7/20/09 – PAPER TRAILS: E-mail from Alamo stays on message
Arkansas Democrat Gazette
July 20, 2009
By Linda Caillouet
PAPER TRAILS: E-mail from Alamo stays on message
This columnist had just finished reading a grim account in this paper’s Friday edition titled “Women say they married Alamo” by Andy Davis reporting from evangelist Tony Alamo’s federal trial in Texarkana.
The leader of Tony Alamo Christian Ministries in Fouke is on trial on child sexual abuse charges, specifically that he transported five underage girls, who all say they were his wives at the time, across state lines for sex from March 1994 to October 2005.
The article told of four additional women who testified Thursday they were married to Alamo at young ages (one said she married him at age 8, two others at 14, and the fourth at 17). One testified she was 9 when Alamo, now 74, began having sex with her and that, before she was 10, he’d taken Polaroid snapshots of her. She testified that he told her he thought she looked “like a German whore,” which she said he added was “a good thing.”
My stomach was still churning after reading the article when my computer sounded, alerting me to an incoming e-mail.
Well, well … speak of the devil … it’s a press release from Tony Alamo.
The e-mail, signed Tony Alamo and sent from taoffice@alamoministries.com, was personally addressed to me. A few others in the newsroom also received the e-mail.
What happened to the days when Alamo corresponded with us via his fliers left on car windshields by his followers?
The gist of his e-mail?
It’s “a violation of the U.S. Constitution for the government to attack any religion, especially Christianity!! My trial is government vs. the Bible. The five young women who are falsely testifying against me have all been convinced to do so by the FBI.”
Alamo goes on to allege that the FBI, in addition to paying the witnesses “thousands of dollars,” also paid for them to attend a deprogramming center, adding that “deprogramming is a nice word for hypnosis, brainwashing, mind-control, voodoo and black magic.”
He warns “their testimony is not to be believed because it is not true, and they are not in their right mind.
They are under a hateful spell of witchcraft. … Their testimonies cannot be believed because they are all uniformly brainwashed.
… The FBI is against the Bible, Christianity, God, and all Christian churches. … The legal age of marriage is puberty …’’ and on and on.
Alamo should set down those stones he’s hurling as a jury of 12 of his peers will soon determine exactly what his house in Fouke is made of.