Greater Grace World Outreach has thousands of members. Over its 50-year history, the church has been accused of being cult-like and of turning a blind eye to a culture of abuse. Now a group of former members, who call themselves the Millstones, are demanding a reckoning. This is the first installment in an investigative series:
The guys drove up to the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains that brisk November day, set up their tents, lugged coolers from the car and started a fire. That was one thing they had learned in the church—how to work together, heads down, focusing on the shared task.
That evening, the young men sank into folding chairs around the fire, cracking open beers. The camping trip was an annual tradition, a way to support each other as they carved out lives beyond Greater Grace World Outreach, the East Baltimore-based evangelical megachurch in which they were raised.
This time, the conversation turned dark. I’ve got to get something off my chest, one of the friends said. Years ago, he said, my aunt was babysitting and she walked in on a man molesting his son. He named the man, a prominent pastor in their church.
For a moment, the only sounds were the pops and crackles of the fire. Then another man spoke up: That same pastor…his son abused my sister.
Soon they were all talking at once. There was youth leader and coach Ray Fernandez, serving time for molesting three boys years ago—including one man sitting at the campfire. And Jesse Anderson, a camp counselor and Sunday school teacher who received an unusually light sentence for sexually assaulting a boy.
They spoke of loved ones who had been victims of abuse. My sister. My cousin. My friend. Me.
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A tale of bizarre goings-on in Austin, Texas. If you were blackmailed, would your first choice be to hire a hitman? It was for Erik Maund, which—unsurprisingly—escalated things further. With strong reporting from Katy Vine and Ana Worrel, this story races along to a tragic conclusion that could have easily been avoided.
Two days later, Erik met with Layla Love as planned; he made reservations with a different escort the following night. Afterward, he returned to Austin, where he went back to his routine at the dealership and the country club, in what would be the last few weeks of normalcy before the COVID-19 lockdown.
And then that text appeared on his phone. The message is now lost to the digital ether, but as court testimony would later establish, the sender threatened to expose him. Get me $25,000 dollars, the blackmailer demanded, or I’ll tell your wife everything.
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Decades ago, Kris Hansen showed 3M that its PFAS chemicals were in people’s bodies. Her bosses halted her work. As the EPA now forces the removal of the “forever chemicals” from drinking water, Hansen is wrestling with the secrets that 3M kept from her—and from the world. This ProPublica investigation was co-published with The New Yorker:
In 1979, an internal company report deemed PFOS “certainly more toxic than anticipated” and recommended longer-term studies. That year, 3M executives flew to San Francisco to consult Harold Hodge, a respected toxicologist. They told Hodge only part of what they knew: that PFOS had sickened and even killed laboratory animals and had caused liver abnormalities in factory workers. According to a 3M document that was marked “CONFIDENTIAL,” Hodge urged the executives to study whether the company’s fluorochemicals caused reproductive issues or cancer. After reviewing more data, he told one of them to find out whether the chemicals were present “in man,” and he added, “If the levels are high and widespread and the half-life is long, we could have a serious problem.” Yet Hodge’s warning was omitted from official meeting notes, and the company’s fluorochemical production increased over time.
Hansen’s bosses never told her that PFOS was toxic. In the weeks after Johnson left 3M, however, she felt that she was under a new level of scrutiny. One of her superiors suggested that her equipment might be contaminated, so she cleaned the mass spectrometer and then the entire lab. Her results didn’t change. Another encouraged her to repeatedly analyze her syringes, bags and test tubes, in case they had tainted the blood. (They had not.) Her managers were less concerned about PFOS, it seemed to Hansen, than about the chance that she was wrong.
Sometimes Hansen doubted herself. She was 28 and had only recently earned her Ph.D. But she continued her experiments, if only to respond to the questions of her managers. 3M bought three additional mass spectrometers, which each cost more than a car, and Hansen used them to test more blood samples. In late 1997, her new boss, Bacon, even had her fly out to the company that manufactured the machines, so that she could repeat her tests there. She studied the blood of hundreds of people from more than a dozen blood banks in various states. Each sample contained PFOS. The chemical seemed to be everywhere.
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Sophie Vershbow | Esquire | June 18, 2024 | 7,436 words
When the storytelling is this compelling in a 7,500-word profile, time evaporates in an instant. Reporter Sophie Vershbow was 4 days old when she attended a funeral for her cousin, Jeffrey Bomser, who died on Monday, August 14, 1989, at age 38; he’d fallen into a coma after surgery to treat an AIDS complication. For Esquire, Vershbow mined diaries, letters, and newspaper clippings, and spoke to many people in Jeff’s circle to tell his story: he and his brother Larry contracted HIV and died within six months of each other in the early days of the AIDS epidemic. Vershbow learns that Jeff was bisexual. He never knew whether he contracted the virus from sex or by sharing needles with his brother. Jeff became a staunch, outspoken support for others navigating HIV infection. He fought stigma and advocated for clinical trials to find promising treatment. Above all, he helped people live out their remaining days with peace and grace, at a time when an HIV diagnosis often meant fear, shame, and isolation. “Jeff believed that the more people who knew about AIDS and people who had it, the better chance there would be of finding a cure,” she writes. “He was aware of his privilege as a charismatic, straight-passing, sober, middle-class white man dealing with a diagnosis mostly shared at the time by gay men and disadvantaged IV drug users who were being systematically ignored.” Vershbow excels at helping readers remember the stigma society imposed on those living with HIV and AIDS, highlighting exactly why Jeff and his contributions were extraordinary. What Vershbow makes clear in this riveting profile is that it’s not about the dysfunctional and dangerous path you once walked or what befalls you as a result. It doesn’t matter where purpose originates, it’s what you do with it that counts. —KS
Sharon Lerner | ProPublica | May 20, 2024 | 8,018 words
This is a story about dangerous secrets. It’s also about complicity and how it manifests, not only in the keeping of dangerous secrets but also in the decision—the failure—to ask questions or to take a stand. In the 1990s, Kris Hansen, a chemist at 3M, tested human blood from the Red Cross for the presence of the company’s fluorochemicals. She found it everywhere because fluorochemicals, as we now know, are “forever chemicals,” contaminating our water supplies, soil, animal products, and bodies; they can even be passed from mother to child. When Hansen presented her research, the company shut down her work. Her bosses also told her that fluorochemicals were safe, and she believed them. The headline of this piece says that 3M “convinced” Hansen, but in truth she wanted to be convinced. She respected the company. Her father had worked there and helped to develop some of its most important products. Even after her research was shuttered, Hansen continued to work for 3M. “Perhaps, I wondered aloud, she hadn’t really wanted to know whether her company was poisoning the public,” Sharon Lerner writes at one point. “To my surprise, Hansen readily agreed. ‘It almost would have been too much to bear at the time,’ she told me.” This isn’t a profile of a hero. It’s a profile of someone more familiar than many people might like to admit: someone who knows or at least senses the truth, but chooses to look away from it. These people are crucial to the functioning of corporate America, which prioritizes profit over well-being. You know these people, and I know them. Perhaps we are them. —SD
Geoffrey Gray | Alta | June 20, 2024 | 20,487 words
Chances are you’ve encountered a dog-eared copy of a Carlos Castaneda book sometime, somewhere in your life: a hostel bookshelf, a Little Free Library, a random park bench. At least, that’s how I’ve stumbled on one, but I’ve never actually read any of them. For me, “Carlos Castaneda” has simply floated in the ether all these years, a name synonymous with New Age. He became a top-selling author in the late ’60s, best known for his titles on the spiritual teachings of Don Juan. But these encounters with a Yaqui shaman were fabricated, and his body of work, originating from his anthropology thesis at UCLA, was discredited and has been extensively debunked. Still, decades later, he remains a New Age icon. The lesser-known details about his life, which Geoffrey Gray resurrects for this Alta story, are that he disappeared from public life in the ’70s, bought a compound in Los Angeles, and formed a cult, which consisted of mostly young women who identified as witches. These chacmools—a term from ancient Mexico for warrior statues—were “gatekeepers between the mundane and the sublime.” After Castaneda’s death in 1998, six chacmools mysteriously vanished, with the remains of one woman discovered in Death Valley. Did they carry out a suicide pact? But where were the bodies of the others? And why was Castaneda’s will changed days before he died, with his chacmools designated as the primary beneficiaries? With encouragement from a friend, Gray decides to investigate. He acts as a guide into a bizarre world, weaving a twisted tale that spans Los Angeles—a place where people can remake themselves, and where Castaneda spun up his own reality—and the surreal, consciousness-expanding landscape of the California desert. Things get weird, but Gray keeps us grounded. He delivers a fascinating story that feels stuck in time but also very of-the-moment given the current resurgence of interest in psychedelics and our fraught post-truth era. —CLR
Christopher Solomon | WIRED | June 12, 2024 | 5,759 words
The journalist who shared this piece with me, Peter Flax, said, “I’m a sucker for good detective stories.” Same, Peter, same. And when I started reading this one, I couldn’t stop. It’s exceedingly fun, which doesn’t mean it’s free of consequence—quite the opposite, in fact. Christopher Solomon tells the tale of Bryan Hance, who runs a website called Bike Index, where cyclists can report stolen equipment. Hance is “tall, genial, and floridly profane,” with hair that “falls away from his face in dark wings that call to mind a mid-’80s yearbook photo.” A few years ago, he got an anonymous tip about a Facebook page run by a company in Mexico, which appeared to be selling bikes recently stolen from California. “Not so long ago, bike theft was a crime of opportunity—a snatch-and-grab, or someone applying a screwdriver to a flimsy lock. Those quaint days are over,” Solomon writes. “Thieves now are more talented and brazen and prolific. They wield portable angle grinders and high-powered cordless screwdrivers. They scope neighborhoods in trucks equipped with ladders, to pluck fine bikes from second-story balconies. They’ll use your Strava feed to shadow you and your nice bike back to your home.” Hance dug and dug until he managed to unmask the man behind an international criminal operation responsible for the theft of hundreds, if not thousands, of bikes. (As someone who loves to go down an internet rabbit hole in search of an answer to a question, I aspire to Hance’s prowess as a citizen sleuth.) Solomon himself takes the reins of the detective work at a certain point, contacting the criminal mastermind in Mexico, for a bizarre conversation. This feature is a ride. —SD
There is only a loose attempt to profile chef Angel Jimenez here: He grew up in Puerto Rico. He cut sugarcane at 14. His father ran a side hustle grilling on the beach. That’s about it. This isn’t a piece about Jimenez’s journey to get to America; it’s about the experience he created once he got there. From a converted trailer in the South Bronx, Jimenez runs La Piraña Lechonera, a restaurant slash weekly block party where, on Saturdays and Sundays, he roasts and sells two pigs. I don’t eat meat anymore, so I did not expect a pork-focused essay to keep my attention. I hadn’t accounted for the wizardry of Abe Beame’s descriptive powers. I could hear Jimenez’s salsa music blasting over the roar of weekend commuters on the overhead intersection. Feel the atmosphere exuding from the eclectic collection of characters gathered, from tourists to local drunks, all lorded over by the effervescent Jimenez. Smell the hot fat as pork is pulled from the oven. Taste the meat itself—although things become a bit too visceral when Beame bites into flesh “glossed with fat and pig liquor, shredded without any shredding necessary, in a liminal state between solid and liquid.” Neither Jimenez nor Beame take themselves too seriously and there is a lightness to this piece, which is graced with incredulity and humor. I particularly enjoyed the bullet points on why it takes two hours to get served at La Piraña. (A key factor is the trips to check on the cooking trays of pork, “leaving the trailer unattended, which often coincide with breaks to smoke a joint.”) Jimenez could be more efficient. He could be making more money. That’s just not his style, and it’s wonderful. At one point, Beame muses, “[H]ow the fuck I could possibly describe all of the insanity I was tasting and experiencing in writing.” He nailed it, with words that ooze fun and grease. —CW
Jeremy Collins | Esquire | June 16, 2024 | 4,570 words
Jeremy Collins grew up in Atlanta, but his Indiana-reared father made sure his Hoosier love for Larry Bird lived on through his son. (As a Hoosier with a father from Boston, I arrived at the same outcome through different variables.) In 1991, though, after almost 15 years of soaring NBA excellence*, Bird came crashing back down to earth—as did Collin’s adolescence. A beautiful, thrumming piece about basketball, family, and vulnerability. —PR
*This soaring was figurative only, even though Bird could, against all odds, manage a reverse dunk from time to time.
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Carlos Castaneda became a bestselling writer in the ’70s. Famous around the globe for his Don Juan books, he was (and is) a New Age icon, despite being later called out for fabricating these stories. He then disappeared from the spotlight, bought a compound in Los Angeles, and formed a cult, which consisted of dozens of followers—mostly young women who identified as witches called chacmools, a term for ancient Mexican warrior statues that protected the Toltec gods. Shortly after Castaneda’s death in 1998, six of these women disappeared. For Alta Journal, Geoffrey Gray investigates what happened, tracing their steps and imagining their journeys. It’s a deep dive into Castaneda’s weird world and a twisted tale set against the backdrop of Los Angeles and the California desert.
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Sophie Vershbow dug through years of letters, diaries, and ephemera to profile her cousin Jeffrey Bomser, who died at age 38 of complications related to AIDS. Bomser was a ray of light in the community; he used his privilege to speak out against stigma and advocate for clinical trials, but above all, took every opportunity he could to help others with HIV and AIDS, bringing comfort and support to others who shared his disease.
“Jeff believed that the more people who knew about AIDS and people who had it, the better chance there would be of finding a cure. He was aware of his privilege as a charismatic, straight-passing, sober, middle-class white man dealing with a diagnosis mostly shared at the time by gay men and disadvantaged IV drug users who were being systematically ignored. For so long, Jeff’s privilege had been used to feed his ego and drug addiction, but in the final years of his life, he used that privilege and charisma to contribute to a movement.”
Throughout his time as an activist, Jeff stuck ACT Up’s silver “Touched by a Person with AIDS” stickers on any public surface he could find. Jeff’s goal as someone living with AIDS was, metaphorically, to touch as many lives as he could every day, whether it was opening someone’s mind or opening someone’s access to treatment. The impact he made in such a short time makes me even more regretful that his life was cut short, knowing how much more he could have done if he’d lived longer.
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This is a joyous account of the singular experience of dining at La Piraña Lechonera, a restaurant run by chef Angel Jimenez. Open on summer weekends, La Piraña is as much about the atmosphere as the food—and is run in a style that most capitalist ventures would balk at. There is noise, smells, and grease aplenty in Abe Beam’s great piece.
While I was waiting, Angel pulled from a Heineken and chatted up the crowd, occasionally fighting with an inebriated local woman he clearly had some history with, and offhandedly mentioned to me that earlier that day he had served a plate of lechon to Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor. The story had the flavor of a guy talking elaborate shit from his station at a dominoes table on a street corner, but when I checked him on it, Angel pulled out his phone. Sure enough, there was a selfie taken that day, posed with the justice from Soundview.
When it was finally my turn to order, Angel had run out of rice, guineos, and seafood salad, leaving only the lechon. I shared it with my wife, passing the hefty clamshell back and forth in the car, eating roast pork off our laps with a plastic fork. It was somehow one of the best meals I had last year, and I haven’t been able to shake the experience since.
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