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Vicious Philippines fight moves to Ireland
Picture on top of Shay Cullen
On June 9 2009, journalist David McNeill published a hagiographic feature about the celebrity Irish Catholic priest, Shay Cullen, whose fame has been achieved by saving woman and children from prostitution in the Philippines. In this piece, titled ‘Every day without compromise’, Shay Cullen makes what appears to have been either a thoughtless mistake or an extraordinarily dangerous gamble.
Here is the section of the Mc Neill article where he does this:
‘The result (of his child and women saving campaign), after nearly four decades of battle, is a cast of bitter, sometimes ruthless, enemies who falsely accuse him of sexually abusing a child.
“They set me up, using a little six-year-old girl we had rescued,” Cullen says. “They forced her to sign a paper saying that I had raped her.”
‘He and Preda were later exonerated, but his accusers are still using the internet to smear him.’
“I felt terrible, of course, but also angry that they abused this little child again,” he says. “She’d be dragged again into court. They had no compassion because they’re just trying to protect themselves.”
Within 24 hours, the ‘they’ about whom he said - “They set me up, using a little six-year-old girl we had rescued”- was revealed to be a single individual, the girl’s father, a retired US Air Force Engineer, Alan Dale Edmonds, an American who lives in the Philippines.
Alan Dale Edmonds replied to the Cullen feature the next day, June 10 by emailing The Irish Times.
Here is an edited version (relevant extracts only for reasons that will be explained below).
Edmonds letter
In reference to your article in The Irish Times, I would like to clarify several points:
First of all, let me be very clear to you that I am the father of the raped child he reported as being six years old at the time (paragraph 20): She was, in fact seven (7) years old at the time and many of the facts reported are totally wrong, as I will explain and prove to your satisfaction.
Now, let's get into the meat of the matter with the start of this sentence: "The result, after nearly four decades of battle, is a cast of bitter, sometimes ruthless, enemies who falsely accuse him of sexually abusing a child."
First of all, I am not a ‘THEY’. I am Alan Dale Edmonds, not supported by any figment of Shay Cullen's imaginary 'sex mafia'. And I take umbrage of the word ‘falsely’ in the above sentence.
The next two sentences are likewise false and exaggerated: For one thing, there is more than the statement my daughter made in the presence of two field agents of the Human Rights Commission out of San Fernando, Pampanga, Philippines. Consider the following:
Here he goes into the detail of his version of the events, from which it is clear that Shay Cullen has given a remarkably shortened version. Most remarkable perhaps is that Shay Cullen should bring up the subject on his home turf in The Irish Times, without mentioning that he has been engaged in a bitter public battle with Edmonds for over 10 years.
As a result of this latest exchange, I have decided to republish below an article I wrote about the Cullen-Edmonds controversy a year ago.
Vicious fight in Philippines
Brian Rothery
A vicious campaign is underway to damage retired US Air Force Engineer, Alan Dale Edmonds, an American who lives in the Philippines. The most recent manifestation of it is a mass emailing of an ‘Appeal for Support’ ostensibly mounted by the Catholic organization Jubilee Action in Great Britain.
This highly defamatory http://newsweaver.co.uk/jubileeaction/index000263314.cfm?x=bcFFJFN,b4ynm6R5,w email accuses Edmonds of being a ‘suspected pedophile’, which in itself is a new sadly common form of attack on someone you want to damage, although there is no such a crime and Edmonds has not been convicted of being a pedophile. It quickly becomes clear that Edmond’s real crime in the eyes of Jubilee Action is that he is attacking (indeed from his point of view defending himself against) the celebrity Catholic priest, Father Shay Cullen, and his organization, PREDA, whose mission is to save young women and children from sex trafficking. Shay Cullen has for years been involved in a high profile campaign involving the rescuing of young women from the bars and brothels of the Philippines.
The Jubilee Action email claims that “Alan Dale Edmonds, has been trying various means to sabotage the work that PREDA does and to bring shame on the organization and its members. Edmonds has been accused of continuous harassment of Preda staff through numerous baseless complaints and his defamatory and malicious web site http://www.preda-facts.info” If they did not want his web site publicized they have done so now.
Two particularly vicious suggestions follow – that as many people as possible write to the commissioner at the Bureau of Immigration in the Philippines requesting that Edmond’s ‘actions be investigated so that Father Shay Cullen and PREDA are no longer suffering the malicious and potentially damaging actions of Edmond’. This, which is already having results, is to try to get him deported.
The second is equally perverse. It is to report him to the IRS in America by sending an alert to their hotline. They even supply suggested contents for the message. The substance of this complaint to the IRS is that he is trying to solicit donations. In fact his web site suggests that while he admits that he is hard up he is soliciting information only, not money.
A glance at the Edmonds web site reveals that the ‘shame on the organization and its members’ that he is accused of bringing includes photographs of their luxurious dwelling and claims that Shay Cullen is more interested in publicity and self glory than saving women. That however may not be what could be truly deadly to Jubilee Action. The second nearest country to the North West to the Philippines is Cambodia, from where news has been pouring about women and child rights organizations that set up men (see recent death in prison of Bart Lauwaert) and kidnap some of the women and children that they claim to rescue. Edmonds has been accusing Preda of precisely this.
This email has just arrived from Alan Dale Edmonds: “Shay Cullen and his staff have filed for my deportation. I'm getting too close to the truth for them, so they have gone all out to get me deported from the Philippines. I was in Immigration today with my lawyer, and although seven or eight staff, including Shay Cullen, signed the complaint against me, only four showed up, two who had not signed the complaint, but stated that they were willing to testify as my malicious nature.”
Edmonds went on to ask me to put the following question to the commissioner:
"If people from Europe and other countries are demanding the deportation of Mr. Edmonds, and the letters all came in shortly after the case for his deportation was filed by Shay Cullen and his staff, who set them up to writing to you?"
I ask that question now.
Shay Cullen has created a formidable enemy in Alan Dale Edmonds. Edmonds has both filed a counter affidavit for the deportation of Shay Cullen and written a book which criticizes and claims to expose errors and miss-information in Cullen’s recent book Passion and Power.
The Edmonds book, about to be published, is called Hard Questions and its main content is made up of dozens of questions, critical comments and claims of deceit and contradictions in the Cullen book, which he dissects page by page. More seriously for Shay Cullen he has included a number of these in Annex 8 of his counter affidavit for the deportation of Shay Cullen. A central plank to the Edmonds attack is that Cullen did not allow his book to be available in the Philippines, where according to Edmonds it would be defamatory both to him and to the government and many people. Edmonds has adopted a similar strategy to avoid defamation by keeping his book out of the Philippines also, but by including Annex 8 in his affidavit he has alerted the authorities to potentially controversial content in the Cullen book together with his response to that content. Here for example is a flavour of some of it.
Page 246: There was a growing hostility and opposition to our efforts to help the deprived settlers and our campaign to replace the military base with an economic zone. Local politicians made critical remarks too about the PREDA campaign for children’s rights. Some who had interests in the entertainment industry claimed that our campaign branded the city as a “Sin City”, and gave it a bad reputation that kept away tourists. According to the politicians, there was no evidence that there was any child prostitution in the city.
POINT: Did Shay Cullen and his staff brand Olongapo as "Sin City", or is this a misdirection of critical remarks? Consider Shay Cullen's own words on page 4 of his book: "One late afternoon before sunset, I left the rectory dressed in casuals and took a short ‘jeepney’ ride into the heart of ‘Sin City’, the center being right outside the gate of the U.S. Navy Base. The nightclub strip called Magsaysay Drive was blazing with neon lights."
Page 269: The article read: “When the ships anchor at Subic Bay Naval Base, (Name removed here but in book) sells her only possession – her thirteen-years-old daughter. Sailors and Marines pay $5 a night to indulge their fantasies, using (Name removed here but in book - the daughter) as an erotic toy. In the morning, the girl slips into a blue-and-white uniform and walks to school, where her mental retardation has kept her in the first grade."
POINT: Shay Cullen makes it a shameful point that Filipinos sell their offspring to survive in a book not for sale to the Filipino. He holds no punches in mentioning the mother's name, the daughter's name, the circumstances, how much she gets and so forth. This is nothing more than shameful writing at its worst, defamation of Filipinos, and his hiding of names of perpetrators and those who cover up such crimes is nothing less than despicable.
Page 272: Outside there was a staged demonstration. There was a crowd waiting in force with placards denouncing me by name, one read: CULLEN, Journalist – NO, Opportunist – Yes! Others had derogatory slogans. The media were following in hot pursuit and it was clear that this was staged for the media. The rent-a-rally crowd had been prepared and briefed in advance – a common phenomenon in political rallies and demonstrations. They were shouting invective insults and derogatory comments, as I tried to make my way out.
The police were ready too to “give protection” and to heighten the spectacle and impression that this was a person non-grata and all that I represented was totally rejected. They began throwing things at me: rotten vegetables and stones, I learned later. I walked directly away, ignoring the curses, taunts and shouts as the crowd broke and ran down the street after me waving placards. Alex was there. He had witnessed it all and, as soon as he was a break in the crowd, he drove in, snapped open the door and we were away.
POINT: Is Shay Cullen telling the whole story? In our complaint for deportation filed, in 2004, one of the attachments was a complaint for his deportation in 1987 that mentioned the above incident, and I quote from that: WHEREAS, last November 10,1989, during the senate committee hearing on the bases chaired by Sen. Leticia Shahani, Cullen heaped insult on the people of Olongapo saying that the city is nothing but a hovel of sinners and criminals. As a result, he was almost mobbed by a jeering crowd; Therefore, was the crowd a "rent-a-rally" as alleged in Shay Cullen's book simply to disparage the Filipino, or were there hot tempers against Shay Cullen? Is Shay Cullen's disparagement of the police justified, or else why was it only later he learned that rotten vegetables and stones were hurled at him due to the fact that the police did, in fact, protect his person?
Page 279: A formal hearing by the Commission on Immigration and Deportation began on November 23. The list of unfounded complaints from seventeen Olongapo Officials claimed that I was an “undesirable alien” and an enemy of the Filipino people. They alleged that I was portraying Olongapo as a crime city, engaging in business in violation of my vocation (handicraft training). They also absurdly claimed that I was abusing Filipino hospitality, attacking Filipino dignity and honour. The almost endless list of complaints also stated that I was usurping the drug rehabilitation centre and using it to solicit donation for the handicraft project. The complaint also said that I had continually criticized Olongapo for being a hovel of sinners and criminals. They even complained about some small construction project we made near the cemetery and, most weird of all, was a charge of sponsoring lewd shows!
POINT: This paragraph is as clear as one can get that I have not been the only one to claim that Shay Cullen has defamed the Philippines.
Page 302: Framing up innocent people who are critics or rivals is a common tactic in Philippines. Writers, human rights advocates and troublesome clerics as well as opposition politicians are the main targets. I was to be one for many years to come. And much more lay ahead.
POINT: Shay Cullen stated clearly and concisely what are common underhanded practices in the Philippines to the world to the shame of all Filipinos.
New evidence is received
I have received more evidence from a new source in the Philippines, a third party to those above. I must now reluctantly reveal that the event causing the warfare between Alan Dale Edmonds and Shay Cullen was that the latter or Preda or both were involved with the local authorities in the removal of Edmond’s eight year old daughter and her committal to Preda ten years ago. The reasons for my reluctance to outline these events are threefold. First, I have grave reservations about this event, as I have about many similar events elsewhere, where publicity is a possible element in the child protection activity. Second, the original event and the allegations that emerged in the subsequent long battle are highly defamatory and include accusations of criminal behaviour on both sides. Third, both sides of the story are already published on the one hand by PREDA and in the Cullen book and on the other by Edmonds on his web site and in his response book.
For now, however, it does need to be said that a twelve year old boy in Edmond’s home, not Edmonds himself, was the one accused of molesting Edmond’s eight year old daughter. However, after the girl was confined to PREDA, at least two new developments triggered the subsequent ten year old war between Cullen and Edmonds. First, Cullen claimed that Edmond’s daughter was adopted, despite documentation to the contrary; second, Cullen made, or supported (which is unclear) a new allegation concerning Edmonds himself and his house maid's daughter. The timing of this new allegation, coming at the beginning of a battle between a father and a child protector, plus the daughter’s hymen being found to be intact, raise worrying questions.
Here now is an outline of the new evidence that I have just received.
To protect the man’s family from possible attack, I cannot name him, although I will be asking the Philippines authorities if they have taken note of his testimony and they know who he is, as he has already submitted a sworn affidavit to them concerning the events now being outlined.
I will call him Paul here, an ex-pat, retired, American professor and long-time resident of the Philippines. He is confined to his bedroom, attached to a large oxygen bottle as he is dying of emphysema and he has sent me this information saying, “I hope this thing is resolved before I go so I can see justice done.”
The information sent consists of a statement to me and a copy of his sworn affidavit to the Philippines authorities. I have to add that, like Edmonds, he also fears attacks on himself and his family for going public on this matter and says that because he is dying he has the confidence to do so now. For legal reasons, I have to edit some of what he says, but the Philippines authorities have the full report.
Paul begins his statement to me by saying that in the Autumn of 1998 Edmonds had succeeded in getting his daughter out of PREDA. Here now are some of his own words:
“He had just gotten her out of the Preda ‘prison’ and was receiving threats against himself and his family from persons unknown. He was also afraid his daughter might be kidnapped by the Preda people (the rest of this sentence is removed here but basically he feared she would be kidnapped because of what she might say about PREDA).
“I agreed to help him in this matter and took her into my household. Preda had no knowledge of her whereabouts after that. Since Mr. Edmonds told me he had had several attempts on his life and was afraid for her, I hired an armed security guard to be present in my house during the 6PM-6AM time period when the household was asleep. She was my ‘guest’ for nearly a year.”
He goes on to say what the child told him one day out of the blue and unsolicited, which I cannot publish here, but he submitted it in a sworn affidavit to the local judiciary. What I feel I must say is that, while what she said contained a serious new allegation, it cleared the twelve year old boy in a way that now looked like he had been used to take her into ‘protection’. And it cleared her parents and her home of any wrongdoing.
As the ten year battle between Cullen and Edmonds has now reached the stage where Cullen and his supporters are engaged in a campaign to get Edmonds deported, I think that it is time to ask the local authorities to look again at that sworn affidavit and perhaps interview this witness again before he dies.
They might again review this whole sordid story and seek out the real reasons behind this long and costly battle between two Westerners, and now we learn involving a third. (There was also a public fight involving a German ex-pat who died recently.) The questions could include how many lawyers have been hired and how much money spent on these rows over the past ten years and also what other controversies have there been involving PREDA and at what cost. And where the money to pay for them has come from.
(Irish Times article quoted above is at http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2009/0609/1224248403509.html)
Where it all began
The Cullen-Edmonds feud appears to have been conceived in Shay Cullen’s hostility to the US military presence in the Philippines, in particular the US Navy base in Olongapo City where he worked. In his book Passion and Power he also mentions Clark Air Base, some distance away and one other smaller facility, but it is the Subic Bay facility at Olongapo upon which he focuses most of his fury. In the book he supplies the following statistics about it: 12,000 regular workers, 8,000 part time contractors, by 1964 98 US ships docking, resulting in 9,000 visiting marines a day or 3.8 million annually. There was no other major industry in the city except ‘entertainment and sex’.
In a most revealing chapter, he takes his first stroll through what he calls ‘Sin City’. It becomes the most descriptive and colourful section of his book. “The street was thronged with American sailors, all bar hopping, leading girls to a cheap hotel or carrying the small little ones in their arms like children. Many of the girls were no more than fifteen or sixteen.”
While the age of consent in the Philippines was until recently 12, and it is still not clear what it is between consenting young people there, the concept of the sex abuse of youngsters came only after international pressure about sex tourism, which swept through South East Asia and created a virtual industry in ‘child and women saving’. There was little sign of such moral indignation back in 1964 and Shay Cullen may have been one of the first thus outraged. His language however is quite misleading. He claims that some of the American sailors were carrying the small little ones in their arms like children into the sex hotels. Anyone who has had the good fortune to have been in a European hospital staffed by Filipino nurses will be well aware of how small they are. It would not be at all surprising if some enthusiastic American marines lifted them up. Note his exact choice of words- ‘the small little ones in their arms like children’. ‘Small little ones’ is an Irish way of describing children. These were not children.
But now we come to what may be the real origins of the Cullen mission. He moves from ‘the small little ones’ (the children, the victims being abused) to this: “The sailors were tall, muscular and macho, dressed in bulging t-shirts and gym shorts, they walked about as if they owned the place, shouting obscenities to each other, waving beer bottles, grabbing the girls that stood in the doorways of the sex bars and clubs.”
It seems fair to conclude that the girls wanted to be thus grabbed, but Cullen’s viewpoint is clear: the women, many of them little children (which appears to be extremely misleading) were the victims, needing rescuing, while the bullying marines were the abusers. A few lines later he describes the sailors ‘bullying’ their way down the street, even once bumping him off the footpath. It is clear that these marines ‘tall, muscular and macho, dressed in bulging t-shirts and gym shorts’, outraged and disgusted him. It would be interesting to hear a psychological explanation of his outrage, but the Shay Cullen mission to save young women from the bars and brothels of the Philippines appears to have been conceived here at this point in ‘Sin City’.
A great irony in this story is that around the time of these events the Catholic Church had the famous book Thais by Anatole France on its index of prohibited works, which means that Shay Cullen could not have read what is possibly the most famous story of a holy man who saved women ‘for their own good’ and what happened to him.
Now I come to the source for examining the origins of the Cullen-Edmonds feud, also in the Cullen book Passion and Power on page 451
Here is a section: “- - - one of the Mafia’s dummies. A middle aged American whom we suspected of child abuse, American Joe we call him, is a former employee of the US air force that retired in Olongapo City. He bought a house in a nearby province and set up home with a Filipino woman called Fat Mama as his housekeeper and mother image. He brought her two children, a boy Arnold, and girl Alice, into the house and sent them to school. American Joe became intimate with the twelve years old Alice. He put the house in her name, perhaps in exchange for her daughter. In an amazing frank interview at PREDA, taped with American Joe’s permission, he admitted being with the twelve years old in bed and he wanted to marry her. That is what her mother wanted too. The child didn’t. He admitted too that he had shown her pornography videos and she confirmed our worst fears and disclosed that after that he lay with her in the bed. Her brother Arnold confirmed that they went to bed together.”
The American referred to is Dale Edmonds and I will now try to analyse and comment on the section above.
After 10 years of legal battles between the two men, we have only Cullen’s apparent opinion that Edmonds was a member of any ‘mafia’ or was a ‘suspected child abuser’. It is not Cullen’s business to name anybody thus as this is the job of the police and courts and Edmonds has not been convicted of either. As far as allegations are concerned the two men appear to have levelled plenty at each other, including some of the most serious kind. Edmonds claims that his were in defence, particularly for PREDA taking his daughter, which appears to be reasonable.
Back to the above passage. The expressions ‘mafia’, ‘American Joe’ and ‘Fat Mama’ used by Cullen are extremely derogatory and insulting; indeed, the second appears to insult the entire US base, which he despised. Apart from it being insulting, the language is also foolhardy for anyone who purports to be seriously exposing crime and corruption and while there might have been a time when I would have felt that it was unusual for it to be used by a Catholic priest, I now longer hold such a view.
On my first reading, I assumed that Fat Mama was both Edmonds wife and housekeeper, as he is married to a Filipino woman, but while it read like that she was not his wife. He goes on: “He brought her two children - - - into the house.” Pity he did not write that she brought her own children with her when she came into the house. And then: “In an amazing frank interview at PREDA, taped with American Joe’s permission, he admitted being with the twelve years old in bed and he wanted to marry her.”
Astonishingly, he appears to neglect to say here that the interview, which he taped with his own recorder, was at a meeting in PREDA when Edmonds came to try to free his daughter whom Cullen and the authorities had removed from the Edmonds home on charges of abuse that were never subsequently upheld. Later when he writes that Edmonds managed to get her back, he does not add that a friend of Edmonds hid her in his own home for a year as it was feared the she would be abducted again by PREDA and that while here she made very serious allegations about an experience at PREDA. This same friend is the one who has sent me the statement from his deathbed.
One way that Cullen could defend his version of events is to produce the tape of the ‘amazing frank interview at PREDA taped with American Joe’s permission’, because Edmonds denies that he ever admitted to what Cullen claims he did.
Created on 06/10/2009 07:53 PM by Editor
Updated on 12/05/2009 01:55 PM by Editor
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