The biggest and serious scandal from the backstage of Brazilian Spiritism was known some days ago.
The alleged medium and farmer, Joao Teixeira de Faria, known as Joao de Deus (and John of God to the foreign people), is accused of making several sex harassment to women attended by him.
He works on a religious house in Abadiania, Goias, Brazil, called Casa Dom Inacio de Loyola.
He was known as an apparent spiritual healer, making paranormal surgeries by the same way the legendary Zé Arigo (1921-1971).
Sensationalist TV show O Povo da TV, formerly aired by SBT network (owned by its entertainer and businessman Senor Abravanel, aka Silvio Santos) had other alleged medium, Roberto Lemgruber.
Zé Arigo, who passed away by a car crash in january 1971, and Roberto Lemgruber, was laterly recognized as charlatans. Arigó received a spirit of a late german doctor who worked in World War I, called Adolf Fritz, or "doctor Fritz".
Joao de Deus is known as the "medium of the celebrities", who received stars like Shirley MacLaine, Naomi Campbell and Oprah Winfrey, who interviewed him in 2012, when she went to Abadiania.
After the scandal denunciation, Oprah removed this interview video from her social media channel.
Joao de Deus is also a charlatan, because he strangely avoided to operate himself to remove a cancer.
He preferred to appeal to Hospital Sirio-Libanes in Sao Paulo to make a normal surgery from the doctors at the material life.
"A barber would cut his own hair?", said, with a certain irony, Joao de Deus, when he was asked about to not doing his own surgery.
It's very worst. Story reports that the russian doctor and researcher, Leonid Rogozov, operated himself by appendicitis, in near-tragical conditions, when he was in Antartida basis, in 1961.
Leonid was only helped by two men: one held a mirror and other took the instruments requested by the pacient, who made himself a surgery, with successful results.
The harassment denunciations emerged accidentally.
The TV talk show Conversa com Bial, presented by journalist Pedro Bial and aired by TV Globo network (aka Rede Globo), planned a special edition with Joao de Deus.
It would be the same interview show that he could talk about mediunity, charity and religion.
The journalist Camila Appel, also Conversa com Bial's screenwriter and producer, traveled to Abadiania do find Joao de Deus and ask him to go to the show stage.
Suddenly, Camila met some women complaining about Joao de Deus' sex assaults.
The complaints are so serious. Something like Joao de Deus showing his penis to every woman attended by him.
One example, said by the one of Bial's interviewed women - four from a initial ten denouncers (currently it became most of 200 denunciations taken by Public Ministry of Goias) - , almost all hiden their faces and their identities:
"'Get up and I will clean your chacras', [Joao de Deus said). Then he stood up and I stayed in front of him, and he started a movement, touching his hand on my breast. Then he turned me and asked me to make a massage on his belly. I making a massage on him, and he asked me to make it so strong, asked me to keep my eyes open and I didn't because I was very troubled with it. So he stood back a little and put his penis out. I took my hand to touch his penis, take out my hand and he said: 'You are strong, you are brave. What you are doing has a bigger importance'. I didn't doing anithing else. I was there because I was being abused. I didn't do anything else".
The woman who said it suffered panic syndrome and depression and searched him to resolve it.
The only of four interviewed women who showed face and identity was the dutch coreographer Zahira Leeneke Maus, who said:
"I was afraid that then could send me bad spirits. I was very afraid. Now I feel so safe and think that the true is finally coming".
(...) "there's a system. The first thing is 'turn your back, I'll cure you'. There's a pattern (...) You are manipulated to believe to your cure".
Joao de Deus declared, through his lawyers and spokesman, that he is innocent. But this case is under investigation by Brazilian justice and it indicates that the sex assaults would be reported.
Rumours point that Joao de Deus made sex harassments to his female clients, during individual treatments, since, at least, 1983.
Although the Brazilian Spiritist Federation (FEB) refuses to vinculate Joao de Deus to the Brazilian Spiritism, and despite the alleged medium defines himself as a "devote catholic", he was blessed by the alleged medium Francisco Candido Xavier, aka Chico Xavier.
Before the sex scandal, Joao de Deus was sight to be a new Brazilian Spiritism star, a possible successor of alleged medium Divaldo Franco, who is 91 years old.
A positive-view documentary from Joao de Deus, called O Silencio é uma Prece (Silent is a Prayer), directed by Candé Salles, was released some months ago.
Another movie, this turn a dramaturgic biopic, is in a post-production and was temporarily suspended.
The technical staff, who requested the public coffers (based to Lei Rouanet's rules) an investment estimated about US$ 1 million, will review their screen, adding on it the sex assaults affairs.
The Public Ministry of Goias requested a preventive detention of Joao de Deus. The request was not worked, until the time this text was written.
The scandal is a great one associated to the spiritist brazilian movement.
But it was not the first. There's a lot of one.
Chico Xavier was targeted himself by a serious scandal associated to his fake mediunity, in 1944.
The Humberto de Campos' heirs, widow Catarina Vergolina de Campos and her sons, Humberto Filho, Henrique and Maria de Lourdes, sued Chico and FEB for their appropriation of the name of late brazilian writer.
The tendencious justice innocented Chico Xavier, despite the evidences that the style of the alleged spirit of Humberto is very different to his original style.
Chico was also involved by another scandals, including the materialization frauds leaded by trickster Otilia Diogo, in the mid-60s.
But Chico Xavier was always armoured by FEB and mainstrema media, which made a rhetoric campaign to make the alleged medium as a pretense "spirit of light" and "symbol of human love and dedication to the poor and the sick".
Chico Xavier's previous scandals will rise again, despite his 16 years of death.
That's the fear inside the Brazilian Spiritistm backstage, the scandals going to reach the sacred idols of this religion.
There's an effort to isolate Joao de Deus from the Brazilian Spiritism movement, if he would to be really condemned for sex harassment (although he's also a charlatan and investigated for illegal medicine exercises).
But new scandals would denunciate other alleged mediums, associated to fake literature, extremely conservative values and pretense philanthropy.
The major fear is a scandal reaching, although posthumously, Chico Xavier. But it is sure, unfortunately to his followers and supporters.
Heads will roll and tears will flood.
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