Here is a story out of Winnipeg about an AA whose character flaws include raping and beating women. His first victim was his ex-wife, who he met at an AA meeting. Naturally, AA welcomed him back with open arms. The second victim was another woman he had 13th stepped in AA and started dating, and though they had stopped dating, she remained his friend, and drove to his home to help him when he phoned her in a drunker stupor. She was met with this:
The man put duct tape over her face, bound her hands and legs together and then sodomized her. He also demanded she call her 18-year-old daughter to come over so he could sexually assault her while she watched. She was repeatedly beaten when she refused. The man also threatened to hit her with a lead pipe.
I wonder why this woman’s higher power™, an all-knowing AA god who was kind enough to take away her shortcomings and keep her sober, would not keep her out of harms way by advising her not to show up at this guy’s home to help him in the first place.
Ask a true AA believer, and you will be told this guy was obviously not working the program correctly, or he would not have been drunk in the first place. Or, maybe he was not a real alcoholic, as the steps only work for real alcoholics. What I wonder is why his higher power™, who was standing idly by, waiting for him to really start working those steps properly, would not step in and intervene in this situation. It seems like if He (the higher power) were going to allow this guy to victimize a person, He would have forced this AA to grab a bat or a baton and sodomize himself. Now that would be a higher power™ I could believe in.
March 30, 2010 at 5:17 am
Ask a true AA believer, and you will be told that AA is not responsible for the actions of individual AA members.
AA is completely unregulated.
The courts have loaded up the halls with toothless criminals.
Mind control freaks… Sex offenders… AA is just not a safe place.
March 30, 2010 at 5:59 am
Examples like the one here are endless. We did a vid on this exact topic awhile ago. There is a sure cure for most of these cases, described near the end of it.
March 30, 2010 at 6:05 am
I’m trying not to be cynical or unfairly demonize AA for the actions of a few, yet this incident reminds me that AA all too frequently tolerates obvious sociopaths, and in some cases the behavior of sexual predators. Coed meetings, it should be obvious, must be preceded by an announcement by the leader that any complaint of 13th stepping or of salacious remarks will result in a group consciousness meeting to consider immediate expulsion from the group.
March 30, 2010 at 7:25 am
Great idea Dan.
That would require AA (as an organization) to admit there is a problem.
I’m not sure that will ever happen, but it was a great idea anyway.
March 30, 2010 at 7:33 am
Thanks for my morning laugh. Believe me, I feel bad laughing at your touching naiveté, but you can’t have been in AA very long if you think that there is a chance in hell of such a thing occurring.
March 30, 2010 at 8:08 am
way back in 2001, i use to attend a co-ed aa meeting in los gatos (at the urging of my sponsor, who claimed that folks in los gatos were of a better caliber). i only attended four of them, and at the beginning of all of them, the chairperson would make a statement such as ”
if any of you men are thinking of acting inappropriately towards the younger girls, and you know what i mean, you will be dealt with harshly.”
WTF??? why would there even be the need for such a warning if aa were a safe place? the chairperson himself, i found out later, was a convicted child molester, and seemed to think that all the other men in the room had the same sick perversion that he had.
March 30, 2010 at 11:12 am
only in aa…. this is actually an amazing idea for a meeting format. but the more of this site i read, and the more i realize that aa is made up of sociopaths who are there to back each other up, the more i realize that this is naive,as the predatory behavior happening is what is bringing people back. they WANT it to happen. i talked to a counselor at a local battered woman’s shelter about this issue. she explained that it was like an orchard for abusers,.
March 30, 2010 at 2:51 pm
anon is violet here
March 30, 2010 at 4:00 pm
I know the reverence for “PROVE IT” is strong when it comes to these things. Since it is such a favorite topic here and with all the reverence paid to scientific ‘data’ with regard to alcoholism, there must be some statistics/data indicating that within the AA society there are incidents of antisocial sexual human behaviors in greater numbers than other communities. Can some please cite the data used to formulate and support this seemingly popular “AA is a den of sexual deviants” much more so than other communities like, the Elks Club, Microsoft, Lutherans, NYPD, square-dancers? Or is the opinion rampant merely a guess of some kind? I know the reverence for “PROVE IT” is strong when it comes to these things.
March 30, 2010 at 4:28 pm
I do not understand how comparing assault rates is relevant. Every crime stands on its’own. Elks Club is responsible for Elk’s Club, Microsoft is responsible for Microsoft, AA is responsible for AA.
March 30, 2010 at 4:42 pm
Who needs studies, data, and reports when we have film at eleven? When judges start ordering sociopaths into the Elks Club, and the secretaries sign their slips, we will talk about the Elks Club. Till then, let’s talk about how AA.
March 30, 2010 at 4:56 pm
It confuses the holyhell out of me when you get the back of MOTR AA.
March 30, 2010 at 6:12 pm
Given that to my certain knowledge the US Courts (that is to say institutions of the United States Government) do no mandate attendance at an Elks lodge or a Lutheran church (or say a Catholic Church) as a condition of avoiding incarceration and that secretaries, ministers or others in charge at these institutions do not sign documents that are filed with the courts attesting to that attendance I feel that the relative presence or non-presence of predatory individuals in those institutions to be separate matter.
That said, the continued use of the institution of Alcoholics Anonymous as a dumping ground for all manner of perpetrators of crimes by the United States Government as evidenced by the provided links and attested to by my own considerable experience does in fact demonstrate a substantial higher likelihood of encountering said perpetrators when attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. They are required to be there. It is literally built into AA as an institution.
March 30, 2010 at 4:59 pm
I went to a meeting today first time in three months.
Some old oldtimer was prattling on about how he had been in two car crashes and was squashed by a tractor.
His reasoning for his survival was that God was looking out for him.
This I have realised offended me.
What makes this old fart so special.
Ya Dig.
March 30, 2010 at 5:01 pm
Prove that there are more sexual predators in AA than in the Elks ? Is that the best response you can manage?
By the way, what was described in the article was violent rape. “Antisocial sexual human behavior” is a pretty inadequate term for that.
March 30, 2010 at 5:05 pm
what “MOTR” AA?
Also what is ETOH (am i getting this right? danny refers to is here and in his blog).
I think Danny makes a goof point when he says prove it and well, there is not a lot of in print proof. not because it is not there, but because people are aware enough to do this sort of study. there is the recent study i read with the nurse who interviews aa women about thirteen steeping… i think there is a link from this site, but this is a rarity. i wish there was more proof. heck, if i were not at work, being as ingle mom, or in my post bac program i would try to convince somebody at the nearest state u to me to do a study or at least write a paper..so at least you could get some hits while doing an ebsco search. really, there is very little written on this. but sites like these, with skeptics/scoffers like danny (not to be mean, but how hard is it to say prove it?), are a decided start.
March 30, 2010 at 6:14 pm
hi violet: MOTR, I think, means “middle of the road” but I thought it meant “millions of tiny robots.” In either case, it means mainstream AA, or, as Danny puts it, Pop AA — the AA that you will most certainly land in if you choose an AA meeting at random in any city in the world, or if you are sentenced to AA, or if some 12 step rehab prescribes AA as aftercare.
Danny — he will clear me up if I misrepresent — is a strictly by the Big Book AA member, which means that if it’s not in the 12 Steps or in the Alcoholics Anonymous book, it’s not AA. So, when an AA member says, for instance, “take what you want and leave the rest,” he will call balls on that because that is Pop AA, or MOTR AA — it’s not in the Big Book.
That’s why it confuses the hell out of me when he seems to defend the general AA miasma that’s taken over the treatment industry. On one hand, he will say it’s not AA, and on the other, he’ll deny that horrible shit happens as a matter of course it what he believes should not legitimately pass for AA.
[Edited to add: etoh is alcohol]
March 30, 2010 at 6:00 pm
i know anecdotal evidence is the worst kind, tantamount to a testimonial. that being said, my personal experience is this: when i was popped for a dui (2nd) i got into a program called RCP, which reduces one’s sentence and allows one to go home at night instead of staying in jail. i reported daily, mon-fri, 7am-3pm, to a classroom instead of a jail sentence. it was for 6 weeks, then afterwards, i had to attend 3 meetings a week for another 6 weeks, with proof via court slip. to get into RCP, as long as you were not charged with a violent felony, you qualified. again, no violent FELONIES. violent misdemeanors, however, qualified for the program of aa meetings instead of jail time. out of the 100 people in the class, only 3 of us were drinkers. the rest were all crystal meth users, and the vast majority of the men (it was a co-ed type thing) had a history of beating up girlfriends, wives, sisters and mothers. over half of the men had to take a class called “anger management”, because they were charged with domestic violence, while the rest of us learned about the physical, psychological and sociological effects of drug use. we had a daily aa meeting at noon that the wife-beaters had to attend as well. they also had to attend the 3 aa meetings a week afterwards like i did. i ran into many of them at meetings. so yeah, there are convicted wife-beaters, rapists, cons and thiefs in aa. i am not one. i was stupid and decided to drive while under the influence. and on the advice of my attorney, i ended up in an aa-centric program with those people. one guy (a real meat-head) told me how he beat up his “old lady” because she didn’t like him playing his sony playstation. so he beat her up so bad she had internal bleeding. did i mention that he raped her after he beat her, and laid on top of her afterwards so that she couldn’t escape? and she pee’d the bed, and it was bloody? he told me this, describing it with a grin, as he showed me how he throttled her, then punched her in the kidneys. yup. those guys are in aa. court ordered. and that was just one story i was told by the perpetrator. women told me stories of stealing from dept. stores, breaking into tool sheds, stealing cars, prostituting…dealing (“slanging dope”), and NONE of them had ANY desire to stop. they just wanted to make sure they reduced their sentences to get out of jail quiker to get back out on the street.
March 30, 2010 at 8:56 pm
I don’t see what the big deal is. I mean, the average Elk can talk a hooker deaf — ladies, you have nothing to worry about if you seek safety at one of their lodges. WTF are you people talking about?
I’m sick of crybaby, butthurt women in my group whining that I’m such a jerk because I helped them work their third step. In the backseat of my car. BIG DEAL. They and I each made a decision to turn our wills and lives over for an hour or two to seek Divine Guidance through acts that are ancient and sacred. I’m sorry, OK? — sorry if some of them didn’t get as much out of the experience as I did, and that most of them seem to expect that it will be an ongoing process instead of an event that I freely share with all the newbie girlmeats, and that I sometimes can’t always immediately pull together enough money to pay my half of her dry-cleaning bill when she really should have been looking at her part. Of course, to be forgiven we must forgive, so I strive to forgive these women for making me pay a bit for them not knowing that they should already have their mind in gear about what they’re doing down there before they engage their mouths. At least the men in group can grasp the idea of forgiveness!
But really, ladies, enough with this babe-in-the-woods crap — I’m a human being too, you know. I’m just as vulnerable and needing love, and if a lady is up with making hammerlove on the first hangout to a man who — duh? — keeps lube and rubbers in his glove compartment, then you lose your right to use the Soiled Dove Plea when your case is tried in SHITTY-REPUTATION COURT. That I’ve had a dozens of these spiritual sessions/first dates that don’t work out doesn’t mean I’m a predator, it just means that I still have a ways to go on my journey and should NOT be judged by some dusty-snatch Harpies with 20-year coins and peeled lemons up their tightasses. The good Lord invented Azithromycin for a reason!
Yours in Christ,
– pierre
March 30, 2010 at 9:07 pm
By the way and for the record: that Winnipeg drunk was totally out of line, unless the woman forgot their safeword/phrase [mine is "I thirst," just like Jesus's] in the middle of some rough trade — or since she was gagged, maybe the guy didn’t notice she dropped a ball or a handful of 24-hour coins or whatever BDSM Canadians do to signal a “time owwut” during gagged play. Still, that dude is an asshole.
March 31, 2010 at 5:49 am
If you’re trying to be funny, it’s not working. It is highly fucking offensive. Piss off.
March 31, 2010 at 6:54 am
Same troll, different sock.
March 31, 2010 at 9:50 am
That’s not a very Christian attitude, “Susan.”
– p
April 1, 2010 at 3:25 am
Guess it’s a good thing I’m not a Christian.
March 31, 2010 at 6:38 am
I think we all know that it is a practical impossibility to obtain accurate figures, given the anonymous and unaccountable way in which Alcoholics Anonymous is set up, which in itself creates an obvious potential for abuse that sets it apart from responsible organisations that have established procedures for complaints and accountability for abuses and encourage constructive criticism and suggestions for improvement.
This pretty much leaves us with our own personal experience of AA and the public record in the press and mass media.
The case mentioned above is far from unique, so it really should be a matter of concern to all that the rooms of AA can’t be assumed to be safe places, to say the least.
In the UK, Alcoholics Anonymous explicitly admitted this in a memo distributed to meetings warning of widespread sexual abuse of members in 2000, which was leaked to the press:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2000/jul/05/gerardseenan
March 31, 2010 at 7:22 am
This reminds me of the Midtown Q Group.
The silence of corporate AA on this issue is deafening. It is their alleged “good name” involved and they should have made very strong statements against these actions and behaviors.
To think that people are incarcerated, have lost custody of children, have lost employment, and have been denied organ transplants for failing to participate and convert to this fanatical, fundamentalist, evangelical religion is itself, insanity.
March 31, 2010 at 8:56 am
PS. Re a couple of the above posts, a very strange idea of what passed for “humour” was one of the reasons I found the AA experience so unpleasant.
March 31, 2010 at 10:22 am
indeed.
March 31, 2010 at 10:32 am
This wasn’t the right day to skip coffee.
July 20, 2011 at 9:24 am
AA losers, just do the rest of us a favor and only interact with eachother.
You are all the most selfish losers on the face of the planet, and though I directed and produced a play that was for your benifit, I realized at the end of the 4 year run that you people are a waste of time and space.
You work a program that has a design that an average 5th grader would find
ignorant, and it is only good for keeping you feeling fine about being the worst lairs/losers and simplistic jerks on the planet