"Over four decades, he worked as a celebrity faith healer in Abadiânia, a small town in central Brazil.
It was there - conducting bizarre and unproven medical procedures - that João Teixeira de Faria became known as John of God, building a legion of believers across the world, including a band of loyal followers in Australia who were happy to open their wallets for his supposed miracle-giving touch and ethereal blessings.
Each week, people from all corners of the globe flocked in their thousands to John of God's compound, Casa de Dom Inacio, 130km south-west of Brasilia.
There, dressed in all white, many hoped to find a cure for cancer, blindness or to stand and rise from their wheelchairs.
Faria's rising fame was elevated to a new trajectory, courtesy of some Hollywood star dust, when Oprah Winfrey came calling in 2010 for a series titled "Do You Believe in Miracles?"
In a since-deleted column on oprah.com, Winfrey wrote how she was overwhelmed by the experience of seeing Faria cutting into the breast of a woman without anaesthesia and that she left feeling "an overwhelming sense of peace".
That appearance on Oprah's mega platform ensured John of God attracted even more international attention, with Faria's faith healing compound reportedly luring celebrities and stars, including supermodel Naomi Campbell and Brazilian footballer Ronaldo.
In 2012 Oprah Winfrey traveled to visit de Faria to record a special for her talk show, Super Soul Sunday. She told Brazilian media at the time that the experience was overwhelming. "It was so strong that I had to sit down because I felt like I was going to pass out," she told Band TV Goiania. (Supplied)"John of God is not a surgeon, he is not a trained doctor," Michael
But it was regular people - often vulnerable - who were John of God's bread and butter.
It was the stream of those visitors which allowed Faria to amass a fortune worth tens of millions of dollars before his world caved in under an avalanche of explosive accusations that he had sexually abused hundreds of women, and claims he had operated an international baby-trafficking ring from his compound.
Among his followers, Faria became famous for conducting "psychic surgeries" that he said could cure diseases, including cancer.
The "psychic surgeries" involved supernatural invisible procedures using only the power of what Faria called the "Entity" - some kind of divine connection - to cure illnesses."
"In this episode, Ashlen and Maxwell discuss Polygamy, hyper-conservative, Catholicism, Utah, Salt Lake City, Kaysville, Mormon, LDS, Church of Latter-day Saints, trying to convert people to different religions, Alexander Campbell, Joseph Smith, colonialism, hermeneutical methodology, recruiting people to the church, evangelism at Temple Square, polygamist groups, Kingstons, similar to the Mafia, preserving the bloodline, Aryan, marrying young girls off early, inbreeding, white supremacy, tracking devices, and trying to save women leaving these groups."
Here's how a two-person startup became a powerful source for holding major companies accountable."Nearly two years before Better.com CEO Vishal Garg fired 900 workers in a phone call that made him infamous as one of 2021's worst bosses, half a dozen of his employees got on the phone with two women at a tiny startup in Brooklyn, New York to talk about the problems with Garg.
Garg didn't magically become a pariah on that day he fired 10% of his workforce without apology or warning. Ariella Steinhorn and Amber Scorah knew just how miserable his workers were in 2020 — before the pandemic began — because they sit at one end of a vast whisper network of internet-savvy workers who share gossip and tips about how to take your (usually horrible) workplace story and bring it into the public light, without going to traditional journalists.
The whispers go a little something like this: Scared of your non-disclosure agreement? Need legal help? Don't trust reporters? Lioness sells itself as the destination for those who just really want to share their story with someone. With very little advertising and no search engine optimization — their website is very hard to find on Google — Steinhorn and Scorah have achieved a word-of-mouth reputation that leads a few dozen people every week to reach out about a problem at work.
Coordinated groups of legal, strategy and media teams for tech whistleblowers started to emerge in the late years of the Obama administration (think Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning), according to Delphine Halgand-Mishra, the founding and executive director of a whistleblower support organization called The Signals Network. (The Signals Network was founded in late 2017.) Prominent whistleblowers like Frances Haugen and ex-Pinterest employee Ifeoma Ozoma made the importance of a coordinated legal and media strategy well-understood across the tech industry specifically, Halgand-Mishra said.
Lioness is one of the newer entrants to the developing whistleblower support space. Though most organizations like The Signals Network fund themselves through grants in a nonprofit model, Lioness is funded primarily by paid partnerships with law firms. Law firms pay Lioness as a partner, and Lioness will refer clients to their attorneys for help and receive pro bono legal advice when they need it. Though Lioness has received venture funding offers, the women turned down the investments because they want full control over their work.
Scorah and Steinhorn said it's not exactly a lucrative job. "We always say, this would be the perfect job for a trust-fund kid," Scorah said (which neither of them are, they clarified). And they aren't immune from trying to make a buck off a hype cycle; they minted a non-fungible token for the art attached to one essay on their platform as an experimental funding source, and they are now accepting donations in cryptocurrency. "Whomever buys the NFT, we don't know who they are necessarily. They don't have any control over us," Steinhorn said. "There is so much money sloshing around in that ecosystem, if someone were to buy it, it could be a revenue stream for us that doesn't conflict us." Lioness is also exploring documentary film projects, which tend to be more lucrative avenues than written stories for companies in the media industry."
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