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As Spotlight Wins Oscar, Silence Surrounds Ex-rabbi Marc Gafni’s Alleged Misdeeds

By Nancy Levine
Wear Your Voice
February 29, 2016

http://wearyourvoicemag.com/more/social-justice/marc-gafni-sexual-assault/



The movie Spotlight won Oscar awards for best picture and best original screenplay at Sunday evening’s 82nd annual Academy Award presentation.

On the red carpet before the Oscar telecast, actor Mark Ruffalo, who played Boston Globe reporter Mike Rezendes in the movie, told ABC’s Robin Roberts:

“It’s still happening today. I was at a protest today in Los Angeles at the Cathedral with the SNAP group, with the survivors of priest sexual abuse. They were telling me that every day they have more and more people coming out of the darkness to tell their stories of sexual abuse by priests. And the more that happens, the closer we get to actually healing this wound, I think.”

Indeed, those stories continue to come forward. On December 25, 2015, The New York Times reported former rabbi Marc Gafni’s admission of sexual engagement with a minor, and Whole Foods CEO John Mackey’s position on Gafni’s nonprofit board of directors:

“He [Gafni] added, ‘She was 14 going on 35 … ‘”

“A co-founder of Whole Foods, John Mackey … is a chairman of the executive board of Mr. Gafni’s center … “

The Monterey County Weekly subsequently reported former NAACP Ben Jealous’s membership on Gafni’s board of directors:

“Another board member is Ben Jealous, a Seaside native and former president of the NAACP from 2008-12, is also listed as a member of the board of the Center for Integral Wisdom. (Jealous did not respond to earlier requests from the Weekly for this story.)”

Sara Kabakov was the 14-year old girl whom Gafni referred to in the Times story as “going on 35.” After the Times story broke, she came forward publicly for the first time. Her first-person essay appeared in the Forward, relating how she was abused while a teenager under Gafni’s tutelage.

A number of media outlets followed up on the Times story, but public outcry was mostly from the Jewish community, where Gafni has been a lightning rod for years. Rabbi David Ingber posted a petition authored by 100 rabbis on Change.org, urging Mackey and Whole Foods to cut ties with Gafni. Rabbi Ingber told The Jewish Week that as Gafni “rises in the New Age world, he continues to act with impunity. We in the Jewish community didn’t do enough years ago. We could have prevented many of the more recent victims.”

Gafni’s CIW website was soon scrubbed of all board members’ profiles. These screenshots of Mackey and Jealous on Gafni’s CIW Executive Board of Directors were taken on January 3, 2016:

 

 

 

 

 




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