In Memoriam – Glen Meloy
("Standing up for truth and goodness")
Year's Day 2006 is the first
anniversary of Glen Meloy's passing. A much-loved former
devotee international coordinator of the Exposé, Glen is
memorialised in a moving article by his close friend Barry
Pittard, which we repost here in both text and pdf formats.
Editors Exbaba.com
|
Date: 01-01-05
From: Barry Pittard
Email:
bpittard@optusnet.com.au
Source:
In Memoriam Glen Meloy.pdf
Glen Meloy,
of Palm Desert, California, a global coordinator in the
effort to expose Sathya Sai Baba and his worldwide cult, died of
cancer on January 1, 2005. He was born May 3, 1930
DesMoines, Iowa.
Since early 2000, Glen Meloy was a major
international leader of a coalition of former Sai Baba devotees
and others, known among its proponents as The Exposé,
which calls for formal investigation of alleged crimes by this
guru and the cover-up perpetrated by his organization and
maintained by successive Indian governments.
The enormously powerful and influential
Sathya Sai Baba lives in south India, and proclaims that he is
God incarnate come to save the entire world by 2022. Many power
brokers in India across the socio-political spectrum believe in
him. He has millions of devotees and an organization spanning
more than 150 countries. For many years, there have been
allegations that he serially exploits boys and young men for
sexual purposes – from his schools, colleges and university, as
well as boys and young men visiting from overseas - using
bribery and threats as coercion. Investigators allege other
wrongdoings such as faking miracles, promising but not
delivering miraculous cures, claiming to be omniscient and
making prophecies subsequently falsified, and the implication of
Sai Baba and some of his leaders in police killings in his
private quarters in June 1993, etc. Glen Meloy’s greatest
concern was always for the young and defenceless. He neither
despaired nor retreated when he discovered the enormity of what
he was up against, not least the powerful evidence that Sathya
Sai Baba and senior officials of his organization have
perpetrated massive cover-ups, which also implicates successive
Indian governments, state and national.
Glen Meloy was a dedicated devotee and active
social service volunteer within the Sathya Sai Organization for
26 years. He served in the United States Air Force, was
Advertising Director for a large firm in Iowa, and a former
co-owner and President of The Grand Chandelle, Inc, as well as
other corporate roles where he created the projects and directed
all operations. He helped found Los Angeles Magazine, which is
still prominent in Los Angeles. Embezzled by a business partner,
he lost a fortune and retired poor but unbowed, but kept up his
extremely hard work at social uplift projects in devotion to his
then guru. Some of the causes he championed were world health
care, especially alternatives, children’s and women’s rights,
vegetarianism, freedom from alcohol and tobacco … He once
studied an English dictionary, word for word, A-Z. Deeply
saddened by rapidly shrinking democracy in the United States, he
loved the sea front in Victoria in Canada and deeply wished to
live there. From there his ashes have now been scattered on the
ocean – not in a funeral but a celebration.
Children of many Sai devotees called him
‘Uncle Glen,’ as did a boy whose mother came to him around
October 1999 with shocking allegations of sexual molestation of
her son by Sai Baba. After exhaustive investigation of many
other reports, both current and long-standing, Glen and others,
including formerly high profile leaders, attempted to get the US
Sathya Sai Organization to show duty of care and properly
investigate the allegations. It failed to do so, as has been the
case worldwide. Media - including the BBC, The Times of
London, The Daily Telegraph, India Today, The Age, The West
Australian, Vancouver Sun, The Ottawa Citizen, Toronto Star and
many others - have found Sai Baba’s organization impervious to
investigation. In a word, cultic! This fact was brilliantly
captured by the BBC’s hidden cameras in its 2004 documentary
“The Secret Swami,” when Dr Michael Goldstein, world head of Sai
Baba’s organisation, becoming increasingly angry, demands of the
interviewer, “Transparency in what sense?” and “What do you mean
by thorough investigation”? When I phoned to tell him that I had
viewed the documentary, I said to Glen, “Does Goldstein need a
dictionary,” to which Glen replied, “He may need a lawyer!”
Proclaiming that he would be able to tell if Sai Baba’s students
had been sexually abused, Goldstein shouts at the BBC “I would
know it in my heart because I am what I am – a consummate
professional. Can you understand that?” Glen commented to
me , “So Goldstein’s a consummate clairvoyant too, is he?”
Glen Meloy’s exposure
activities were self-sacrificing and unrelenting. He preferred
social action on the ground and mostly used the Internet as a
research tool. Above all, he aimed to stop the flow of
vulnerable young males to Sai Baba’s ashrams. He envisaged the
place where Sai Baba lives as overtaken by sunflowers and
rainbows, and his pictures in his home radiated with these
natural images. He regularly inspired former devotees to inform
political, religious, and educational institutions of the Sathya
Sai Organization’s true agenda in its expensive and constant
promotional attempts to inveigle itself into the social
mainstream. With the aid of enormous and careful research, Glen
exposed that organization’s failure to tell the public of its
true intent and especially its failure to reveal or investigate
the negative allegations coming from many good and decent former
devotee families worldwide. A very qualified sexual abuse
therapist and former Sathya Sai Organisation leader, Shirley
Pike, speaks for many in saying, “Glen spent many hours
counseling and supporting former devotees when they found out
the truth and were reeling with the shock of it all.”
Despite taking on a vast cult, Glen Meloy
remained a very kind, sweet person. He had a keen mind,
maturity, tough self-discipline, and a clear vision of his
mission that won the respect of police, lawyers, sexual abuse
counsellors, Foreign Service professionals, anti-cult workers,
etc, with whom he dealt on the issue of Sai Baba and his
organization. When other former devotees were about to settle
for a less strongly-worded UNESCO media advisory, he seized the
moral high-ground, and it was his determination and powerful
advocacy alone that encouraged top UNESCO officials in Paris to
issue their strongly-worded media advisory of September 15,
2000:
http://webarchive.org (shortened
link leads to correct document)
The advisory cancelled UNESCO’s
participation, along with a leading Australian university
partner, Flinders University, in an education conference at Sai
Baba’s ashram, stating that it was “deeply concerned about
widely-reported allegations of sexual abuse involving youths and
children that have been levelled at the leader of the movement
in question, Sathya Sai Baba.” It also cited “several other
concerns” that reflected badly on Sai Baba’s organizers. Glen’s
coordination of extensive efforts with the FBI and State
Department resulted in the latter’s public acknowledgement to
the BBC in May 2004 that Sai Baba was the subject of their
concerned investigations and US travel advisory. Just before
Glen died, he was researching laws that offer hope to abuse
survivors, even if the offences have been committed outside
their own country. His legacy is ongoing and his example
inspires others to bring his work towards the goal.
It was Glen's profound sense of moral outrage
at the sexual abuse of children that most fuelled his fight. The
lies, contradictions and evasions his and his colleagues’
investigations unearthed acted as a fuel booster. More than
once, with a passionate love, he spoke of "standing up for truth
and goodness." However much he disdained his adversaries’
deceptions and betrayals of these qualities, he did not hate his
antagonists, nor did he respond to even the most vicious slurs
cast by certain highly active Sai Baba supporters, whom he never
regarded as typical of most Sai Baba devotees.
India's famous "guru buster" B. Premanand
wrote: "Glen's death was a great shock. I wanted him to live
till Sai Baba was arrested ... I am missing a great loving
friend whom I came to know from the BBC film production." (Sri
Premanand refers here to the BBC television documentary "The
Secret Swami," screened in June 2004 in England and many other
countries since.) Glen Meloy lavished on this documentary seven
months’ intense effort as an unpaid researcher and coordinated
much testimony as well as assisting the BBC in its research and
filming of interviews in the USA. He believed that the BBC, in
focusing so much on just one family (no doubt for reasons of
dramatization), obscured the sheer serial and worldwide nature
of the sexual abuse that is being alleged, and of which the BBC
investigators had direct contact with other and compelling
witnesses from various countries.
Mick Brown,
author and journalist (Daily Telegraph, UK), who flew to the USA
to investigate allegations against the guru, wrote, "I spoke to
Glen often at the time I was writing the piece on Sai Baba. He
was not only extremely kind and helpful, but struck me as a man
of great courage, honour and integrity, who was galvanized by
injustice and determined to rectify it." Many tributes have
applied the words "warrior," "compassion," "goodness,"
“honesty,” “sacrifice” and “truthfulness." Glen was relentless
in his quest for justice, and almost none of his colleagues knew
that he campaigned despite a difficult and sometimes painful
illness.
Glen was most self-effacing, but I believe he
would have allowed for himself an honest obituary written by a
close friend. He leaves behind many deeply indebted former
devotees and others around the world. He leaves a son Glen
Junior, and former wife and still friend of 26 years, Carolyn
Wunderlich.
Barry Pittard,
Australia.
bpittard@optusnet.com.au
Phone, Intnl: 61 7 5478 6007. Australia:
07 5478 6007