Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Imaginary friends: the more things change…

This isn’t the post I was originally planning to put up today; I’m still finishing that one. But I just received an email from someone who wanted to know more about the Mafu/Penny Torres/Ammagi cult, hoping that I might have some insider info. I explained to this person that my blog posts about Penny/Mafu, aka "Swami Blonde," were based upon spam emails I’ve received from her organization, and I referred the individual to a Mafu/Penny thread on the Rick Ross forum site.

There’s some sad and pretty scary stuff on that thread, and, as I told my correspondent, the more I find out about Swami Blonde and some of her followers, the more I believe they need to be institutionalized.

I especially think this after seeing a 20-year-old video of Penny. While reading the Rick Ross forum, I came across a link to an early interview by Meredith Vieira, from a defunct (1985-1989) TV series called West 57th Street.

Not much has changed since those prehistoric, pre-Internet days; if anything, things have gotten worse. The imaginary-friends segment of the New-Wage industry is still thriving, fueled by the gullibility of seekers, and held aloft by the obfuscation, rationalization and outright lies employed by the New-Wage hucksters. Listen to Penny's answer when she is caught in a lie about "curing" an AIDS patient who never had the disease in the first place. And a few minutes later, watch her as she blithely rationalizes being caught red-handed in another blatant deception.

In fact, if you ignore the big hair, the references to outmoded technology, the less-than-sterling production quality, and the lack of mention of The Secret and imaginary-friends moguls Esther and Jerry Hicks, you’d almost think you were watching an interview that was filmed last week.

As for the young Penny Torres who appears in that video – well, I’m no expert on psychiatric disorders, but I look in her eyes and I see a seriously disturbed individual. What’s even more disturbing is that, even today, she still has a following.

Oh, yeah, here’s the link to the video.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This insane freak's original birth name (before multiple failed marriages)was Penny Rue. She was a Drama major in northern California - a hick from small-town Sierra Foothills - and a very poor actress then too, who used that CHEESY, laughable "MAFU" dialect when she was just screwing around with her fellow students - I wouldn't say "friends" because no one trusted her... the most manipulative person I've ever known, even at the young age.
She had a reputation for "speaking in tongues" at church as a kid, and then for faking a brain tumor in college to get attention and sympathy. Abhorrant creature then, evil and destructive to naive, vulnerable people now. She should be arrested and put away for the destruction she causes, and the PATHETIC lies with which she tries to wiggle out of her fraud. Never was very bright. Shocking that people would listen to a word, let alone pay MONEY for it.

Cosmic Connie said...

Sadly, Anon, people seem to be willing to believe or listen to anything. Whether she's very bright or not, the fact that she has followers who are willing to give money to her says as much about them as it does about her.