Pagan Community Notes

Pagan Community Notes: ADF; Kenny Klein; Witchcraft Museum, and more!

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NEW ORLEANS —  Pagan musician Kenny Klein was sentenced to 20 years in prison after his request for a new trial was rejected. As previously reported, Klein, who was first arrested in 2014, was convicted in April on 20 counts of child pornography charges. According to local reports, the judge called the case difficult, saying “Any type of incidents involving juveniles, particularly as it relates to child pornography, are not good.” After his conviction, Klein’s attorney requested a new trial on the grounds that the court had made numerous errors in several of the pretrial rulings. Criminal District Judge Byron C. Williams rejected that request after receiving an flurry of letters from both his supporters and his opponents. Williams told local reporters that he did not find any credibility in the arguments requesting the new trial.

Pagan Community Notes

Pagan Community Notes: Scott Holbrook, Dr. Lucie Marie-Mai Du Fresne, and more.

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GASTON, N.C. — A transcript of Daniel Scott Holbrook’s plea deal in court last month doesn’t jibe with his version of events. Holbrook pleaded no contest to charges of disseminating obscenities after, by his account, an attempt to download a movie from a file-sharing site yielded hundreds of illegal images. However, the prosecutor asserted during the proceedings that Holbrook had admitted to the officers who arrived at his home to not only downloading the images in question, but using them for personal gratification. Wiccan Priest and Rev. Tony Brown, who is otherwise unaffiliated with Mr. Holbrook and his grove, was at the original hearing, and shared his account with The Wild Hunt at that time. He omitted the information because he wasn’t sure he heard it correctly, saying only, “Some of the details in [Holbrook’s and others’] accounts differ from what I heard in court.”

News

Holbrook pleads no contest, citing legal cost

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GASTON, N.C. –Druid Daniel Scott Holbrook pleaded no contest Apr. 4 to dissemination of obscenities, accepting a suspended sentence as well as six months of probation. While Holbrook’s claims of innocence ring true for some members of his community, others are withdrawing contact in the wake of what is functionally similar to pleading guilty. Holbrook, who has maintained all along that the images were downloaded unintentionally, agreed along with his wife and a family friend to speak about what happened over that July 4th weekend. He also wrote about what happened in a recent blog post, in which he recounted how he and his wife were entertaining an old friend from out of town and decided to download a movie using a peer-to-peer BitTorrent client.

Pagan Community Notes

Pagan Community Notes: Patheos, PantheaCon, the awen and more.

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TWH – The tensions between bloggers and the Patheos company continued this week as former Patheos writer John Halstead announced that he and others would be demanding that their material be taken off the site. Their joint letter begins: “We the undersigned former and current Patheos Pagan contributors hereby request that you remove our names, likenesses, and our intellectual property, including our writing, art, and images, from your site. We previously gave Patheos license to publish our writing, but Patheos is no longer the company that we contracted with.” The letter continues on to list the writers’ grievances and detail why the group feels that Patheos is no longer the company that it once was. In its conclusion, the letter says, “We should not be forced to affiliate with or be seen to support, through our work, organizations which are inimical to our values and which, in many cases, are hostile to our existence…” 

Currently eighteen bloggers have signed the document.

Pagan Community Notes

Pagan Community Notes: Women’s March, Chaplain Conference, Jerry Fandel, HUAR, and more

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WASHINGTON D.C. — Beginning 10 a.m. Saturday, Jan. 21, women will unite and march on Washington to, as organizers say, “stand together in solidarity with our partners and children for the protection of our rights, our safety, our health, and our families — recognizing that our vibrant and diverse communities are the strength of our country.” Although it is called the “Women’s March on Washington,” organizers say that everyone who supports their purpose is welcome. They wrote: “In the spirit of democracy and honoring the champions of human rights, dignity, and justice who have come before us, we join in diversity to show our presence in numbers too great to ignore. The Women’s March on Washington will send a bold message to our new administration, Congress, Senate, state and local governments on their first day in office, and to the world that women’s rights are human rights.”