Rechtfertigt der gute Zweck jedes Mittel?
Darf man den Menschen derbste Lügengeschichten erzählen, damit sie für einen (mehr oder weniger) wohltätigen Verein möglichst viel Geld locker machen?
Diese und ähnliche, ungewohnt kritische Fragen stellt die aktuelle Ausgabe des renommierten US-Nachrichtenmagazins Newsweek mit ihrer Titel-Story:
Den weit ausführlicheren (!) Artikel findet Ihr hier:Somaly Mam: The Holy Saint (and Sinner) of Sex Trafficking
[...]
Nestled on the banks of the Mekong River, Thloc Chhroy looks like the typical rural Cambodian village. [...]
But this is no ordinary village. Every now and then, a shiny four-wheel drive bounces down the dirt track that leads to a refuge center of an organization whose name in French is Agir Pour Les Femmes en Situation Précaire, or AFESIP. (Rough translation: Helping Women in Danger.) Inside the vehicle you may spot a powerful government official, a heavyweight journalist or even an American movie star. They all come to meet with AFESIP’s president and co-founder, Somaly Mam, and support her courageous work fighting sex traffickers[:]
[...] Former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton and actresses Meg Ryan, Susan Sarandon and Shay Mitchell [...] Queen Sofia of Spain [...] Mark Zuckerberg’s former PR guru, Brandee Barker, whom The New York Times recently described as “perhaps the most sought-after image consultant in the startup world,” is a board member for the Somaly Mam Foundation, and Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg is an advisory board member.
Mam has raised millions with a hectic schedule of meetings all over the globe with the good, the great and the super-rich—from the U.N.’s Ban Ki-moon to the pope. [...]
Mam claims to have rescued thousands of girls and women from sex trafficking[...] In 2005, she published her autobiography, The Road of Lost Innocence, which became an international best-seller. Mam was one of Time’s 100 most influential people in 2009 and has over 400,000 followers on Twitter.
[...]
In 2011, [...] at Fortune magazine’s Most Powerful Women summit [she] told the hushed audience[:][...] “I have been sold in the brothel by the man who come and tell me that he’s my grandfather,” she said. “I stayed in the brothel nearly then 10 years. [...] one girl…she refused to do what he asked to do so [the brothel owner] take a gun and kill her[...]”
Mam declined to be interviewed by Newsweek for this article and has declined numerous requests for comment since I started reporting on inconsistencies in her stories in 2012. [...]
Mam tells how “Grandfather” turned her at a very young age into his domestic slave. He would gamble and drink, and when he came home, he sometimes beat her until she bled. He eventually sold her as a virgin to a Chinese merchant and then forced her to marry a violent soldier when she was just 14. She was later sold to a brothel in Phnom Penh, where she recalls being tortured with electrodes hooked up to a car battery.
[...] In 1991, she met Pierre Legros, a young Frenchman working as a biologist in Phnom Penh. This meeting, she writes, [...] convinced her to leave the world of prostitution for good.
She and Legros got married and moved to France[...]
In 1994, they returned to Cambodia. [...] Mam began doing volunteer work in one of the organization’s clinics for patients with sexually transmitted diseases. Cambodia then had a sex trafficking crisis and the highest rate of HIV/AIDS in the Asia-Pacific region. [...] Mam, Legros and a friend started AFESIP, a small but feisty nongovernmental organization.
Mam and Legros were an intrepid and attractive couple fighting for the most worthy of causes, and the media soon began to take an interest. At first they were hard-pressed for cash, but a France 2 documentary broadcast in 1998 gave AFESIP major exposure[...]
Legros was now thinking big[...] “[...] I always said to Somaly, ‘The real thing to do after the television is to write a book.’”
[...] Published in France in 2005; published in America three years later, The Road of Lost Innocence was translated into Japanese, Swedish and over a dozen other languages.
[...] As the years went by, Mam and her organization went from triumph to triumph, bringing in more and more money. Mam is now a superstar [...]
[...]
Mam’s success has been due to her energy, her fearlessness and [...]due to the shocking stories she and her girls have told[:]
[...] about a girl named Long Pross [...] a woman had kidnapped Pross and sold her to a brothel, where she was beaten, tortured with electric wires, forced to endure two crude abortions and had an eye gouged out with a piece of metal by an angry pimp. Pross [...] was rescued by Mam and became part of her valiant group of former trafficking victims[...]
[...]“Believe it or not, when I returned home, my mother and father didn’t want me around. I wasn’t considered a good person,” she says in the documentary.
Equally hard to believe is the fact that Pross’s family, neighbors and medical records all tell a different story. Dr. Pok Thorn says he performed surgery on Pross when she was 13, after her parents brought her to a hospital with a nonmalignant tumor covering her right eye. Photographs in her medical records clearly show the young girl’s eye before and after the surgery.
[...]
Another of Mam’s biggest “stars” was Meas Ratha, who as a teenager gave a chilling performance on French television in 1998, describing how she had been sold to a brothel and held against her will as a sex slave.
Late last year, Ratha finally confessed that her story was fabricated and carefully rehearsed for the cameras under Mam’s instruction, and only after she was chosen from a group of girls who had been put through an audition. [...] “Somaly said that…if I want to help another woman I have to [tell this story well].”
She, like Pross, was never a victim of sex trafficking[...]
Many of the villagers in Thloc Chhroy say they never met or even saw Mam’s cruel “Grandfather,” the rich Chinese merchant [...] or the violent soldier [...]
Orn Hok, a former commune chief, remembers[:] “Somaly came here with her parents. She is a daughter of Mam Khon and Pen Navy.”
[...]
Mam [...] attended school [...] until she got her high school diploma [in 1987]. “[...]Somaly and I [then] went to sit the teachers exam in Kompong Cham together.”
[...]Mam was well-known and popular in their small village, a happy, pretty girl with pigtails.
[...]
Rights workers and police officials, including [the former] head of the Interior Ministry’s anti-human trafficking department [...]and a senior official at the U.N.’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Phnom Penh, have also strongly denied [...] that traffickers kidnapped [Mam's] 14-year-old daughter in 2006 and videotaped the girl being gang-raped in retaliation for Mam’s work. [...]the young girl was never kidnapped; instead, they say, she had run away from home with her boyfriend.
Legros, who split from Mam in 2004 [...], now says he is not surprised that the truthfulness of her autobiography is being questioned. [...] “I did not search the truth. My objective was that she felt good with herself.”
[...]those who have worked with Mam in Cambodia say there is a vast difference between the image she puts forward in the media spotlight and the one she shows in Phnom Penh. “[...] when [donors] are not there, she can be tyrannical; she’s moody, she’s erratic, she’s entitled.” [...]she saw Mam ordering the girls she looks after to carry out personal chores for her.
[...]
“It was such a traumatic and hostile environment,” the former employee [of AFESIP] continues. “We were treated very much in a hostile and aggressive way. You’re either part of the group or you’re not, and if you’re not part of the group, bad things can happen to you. And that was said in sometimes very direct terms.”
[...] nobody spoke up due to a mixture of fear of Mam and threats from others.[...]
“If your goal is fundraising, you actually have an incentive to pull out the most gory story,” [...] “and so we get completely false realities of the world.”
http://www.newsweek.com/2014/05/30/soma ... 51642.html
Ist doch schon lange bekannt, gerade die Assi Medien wie RTL,Sat 1 und Bild leben doch von Fake Stories ! Und "Innocence in Danger" mit der Guttenberg Schl.. an der Spitze macht doch genau das selbe !