then that Melanie Byng went cold and would not communicate at all, causing unbearable stress to Angel. This was in August, two months before Angel’s mum’s death: “I noticed that you are about today because you've commented on there this morning. Is there a reason why you aren't replying to me then? I'm struggling, mum may have only days, we can't take the kids until we get a passport and I feel as if I'm being crushed by large rocks.”
Who wouldn’t feel like that faced with such aggressive silence following extensive love-bombing and assurances, in a situation mirroring the case of R V Ireland (1997) where a criminal conviction was upheld on the basis that silence can amount to an assault, and psychiatric injury can amount to bodily harm.
But it was when we published the Local School’s Network piece on the 30th of August, six weeks before Angel’s mum died, that she really started.
As soon as it was published Melanie warned the critics about us, writing to Alicia Hamberg, Diana Winters and Pete Karaiskos, “They are dreadful people, frankly. I don’t want this discussed AT ALL publicly of course but I suggest that you treat their advances with caution. I’m forwarding this to Diana in case they try to contact WC. I would urge anyone (including Pete) to be aware that they are not entirely trustworthy.”
When a group of people (those exact ones) who have previously recognised a cult situation suddenly turn up to repudiate and mob you, and the only one you’ve ever met is conspicuously absent from the public attack, it’s pretty obvious she must be stirring it up. And she was: throughout that long online mobbing we endured, disclosure shows conclusively that she was there in the background splurging false information including a great deal of private information concerning children to get Alicia Hamberg, Diana Winters and Pete Karaiskos to warn everybody not to have anything to do with us.
[The only communication we received from Melanie after her son’s departure was in late September where she said “I am surprised if you imagine (if indeed you do) that I would place private information in the public domain, especially when it concerns children. I have given you no indication that I would do so”. Yet disclosure shows the lie of this statement, exposing all the lies about us and our children she spread to her contacts in order to vilify us.]
On the 4th of September 2011, Melanie wrote to Alicia Hamberg: “I did say I’d have their daughter here if she did a trial week at Sands school, that was before they behaved so badly. It was a reasonable offer to make to a family who don’t live in the area and who are facing a bereavement. I feel sorry for the child, but even if I could stomach it, it would be horrible for [my son]. Anyway of course it’s impossible, in fact we feel we have to talk to Sands. They’re used to odd parents, but not litigious, possibly dangerous ones.”
Melanie Byng had no reason to suspect we might sue anyone. By behaving “badly”, Melanie is referring to how we responded to her sudden change in behaviour towards us, by trying to look after Angel’s dying mother. Richard Byng later referred to us trying to find a mutually beneficial solution to their son’s sudden change of mind, instead of a solution that benefited solely one side - the Byngs - as “insisting on all the solutions”.
By going back on her offer to help our child, Melanie was throwing her on the scrap heap, having literally sent her son to tell our daughter that “he was really only there to talk about his lovely school in the country”. So now, a then 11 year old child who had been expelled from a cult after having been threatened with an axe was once again dumped by a adult because it was no longer convenient to help her.
Having done that, she then set about telling everyone what rotten parents we are. Angel had met her twice. Steve, only once. Was she milking us for information to set us up?
At the time she was still “anonymous” on Twitter because writing about the big bad cult of Steiner she needed the protection of anonymity. It also turns out to be a helluva weapon. Having told the critics not to mention her or what had happened between the families, she then wrote “[Steve] must think if only Thetis would make an appearance, or the events in France are mentioned he can defend himself and suggest I’m over-reacting, and that since I haven’t answered any of their emails I clearly would rather wreck their project than discuss it sensibly and that this would be the right ‘etiquette’”.
Her determination to “wreck their project” was self evident. For one thing, she didn’t warn anyone about us until after Angel had published her piece on Steiner education on the Local Schools Network. Once she’d warned her close network of friends, she then branched out to other critics to make sure they were all on side, like Mike Collins of Anthroposophy Now. She told him on the 11th of September 2011 that: “It's not a good idea in our view to encourage Steiner parents to view their sites or get involved with any possible (but frankly unlikely) documentary. [They] are potentially litigious and certainly capable of dishonesty or misrepresentation.”
His response was “Noted, thanks. I never did like the tone of their communications.” Which is an odd response since we’d never communicated with him.
By the 22nd of September, still a full month before Angel’s mum died, Melanie was planting ideas about her not even existing “let’s assume the mother is real”, all the while stalking us to the hospital where she lay, writing on the 28th “It will be the the hospital will be in Guildford Home | The Royal Surrey County Hospital - NHS Trust. One call from [Richard Byng] to this team…”
No wonder we felt we were being monitored and stalked: we were!
It was supremely distressing, not least for the woman who was dying amid the x-rays and radiotherapy, and having to see her disabled daughter reeling from the double whammy of being openly mobbed and covertly stalked and harassed. We knew it was happening, but we didn’t know why.
Because we lived out of the UK at the time, and were only there due to the sudden illness of Angel’s mum, and because it was so covert, there was little we could do when Melanie Byng started obviously spreading lies about us, and us not knowing who they were speaking to or what they were saying, except publishing the facts, and that’s what we did, seeking to keep open dialogue open. In spite of the Byng’s unrealistic expectations of a grieving family, having deliberately stoked their offers of help by citing their own superior understanding of the situation, they then literally framed ordinary assertiveness of wanting to resolve any issues caused by them, as mental illness. And they still are.
At the same time, Melanie did a publicity stunt of getting off twitter and then came back dropping her anonymity, just before her account would have been finally deleted, and wrote “I think me using my own name and gathering followers pretty briskly since returning as myself, plus you unlocking your ac, must have pissed them off greatly. That’s all I wanted, to piss them off. Ha! I say.” Angel’s mum died the next day.
Some critics were wary of swallowing the smears, but Melanie Byng had her husband Dr Richard Byng, of Peninsula Medical School at Plymouth University. He was quite willing to encapsulate the stress of bereavement into a smear and pressurise others to believe the lie and ostracise Angel with it.
Roger Rawlings for instance was not easily convinced and Melanie wrote on the 23rd of October 2011, two days after Angel’s mother had died, “He doesn’t know to trust Richard’s clinical opinion.” And the next day “I felt he had to take some responsibility. R says he’s just being bloody-minded - takes a bloke to know a bloke. Whatever he says now, Roger will be a bit shaken and it’ll make him think twice.”
But it was @LovelyHorse, aka Melanie’s friend Sam Brookes, whose 180˚ about turn following staunch resistance, that best illustrates the power of a mental health smear. Melanie wrote on the 14th October 2011 “Sam seems to think that I could diffuse the whole business by having a chat with Angel, I think she feels it’s my fault for not talking to Angel after [my son] got home. I can’t get her to understand the pathology. It’s very painful.”
And “She feels, I think, that it was initially my business to sort it out so that others didn’t have to become involved.”
These tiny glimpses of reality, a friend being honest about prompting her to take responsibility for her own actions, came and went, and in the case of the critics as with Steiner itself, they mostly went.
Sam Brooks’ continued reasonable viewpoint - Melanie had never tried talking to us after all - provoked Melanie to max out on the mental health smear in order to bring her onside: on the 12th January 2012, she told Sam that “Angel has a borderline personality disorder. This is a clinical judgement, not a personal opinion. It isn’t simply depression. It makes her very dangerous”.
And from then on, despite the fact that this “clinical judgement” doesn’t actually exist, Sam Brookes, a supposed researcher who obviously didn’t do any research on this, joined the gang; As she said later about us: “does he realise how dangerous they are?”
PERSECUTION
BPD being a risk diagnosis means that suicide rates, and even murder rates are high among sufferers. Sam Brookes’ dramatic switch after such a long time holding the view that Melanie was responsible, shows that this is the absolute best lie to tell about someone if you want to persuade another person to ostracise them, because it causes actual fear, so people are very unlikely to approach the target to check out whether it’s true or not.
Telling such a lie about someone is also another form of grooming - grooming that person to believe what you tell them for your own purposes.
Let’s consider just for one sane moment, if Melanie Byng, and even her husband, really believed that a person was mentally ill, and really did suffer from BPD, having courted them, knowing they were being bereaved, what would have been the ethical course of conduct? How should a doctor with a speciality in mental health behave in such an instance? He would know, and so would Melanie, that cutting off contact with that person would be likely to have disastrous consequences for them and for their family, so that would be the absolute last thing a bona fide belief in that condition would have caused them to do.
Unless, that is, they were deliberately trying to cause that person to commit suicide or murder.
Whichever way you look at it, whether the Byngs believed the mental illness was true, or whether it was invented to serve their purpose, the outcome was all too clear: it was designed to cause maximum damage to a person through ostracisation.
Having used our children’s grandmother's death and her own son to begin the campaign, she used every possible avenue to grow it, and she’s been stalking us to prevent our free association ever since. On the 15th of February 2012 Melanie said to Sam Brooks: “We can’t placate her because nothing we could do would be enough - that was always the case. She’s not acting in a way you would expect a sane person to act.”
This flight into mental health smearing, the projection of mental illness onto ordinary reactive stress of bereavement, which she herself had exacerbated, has inevitably led the critics down the road of ceasing to genuinely criticise Steiner/Waldorf education, and through telling lies about parents standing up to it, eventually starting to protect and support Anthroposophy instead.
By the 19th of February 2012, Melanie had told so many people that she was feeling pretty confident about her ability to exert control: “Just remember - there are lots of people who know about this now and they will tell each other. but let me know the minute you see anything because I can probably do something about it.”
Nevertheless people still noticed the obvious contradictions. Graham Strouts asked her on the 7th of March “Confused - [Angel’s] claims about being expelled from the school would support Andy’s (and yours) posts? let me know what’s happening.”
Melanie replied, “I think they were expelled because of their behaviour, that it had little to do with the children and even less to do with Steiner ed.”
The spreading of her lies through underground springs continued: on the 29th of March 2012 she said: “There was a big Guardian open festival last weekend, with lots of journos meeting and discussing and debating. So who knows what got about.”
That same day, the told Alicia, “I tell you what, they'll be drinking to you at the Titirangi School” (the Steiner school our children had been expelled from).
Later in April, Alicia publicly stated, “I support the NZ Steiner school. Unequivocally.”
Meanwhile, our “brilliant” videos anonymising parental accounts that Melanie had earlier frothed about, now mysteriously turned into messages of evil designed to expose those same anonymised parents! A supposed bastion of rationality, the British Humanists, was being drawn into a cult-like scenario of authoritarian control, based on outright lies.
On the 27th of April, Melanie wrote: “Sam and I have talked about the best way to approach this. We think if you could say that those of us involved in talking to the BHA atm do not endorse her activities, and possibly, that she has expressed herself in a way that suggests she is untrustworthy, particularly with reference to Steiner parents who may be vulnerable and who may not want their identities or personal details revealed.”
Casting doubt of our ethical position as researchers and filmmakers based on no evidence whatsoever, was obviously continuing behind our backs. We only knew this was happening by the odd reactions of the people they were warning about us. We only learned the specifics through disclosure. We were actually quite surprised to see how readily such skeptics were to take on the unskeptical ostrich position when it came to rumour and innuendo. Take for instance Mark Hayes on the 27th of April 2012, after having been warned by Melanie: “I came to the conclusion that people who’ve had bad experiences at Steiner schools aren’t immune from being fruit loops either! I will ask Jeevan [Vasagar, a journalist for the Guardian] if he’s had any contact, though if he has I’m sure he’ll figure out for himself that they’re not credible sources.”
Melanie’s further response: “They are manipulative and dishonest.”
Meanwhile scientific luminary Professor David Colquhoun, referred by the Science Media Centre in September 2017 as a “Quackbuster extraordinaire”, jumped on the mental health smear on the 3rd of May 2012: “She sounds quite sane, but clearly isn’t.”
Colquhoun’s enthusiasm in helping to spread smears too was highlighted by Richy Thompson of the BHA (Now Humanists UK), when he commented on the 13th of May 2012, having just been contacted by Melanie: “DC gave me a similar warning some time ago!”
David Colquhoun’s splitting of reality is quite severe: he stands proudly on a public platform of evidence representing British science, yet he privately joins in a hate-campaign about people he doesn’t even know, based on obvious rumours and outright lies.
That’s kind of surprising behaviour for someone who insisted on a piece being amended early in 2017, claiming it was “abusive” because it referred to him as an “old skeptic blogger” (he was 81 at the time).
And of course once you dehumanise people, and spread lies about their private information, including about children, it becomes easier and easier to attack anything about them.
Steiner critic and moderator for the American Waldorf critics site PLANS (People for Legal and Non-Sectarian Schools), Diana Winters, excels at this, having rabidly joined in from the beginning, taking all of Melanie’s carefully placed suggestions and knitting them into garments of falsehood and hatred, which she wears with cultish pride, abandoning knowledge and facts for a feast of ghoulish speculation, as she proclaimed on the 16th of May 2012: “I’ll say it if no one else will… I doubt her claim to have a “mobility impairment. My guess would be, she did once have some kind of injury to her foot, but it was probably not nearly the big deal she made it. They probably did as they always do, look for someone to blame and someone to sue, then get involved with a succession of doctors who probably failed to recognise her “severe disability” and they then probably sued the doctors, appealing then to disability rights organizations, etc. to get herself somehow officially recognised as “disabled”. I have a suspicion that if we dug a bit, we’d find disability advocates who have had the SAME experiences with them as we have had. We are seeing just ONE episode in this couple’s victimhood career. I mean, these people made us DOUBT that a Steiner school might really have done anything wrong. Probably there is an equivalent story re: her so-called “mobility impairment.” I’m basing this partly on Joe’s comment that she didn’t really have an impairment, but it didn’t surprise me. I would guess at best she has SOME SLIGHT problem but quite likely, nothing warranting the amount go sympathy and victim status she tries to get from it.”
She didn’t stop at making ignorant, malicious and utterly unsubstantiated suppositions about Angel’s physical state, but even thought about getting our ordinary human rights revoked, as she said on the 18th of May 2012: “Can the [Human Rights Commission] put a gagging order on them? Normally it would be against human rights but in this case”.
This didn’t come out of nowhere: an attempt to sabotage our Human Rights mediation with the school had started with Melanie Byng on the 28th of April 2012, the very day our mediation had actually begun: “if someone was to suggest to the commission that they are unsafe they’d be doubly unlikely to support a legal case which they’d then have to pay for themselves”.
It must be such a strain stalking and harassing people though, having to constantly monitor them or they might actually be able to communicate freely and exercise their rights to free association and free speech. By May 2012, the strain on Melanie was starting to show: “I've done my very best on Twitter - so many people to write to...I've tried to stop people tweeting their stuff but I don't know everyone.”
But persuasion, coercion and threat, the ostracisation MO practised by Melanie Byng, Andy Lewis and their friends are pretty powerful, and people certainly got the message to ostracise us or else, as Melanie said “I can only see Good Schools Guide tweeting it - I’ve spoken to her (she was mortified when she realised who it was)”. And Andy Lewis, “there is very low tolerance with some people for anyone who is engaged with [Steve] or [Angel]”.
Perhaps it was the hard work she had created for herself when she made the decision to practise covert harassment that made her feel other solutions may be simpler, as she said on the 9th of June 2012, “I am happy to give her a hole in the head anytime”.
By June 2013 Alicia Hamberg was suggesting flat out that we “made up what happened” at the school because we’re “basically serial criminals”, “hell-bent on terrorising people and to get money from this”.
In August 2012, while our mediation was still ongoing, Grégoire Perra, a French anthroposophist, Steiner teacher and former Steiner pupil came on the scene, and started exposing his knowledge of this education system to the great concern of the other French anthroposophists. We contacted him and offered to help him. We told him about our own experience with the Titirangi school and he was extremely supportive on the 29th: “have faith and keep your head held high: what you have exposed is true and you were right to do so.” Angel began translating his articles into English to his great delight, calling us “charming” and being highly complimentary: “thank you for this beautiful work! It’s a beautiful translation, very accurate and elegant!” and “I find your translation excellent! You were able to preserve my style and the dynamism of my ideas!”
Diana Winters even agreed with him regarding the quality of our work: “I did see Angel and Steve’s translation of Gregoire’s article - it looked like a darn good translation, I have to say, though I haven’t read but a brief bit; I did have the impressions it was very polished.”
It was so good, it even drew the attention of anthroposophists. So what did Alicia Hamberg, who keeps saying how dangerous this group of people is and how untrustworthy they are, do about that? Warn them of course: “I had to warn a couple of anthros about them last night - one of them had found that translation and I had to say something.”
It was time to move in on Grégoire. On the 11th of September 2012, Alicia wrote: “I had got a message from Grégoire on facebook I hadn’t seen […] He thanked me for the warning. I think I confirmed something he suspected.”
A warning he never shared with us, telling us instead on the 23rd of September when we started discussing with him what the critics were doing to us, “since I don’t know the story, I do not wish to get involved”.
That was pretty much the end of our relationship with him. In August 2013 we asked Yves Casgrain, a Canadian researcher into cults, to ask him what happened. His response: “he didn’t want to elaborate. He just told me he didn’t want to engage in a relationship with you any more”.
Meanwhile the big daddy of Steiner Criticism, Dan Dugan, allowed himself to be led away from his commitment to free speech, when Diana Winters banned us from Waldorf Critics, where they continued to discuss us. He nevertheless said of his site on the 21st of October 2012 that “We do this for public service”.
This stalking and monitoring behaviour extended beyond just looking at the people we communicated with. Melanie Byng even reached out to the Titirangi school’s community, communities which regularly smear families who speak out against them as we’ve shown, as these critics know full well, looking for non-existent dirt on us. She wrote in November 2012: “I’ve not heard accusations from the Steiner school in Titirangi through any source, including other parents.”
But it was important our experience with, and work on, Steiner was properly snuffed out. When we were invited to speak in Trieste, Italy in July 2013, at the International Cultic Studies Association conference, Melanie, Andy and the rest were right there, working to sabotage this too:
Alicia worked on social media: “I put the news about her participation at the conference on my facebook wall (not sharing it publicly though, only with ‘friends’.). An acquaintance - psychologist and cult expert - saw her, said he is at the conference and had spoken to her yesterday. He asked me for more information so I tried to sum up the past two years…. Anyway, the ICSA is making a fool of themselves when allowing this, which I also said. [redacted]. He’s going to talk to the ICSA people he says.”
She contacted this person privately, “I did explain things in more detail - how I feel they are a risk for people who might trust them, for example… I also added that Melanie, I and probably you, Andy, would be available if folks from the ICSA want to contact us. And that there are others too who can testify to what we’re saying.”
Richard Byng was “going to write (with his uni email) asking this very question.”
And Andy Lewis was “Happy to talk to anyone who wants anything checked about them”, although he was worried that “More concerning is if they get anything published in any proceedings We might want to think about seeing if that might be worth stopping.”
This flurry of networked coordinated stalking and harassment, led Melanie to address the gang almost militarily: “Everyone re-group: reports?”
In October 2013, the British Humanists organised a Human Rights talk with Andy Lewis as the speaker on Steiner education. They refused us entry on the basis that we’d had to give him a legal ultimatum about his lack of democracy, which they referred to as a “threat”. Andy Lewis apparently saw no contradiction in taking a human rights platform about the dangers of Steiner education whilst simultaneously lying about children targets of Steiner’s notorious unchecked bullying which he knows had achieved Human Rights agency.
As he said himself: “yes it is a little bit of a paon convincing Stephen Law that he has to ban them, but Richie is right on the money and will notify the police before the meeting.” Arranging to have people arrested who wish to peacefully participate in a field they have experience and knowledge in is certainly an unpalatable underside of Humanists UK.
PROTECTING ANTHROPOSOPHY IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Although the covert hate-campaign forced us to trans-globally relocate from New Zealand to the UK, and seek help from the court, which exposed their twisted and murderous intent, the narrative is still corrupted by perjury and lies and the deliberate removal of covert harassment from the case immediately before trial.
Words were unlawfully put in our mouths, and facts were either ignored or misrepresented. The judge was deceived by barrister Jonathan Price through lies, altered chronology, tampered evidence, and a breached court order, and despite all the evidence shown above - and so much more besides - Melanie Byng and Andy Lewis were ruled to be honest, and they were awarded our children’s home.
Nobody, let alone a top mental health professional, could offer help to someone because they were facing bereavement, and then claim to be surprised that they were under stress, and make-up a fake diagnosis to explain that stress, all by accident. That is just not believable, even if UK Judges can somehow be persuaded to buy it.
They got their Barrister, Jonathan Price QC, to alter part of the Open Letter comparing the grooming aspects of the cult of Steiner education to the grooming aspects of Melanie Byng’s actions. He deliberately tampered with the wording, removed most of the sentence, purposefully took it out of context, and then made the preposterous claim that we had implied Melanie tried to sexually abuse our child.
So now, according to Jonathan Price of Doughty Street Chambers, which claims to fight for people’s human rights and civil liberties, cults only groom children as a form of sexual abuse leaving children groomed by cults for other purposes without any agency whatsoever.
And yet disclosure shows that they knew all along what we meant when we said Melanie had groomed our child (and us), as she admitted herself on the 4th of November 2011 “They don’t actually mean sexual misconduct”, but what they say privately and what they say in court doesn’t have to match up.
Using paedophilia as a smokescreen to hide emotional and cult abuse is the most disgusting thing possible, it reduces everyone. By removing the cult element, just as the school removed the education element, the corrupted mess was yet again projected back onto the children. Is the fog lifting?
Cultified critics don’t see that supporting the school, who admitted they hadn’t dealt with the bullying, in spite of honest reports of an 8 year old including being threatened with an axe, is protecting Anthroposophy.
Lewis’ statement that he was “happy to be convinced that no bullying took place beyond the usual moderate rough and tumble of any playground” , just lets Steiner right off the hook. So much for him saying this education system is an “insidious cult”, that “Everything in Steiner Schools is done for an occult purpose. That is the first and most important thing parents need to understand”, that “Bullying issues in Steiner Schools could be symptomatic of their beliefs in allowing 'karma' to play out”, and “my own research on Steiner suggests *nothing* should be taken at face value when looking at Anthroposophical institutions.”
Publicly he also states that “What they say to the public differs from internal beliefs”, but he had no qualms in court, about using the contradictory statement the school issued going back on everything they had signed in the Human Rights settlement with us, as proof the school was blameless and right to expel our children. And he even disgustingly commented in court that children can claim to be bullied to manipulate their parents.
But in abandoning reason and protecting Anthroposophy in our case, the critics are sadly ignorant of what they speak because the cultish acceptance of authoritarian violence against children always leads to avoidable harm. The Critics “unequivocal support” for the NZ Steiner school’s aggressive repudiation of their own public statements, now stands as backdrop to an ugly reality.
The targeting of our family first by the school, then by the critics, instead of dealing with the bullying, means that the state of the young boy who threatened a child of 8 with an axe when he was 9 or 10 was not addressed, and he is now a young man.
This young man has recently been prosecuted with having raped three minors.
Because the Steiner school protected him, and blamed the target and her family, there was no accountability. Sheryl Mace, his kindergarten teacher, told us he was a challenging child even then, but the Steiner ethos is very clear: bullying is not to be dealt with lest it lead to serious consequences like getting addicted to computer games. So nothing was done. This young man has been let down so badly by the system and by extremely dangerous esoteric beliefs. This harm could so easily have been avoided at many stages. But nothing was done.
We asked the school when they expelled our children what would it take for them to do something about the unchecked bullying, and advised them not to wait until, for example, a child lost an eye.
After this hideous outcome, the boy has finally been expelled from the school he was transferred to, eight years after he threatened an 8 year old with an axe, who was then expelled to protect him.
But due to him having committed these rapes while still a minor himself, the case is under name suppression, so although the Titirangi Settlement itself was front page news and appeared on prime time TV, nobody in New Zealand or elsewhere is allowed to know who this young man is, and about the forseeably violent harm hidden beneath Steiner’s idea of karmic bullying.
Did somebody say cult?
PARTICIPATION
What the research is showing is that it’s because it is so hard to stand up to networked and co-ordinated bullying that Steiner is doing so well, but not all of the networked and coordinated bullying that protects Anthroposophy is done by Steiner and its communities; a good portion of it is done by gate-keeping critics. And there are further layers too.
The email disclosure of the defendants doesn’t lie: we were targeted for abuse from the beginning, but there is no evidence anywhere of their projection of us wanting to be the centre of anything. All we have ever wanted is to participate, because we had documented evidence no one else had managed to get.
But the fact is we are participating aren’t we because this is our participation. We are the family whose job it is to put a mirror to Steiner education and the critics, and demonstrate that one ugly reflection is eerily similar to the other.
From this position it’s not hard to see why Steiner criticism achieves nothing, why Andrew Copson had no evidence for his claims on Newsnight, and why the parapet is still waiting for people like David Gilmour to stick their head above it again so they can be chopped off once again. The critics may be fake, but the cult is real.
If Steiner criticism has any use, beyond a way for “ex” Anthroposophists to carry on talking about anthroposophy way after they’ve pretended they’ve disengaged, it’s surely to stop it from hurting any more people.
Children need critics who are prepared to stand up to sociopathic manipulations to harass and shun families, not a vicious little armchair gang chomping at the bit to join in.
WE DON’T NEED NO STEINER CRITICS
So parents need to be warned that their courage, their willingness to negotiate, their concern for their own kids and those of the rest of the class, all that can be turned against you if you trust those whose motives are not honest or genuine, but who will be waiting for you as you emerge from one cult, to make sure that the damage never ends.
Power over others, like empty calories, seems to create the very hunger it seeks to satisfy. And we haven’t even told you everything yet.
It’s hard to see why just one family who have had the tenacity, guts and love to actually do something real and positive about their negative Steiner experience, are seen as such a threat that people high up the food chain, who seem interested in beating us to a pulp… unless somehow the interests of the supposed critics and the interests of the Steiner cartel are much more similar than anyone could suppose.
Robbed of our home by tampered evidence and their breached order to provide even more evidence, we were ground into the dirt, and thrown away like guilty body parts in sacks.
But we still have truth on our side, and nothing can change that.
Plenty of you will know that in full cult manner, a UK Judge has abandoned reality, misogynistically blamed Angel for being affected by Melanie Bing’s deliberate cruelty while her mum was dying, for experiencing it as unbearable harassment and bravely trying to protect others by pointing out that making offers to vulnerable people with no intention of following through with them, but with an ulterior motive, is the very definition of grooming.
Deep down you know that it is, and that shunning and harassing whistleblowing families is an abhorrent thing to do, especially when those attackers are all the while claiming to be exposing cult abuses. Looking at the disclosure it’s abundantly clear that some people did resist, questioned and tried and stand up to it, and were themselves groomed into participation by persuasion, coercion and/or threat.
Exposing cults isn’t easy, and we know that at least some of those who have been lured by false testimony, false evidence and false clinical judgements, will grudgingly and probably only very privately acknowledge that we’ve shown huge courage in standing up to it.
YOU SAY KARMA, WE SAY AVOIDABLE HARM
We know that satisfaction will be felt, seeing this anniversary post, about how we are forced to continually explain all this, and of course it’s inevitable that we should do that, just as the critics endlessly recite Rudolf Steiner.
Because that’s what abuse is and what it does, and it’s all just as cultish as the other, but at least you know that we will seek something practical out of the enforced repetitions.
High control groups absolutely contain the sort of people who would take someone’s home by pretending to believe they were mentally ill, having set fire to them when they were at their most vulnerable.
In cults, autonomy is replaced with automatic mental slavery to antisocial behaviours, reasonable people end up joining large gangs with very high connections in harassing individuals and families, which means, in the end, children.
Look in the mirror.
When the critics’ ceaseless stalking of us gave them the opportunity to speak about Steiner in court, Byng and Lewis repudiated their public views, denied their beliefs, and ended up trying to protect the whole edifice of Steiner and Anthroposophy, from claiming to no longer wish these dangerous places would close down, to using the school’s own contradiction of the admissions they had made through Human Rights process, as the more truthful account of what happened.
Having to bring a legal case was the only option left to us to try and relieve ourselves of the putrid mess of fake critics once they found us. We then discovered in court that their transparent lies protecting Anthroposophy were unbelievably judged “honest", and our dissenting opinion was heavily punished by the Crown.
So we can well understand David Gilmour’s refusal to stick his head over the parapet again, especially considering what happened to us, a family who achieved something regarding Steiner education even Lewis says can’t be done: “No one will call them out. It requires too much work to expose them!”
It would be so easy to become paranoid about the extremely high level of protection of Anthroposophy and persecution of us, but the evidence here also provides a very simple explanation.
So many “rationalists” are so easily radicalised into authoritarian control, stalking, hate-crime, disability abuse and the whole course of conduct we have called ¡STOP! Defamation, that their secondary persecution of us was likely inevitable anyway, no further conspiracy needed.
And if it’s inevitable that this would happen in exposing Steiner, then it’s possible that exposing the course of conduct of the critics is part of exposing Steiner.
Which obviously means that the fact that we haven’t won through yet, in no way predicates the final outcome.
