Blood Curse, White Cobra—Part 1
TGDW — CHAPTER THREE: A Two-Part Mini-Story — PART 1 of 2
NOTE: This is a ‘mini-story’ and prelude to ‘THE GOVERNMENT DENIES WRONGDOING: Finding ancient Jesus in the post-whistleblower era’ — a dramatized story series based on real events, by Eeshan V. Melder. These two chapters, CHAPTER THREE (this one) and CHAPTER FOUR, are dramatized autobiographical background about the blood curse on my grandfather. Click here for CHAPTER ONE & CHAPTER TWO which are an overview of the technical part of the larger story.
“My grandfather was a lawyer in Sri Lanka in the 1930s. After he made enemies defending smugglers and gangsters, somebody hired a village Shaman to put a blood curse on him. He was dead within two years.”
[DISCLAIMER: This story is part of a dramatized article series based on real events. In certain cases, events, characters and timelines have been created, changed or removed for dramatic purposes, to allow exploration of religious beliefs and spirituality, to protect sources of information, or for entertainment purposes. This story is NOT legal or professional advice. It’s a story. Regarding all matters of law, career or government policy, please consult a licensed attorney, expert or the appropriate federal agency. The U.S. government denies any and all wrongdoing.]
Blood Curse, White Cobra — Part 1
THE STORY: As a 10-year-old child in the 1970s, in America, I am told of a blood curse on my Sri Lankan Tamil grandfather. I am taken to a Hindu temple in Sri Lanka with a white cobra, and given a protection spell to keep me safe.
INVOCATION
William Tyndale was captured and executed in 1536 for translating the Bible into English — from the original Greek and Hebrew manuscripts — so people could read it for themselves. It’s harder for those in charge when the people can understand the rules for themselves, and no longer require the interpretation or assistance of others. Despite being executed, Tyndale’s work was later combined with that of others, translated from German and Latin, and used to create the Matthew Bible (or Matthew’s Version), one of the first known English Bibles to be mass produced on a printing press.
Genesis 3:14
14 And the LORde God sayd vnto the serpet because thou haste so done moste cursed be thou of all catell and of all beastes of the feld: vppo thy bely shalt thou goo: and erth shalt thou eate all dayes of thy lyfe.
— Tyndale translation into English (circa 1500’s) of some of the oldest known Greek and Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible.
SOURCE: https://biblehub.com/tyndale/genesis/1.htm
THE CURSE ON MY GRANDFATHER
I grew up with a family legend…
I’m over 50 years old as I write this, but I was probably around 10 years old when I first heard that there was a curse on my grandfather.
It was an ordinary day when I first heard the story.
So many things, that turn out to be strange later in life, happen on days that seem entirely ordinary at the time.
I was living in the America of the 1970s. It was a very different place.
It was a late weekday afternoon, just after school. I had made my way through the school from home room with Mrs. Buckminster, after grabbing my book bag. I’d pushed through the kids and waded into the thick wall of sound at the door. It was a familiar sound made every day at every school by the chorus of buses, bells and the booming voices from the hundreds of happy suburban children breaking free of that day’s obligation to their future.
I didn’t like school much at this age. Bullies. Mean teachers. Fashion — in a country other than where your parents grew up — meant being sent to public school in the wrong clothes. Social mistakes, like bringing my dad’s old briefcase to school as my school bag, had a long shelf life.
I just wanted to be like my dad. I still do. The kids had laughed at me and made sure I never forgot.
My no-brand name sneakers, and budget-friendly, Sears Toughskins jeans didn’t help. They wore sneakers by brand names like Nike, Adidas, Converse or Puma — and jeans by Levis or Lee. Rich older kids, my sister’s age, wore jeans with fancy designer names like Fiorucci.
That’s me around the time I learned about the curse. I was sporting my mom‘s homemade hairstyling and my Sears Toughskin denim jacket.
I was a pudgy Asian kid, with brown skin, and accent, and serial killer glasses. Old school playground bullies — it just felt like they could sense my presence within a mile.
Get this — my parents had even gone to the home of the WORST bully in my class!
His name was Augustus. Bully ass name, if I ever heard one. He was huge. Biggest guy in our class. When we went to his house, we all had to sit in the living room and discuss why we weren’t getting along. Your child keeps kicking my ass for no reason. That’s what I should have said.
Anyway, then the adults decided they wanted to confer privately in the kitchen. That left me and Augustus sitting alone in the living room — for 10 minutes. It was terrifying. Like being behind enemy lines. I felt like parental supervision wasn’t enough.
We figured it out. Sitting there together alone, I think the sheer embarrassment, of forced parental interaction, made us friendlier.
We’d shaken hands.
Since then, at recess, instead of beating me up, he’d started “teaching me how to fight”. I’d still get beat up. But it was educational, now. Better than being kicked in the stomach. That’s what had my gotten my parents so mad.
[I saw Augustus for the last time in high school. I’d changed schools. I’d had my growth spurt and was over 6 feet tall. I was out on a date. Augustus was our waiter. He was still the same size he was in elementary school. He said something about my size when we stood up to leave. I remember thinking somewhere deep inside me, that little kid was definitely still in there, cos’ it felt good to see him and not to be afraid.]
School out, I trudged home alone. I was reading and walking. Re-reading, technically. I had a copy of a Tintin adventure, Flight 714 — my favorite. Tintin is the journalist hero in a graphic novel series by the Belgian author, Herge.
It wasn’t difficult to read and walk. My path was in the shape of a giant U-turn.
It was so much easier to jump the fence of the house across the street from the school. That put me right in my OWN backyard. But — that created a risk to be managed.
Later in life, I would do risk management on large government technology programs. Managing my mom’s authoritarian control of discipline in our family home, was where I got my start.
The Indian lady who lived in the house behind mine, Mrs. Surpanakha, didn’t like me jumping her fence. She’d caught me once and yelled at me. I was so panicked, I briefly got stuck by the seat of my pants — halfway over the fence — before falling over into our yard. It was awkward for both of us when it happened.
Later when she called my mom.
Mrs. Surpanakha was a chubby lady, who always seemed a little aloof. Couldn’t she just look the other way about it? That’s what I used to think. But growing up and living in that same house, I can imagine how she felt. Plus, living across the street from an elementary school was probably no picnic for them, either.
No skipping the fence today. Like I said, it was an ordinary day. No excuse to rush.
The row of mostly identical suburban houses that led to my street corner was quiet, except for the occasional dog barking. As always, in the afternoons, there was the distant stuttering roar of a gasoline powered lawnmower.
I made the right turn down my neighborhood street.
Now home, and a few slices of strawberry cheesecake later, I was sitting with my mom as she folded laundry in the kitchen of our modest three-bedroom home.
This zone of time was a favorite for me, at that age.
After school — for an hour or so — it was just me and my mom. My sister wasn’t home yet to boss me around.
I had my GI Joes on the kitchen floor. Our small, black-and-white TV in the kitchen was on, as Speed Racer played in the background. Perfect.
The afternoon TV selection in those days was limited compared to what we have today. But back then it seemed endless to me, especially compared to Sri Lanka, which had only just gotten a TV a few years ago.
Sri Lanka is a tiny island some 20 miles to the south of India. That’s where my family is from.
But that’s not where I was as I heard the story of my grandfather’s curse. We were living in the well-manicured suburb of Bethesda, Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C.
Mom was busy folding laundry out of a big blue hamper as she recounted the family legend that, I had no clue, would become such a big part of my life.
She was telling me that, apparently, my grandfather’s curse was a blood curse, so it moved to all his male heirs, including me.
What the hell. I had never even met my grandfather.
This is a picture of my mom‘s family, showing my grandfather and grandmother, back in the 1930s. The child seated next to my grandfather is my mother.
My grandfather had lived, and died, in Sri Lanka long before I was born. This much I already knew.
Now my Mom was telling me that my grandfather died two years or so after this curse!
I was horrified.
Why me? I hadn’t done anything wrong. It seemed totally unfair.
Plus, this was the 1970s. There would be no Harry Potter until 1997. There was nothing to fill me with a childlike sense of wonder about any of this.
All I felt was dread.
Mom could be pretty dispassionate when she was bearing bad news.
She explained to us, later in life, why this was the case. She said that she felt by diminishing the emotional delivery of her bad news, she could somehow blunt the emotional impact on the recipient s— usually me and my sister.
Truth be told she was pretty thick skinned. She was a bit of a badass for her day. This is a picture of my mom, and dad, when they first met. This is also how she would want to be remembered.
Over the years she grew up into a stout woman with a fierce temper, and a strong belief in conservative values. She always supported the underdog and stood up to bullies. Full of fire, she either had everyone laughing, or got people a little bit scared — there was no in between with my mom.
On this particular day, in my child's mind, I thought mom was telling me this curse story so calmly because she wanted to downplay the fact that I was soon to die, and she had to discuss the arrangements to be made.
I felt a pit in my stomach.
There was a two-part episode of The Six Million Dollar Man this week. Oscar Goldman, one of my favorite federal managers, had been kidnapped.
I wanted to live — at least long enough to see the second half…
ABOUT MY GRANDFATHER
My mother was born in 1933, daughter of Harirajah and Parameswary, in the northern part of Sri Lanka. There the population is Tamil, a Hindu minority, in a majority ethnic Singhalese and Buddhist country.
When Mom was born, Sri Lanka was still occupied by the British. Mahatma Gandhi was still in the newspapers. He wouldn’t end the British Raj until 1947, more than a decade away.
My grandfather, her Dad, was a “proctor” — a flavor of Attorney in the old British system.
When I see this photograph, I always imagine a flash powder bang, just before the shutter on an old-style camera — as the scene comes to life. Grandpa was probably a recent graduate, eager to start proctoring and make his fortune in the British Raj.
It was a smart career move. The British legal system offered opportunities for a young Tamil in the ‘divide and rule’ imperial period. Sri Lanka is 80% ethnic Singhalese with a 10% or so Tamil minority. It was a documented technique of the British, when they occupied a country, to find a minority group, and put those minorities in charge of the majority.
That way, the minority-run government had an interest in keeping the British around. We’ve got your back, Minority Jack, just remember that.
BACKGROUND: The British Raj in Sri Lanka
The British Raj during which my grandfather lived lasted from 1858 to 1947. It was the Indian extension of the British kingdom created by their occupation of India. Their control extended to Sri Lanka as well.
Remember the movie Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom? It was that period of time when my grandpa was doing his thing. In fact, in that movie, remember the little village that Indiana Jones helps out? All their children had been kidnapped to work in mines under an ancient castle? That village scene (only) was filmed in Sri Lanka.
Let’s not just pick on the British, who are generally remembered favorably by Sri Lankans. (This is likely because of World War II, when Sri Lanka was an important refueling point for the aerial bombing campaigns over the far east.) Throughout Sri Lanka’s history there were waves of occupations, by the Portuguese, the Dutch and then the British.
The foreign naval and trade presence also brought waves of immigrants from Europe. Many intermarried with the locals. On my father’s side I have Dutch and Scottish ancestors. Here’s a picture of them. Very different.
My dad’s family lived in a municipality in Sri Lanka called Nugegoda, down a street aptly named Melder Place. Though it still bears the name, there aren’t any Melders left that way as far as I know.
In the distant past, our grandfather owned large swaths of land for agriculture. He died young, and the family slowly sold off the land to keep the family going. My dad spent years tracing his genealogy, before the internet hosted websites dedicated to helping you do it ever existed. He used paper birth records and marriage certificates. Everything on our our grandfather’s side traced back to Holland.
On his mother’s side it was not as clear. Genealogy is harder when your ancestors are hyper-mobile. We thought for years that there was a Native American on my paternal grandmother’s side. Then my cousin’s whiz kid son ended the debate. He traced my grandmother, Ellie Jane, to a Scottish biscuit maker that came to Sri Lanka back in the way back when.
[AUTHOR’S NOTE: It explained a lot. I don’t like biscuits. But for many years, I drank a lot of Scotch. I have a closet full of liquor for guests, today. But I haven’t had a drink myself in 11 years. Maybe when the UFOs land and talk to us? Then I’ll have a drink. Or two. Freemasonry is also a Scottish thing. I was also briefly one of the few non-Black members of a lodge of Freemasons in South Central Los Angeles. This was back in the 1990s. The lodge I joined was supposedly a breakaway group started by black men in LA during segregation. They were some amazing men and a lot of fun to party with. I’ll write about my time in graduate school in South Central LA in the 1990’s sometime, and link it here.]
These occupations by western countries brought some richness and cultural contributions. Today in Sri Lanka, you’ll hear beautifully hybridized east-west names, like “Fernandopillai”. It’s a common name in Sri Lanka. “Fernando” is a Portuguese name. It means “daring”, but over time, it picked up a Tamil component. “Pillai” means “Prince” or “child of the king” in Tamil and Malayalam. The food, the music — everything in Sri Lanka has traces of this imperial time.
Sadly, all the evils of imperialism came with the western occupation. Folks in Sri Lanka know about a place called Slave Island in the capital. Tamara Fernando wrote a good article about the place in the Sri Lankan newspaper, the Sunday Observer. Her article was called “The forgotten history of slavery in Sri Lanka”. She was writing a review of the book “Slave in a Palanquin. Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka” by Nira Wickramasinghe (2020).
Slavery feels like the past. The name Slave Island was changed only recently. The sin of slavery, however, persists in different forms to this very day. The only difference is that now, it’s illegal. Back then, it was not. But, truly eliminating something from your society, versus simply declaring it illegal…well…those are two very different things.
Of course, after 1948, when the British were gone, it went the other way. A civil war started in Sri Lanka in 1983, when I was 16. It took a long time for me to understand that many of the ethnic and religious wars in formerly occupied countries got their fuel or spark this way — from the legacy of divide and rule.
When grandpa passed away after the curse, mom’s family, of 3 boys and 3 girls, fell under extreme hardship.
To hear her tell the story, my mom, despite being the youngest, was the one who pushed the family ahead to persevere and try and advance themselves. After getting a BA from Stella Marisa College and an MA at Presidency College — both in Madras (Chennai), India — mom returned to Sri Lanka and began working for the government newspaper — the Sri Lanka Daily News.
That’s where she met my dad. He was working there as the Personal Secretary to the Editor of the newspaper. This was before he took the civil service exams and joined the government. The editors name was Esmond Wickremesinghe. His son, Ranil Wickremesinghe, is now the President of Sri Lanka, as I write this story!
My mom and dad married in 1960. They had a civil Christian ceremony, and a Hindu ceremony. Pictures of that Hindu ceremony were lost until very recently, when my sister found a few among my mom’s possessions after she passed in 2022.
This picture, which I salvaged and colorized, shows a ritualistic anointing of the head with rice during the ceremony.
My dad always smiles when he’s nervous.
My mom would usually glare at him furiously, to make him stop. But in this case, she’s smiling too.
Dad was supposed to anoint his head with just a few grains of rice, symbolically, but he had grabbed a handful and poured it all over his head. For once, they took it in stride. I’ve learned myself that getting married can definitely be messy at times.
It’s still worth it.
COMING TO AMERICA
Our family came to America in 1973. I was 6 years old. My sister was 11. I remember sitting in the back seat of a sparkly green Ford Pinto in 1973 coming into D.C. from the airport. The car had a white interior and bucket seats in the rear, which I had never seen before. It was driven by my dad‘s friend, who would later become one of the highest ranking Sri Lankans to work at the United Nations.
My dad and his friend were talking about ‘Watergate’. I was 6. I remember thinking it was either a gate, in the middle of the water…or maybe a gate made out of super-fast jets of water?
Dad was a Sri Lankan diplomat. He was in the Commercial branch.
He was an economist.
He’d been sent to America to try and build trade relationships between Sri Lankan and American businesses.
That’s my dad with Colonel Sanders, the military mind behind America’s fried chicken empire. In the 1930s Colonel Sanders built the global Kentucky Fried Chicken brand empire, rivalled only in terms of military chicken by General Tso’s chicken from China. (General Tso’s chicken was invented in the 1950s by someone who shared the same hometown as the famous General Tso from the 1800's.) My dad got a certificate appointing him as an honorary Kentucky colonel.
America in the 1970’s was not the warmest place for a pudgy, brown-skinned, Sri Lankan kid with thick glasses. I was blissfully unaware that segregation had ended just 9 years before we arrived. I just knew there were people who seemed to not like us.
There were always a handful of teachers and students that I felt would ostracize me. Some kids would avoid playing with me, or stop playing with me after their parents met me.
I was oblivious at the time. I thought we were lame, so that was what we got. It also made the nice people we met seem all that more special. there were a lot of them too.
Adapting to America was wrenching for my mom, who was extremely conservative and full of bluster.
In an America where today’s “Karen” was the normal gold standard of the 1970s, my mom would go toe-to-toe with anyone that disrespected us. Simultaneously my parent’s cultural misunderstandings would also perpetually get us into all kinds of trouble.
We didn’t appreciate that we were living in the relics of a very conservative Jim Crow, segregated America. As America had changed after World War II ended in 1946. A generation of young people, the children of World War II, cried out for peace and social change.
Meanwhile as I read the old comic books from 1968 that were stacked up at the barbershop, these were the kinds of ads I’d see.
There are now allegations that the government at the time (1969–1974) targeted both the formerly enslaved Black people in a newly desegregated America, as well as those involved with this peace movement.
In 2016, CNN reported that a top aide in the Nixon administration, involved in the Watergate scandal (in which Republican operatives secretly placed listening devices in a Democratic party office) explicitly stated as such.
The CNN article quoted John Erlichman, “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid (sic) their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Instead of going back to Sri Lanka at the end of his appointment, dad got a job with the World Bank and then the United Nations. That’s how I ended up growing up in America, long before I became a dual Sri Lankan American citizen.
Dad retired as the #2 guy in the United Nations mission in Pyongyang, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — a.k.a. North Korea. I got to visit, twice, while I was in college.
That’s me, with some North Korean people from dad’s office in North Korea, back in the 1980s. I still have tons of 8mm video from those trips I need to go through. I was in college and used to enjoy drinking with the North Korean officials and debating politics.
The North Koreans have a lot of tough stories about them. But they treated my family well. I think living there, in the tranquil, authoritarian silence of Pyongyang was the happiest period of my dad’s life. It really is a beautiful city. Dad lived in the designated UN compound, with his office next door. He got to spend his evenings sitting and reading with my mom — in peace.
Reading was always my dad’s favorite thing.
GRANDPA WAS A BRILLIANT ATTORNEY WHO REPRESENTED UNDERDOGS & CRIMINALS
It was in this 1920’s environment, in the British Raj, that my lawyer grandpa decided to go after a particular segment of the legal business. He decided to defend smugglers and other organized criminals…or as we call them today, gangsters.
While my grandfather became a gangster attorney, his brother-in-law, my mom’s uncle, became a pawnbroker.
They called this uncle ‘Patta’ which was a combination of the Tamil word for grandfather (தாத்தா or Tāttā) with the word ‘Papa’, which just means papa. I met Patta once back in the 1970s during my one trip to Jaffna in the northern part of Sri Lanka where my mom’s family is from. He was a quiet, elderly man with a white sarong and a white shirt. He was mostly quiet, but you could tell his mind was working fast. His smiling silence was a choice.
Folks I interviewed while writing this said different things. One thing was that the combo of pawnbroker and proctor was a tricky one.
Apparently, people would get into legal trouble, go to my grandfather. He’d require payment. The family would pawn their family jewels to his brother-in-law and then…
I heard different stories. Some good outcomes. Some not so good.
Once people get a little power, they feel untouchable. I heard rumors of land deals gone bad, even murders other nefarious stuff.
As a kid, they were just my loving family. But hearing a lifetime of stories, I get the impression that my mom’s family were some tough characters.
I remember once before my mom died, I heard her talking to her brother about their life growing up in my grandfather’s family. My mom had two sisters and three brothers. This was her youngest brother she was talking to.
My mom was defending their mother about something, when my uncle stopped her and said, “Yes, Acca (sister) but I felt so sad. Amma (mother) took that piece of wood and hammered that poor girl until her ear and everything was all hanging…aiyo, it was awful.”
Holy Jesus Christ, I remember thinking.
I asked my mom later — what was happening in that story?
Some backtalk had made my grandmother take a piece of wood and beat a domestic worker at their home until her earlobe tore off.
Who are these people I’m related to?
This explained why, as a kid, my mom could never understand why I thought hitting us was ‘too rough’. If I was still noncompliant then came canes, rulers, slippers, open handed slap, closed fist, iron fist, monkey fist, dragon’s tail, tigers claw, white crane style, whatever kung fu mom had going on at the moment — I got it all.
She was a big fan of ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’. From mom’s perspective, it was for my own good. It wasn’t rough at all. No blood, and my earlobes were still attached.
She could yell without stopping for minutes at a time. I don’t know how she breathed.
But to be fair to my mom, I was one of those curious kids that went looking for trouble. By my teenage years, I was already playing bass guitar for anyone that would let me, sneaking into ska and reggae clubs in DC to watch bands and learn.
Sadly, I never really got to bond with my mom’s family when I was growing up. Remember what I was saying about the price you pay for ‘divide and rule’? When the civil war began in 1983, most of them fled. Some died in the war. Many spent those years suffering as refugees.
I was there visiting Sri Lanka, walking around in the city with my cousin Tanya, on July 23rd, when the riots that marked the start of Sri Lanka’s civil war began.
We were both teenagers, walking around and taking pictures and trying to do some sightseeing in the old part of the city known as The Fort.
Little did we know it was the terrible day of racial rioting that Sri Lankan history would eventually call Black July 1983…
CLICK HERE FOR CHAPTER FOUR!!!
THE GOVERNMENT DENIES WRONGDOING — Finding Ancient Jesus in the Post-Whistleblower Era
A DRAMATIZED STORY BASED ON REAL EVENTS
INDEX OF CHAPTERS
CHAPTER ONE: Seeing the Big Picture — PART 1
CHAPTER TWO: Seeing the Big Picture — PART 2
CHAPTER THREE: Blood Curse, White Cobra — PART 1 (You are here!)
CHAPTER FOUR: Blood Curse, White Cobra — PART 2 (Coming soon!)
CHAPTER FIVE: The Shocking Untold History of the Government’s Civil Rights ‘Exemption’ Program (Coming soon!)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eeshan Melder is a Public Sector IT Programs Specialist with 25+ years of experience in federal program operations. After 15 years as a Public Sector Management Consultant, he joined the federal service as a senior manager. He spent a decade at two different departments of government as a Supervisory IT Program Manager, a Senior Adviser, and a Division Director. In 2015, Eeshan was certified as a federal agency Lean Six Sigma Greenbelt, specially trained to diagnose broken federal systems using engineering industry methods. In 2019, he received the Comptroller’s Award, one of the highest performance-based awards given by his federal employer, for generating exceptional cost savings to the government. In early 2020, he resigned from federal service, reporting apparent vulnerabilities in the design of the mandatory Federal Sector EEO Program used across the federal government, since 1972, for federal employees to report sexual harassment and other EEO violations. He holds a Master’s degree in Communications Management from the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Southern California, and a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism, from Carleton University, in Ottawa Canada.
POSTSCRIPT
In April 2020, a month after I resigned from government, the Federal #MeToo report was released by the government’s own U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
The report raised concerns about the Federal Sector EEO Program.
More than a year later, a September 2021 article in FEDWeek quoted a letter to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) from a group of legislators urging an audit of the federal EEO program. The letter cited concerns “…the ‘fox is guarding the henhouse’, due to…agencies conducting their own (sexual harassment) complaint investigations…”.
As of 2024, and it’s not clear if any audit has happened. In February 2024, an article in FEDWeek noted that GAO issued “a report on training on preventing sexual harassment in the federal workplace says that such harassment has been a persistent problem for years, and also one that is underreported”.
No audit is indicated. No other action to actually address the problem is indicated or recommended. The GAO has been asked to conduct an audit of the Federal Sector EEO Program by legislators. It appears the organization is making a choice not to do so.
Why? Is the government cooking the books on sexual harassment?
The article does add, “GAO pointed out that it has issued some two dozen reports on sexual harassment and assault since 2011, some of them focused on the uniformed military but most involving federal employees as well, or exclusively.”
Meanwhile, sexual abuse scandals have continued to emerge in government at the Merchant Marine Academy (Department of Transportation) and elsewhere. In 2023, the Los Angeles Times ran an article…“Former warden at women’s prison known as ‘rape club’ gets 70 months for sexual abuse”. The warden of this federal prison was found guilty of molesting his own inmates in his prison, forcing them to pose naked for him. These are criminal, not civil, offenses, but could the permissiveness of the workplace Federal EEO laws for staff be a factor?
In February of this year, CNN reported a story with the headline, “CIA fires whistleblower who is suing over claim she was sexually assaulted at spy agency’s headquarters”, further suggesting we may have, indeed, entered a very dangerous ‘post-Whistleblower’ era. If so, it compromises the security of federal workers, and the integrity of government, in profound ways that even legislators and attorneys may not fully understand.
