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The clean test Charmin Ultra Strong Charmin Ultra Strong with Diamond Weed Texture cleans better than the leading one plaid brand so you can use less Enjoy the go with charming Please note that in this episode we'll be talking about sexual abuse and violence which could be triggering for some listeners. Please listen at your own discretion. Early on the morning of September 7, 2006, Anapaula set off for the Casa like she had done every day for weeks. We heard her story in episode one. She had been staying in a woman run inn near the Casa so she could go there to help heal her father's cancer. This morning she sat down to meditate in front of her father's photo as usual.
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I remember wearing flip flops and taking the picture of my father attaching it to the back of the chair in front of me. I closed my eyes, started meditating, took off my flip flops because I was always barefoot there. The floor people said that the energy on the floor was a very good energy and I just kind of went with the flow. People said don't wear underwear because they can cut off energy. So I would wear a skirt down to my feet. I would wear pants, but sometimes, many times, I wouldn't wear underwear.
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The official recommendation was not to wear any tight clothing, especially around your waist, which many people interpreted to include underwear. If I walked into a place of worship and heard this was a requirement, I'd say no thanks. But we have to take many steps back to understand why it didn't register as weird for the followers at the Casa or for Anapaula. Remember that at the core of spiritism is the power of your energy. It's your connection to God and all of your past lives and it can determine your health and well being. Think of it as your soul and through prayer and meditation you can help clear any bad energy that might be making you sick or even your family sick. So if that was core to your spiritual beliefs, you might do anything you could to make it easier for healers to access your energy. Even when they say it helps not to wear underwear. Then maybe you think about what it took to get to this spiritual hospital where you're surrounded by kind and reasonable people just like you. Lawyers, doctors, Teachers who all seem to be following these rules without question. So if everyone around you is going along, why wouldn't you? Anapaula was not going to do anything that could put her father's healing at risk. So she followed most recommendations to the letter. She always wore white to make her aura lighter and easier to read. She avoided crossing her legs or her arms while she was at the casa. She didn't wear any metal like jewelry or a watch, and she held a crystal while she meditated.
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So I was there, barefoot, with my feet on the ground with all that energy, the energy of the place, with my eyes closed. And I felt a hand on my shoulder. When I opened my eyes, it was John of God.
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He signaled for her to go with him, so she stood up and followed him to his office.
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I've been to his office several times. Never alone. He would even close the door. But this time I went alone. And as soon as I got in, he not only closed it, but he locked it with the key. At that moment, I felt bad and he said he was going to do healing work for my father. He asked me to turn with my back facing him. I turned around. I closed my eyes. But I wasn't feeling well. There.
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Now, before Anna Paula said any of this, I told her she would get to decide how much she wanted to say about what happened next. There you can hear me tell her in Spanish that we really didn't want her to relive anything. She didn't want to. But I said, I also want to provide a space for you to share whatever you feel comfortable saying. I thought Anapaula would take a moment to think it over, but she didn't hesitate. Immediately she answered.
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I say that I was a victim of John of God. I'm not anymore. And that's true. Other victims also say that because we are survivors and we move on. So today I don't have any problem touching on that subject. I know that the more I say, the more I tell, the more I am somehow empowering other victims, not only of John of God, but of other abusers. So today I have no problem talking about what happened to me.
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So this is the story Anapaula wants to share with the world for herself and for others. It's her way of making sure you, whoever's listening, knows this.
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I'm not in pain anymore. It doesn't hurt anymore. I am much more than the harm he did to me.
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From exactly right media and adonde media, this is two faced John of God. I'm your host, Martina Castro Episode 3 the treatment that moment when John of God locked the door to his office wasn't the first time Ana Paula got a weird feeling about him. Months before, a young American man who was assisting her father had asked her.
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If I was afraid of John of God. If John of God had ever done something with me or tried something with me. I remember him saying that I should promise him that I wouldn't go to John of God's room alone.
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She thought it was a bit odd that this man insisted so much on this. But she agreed. Anytime she went to John of God's office, she made sure she was accompanied by someone else.
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I had no idea what really happened.
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In there until this day in September 2006, when, maybe because of the holiday or because she was caught off guard, she does end up in Joao's office, alone with him. And when she hears him lock the door, she starts to wonder if this is what her father's assistant had been talking about.
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I remember my eyes closed. I felt him running his hands over my shoulder, putting his hands over my head, putting his hands on my ass, on my breasts. And when I turn around, his pens were already open. His penis was erect. He has an armchair in his office. So he sat in that armchair and put my hand on his penis and so on. I remember that at that moment I froze. I just froze. I couldn't react. And I fell to the ground. You know, when you lose your strength. I remember that I slipped. And he came like an animal on top of me. And then I just couldn't. I couldn't defend myself. I couldn't get rid of him. I remember when it was over in the bathroom, him washing himself, then me washing myself. And I remember that he took me back to the place where my flip flops were and the photo of my father. And he immediately said the prayer of Caritas and began conducting spiritual surgeries. I was there, sitting in that chair with his mail, with his ejaculation on me. I couldn't concentrate. And then I couldn't keep my eyes closed. I just wanted to run away from there. And his smell on me. I remember it's very strong. He uses a specific brand of soap, so it's a strong smell. And to this day I can't use that brand. I feel immediately sick. That was the first time.
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Anabala didn't sit there long. She stood up and ran back to the inn where she was staying. When she found the woman who owned the inn, she told her what had happened.
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I was crying a lot. I was Very nervous. I told her what he had done to me and she slapped me and told me to shut up.
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Anabaula was in shock. This was a woman she trusted. She didn't know what else to do. So she decided to go back to the casa to see if she could talk to one of the volunteers there.
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I was crying a lot. A volunteer came, hugged me, took me to the infirmary. And then another woman, the nurse. I told her what had happened to me. And she told me to be quiet because the gringa had said something similar a month before and disappeared. Don't you want your father to be well? Be quiet. Be quiet, Paulinha. Be quiet.
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Anna Paula was dumbfounded. She had just been raped by John of God. But everyone she went to for help threatened her or told her to forget about it. She tried one more time to report it to someone else at the Casa, someone with more power there. But again she was faced with an incredible response.
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I reported it to the wife of this influential volunteer who told me that it was part of the spiritual work for him to penetrate me.
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When Anapaula realized that no one was on her side, she decided she just had to leave Abadianya. So she went to her father's room and begged him to go with her. He agreed, but first he said he wanted to say goodbye to John of God. She didn't have the heart to tell him what Joao had just done to her. So she changed out of her white clothes and agreed to take her father back to the Casa to say goodbye. Once there, in her normal street clothes, she got in line with him to see John of God, or the Medium, as she calls him.
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Even before my turn, the medium had an eye on me. When I arrived, he asked why I was dressed like that. He told me to go talk to him in his office.
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He told her to return to the very place where he had just raped her. She thought twice about it and then she went.
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Because what else could happen to me? Nothing. All had happened already. So I went. I went to his office, I questioned, I confronted him. In a way, I told John of God that he couldn't do that to me. I told him, I'm here for my father. You can't do that to me. I remember I sat on the couch and crossed my legs because he gave the order not to cross your legs at the Casa de Dominacio. So I made it very clear that I wasn't there in the vibe of the house, right? And then I remember he started saying, no, it's because you represent your Father, it's all done on you. Your father's treatment uses your energy because you have a lot of energy. Life energy, sexual energy, healing energy.
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And then John of God said something that cut straight through all of her anger, all of her indignation and all of her pain.
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He said I was the reason for that cancer, what caused my father's illness. The reason my father was there dying.
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Imagine how hard it must be to hear something like that. You are the cause of your father dying. Joao went on to tell her that in their past lives, Anapaula and her father had been in a dispute that had to do with Anapaula. So her father's illness was a punishment in this life for this previous experience. However painful it was to hear this, it made sense to Anapaula according to her beliefs.
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He said he was going to cure my father. Nobody told me they were going to cure my father. No doctor, neurologist, neurosurgeon, no one said they could cure him. But he said, I'm going to cure your father. You don't understand. This is a healing treatment. And your energy, you represent your father. And I believed it. I wanted to believe it because I didn't want to lose my father. So I believed it. He said that I had to go to his office to do these treatments. And I went. I was already 22 years old then. Today I'm 42.
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Right at this moment in the interview, the studio engineer in Brazil interrupts us to say that the computer all of a sudden shut down. The recording of the entire interview up to that point, including Anapala's description of Joo's abuse was erased.
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It's funny that something like this always happens when it's John of God or a light is missing or something burns or the audio stops. You get used to it because it's always like this. The computers failed. It's incredible. Incredible. Incredible, isn't it, Malaya?
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Thankfully, we always have a backup recording running just in case, so we laugh it off. To be fair, power outages are common where the studio is located, so it's not exactly surprising that this happened. But to hear how quickly Anapaola blamed it on John of God shows how much she still believes in his power to do something like that, even so many years later. Anabaula isn't deterred, though. She looks a little rattled, but continues her story and tells me about the months she spent undergoing this treatment. She says she came to see it as the sacrifice required of her in order for her father to have a chance at recovery. Until it became very clear that it was all a l. For months in late 2006 and early 2007, Anapaula lived in Abadiania and was subjected to regular sexual abuse by John of God.
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And the whole time, it was the healing energy. He kept saying that I had a lot of healing energy, not just to cure my father. He implied that he even used my energy to cure other people as well. And I believed it because I didn't want to lose my father.
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Anapaula's faith, one she held her whole life, was a faith in the power of spirits and of prayer to make the seemingly impossible possible. But now the moment came when her faith couldn't hold on any longer.
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A week before my father passed away, John of God told me and my sister that he would start my father's cure until the last moment. I believe that when a man picked up my father in Annapolis to take him to rio. And then two, three days later, on a Sunday, 10:00pm, 8:00pm, my father dies. I think it was 10:00pm he passed away. That's the time it actually ended, because right up to the last second, I believed it.
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That's when the story John of God had been telling her about her energy, his power, his confidence that he would cure her father, all of it went up in smoke.
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That's when I began to become aware that those spiritual treatments were actually abused. And then I had to deal with the death of my father. I also had to deal with the pain of telling my husband that I had been raped several times. And it was really painful. It was really painful. Everything I went through afterwards was really, really painful.
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Anna Paula spent the next decade in mourning and recovery. She went to therapy and slowly tried to find answers to very difficult questions that kept coming up for her. How could she have let this man abuse her so many times? How could she have let her belief in him make her so blind to what he was doing?
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I don't know. Or was it fanaticism, Idolatry? I don't know. One thing I do know that Joan of God is not of God. He's not of God. God wasn't there anymore.
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Ana Paola had to reconstruct so much in the years following her father's death. The sexual abuse nearly ended her marriage, and she had to move to another city for fear that John of God would find her. She's also still working on rebuilding her relationship with her faith.
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I got to the point of being kind of mad at God, you know, Today I have no religion. Today I do follow some things that I believe because I believe in reincarnation. It's so natural to me that I can't think of it in any other way. So this isn't something they put in my head, just like there's no other way. Do you understand? But I don't have any religion.
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However much Ana Paula needed to focus on herself, she didn't lose sight of the injustice of what had happened to her. For years, she did her best to denounce Joao.
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I heard countless rejections. Nobody wanted to take my case forward. No one supported me. No one. Nobody. Nobody wanted to face John of God, even though everyone said no. And everyone really, like every police officer, lawyer, prosecutor, everyone saying no. I didn't give up. What did I do? I went to my gynecologist. I reported what had happened. I have my medical record. I even have tests, including to find out if I had caught a sexually transmitted disease, anything. There's my entire medical record reporting everything I had been through.
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Anapaola says the lack of support did not deter her. In fact.
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My strength only increased. That force was there inside me. My father, he was a public defender, then he was a prosecutor. He became a judge. So there were several people that he helped. And every day, even at the end of his life, my father would wake up and take his bath, listening to songs, lots of, like, happy songs, and doing good and staying firm. If he. At the end of his life, he acted like that, helping people. Can you imagine if I'm not going to act the same way?
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Annapaola talks about helping people. Because denouncing Joao wasn't just about letting the world know what he had done to her. She knew there were others.
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I knew I wasn't the only one. When Wednesday arrived. Sometimes he harassed me, abused me. Early Wednesday. And then the care of caravans and buses would arrive and he would forget about me.
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That's because the Casa was open to visitors Wednesday through Friday, every week.
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Wednesday, Thursday. And I thanked God. I know what I'm going to say is horrible. Because new women showed up and he would leave me a bit alone. I didn't know exactly what he did with other women, but I could notice some things. Starting to notice that some women there, they cried with pain in their voice, like I cried.
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And then there was this woman one often saw at the Casa when she would stop by to see John of God. Every time this woman saw her, she would wrap a sheet around Anapaula, almost as if to try and protect her from. From Joao.
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When she wrapped me in that sheet, I knew she knew.
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But people knew long before this, before Anapauda ever set foot in Abadianya. Back in 2001, six years before Ana Paula visited the casa for the first time. Michael Baylot, the tour guide we met in episode one, remembers noticing something was off about Choao.
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Everybody wanted to be close to him, but you couldn't be close to this guy. He was totally aloof and he wasn't a friendly kind of person. People didn't make friends with Juan. They worked there. That was it.
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The Casa had been in operation for over two decades, and Michael had been living in Abadianya on and off for about a year. He remembers observing Joao while he was treating visitors in line.
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You weren't allowed to open your eyes to see what was happening. And it was monitored. And if you opened your eyes, you'd be thrown out of there. But while you were in the line, you had your eyes open because you had to walk. And I would open my eyes a lot when I was in there, you know, I'd just take a little peek.
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And he often saw Shawao sitting there in his throne like Chairman, looking rather bored.
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And he was always yawning and fidgeting. He wasn't in a trance, he wasn't in an altered state. He was just some guy in a chair playing God. But when a pretty young woman, particularly teenage women, were in the line, he'd perk up and his eyes would be glued on that person, even though there were 20 people in front of her. And when she'd get there, that person, he'd want to hold her hand, he'd pull her close to him and he'd say, you are a medium. You need to be trained to be a medium. And I'm going to have a private meeting with you to teach you how to be a medium. I began to get suspicious, you know, who is this guy really?
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Then Michael heard about a specific incident from one of the visitors who came to him for help.
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At this point, I'm one of the staff. And so there was an older man, a middle aged guy, and he was there with his 22 year old niece. And the niece had a problem with heroin addiction.
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The man goes on to tell Michael what happened to his niece.
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When this young lady came up to Juan, he took her hand and he had a towel in his lap. And he put her hand under the towel and slipped it into his unzipped trousers. And he had a full erection. And when she touched, she didn't know what. Jesus grabbed her and pulled it in there. He ejaculated on her hand. This was with hundreds of people all around, sitting there and people in the line. So afterwards, the two of them wanted to know, well, what happened.
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So Michael starts asking around.
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I asked the translator, he said, no, no, nothing like that ever happens. I never heard of such a thing.
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Michael then decides to confront Joel. Maybe there was some misunderstanding. Could this possibly be true? So he stands in line to talk with him. Once Michael is face to face with Joo, or the Medium, as he also calls him, Michael tells him what he heard. Joao fervently denies it, but.
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But everybody I asked, including Medium, were saying, but if something like that did happen, that was the cure for the person. The person needed that to happen, to get cured.
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These kinds of responses made Michael think there was something strange, even sinister, going on. And a lot of people were in on it.
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Si muyntas pesua sabio.
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Yes, a lot of people knew.
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Marcelo Stoduto, one of the Mediums who worked with Joo, confirmed during our interview that people at the Casa largely knew this was happening.
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Within these people, you heard from the most loyal collaborators, in the sense of being fanatic, loyal, in the sense of not questioning anything. They knew it, but for all purposes is either a rumor or it's gossip, or it's a distortion of someone who wants to take advantage and take money from Droam. So you had these people, some of them had coordinating positions in the house, and these people helped reinforce the blindness.
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But Marcelo says then there were people outside of the Casa who must have.
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Known voce pesoas the autograuge, influencia na socia diagnosis.
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You have people with a high degree of influence in society, high degree of power in society, and corrupt or corruptible enough to help support this process. And if there is any type of information, complaint, etc. If you try to go a little further, they are able to use legal means to placate and somehow erase these records, or archiving, as we like to say directly.
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And of course, there were also people who feel they were healed at the Gaza, who fervently believed in the power and sacredness of what was happening there. How could someone who had healed them and so many others do something this horrible? It just didn't make sense. So they went to great lengths to defend Joao and his healing abilities.
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We cried and prayed for an awakening, for an understanding, for a rethink of his attitudes. Of course, when we cried and prayed, we didn't know half of everything that was happening, of all the criminal implications that occurred.
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The way he characterizes Himself. Today, Marcelo seems to not have been in the group of people who were blind to what was happening, nor in the group fervently defending Joo. He's somewhere in between. On the one hand, Marcelo now says he knew something was off. He saw Joo have dramatic shifts in his mood, and he didn't like that Joo would pursue attention from celebrities and politicians. But Marcelo also claims he had transcendental experiences at the Casa, as did many others. And he convinced himself that a profane act did not undo the holy work of the sacred, acts that were also happening there.
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I knew about the harassment, and people ask, but why did you keep working knowing about harassment? Right. For a myriad of reasons, because harassment is not the entire work of the Kaza Gi Doy Nastu. These are some people chosen by him in the middle of this work to satisfy his imbalances from the physiological point of view. But they didn't hinder all the work that we did there, which had a magnitude, a very intense scope.
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A
Maybe this line of thinking is why so many people stayed silent about what they saw going on at the Casa.
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And maybe it's exactly because there was something bigger that that part could remain hidden for so long. Right, because it becomes a mixture between the sacred and the profane. And you no longer know when the sacred is prevailing or when the profane is behind the scenes being enabled by the sacred.
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A
That fuzzy line between the profane and the sacred was about to get a lot fuzzier in 2012. The same year Oprah visits the Casa, a series of events starts to take place that makes it harder to hide the dark side of our renowned healer. First, it comes to light that Joao was being investigated for manslaughter in a death that took place at the gassa back in 2003. Deaths weren't uncommon at the Casa. People were in many cases seeking spiritual healing as a last resort to cure terminal illnesses. But in the case of Javier Villarreal Bustus, who was from the us, one of his sisters told TV Globo that his death could have been avoided. He was suffering from AIDS when he sought out John of God. According to letters he wrote to his family, Joo told him to stop taking his medications. And soon after, Javier died. Later, in 2012, Joo was accused of sexually assaulting a 17 year old young woman in the small town where he had established a second spiritual hospital. The young woman's father was an influential man in the town, and he's rumored to have told Joao to leave and never come back or he would have him killed. So Joo shuts down the Casa there and never returns. But somehow, none of these events seem to deter Joo's community or movement from growing. He continues running the Casa as usual and to expand his reach via international events. In 2014, he returns to the Omega Institute in upstate New York, where he had held events on and off since 2007. That time, he is said to have treated 9,000 people over the course of three days. If anything slows him down, it's when he gets sick. In 2015, he discovers he has stomach cancer. In an interview with a Brazilian website called Veja, Joao says Doctors gave him five to 15 days to live. The reporter asks him if he's able to channel spirits to heal himself, and Joo gives a surprising response. There you hear him say, does a barber cut his own hair? I think everyone should go see a doctor first before coming to Abadiania. And that's what he did. Joo saw traditional Western medical doctors at one of the most exclusive hospitals in Sao Paulo. In 2016, Joao is declared cured and he returns to the CASA in Abadiana. Two years later, in May of 2018, the MeToo movement is in full swing in the US and a woman in Holland decides to share her MeToo moment in a Facebook post. In it, she says she was raped by John of God. Maybe it's the graphic and detailed women way she describes what happened to her. Or perhaps it's that it comes from a woman who isn't Brazilian and lives an ocean away. Whatever the reason, this Facebook post slowly goes viral and it comes to the attention of two journalists in Brazil who worked completely separately. Journalists who were inspired to investigate.
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Was very, very shocking. I said, whoa, this is someone completely different from the person we know. This is a monster. There were comments like, see what I told you? And I was like, whoa, maybe it wasn't only her. And I told the host of the show I was working for, look, this is what I found. And then he said, go for it. Keep digging. Let's look into this. And in like 48 hours of doing that, she had six women.
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A
That's next time on Two Faced John of God. Listen to Two Faced John of God on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts there you can also find this show en just look for Dos Caras Juan de Dios. Two Faced John of God is a production of Exactly Right Media and Adonde Media, hosted and written by myself, Martina Castro. Our senior producer is Mariano Pacela, reporting and fact checking by Eloisa Traiano. Production assistance and research by Giovanna Romano Sanchez Sound designed by Maurice Mendoza and our mastering engineer is Martin Cruz. Original music was composed by Mariana Romano, the artwork is by Vanessa Lilac. Marcelo Toduto was interpreted by Claudio Diaz and Ana Paula by Giovanna Romano Sanchez for Exactly Right Media. The executive producers are Karen Kilgariff, Georgia Hardstark and Danielle Kramer, with consulting producer Lily Latowig and associate producer Jay Elias. When this story broke, it led many people to realize they too had been victims of sexual violence. If you find that you need to talk to someone after hearing the stories we shared today, you can chat with someone for free and confidentially@rainn.org that's R A I N N. O R G Everyone we spoke with for this podcast says the most important thing to do as a survivor is to use the power of your voice to get counseling and start the process of healing. Weight Watchers now offers access to affordable GLP once it works for members like.
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