| No Images? Click here   HuffPost reporter Rebecca Klein didn't set out to become the subject of a hate-filled sermon, but that's what happened in the wake of her explosive story. Over months, Klein investigated a private school in Harlem run by a church that's been categorized as a hate group. What she found was shocking: a pattern of abuse that, in one instance, included locking a student in a pitch-black, bug-filled basement for hours. After her story came out, Klein was vilified by the pastor from the pulpit and on Twitter, but she remains unfazed by such attacks. This story is intense. How did you first hear about Atlah Church? I was actually looking at the Southern Poverty Law Center's list of hate groups when it occurred to me that some of the church's on that list might also run schools. Atlah was one that did. Once I started researching the school, I was like -- oh, that guy! I remembered the church's pastor and school superintendent from previous coverage. How did you find your sources? They opened up about some pretty traumatic stuff. After I figured out that the church had a school, I started searching the pastor's Twitter feed for mentions of his students. It just so happened he had recently gone on a rant about some of his former students, threatening and degrading them. Lucky for me though, he used some of their full names, so it was pretty easy for me to find them. It wasn't difficult to get them to open up. It was almost as if they were waiting for my call. For the most part, they wanted to tell their stories and get them out there. Have you been in touch with them since the story came out? I have. They all seem very happy to have the story out there. The pastor has been calling them thugs and dragging their names through the mud, but they expected that. In some ways, they seem more concerned with how the pastor has been treating me. Please talk about that. He has been calling the article a hit job from the LGBTQ mafia, and saying that I'm a "lesbian witch." He held a service attacking me and my sources. He won't say my name though. He said that he doesn't like to glorify mass killers by using their names, so he won't use mine either. Does this bother you? Sounds like you struck a nerve. The attacks on me personally don't bother me. It's part of his effort to discredit my reporting, which I stand by wholeheartedly. I would hope that readers can see through these outlandish attacks. Do private schools like Atlah need more regulation? What could have prevented this? There's an assumption that if a school is private, it is automatically prestigious or superior to public schools. Much of my reporting over the past few years has disproved this. Private schools exist as part of a free-market system in which schools are the business and families are the customers. The idea is that if a school isn't good, its customers will rebel. But I've found that parents don't always act as objective customers. At Atlah in particular, former students describe their parents as brainwashed and loyal to the pastor above all else. Additionally, Atlah should have received a visit from New York State officials years ago, when it applied for registration. Due to years backlogs and staffing shortages, this visit still hasn't happened. Love, |
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