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Wednesday, October 22, 2014

NAVEL-gazing with Lenny Coldwell: every health expo needs a keynote ranter

Be sure to see the updates on October 25 and 28.
~CC

So there's this alt-health expo coming up in the Long Island, NY area this coming Sunday, October 26, 2014, at the Huntington Hilton in Melville. It's the 22nd NAVEL Wellness Expo, NAVEL being an acronym for Nutrition, Aesthetics, Vitality, Efficacy, Life. The man behind the NAVEL is one Alex Lubarsky, who also seems to be a long time friend and admirer of imprisoned serial scammer Kevin Trudeau, aka KT, aka Katie.

And guess who the keynote squeaker is going to be at the NAVEL Expo? Not-doctor Leonard Coldwell, the stupidest man in Scamworld, ex-b.f.f. of Katie, and nutcake extraordinaire.
 
Here's a PDF of the Expo magazine featuring Lenny. His story is on pages 14-15. You will note that the writer continually refers to Coldwell as a doctor, implying he has true medical expertise. But Coldwell is not a doctor; all of his "degrees" are from diploma mills, and his claims about being a medical doctor/naturopath back in Germany are unsubstantiated.

Purple prose about a pink-shirted little lunatic.
The onstage pic of Coldwell was actually taken
at a Kevin Trudeau GIN event;
there's no evidence that Coldwell has ever been able
to draw so large a crowd on his own merits.

The blurb in the speaker lineup (page 7) mentions Coldwell's story about curing his mommy of Stage IV liver cancer, but curiously enough, has no mention of the Hep C:
...Join renowned naturopath Dr. Leonard Coldwell, who is the author of 19 bestselling books, including The Only Answer to Cancer, who cured his own mother of Stage IV Liver Cancer when he was only 13 years old, as he shares how to regain power and control over your health and learn how to manage and eliminate pain in the most effective way.
Anyway. Some people were concerned that Alex Lubarsky might be compromising his business and personal credibility, and the greater message of natural cures and alt-health, by promoting Coldwell. A thread was initiated on the NAVEL Wellness Expo page on October 18. I did not initiate the thread but was one of the most enthusiastic participants, though of course not the only one. I wrote nothing that I haven't written on my very public blog and on the public Facebook forum GIN Network Truth. I stand by everything I write.

In response to the critical comments about Coldwell, Alex mounted a spirited defense of his choice of keynote speaker, and seemed to be more willing to focus on attacking the critics than to listening to their arguments. But at least Alex allowed dissent -- unlike his loony-tunes keynote speaker does on his forums -- for which I give Alex all due credit. Follow the link -- here it is again -- and you can read it all for yourself, since it is a public page. Be sure to expand all of the individual comments and all of the replies to those comments. (A shorter thread on the same topic also appears here.) [Note: See October 25 and October 28 updates at the end of this post. ~CC] 

Lenny had a response to the discussion on the NAVEL Expo page as well. But he didn't take it to the small little corner of the NAVEL Expo page where the two threads appear (and I should stress that they do not show up on the main timeline; you have to look on the left-hand side of the page to find them, and you have to expand them to see all of the comments). Instead, Lenny took it to his own personal Facebook page, which has thousands of followers, and to his buddy Abe Husein's page. I have to hand it to Abe; even he seems to be getting sick of Coldwell's crazy rants. Rather than flooding you with more verbiage, here are some pretty pictures from October 19, 2914. Click to enlarge, of course.



You should be able to read Coldwell's post pretty clearly if you click on the picture and zoom in. But just in case you can't, here is a closeup of that post, with my personal data redacted.


On the same evening he posted that screed on his main page, Lenny posted two short porno fantasies on Abe Husein's page.


Facebook removed that post from Lenny's main page, in response to complaints from me and from a few of my friends. After I sent him a private message, Abe removed the shorter posts from his page. Good for Abe.

 It's important to know that I have not and do not complain about every post Coldwell writes about me...
...only those that list my home address and phone number and that seem like clear attempts to get his craziest fans to deal with me. But the way Coldwell whines, you'd think that Facebook is just out to get him and that I'm behind a lot of that. And his fans eat that story up, not even questioning him. He has even falsely claimed that I have some sort of "connection" with Facebook and am responsible for getting his posts deleted and for Facebook's threats to ban him.
 
The truth is that I have had a hell of a time in the past getting Facebook to take down Coldwell's posts that endanger me. But this time Facebook actually responded, removing not only the October 19 post from Coldwell's main page, but also a long screed from July 17 and August 30 (Coldwell had also published my home address and private cell phone number on those two posts). In the past, Facebook had refused to remove them after several requests, but this time they did.

And it's about time.

Of course, Coldwell is whining about it now. This is from this evening, October 22:



Lenny, although you are trying every devious and dangerous way possible to shut me up, I actually fully support your right to free speech. I don't care how many wackadoodle "cures" you write about, how many crazy conspiracy theories you push, how many misogynistic or anti-Jewish or homophobic remarks you make on your social media pages. I don't report those to Facebook. I make fun of a lot of them but I don't report them.

I don't even care if you continue to promote that anti-Jewish nutcake "Brother Nathanael," as you often do on your Facebooks. Presumably you share BroNate's vision of "an America that is Christian in its consciousness and wholesome in its culture" (and hates Jews, of course)... although putting you and "wholesome" in the same thought cycle is kind of a stretch.



Heck, I don't even care if you call me an AIDS-infected prostitute/tumor on society who's being paid by Big Pharma to discredit you; or if you say I am sexually obsessed with you and that I killed your dog because you rejected me, although much of that is the type of defamatory speech that is clearly not protected by your cherished First Amendment. But the truth is that all of those silly, childish, junior-high lies just make you look stupider, crazier, and less credible. You're hanging yourself with them.

I do, however, care when you post my personal information and invite your crazy fans to "get in touch with me." Because when you do that, you are endangering me. And I will continue to report each and every one of those posts as they are made known to me (of course I cannot see them myself, since you have me blocked). 

I will also continue to complain to Facebook when you post pictures of my friends, such as Bernie O'Mahony, and falsely accuse them of being child rapists.

Even as I fully support your right to (most) hate speech and crazy talk, though, I fully support my own right -- and that of other critics -- to say something about your hate speech and crazy talk, and to ask questions about your phony credentials, dodgy past, and unbelievable cure claims.

In other words, Lenny, I have just as much of a right to be here as you -- perhaps even more, since I'm not a scammer or alleged predator. And I am not going to shut up. I am not going to go away.

As for you, Alex, I wish you well with your health expo. Let's just hope your loony little keynoter doesn't alienate too many audience members. Try keeping him away from the bourbon, at least until after his speech is over.

Updates, 25 October 2014:
Other conversations about Coldwell's NAVEL Health Expo appearance
First off, in the interests of total accuracy, I need to say that contrary to what I stated above, there is one group of critical comments about Coldwell that currently appear on the main timeline of the NAVEL Expo page. I didn't discover these comments until October 24. But even though the thread itself was initiated by the page owner on October 12, the first critical comments did not appear until October 20, and it was on October 19 that Coldwell published his scurrilous posts about my "defamation" of him in conjunction with his NAVEL Expo keynote appearance. Clearly he was referring to the October 18 threads, which I linked to above: the longer thread and a shorter one.

In addition, over the past few days I have written comments on several public forums about Coldwell's upcoming appearance at the NAVEL Health Expo:
As I noted, these are public forums and anyone, including Coldwell, can respond to the comments on those forums.

Coldwell's additional responses to having his abusive Facebook posts taken down  
I had suspected that the October 22 screen shot I shared above -- the post in which Coldwell whined that Facebook is constantly deleting his posts -- would not be his last word about the matter. And I was right. As per usual, he worked his conspiracy obsessions into his whine-fest, reiterating his claim that Facebook is owned by the CIA, and insinuating that Facebook has targeted him because of posts such as the cop-kills-dog post/petition plea he shared, rather than totally abusive posts such as those I displayed above. 
 



He also had to make things personal again, zeroing in on his critics -- particularly "Horny Connie" and "Maloony" (that would be Bernie O'Mahony).





I can't speak for Bernie "and Co.", but I for one was touched and flattered by the announcement that Loony Lenny Coldwell is writing a book about moi. It seems that you just can't keep a good idiot down. Even though that whole porn-site idea was dead in the water, he is still determined to get the "truth" out. Over the years, I've had poems and songs and breathtakingly beautiful pieces of prose written about me, but never a whole book! Ron and I and our legal team hope it will be a smashing bestseller.

Update, 28 October 2014:
Lenny returned triumphant -- at least in his own mind -- from the NAVEL Wellness Expo, as indicated on a thread he initiated yesterday.




"...every time Horny Connie and Maloony assault the event provider with their slanderous posts the event gets twice as big. Evil never has a chance." Ha.

I guess evil really is in the eye of the beholder. I suppose, though, that if you're an evil little man, everyone who questions your evil is evil in your eyes. In truth, no critics "assaulted" any event owner. I've already mentioned that in the days leading up to the NAVEL Wellness Expo, some of us participated on public Facebook forums and conversations with the owner of the Expo, Alex Lubarsky. (I even provided links to each thread.)

In any case, Bernie wrote about Coldwell's post-Expo ranting on this post on GINtruth, and he covered just about all of the bases, including the false claim that "Horny Connie, Maloony and Co." tried to sabotage the Trinidad event Coldwell infested in April of this year. This isn't the first time that Lenny has falsely claimed that the alleged "co-conspirators" tried to trash the Trinidad love-fest. Here's an exchange that took place in July of this year, in the wake of Coldwell's claim that I poisoned his dog. Monique M. Hackett is the sister of Uchenna Hatchett, aka "Dr. Livet," who hosted the Trinidad event.




I can say with reasonable assurance that nobody in my circle of friends ever "threatened to destroy" Uchenna/"Dr. Livet." Some of us may have questioned his choice of keynoters, even as we questioned Alex Lubarsky's. But I have nothing against Uchenna himself. I like a man with dreads.

At any rate I'd like to take a closer look at Coldwell's claims that Bernie and I made "countless" defamatory posts to harm Alex's Expo. I went back again and looked on each one of those threads, and actually counted the number of posts written by Bernie and by me. Far from being "countless," they were in fact quite easy to count. And I'm hardly a math genius. Here's the pre-Expo tally; permalinks to individual threads are embedded in the bulleted items:

I'm not against your expo, far from it! Events like yours can be extremely useful and helpful to visitors. But you're touting a known charlatan as your headlining speaker! He has no real degrees (the honorary one coming from an unaccredited establishment) and cannot provide even the simplest of evidence regarding his cancer cure claims! All he does is quote the work of real doctors, and tout his own ghost written books as "best sellers"! Is it so difficult for you to accept he is not who he says he is? He has hurt many people. I saw him on the GIN cruise in 2012, and he was vulgar and rude, even in front of children! Having him at this event is a risk you're willing to take, obviously.

3 "likes": Connie Schmidt, Julie Daniel and Alex Lubarsky
That's right: Despite prior arguments he'd had with Bernie, Alex himself was one of those who "liked" Bernie's statement regarding some of the objectionable things about Coldwell. Wow.

Here's the screen shot:

Alex also "liked" a comment on that same thread by Julie Daniel, who wrote, "Thank you for your time, and I hope your expo goes well, and having Coldwell on board doesn't ruin it too much for you."

But back to the "countless" comments tally. In the interests of full disclosure I will once again mention the comments about Lenny and the NAVEL appearance that I posted on the following three forums:
So let's run those numbers. I wrote a total of 17 comments about Lenny and the NAVEL Wellness Expo on various threads on the NAVEL Wellness Expo Facebook page, and 5 additional comments about the same topic on three other forums. That's 22 comments from Connie about the Expo's infamous keynoter. Then, of course, there's this blog post.

And Bernie? Besides his blog post about the topic of Lenny and the NAVEL Wellness Expo, which he posted after the fact, Bernie wrote a total of 16 comments, most of which appeared on Alex Lubarsky's own page, and at least one of which Alex liked.

Between Bernie and me, we wrote a total of 38 comments about Lenny and the NAVEL Wellness Expo on forums outside of our own blogs. That hardly constitutes "countless." But then, Coldwell has always been innumerate. Perhaps to him, anything over one or two is "countless."

As for Alex Lubarsky, post-show he published a few comments on his own page about the show's success, but so far, as I write this, there's only one post about Coldwell: an odd little 10-second vid snippet on which it is difficult to tell whether Coldwell is babbling about talking to a 16-year-old "very heavy" girl on the phone, or "very happy" girl on the phone. For various reasons I don't really like to think about Coldwell and 16-year-olds girls, but in any case, perhaps someone will soon post a longer snippet, or the entire presentation, so I can get it in context. For now, here's that odd little link about an odd little man.[Update: A few days later Alex Lubarsky posted a series of photos about Coldwell's "inspriring" talk and book signing. ~CC]

"Help! Help! I'm being repressed!" redux
Meanwhile, Coldwell continues to enjoy whine with his cheesiness, carrying on his "Facebook is out to get me" meme, as indicated on this very brief October 28 blog post on his main site. On that post he displays a warning he received about violating Facebook's Terms of Use, though I suspect that the shot he shows on the post is but one of numerous warnings. Generally Facebook will let the user know which specific post(s) have been complained about, and my guess is that Coldwell has scads of specific examples that have nothing to do with "the truth of the Cancer Industry, Natural Health, or World Events." Instead I suspect that they have to do with his actionable lies about his various critics -- here is but one of numerous examples -- and his clear attempts to incite wrath and violence against them.

I submitted a comment to Lenny's blog post, but I'm sure he won't publish it. Just in case he tries to convince any of you that I am writing abusive or harassing posts to his blog, though, here's a screen shot of the comment I tried to submit:



As I've noted before, the three posts I complained about to Facebook were on Coldwell's main Facebook page. Many of you may not be able to get to the page at all because he has you blocked (I can't get to it myself, but a friend had provided it some time ago for some documentation I was putting together). And many of you who can get to the page may not be able to see any recent posts at all, due to his paranoid privacy settings.

In any case, if any of Coldwell's pages are in danger of being blocked or canceled, I would imagine it is that main page. And I maintain that it is because of his clearly abusive posts about others -- which several folks have reported -- not because of his ramblings about cancer or natural healing or world events.

First off, there are these two; they've been around a while:
He has used both of those pages to share some of his abusive posts about Bernie and me and others, including the posts about his dog, where he published his pornographic fantasies about me as well as my personal information. Fortunately one of the admins for those pages removed those posts at my request and apologized for their being up there. However, she told me she did not have admin privileges for his main page. It took Facebook to remove the abusive posts from that page.
There's also the Dr. Coldwell Opinion Radio Facebook page, which is used not only to promote his weekly "radio" show but also to expound upon various topics, mostly health or motivational related.

Then there are some newer Facebook pages:
  • This "Business Person" page was created on September 9 and looks as if it is maintained by someone from his lame, bargain-basement SEO service. Some of the posts link to some very new, obviously SEO blogs. (For more info about Lenny's SEO efforts and absurd new blogs, see this post, under "Strategy number 4: Lame SEO tricks.")
    Of note, s    omeone from Slovenia asked for medical advice on September 27; there is no public answer so far. It's a little disturbing that many people apparently think he is a real doctor and continue to seek medical advice from him.
  • This "Writer" page was created on September 18 and appears to have been abandoned after September 23, but it still has a sprinkling of English-challenged posts singing the praises of IBMS and naturopathic medicine. He can always revive it if he needs to.
  • This "Public Figure" page was created on October 23, with the apparent purpose not so much of dispensing medical advice but rather of showing how deeply and widely loved "Dr." C is. A post I wrote actually remained up there for several days, but now seems to be gone. See pic below. And -- no big surprise here -- I am no longer allowed to write on that page. Help, I'm being repressed now too!

That's a total of at least five other Facebook pages where Coldwell is perfectly free to dispense his "health advice" and his rants about world events, unchallenged (although if he publishes abusive posts on those pages about me or some of my friends I will continue to report him). In short, in case you hadn't already figured it out, Lenny Coldwell is just whining to get more sympathy and to push his newsletter and other content/frauducts/flopportunities. Scamworld gurus alternate between boasting and whining; that's how they work.

Whatever happens, I have no doubt that Coldwell will continue to flog the theme of himself as the alt-health hero/martyr, because that is the basis of his entire shtick. He's so Gollum; he's the one perpetrating the evil, but it's always "the fat Hobbit tried to kill us!"

Or maybe a better comparison would be Coldwell's ex-b.f.f., Kevin Trudeau, who is doing the same thing even now, from behind bars. "The government is out to get me because I dared to tell the truth!"

The facts don't matter if the story is good.

More LoonyC, if you can stand it...
A five-part Whirled series that most likely inspired some of Lenny's latest and lamest SEO efforts:
The story of how I did NOT kill Lenny's pit bull dog Blue, but got blamed for it anyway (how crazy is that?):
OMT...
My favorite doc blogger Orac (Dr. David Gorski) finally wrote a full post on Lenny (who previously had only been mentioned in the comments section of one of his cancer-quack posts).
at 14 comments:

Wednesday, October 08, 2014

James Arthur Ray: Full blood moon

I'm not normally an early riser by choice, but I made an effort to get up early today to see the full blood moon -- the lunar eclipse that turned the moon, if not bloody, at least a rusty reddish-orange. Trees were in the way, so Ron and I drove a little way down the lane towards the back pastures until we were able to get an unobstructed view. Clouds teased us and tried to hide that big red moon, but we did get some tantalizing glimpses, rendered larger by one of Ron's rifle scopes, though no pictures. That's okay; there are plenty of pictures all over the Interwebz. After our brief sky-watching adventure we came back home and I wanted to go back to sleep for a while, but couldn't.

I couldn't sleep because there was another matter that occupied my thoughts: the fact that today, October 8, 2014, is the five-year anniversary of James Arthur Ray's Death Lodge in Sedona, Arizona. This was the grueling "ceremony" in a phony sweat lodge that took the lives of James Shore and Kirby Brown that day, and the life of a third participant, Liz Neuman, nine days later.

And Ray, the sociopathic, egotistical New-Wage guru who skyrocketed to rockstar status in his industry after he was in The Secret, was convicted of three counts of felony negligent homicide for the three deaths in Sedona. He ended up serving less than two years in an Arizona prison. He has been back out for more than a year now, trying to rebuild his scampire, as discussed at various times on this Whirled: e.g., here and here and (more recently) here.

Although many people -- and I'm one of them -- believe that justice has not really been served in these deaths, Ray is whining that he "lost everything," and seems to be trying to build his shtick around his heroic efforts to overcome the losses he suffered. Take a look at the "About Us" page on his web site, and you'll see.

A fourth death, not covered quite as much as those in Sedona, was that of Colleen Conaway during a San Diego James Ray event in July 2009. Colleen fell to her death from a third-story balcony in a San Diego shopping mall, and when Ray found out about it he reportedly made every effort to keep her death from the other participants, and partied on through the night as if nothing had happened. I've recently been informed that there finally was some civil "justice" of sorts for Colleen's death, but that, I believe, is Salty Droid's story to tell and I will let him tell you when he gets a moment. (He's busy these days, and in good ways. He hasn't been blogging too much lately, but I am pretty sure that we haven't heard the last of Jason Michael Jones.)

Every year since Sedona happened I have commemorated the sad anniversary of the event (here is last year's effort), though never with the length and depth of my first anniversary post, which was framed around Connie Joy's disturbing insider's account, Tragedy In Sedona: My Life in James Arthur Ray's Inner Circle. But I know full well that my blog posts, and all of the other hundreds of posts about Ray's atrocities, his trial, his imprisonment, and his activities since his release, haven't made much of a dent in his scampire or indeed in Scamworld at large. Even the exhaustive coverage by Salty Droid, the excellent coverage by alt-media such as The Verge, and the decent coverage by mainstream media such as ABC haven't stopped the big sick machine from rolling on.

Death Ray seems to be a perfect metaphor for the seeming futility of muckraking efforts in this area; after all, he is out and running free, spreading his inspirational wisdumb about living an "epic" life, telling people they should accept that death is but an illusion... and a Facebook buddy of mine says that at the recent Global Information Network (GIN) Family Reunion, James Ray propaganda packets were being passed out to early registrants. Why am I not surprised?

GIN, as you may recall, was founded by now-imprisoned serial scammer Kevin Trudeau, long a Whirled favorite, and was recently taken over by a cartel of Kevin's long-time buddies. Some have suggested that Trudeau still actually owns GIN and that the members of his crony cartel are proxies, but whether that's true or not, Kevin continues to benefit from GIN, even from Unca Sam's sleepaway camp in Montgomery.

And Trudeau of course still has his loyal fawning fans. Even James Ray has his loyalists, many of whom just don't seem to care about those inconvenient little deaths. True to Scamworld tradition, Trudeau and Ray have done their share of mutual stroking-off, as noted on this blog several times (such as here). Trudeau has spoken out publicly in defense of Ray, and Ray, even while in prison, promoted Trudeau's Your Wish Is Your Command CD set, which was the upsell for GIN. Trudeau is behind bars and Ray is limping along, but their legacies live on.

And this isn't even to mention the thousands of other scams and scammers of Scamworld; they're all going on without missing a beat, despite occasional half-hearted attempts by the FTC or FDA or some other alphabet agency to fart in their general direction. It doesn't seem to matter in the the long run. The FTC seemed all cool with GIN being sold to Kevin Trudeau's buds in May. Another case in point is the recent news of a former FTC regulator, Pamela Jones Harbour, who was recently hired by scummy scam Herbalife to lead their "compliance team." And Herbalife's stock jumped after the appointment was announced. There's a good discussion about this matter on Salty's August 4 Herbalife post. Wrote a regular SD commenter named Barbara, addressing Ms. Harbour: "How do you sleep at night knowing the Herbalife paycheck you just casedd was money squeezed from the poorest people on the planet?"

It's enough to frustrate any muckraker.

I keep my own frustration level relatively low for the most part by keeping my expectations in line. To begin with, I've never had any particular end in mind with my blog; initially I set out to entertain and occasionally inform, and that's still pretty much my goal. I don't have any lofty goals such as trying to drive a particular scam or scammer out of business, despite the lunatic ranting of the stupidest man in Scamworld, Mocktor Leonard Coldwell, ex-b.f.f. of Trudeau. (Coldwell is making mighty -- and mighty comical -- efforts to bury me (as well as a few other bloggers) with SEO, but the Googles seem to be wise to his tricks for the most part. He can put up a thousand poorly written, repetitive, English-challenged blogs with the tag "sexual predator" (all in an effort to negate the buzz that Leonard Coldwell is a sexual predator)... he can get my content swallowed into irrelevant aggregation machines till the cows come home... and for that matter, he can make up all of the totally insane lies he wants to about me sexually harassing him and killing his dog... but I am not going away. I'll just keep on writing as it suits me. I'll keep my long, detailed posts about him right where they are and I will not even go out of my way to promote them. People do find their way here, it seems.)

One thing we can all do -- particularly where James Arthur "Death" Ray is concerned -- is to make sure that nobody ever forgets what he did. I've said this before and I will no doubt say it again. Do what you can to spread awareness: through social media, through blogging, through peaceful protest at live events. And if you are in the self-help industry, consider signing the pledge offered by SeekSafely, the organization founded by Kirby Brown's family. Very few have signed the pledge so far, and no "big names" have bothered to do so. There's a message there.

The blood moon was a little bit of razzle-dazzle that made us all look up to the sky for a while, but to everyone except the mystics and End-Timers it is old news now; the moon is in its waning phase and goodness knows that there are other, literally bloody things to occupy our attention down on the ground, the Ebola scare and war threats being just a few of them. Some have told me that there are more important things to worry about than a few dead followers of a New-Wage guru who has seen better days. To the loved ones of those followers, though, Death Lodge will never be old news. San Diego will never be old news. It's up to the rest of us to let all of them know that even though the media move on to the next big story, we will never forget. My heart goes out to the families of Kirby, James S., Liz... and Colleen.

Never forget.


Related on this Whirled:

at 4 comments: