What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been --Part Three, the Insurrection

                                                                    

by Cathryn Platine

 

I have been writing this series of blog posts so as to leave behind the facts behind the deranged attacks being leveled against the Maetreum and myself all over the internet by Viktoria Whittaker and her psychopath lover, Jay Steward.

Viktoria’s assault on both the Maetreum and myself continues. She somehow didn’t get her certificate for becoming a third degree Corellian. She somehow was overlooked getting her Reiki master certificate and now, despite having been excommunicated from the only Cybeline Revival for openly breaking all three aspects of her oaths is somehow an “independent Cybeline Priestess. In fourteen years she did not contribute a single aspect of ritual, contribute any historical research and she uses the drumming pattern recovered by Dr. McMahon, Cybeline chakras I developed and the body of ritual I originated. Her basic dishonesty is staggering. A normal person forced out of a Pagan group for breaking their oaths and other crimes, would knock the dust off their feet and go on their ways especially knowing that my personal rules of engagement are not to pursue if the matter is dropped. An egomaniacal sociopath, on the other hand, would do what Viktoria has done. She mostly uses Jay Stewart as her proxy but make no mistake, all the things he says come straight from her. I cannot believe I was so clueless as to not see Viktoria for who she actually is and it has shaken my own faith in my ability to see people as they are to the core. It was not until the abuse started and she admitted she was a liar that I saw her as she is. I had told her for years one of the few things I could not stand was a liar because they left you nothing to work with.

Viktoria has sought out any and all people I may have had a conflict with for my entire life. If she hadn’t recently died, I’m fairly certain she would have sought out my ex spouse as well looking for anything that could be spun against me. The people she has allied with are often felons, mentally unstable people who have been in and out of mental institutions that we tried to help, drug addicts and the worst case, Chelsea Goodwin, a pimp of trans crack whores who with her partner, ran Transy House which was a trans themed crack whore house in Brooklyn. Many of the street girls from Transy House told me of how Chelsea would push them out to whore to raise money for her. I visited Transy House several times after I moved to New York and it looked exactly like what it was as anyone who ever visited the place can attest. Out of a misguided desire not to cast a negative image on that period of trans activism I have not said anything about any of this for decades now but as part of her alliance with Viktoria, Goodwin is once again targeting me using her radio show and passing on out and out lies about what we called “the insurrection”.

Pauline Park, founder of the New York trans activist group, NYAGRA , has written about how Chelsea almost destroyed that group  and I can attest she used exactly that same game plan on NTAC, the first grassroot national trans rights organization of which I was one of the founders. She has been notorious in NYC as someone who disrupts for the sake of disruption and managed to avoid ever having a psych professional evaluate her despite having “transitioned” and getting surgery she later expressed regret about in Europe. Psychopaths often have a common trait of gender fluidness and in the case of Chelsea this led to a de-transition to “Chet” for the sole purpose of pursuing a heterosexual woman as a lover outside her relationship with Rusty Moore. Chelsea is a self proclaimed vampire. Not the psychic type but an actual blood sucker. She has left in her wake a series of organizations she destroyed or attempted to destroy and mentally abused victims that passed through her hands. She has conned the greater LGBTQ communities of NYC that Transy House was a housing collective instead of the crack whore house it actually was.

Which brings us to Chelsea’s attempt to destroy the Maetreum of Cybele. Chelsea and Rusty sent many of their mentally ill people up to the Maetreum for rest for several years while both of them visited on a regular basis and participated in our rituals and even the Mysteries of the Season of the Tree. Many of these visitors visibly improved while here but in all cases, shortly after returning to Transy House were institutionalized for a period of time. I made the mistake of elevating her with several others after what would prove to be our most successful Season of the Tree in terms of participants including one who came all the way from Australia. Chelsea immediately started to try to totally disrupt our organization, not an easy feat given we are consensus based. Transy House was about to be condemned and Rusty sold it to her son for rehabilitation which meant Chelsea and Rusty needed a new base of operation. First they tried to remove the oldest priestesses in Conclave by adding a clause about not active participation. Then they worked on the lawyer who joined the same time Chelsea did. We were applying for our 501c3 status at this time and I had to stop the attorney from screwing the pooch just as she had done on my own Social Security disability case which cost me 15000 in lost benefits. Rusty never did join officially. The final step was to move into the Maetreum a totally insane trans person named Katrina who immediately started a campaign of abuse against me so bad I was even afraid to venture out to the bathroom. In the classic abuser pattern, Katrina disconnected my phone, came into my office room while I was sleeping and completely took my computer apart so I would be cut off from the outside world. Whenever I did leave my room she would take hundreds of photos of me trying for anything to use against me and when I tried to drive off the property she would jump in front of my car trying to make me hit her. All of this was at the direction of Chelsea.  While all this was going on Rusty hired a lawyer to try to take the Maetreum over legally. One of the people in on the phone call recorded it and I have a copy of that conversation where they are instructed to get me off the property and never let me back on because they had no legal case at all! All of the paperwork incorporating the church, the deed to the property, the organization model, the tax exempt paperwork and the 501c3 were prepared and signed by me personally. None of them appeared on any official document pertaining to the Maetreum and the lawyer knew it. I went to the State Police requesting they remove these people from the property and they refused because the fix was already in with the town of Catskill.

Chelsea personally threatened to carve me up like a turkey and they conducted illegal Conclaves (as Battakes I was the only person who could call a Conclave under our organization model). A couple I knew from Ohio were visiting and saw I was severely being abused and helped me move temporarily down the street into an apartment fearing for my life literally.

The year before all this went down we had applied for and was granted property tax exemption because the property was deeded to the incorporated church, the Maetreum of Cybele. Having driven me off the property, Rusty and Chelsea moved in temporarily and discovered maintaining a 150 year old inn was beyond their ability. Chelsea then told the Town of Catskill we were a sham religion which led to an illegal inspection I was left out of and resulted in revoking our tax exempt status. It took an eight year long legal battle and almost 100 grand in legal fees to get it back.

Chelsea wrote to others that the entire house was screaming at her to get out and they did leaving behind a couple of crack addicts and a vicious dog to keep me from moving back in. I managed to move back into the caretaker’s house at this time and shortly afterwards the crack addicts fled in fear I would take legal action against them. It was shortly after this that Viktoria became involved in the Maetreum during the period of time we had to rebuild much of what was physically destroyed during the Chelsea era. Chelsea and Rusty bought a property in Pine Hill and moved there.

Viktoria was totally aware of what Chelsea, Rusty and Katrina had done even though she had never met them at that point. That she would ally with them demonstrated better than anything else the length she will go to harm the Maetreum and myself even more than the verbal and physical abuse she aimed at me. I had trusted her completely even to the extent of making her my medical proxy and the executrix of my will. It was not until she lost patience in my not dying during open heart surgery that I finally had my eyes fully opened although apparently she was telling many other people she was just waiting for me to die.

In a facebook reply to Jay Stewart, Julie Pousson stated;

“Jay Stewart, Vikki’s goal was to wait out Cathryn and take the place over. She stated this goal to me and to others. She profited off the losses she caused, and wholly deserves her fate.”

Pay attention to that part, “she profited off the losses she caused” which can be taken that she was confessing having stolen petty cash she was supposed to deposit in our bank account! She did drive off the women who were priestess tracked undergoing classes during the Pandemic.

Viktoria even went so far as to hook up with someone she met through Chelsea named Cynthia Brian Kate, whom I met once fourteen years ago for about an hour at a trans event at Cauldron Farm. Together she and Viktoria produced a radio show that was an hour long false accusation of the Maetreum as a cult and myself as a cult leader. This was not only broadcast on an Albany community radio station, she then uploaded it to the entire Pacifica network distribution site! It was eventually taken off that site but the damage was done. Just in the past day of this writing Jay Stewart put up a libelist review on the Google Business listing for the Maetreum falsely accusing me of actual crimes and running a radio station without a license. This is why I have posted these last three blog entries. Not out of spite but as a self defense having waited over two years for these “people” to finally stop their insane, transphobic and religious bigoted attacks and to leave a record behind if something happens to me.

What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been -- Part Two

  by Cathryn Platine 

For the past couple of years both the Maetreum and myself have been under an almost never ending assault. That is why I am writing about our dirty laundry at this point because we now need to rebuild from almost scratch yet again and one can only be bullied just so much without having to strike back.

Over the years most of the people we have had major problems with have not been those who came to us for religious reasons. Chelsea Goodwin was the primary exception to that and more on her later. Jay Stewart’s connection was sleeping with Viktoria. Now both of them are married to other folks but I guess I am old fashion about that sort of thing. What I did not know about Jay at the time was his long long history of anti-social behaviour bordering on sociopathy. Recently I posted on Facebook about the social differences between those, seeing the pizza is limited, take one piece and those who take three for the same reason. Jay would take the entire pizza. I learned he had been known by others for phone harassment of others for years on end. Not having any legitimate connection to me or the Maetreum, he apparently has set his new life goal at the total destruction of my reputation and the Maetreum itself all on behalf and the urging on by Viktoria Whittaker.

The spring of 2020 was the year of covid. Leslie moved out of the Maetreum due mostly to the unending harassment by Viktoria and others. I did NOT ask her to leave. Shortly afterwards Frodo and I were awakened after dark by the sound of several explosions. They were the tires on my car exploding after it was firebombed in the driveway. My car had not been even driven for several months at that point, probably had a dead battery and the point of origin of the fire was easily seen as the interior directly over the gas tank. The fire chief declared it an electrical fire which would have made it the very first Honda CRV to catch fire for any thing except the window switch in history. He flat out refused to do an investigation. So did the State Police. The very first comment on Facebook came from Debby Graney aka Rennie Yenarg who then posted elsewhere of her fear of being connected with the fire. I am almost certain she was involved in the firebombing from comments she made. My mother died two weeks later.

Rennie (Debbie) and her husband Bruce got involved with the Maetreum solely on the basis of her being a Facebook witch. She never once attended any religious service or even went down to our Temple. She, instead “held court” on our front porch and arranged events for herself we were expected to pay for. Both Rennie and Bruce turned out to be convicted felons. Ironically, although neither Rennie nor Bruce ever attended any of our rituals, their dog did several times. Rennie is notorious on Facebook as a spammer, stalker, and hacker of accounts. I had asked her to leave one night after she had been asked not to come over when Mandie, a young woman we had taken in with her two kids, had a miscarriage scare and asked me to tell her not to come over. Apparently that was all that was needed to make me enemy number one in her book. By the way, the dog, who Bruce had crippled as a pup with a lawn mower, got revenge on both of them. He dragged Bruce over a ledge and Bruce broke his leg in three places and a few weeks later tripped Rennie in the middle of the night and she broke her collar bone. After being asked to stay away from the Maetreum Rennie started a “secret” Facebook group trashing the Maetreum where she sought out several individuals we had to ask to leave for violating the rules of the house and in one case, actually posing a real and present danger to Mandie’s kids.

For the record, Rennie and Bruce were two of the 18 + people Viktoria had magically “bound” using my mirror spell which I discovered after cleaning out the freezer and finding the spells. Apparently Viktoria overused this spell quite a bit! Rather than leave peacefully, when Viktoria was finally removed from the Maetreum she immediately, as within hours, launched attacks on myself and the Maetreum. She shared literally every intimate detail of my life she had learned over the course of 14 or so years and shared it all on Rennie’s “I hate the Maetreum” private email group and directly with Jay. She actively sought out everyone who had been asked to leave the Maetreum in the past 14 years, most of whom she herself actually wanted removed! At her direction, Jay started a campaign of accusing me of stealing funds from everyone, Jay phoned in a threat to destroy the Maetreum and the radio station from a Stewart’s sandwich shop and left it as a message which I still have. We called the shop and verified they had a security camera that filmed him in the act and Jeremiah called it in to the FBI. The accusation of misuse of funds is particularly phony given that the Maetreum has a policy of no one being paid or compensated under any conditions and all cash being deposited in the bank account. Viktoria was the treasurer for almost a decade and, as a result, every single penny went through her hands including all the petty cash! She and Jay also claimed I “stole” all the money over the course of sixteen years she contributed as part of her shared expenses for running the Maetreum. That is like saying a landlord stole all your rent money you paid while living in their apartment.

Viktoria and Rennie and Jay started a campaign of terror against me personally threatening to “out” every supposed secret I had, vicious emails, deadnameing me (using my birth name), threatening and harassing messages on Facebook, comments on almost every public posting I made, false reviews of my book, additional phone calls. All this continues to this day. But the cream of this crop was Viktoria sought out Chelsea Goodwin to be an ally. They even collectively picketed the Maetreum when we were trying to organize a post covid Season of the Tree celebration a year ago. We had to cancel that at the last minute due to the pandemic not being over but they did not know that.

Which brings us to Chelsea Goodwin.

To be continued:

 

What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been

 

                                 by  Cathryn Platine

 

  

It has been quite some time since I have been writing or sharing much of anything and a LOT of weird water has passed under the bridge. On Facebook my posts have mostly been restricted to political re-posts and the cute animal shares and for a good reason. I suffered a major health crisis the spring of 2019 following getting a pacemaker the first of the year. Instead of improving my health, it caused my health to go down hill. Apparently the cheap Medicare approved two wire model interfered with the electrical rhythm for part of my heart and I put on, by early June, 60 lbs of edema water weight.

At the time a younger couple from NYC had started to stay full time instead of just frequent visits but the trans partner was very mentally unstable and as I asked for greater help with chores such as taking care of the chickens it was resented to the point she came into my bedroom and screamed at me for over an hour while I was bedridden. My sister priestess, Viktoria, was not picking up any of the slack on her weekend visits either. As a result of them not cleaning the coop and keeping the chicken feed in the vermin proof containers, we got a rat infestation for the first time after having chickens for almost seven years prior to that. It was also the first time since the insurrection of 2007 that I did not feel safe in my own home.

As my health declined, I turned my bedroom into an efficiency apartment of sorts. I had a microwave, small freezer, small refrig and a breakfast cooking station complete with a griddle and coffeemaker. The ladies bathroom with directly outside my door so that as also not an issue but by the end of May I was, practically speaking, wheelchair bound for anything off the property. Finally I got a doctors appointment and was told to check into the hospital that day. My cardiologist worked out of St. Peter’s in Albany so that is where I was taken. I was put on IV diuretics, practically lived on the can and peed out sixty lbs of water in two weeks. At that point, one of the nurses, ignoring my request she not do so, examined my genitals. I don’t discuss is, but I am intersexed and when I had down there surgery, remained so. She freaked out and got two aides and immediately rushed me out of the room I had been in for two weeks with other women. I mean immediately, like five minutes notice.

I was confused at first but then realized what had just happened. I complained and asked for a supervisor. I got an apology but the nurse wasn’t even disciplined at all despite the non discrimination notices everywhere you looked. Rev. Jeremiah Lennox was visited at the time I was rushed to a private room and basically read them the riot act on my behalf.

While I was in the hospital, Viktoria was supposed to bring me needed personal items since her Albany home was only ten minutes from the hospital and she was still doing her weekends at the Maetreum. Apparently this was asking too much and I waited up to a week for her to “get around” to bringing me underwear, my incontinence pads and pj bottoms among other things of a personal nature. Instead of cleaning up the chicken coops, she gave away our chickens and adopted ten feral cats from NYC to take care of the rats. She proved unable to even pay the bills despite her having been the treasurer for about seven years at that point and I had to run the radio station remotely from my hospital room. I spent my 70’th birthday alone in the hospital. Later I was to learn from several sources that Viktoria was counting on my not surviving my open heart surgery and was extremely resentful that I did. She had even printed up business cards for herself as Battakes of the Maetreum!

I was hospitalized for just over a month and had two more transphobic encounters with staff during that time. I demanded release and came home mostly confined to my bedroom with no one else in the house except Viktoria on the weekends and my cat Frodo, his brother Gandy having died shortly before my hospitalization. Despite having lived at the Maetreum full time for a two year period in the past, apparently it was too much to ask she do so again for a couple of weeks as I started to recover some of my strength. I did have a visiting nurse for a couple of weeks, twice a week for an hour or so.

Unable to do much those first few weeks, Viktoria continued to produce the Phat Coffee House show on the weekends. Keeping these guys from turning our studio into a party house had always been as challenge but Viktoria let them run totally wild and then turned around and lied to me about it to my face. Eventually it got so bad we had to cancel their show altogether.

As a Conclave, all the active priestesses had agreed that we would stop taking in any charity housing women for the immediate future. We had been burned badly by a succession of users who trashed the property and stole from us on the way out. A woman from Texas, who was a FB friend for several years but I did not really follow, approached me about moving to the Maetreum on a full shared expenses basis. Seeing an advantage of someone living with me full time and pulling their own weight during the winter, I asked the other priestesses and was given the go ahead. Big big mistake. She promised she was not into drama at all which should have been a red light. She turned out to be the drama queen champ of all time and upon her arrival, I knew I had made a huge mistake. Her housebroken dog wasn’t. The dog got out and I spent the first four hours of her arrival searching the grounds “before a bear ate her”. She and Viktoria bonded immediately over metal music, smoking too much dope and sleeping with the guys doing their radio show. Having committed to contributing a full share of expenses (600 @ month) Julie immediately announced that due to unexpected travel expenses (someone else drove her up from Texas) she couldn’t make the first month payment. She did have money for dope a week later. During the two plus months she was here, her dog bit at leave five people I know of. Luckily none of them sued us although they could have. During that time she made exactly one contribution of 500 (not the agreed on 600) and borrowed money from me personally twice.

One night Viktoria informed me that her friend Beth was coming up with someone who needed a place to stay. Remember, a Conclave which included Viktoria, all agreed we were NOT taking in anymore emergency housing cases. I was forced to sit at the table, with Leslie, the woman in need, Beth, Viktoria and Julie and keep telling them, no, we had all agreed not to do this again as a Conclave. Yes, I finally gave in having been made to feel like the ogre of all time. Leslie had some serious issues but overall not as bad as some of the characters we had in the past. But after only a couple of weeks Julie decided Leslie was going to kill her and all the rest of us in our sleep. She was totally irrational about it. She had nothing to base this on.

For more than fifteen years we held what we called Orphans Thanksgiving every year for folks who didn’t have family or were estranged from family or just wanted to join us in a Thanksgiving celebration. 2019 was the last one. The night before, while several of us went out to dinner, Julie decided she was going to have a medical emergency and called Viktoria to leave the dinner early and take her to the hospital. We had a houseful of guests either already there or arriving the next day. Julie told the social worker at the hospital she did not feel safe at the Maetreum because of Leslie in an attempt to force me to throw Leslie out on Thanksgiving. This prompted a call to me from social services who were going to come and investigate while I had a houseful of guests. I explained the situation and as a result she would not be allowed by social services to return to the Maetreum and got a free hotel room. I never told her to leave, she maneuvered herself into the position of not being able to return out of a mean spirited attempt to force someone else out.

Thanksgiving day I was doing most of the prep work, still recovering from my heart surgery and getting wore out. Viktoria started yelling at me as I tried to go up to my bedroom to lay down and followed me upstairs into my bedroom screaming at me about Julie and Leslie. She would not stop. Downstairs we had a full house of guests. Once again, I felt totally unsafe in the very home I had founded. My heart condition, commented on by several people at the time, aggregated by Viktoria’s assault, left me cyanotic from the lack of circulation. Two months later I had to have another surgery to replace my bottom of the line pacemaker with a better one. Apparently, according to a couple of anonymous emails I received, I was once more expected to die by Viktoria who apparently was telling a large number of people that she was just waiting for me to die so she could take over the Maetreum! The prior entry here “For the Record” contains the bare bones account of why Viktoria was removed from the priestesshood the following summer. In a facebook reply to Jay Stewart, Julie Pousson stated;

“Jay Stewart, Vikki’s goal was to wait out Cathryn and take the place over. She stated this goal to me and to others. She profited off the losses she caused, and wholly deserves her fate.”

Viktoria had met Jay (John) Stewart at the funeral of Randy Ripley, a long time friend of mine and operator of the community radio station in Woodstock. Jay had been a long time hanger on to the trans communities with a reputation as a user and harasser via phone of other individuals. The fall before my heart surgery, Viktoria had invited Jay and his wife to our Yule celebration and dinner. Jay’s wife, Cheryl, openly insulted me while I was giving our meal blessing. Jay went on to get totally orc-faced drunk that evening. Afterwards I discussed the behaviour with Viktoria and made it crystal clear that Cheryl was never to come back and I was not happy about Jay being coming by as well especially since neither of them was Pagan, let alone Goddess oriented. Viktoria started sleeping with Jay and meeting him at the Maetreum on the Sunday of her weekend visits. As a result, what little work around the Maetreum Viktoria had been doing was replaced with her leaving me a sink full of her dirty dishes every weekend and Jay eating any food available I had for the following week.

The fall following my surgery several folks had cut and split a large amount of firewood for use during the winter. We partially heat with wood from a cookstove I had bought the Maetreum many years before. Jay took it all. Following the disastrous Thanksgiving, there having been no leftovers, that Saturday I cooked another turkey for Leslie and I to have for the following week. Jay came by on Sunday and ate most of it and took the rest. To be clear, I survive on a below poverty level social security income and was also helping Leslie with food. Jay had been joining Viktoria in passive aggressive sniping at me plus refusing to use the mens room toilet, instead the stall I used and leaving the seat up on purpose. I finally had enough and told Viktoria I did not want him in my home any longer.

To be continued: