An Interview With Newsvine Journalist Sandy Frost About Her Writings About the Shriners And Them Coming Here To Criticize Her

Sandy Frost is a great citizen journalist and is, in fact, quietly doing some of the best journalism on Newsvine. It'd be easier to write about topics which might land her on MSNBC such as which young actress got pregnant this week but instead she writes about a topic so specific and non-mainstream – the Shriners – that I didn't even know she existed or was doing such standout work at first.

But like a criminal lawyer defending an unpopular client, she keeps plugging away with her articles and opinion pieces pointing out the problems she's learned about the Shriners since she got an email from a whistleblower over two years ago.

Shriners have come to Newsvine with the purpose of trying to stop her from posting information they don't like. I can't think of any other Newsviner who has had an email distributed like the one she shared in
this piece in which the emailer says:

have learned that the only way to stop her from posting is to click on the " ! " (exclimation point) at the top of her page and choose " Inaccurate " when what she prints is untrue or misleading. You may want to get this information out to all brothers and if they find something that is inaccurate to mark it so.

While some Shriners, including those here, like to attack her credibility and reputation, the fact that she has won
journalism awards for two years in a row and she won a Newsvine RAV proves to me that she knows what she is doing; that she is proving that once again the adage that sunlight is the best disinfectant when it comes to gathering and sharing public information, especially of the type that does not smell right.

I asked to interview Sandy because I was curious how she got started writing about the Shriners (my theory was one of little Shriner cars ran over her foot in a parade) why she continues to write about them versus, say, the Elks or Lions, and what it's like to have people coming to Newsvine and commenting on your stories with the apparent purpose of discrediting you.

I also thought it important that other Newsviners become aware that this battle is taking place, that Shriners are emailing each other that if they hit the right button they can try to get rid of Sandy 's pieces.

What follows is the resulting interview with Sandy .

How did you get into Newsvine?

I had finished up another non profit investigation in March, 2006. For three years, I'd challenged the non profit claims of a group made up mostly of retired spies. After three years, they finally became compliant with IRS regulations and after they posted their documents online, and I was essentially finished. I remember sitting here, wondering "Why in the hell did I go through all that?"

I'd spent three years learning more about non profit groups than I ever imagined.

Or wanted.

Then, the next month, I got an email from Shriner whistleblower, Vernon Hill. He'd been looking for three years for a journalist who'd investigate his allegations of corruption and tax fraud. He'd been working with a former IRS agent who'd been analyzing some of the Shriners' tax returns and had put up a website where he posted the returns and pointed out their discrepancies.

This is where most people stretch, yawn and go to sleep from boredom. But for some reason, I really like digging through and analyzing documents like tax returns, mortgage documents and FDA and Office of Human Research Protection warning letters that have been sent to some of the Shriners hospitals after it was found that they violated clinical study protocols.

So, someone from the first non profit investigation had something to do with my entire body of work being censored offline from Suite101.com, where I was writing as an expert editor. My column was "Intuition, Remote Viewing and Consciousness." I wrote about those topics for three years, then someone sent an email to Suite101.com, wrote the word "libel" and the next thing I knew, over 80 articles disappeared.

Only six or seven of them were the investigative ones.

I had moved some of those articles to two blogs at Salon.com but somehow the password or account or something got screwed up and after a while, I was locked out and my articles just sat there. I have since had them removed in advance of my book being published.

Jeff Rense of Rense.com had published my remote viewing articles for four years, so I got a hold of him to see if he'd post my first few Shriners articles because I didn't have an online "home" yet.

Then one day I was surfing around and just happened to read about Newsvine. As I read about this revolutionary concept of delivering the news, I knew that I'd found a home.

I sent Calvin an email after I first signed up, and let him know that I was working on something that could be quite controversial and what had happened during my previous investigation. Essentially, he just sat back and let the Code of Honor work and here we are today.

What do you do besides Newsvine? Do you work?

I work here in my home office. It's my sacred space. Like I write in my Newsvine bio, I don't have the resources of a daily newspaper, but they can't interview people in their bunny slippers, cook, do laundry and do yard work, all at the same time.

I write a lot. I do a lot of online research. I will analyze documents for months before writing about them. Right now, I hope to have two e-books out in the next few weeks.

You won an RAV and two Society of Professional Journalists awards for writing about the Shriners. To most people the Shriners are those guys with the tiny cars in parades. How did you come to write about them?

Getting the RAV was really happy making! I was excited to get my second SPJ award because this investigation moved up from first honorable mention last year to second place this year in the Online Media, Special Report Original category. And this is the first online investigation to be included in the Investigative Reporters and Editors "Extra Extra" section.

I got an email from Vernon Hill, the Shriner whistleblower, who told me he had been working with a former IRS agent and had been looking for an investigative journalist to look into all this tax stuff. I'd just finished up the previous investigation and was curious. I had no idea, really, who the Shriners were. They could have been the Pink Panthers or the Old Fellows or whatever.

What caught my eye, though, was how messed up their tax returns were and how vindictive and vicious they were towards those who asked questions like "Where does all the money go?" A non profit group usually does not retaliate against or sue those who question them so as to silence them.

Then, that September, the Shriners sued Vernon and Paul Dolnier, the former IRS agent, for defamation and they named me as a secondary party of interest and through the discovery process, asked for otherwise protected communications between a journalist and their sources.

Apparently, the Shriners thought I was either being paid or being fed the information or was being fed the articles, which I took as a huge public insult. After three years of experience investigating non profit claims, I like to think that I know what I am doing.

So, when the Shriners named me in the defamation lawsuit, I wondered, "What are they trying to hide?" Today, with what I've found out about their little secret sub-group, the Royal Order of Jesters, well, no wonder they didn't want anyone sniffing around.

How many stories have you written about them?

21 stories about the Shriners, with at least three more planned. Seven stories about the Royal Order of Jesters. Three editorials.

What has the reaction from the Shriners been to your stories?

It has been either "Yay!" or "Burn her!" or "Off with her head!"

I do try to get the other side of the story, but for over a year, the Shriners' PR people, Shriner leaders and their attorneys have not answered any of my emails or returned my calls. The Shriners reacted to my stories by naming me as a secondary party of interest in their defamation lawsuit. I guess they wanted to circumvent reporter shield laws to find information they could use against the whistleblowers.

I've been yelled at, swore at, threatened and hung up on.

Then there are those who create Newsvine accounts just to leave the nasty comments and start flame wars. I expected the "shoot the messenger campaign" but was kind of shocked after reading the email where a Shriner sent an email out to a Shriner email list and told them how to "keep her from posting."

Other than that, there are those who do support this work. One site, The Burning Taper, has followed things the past few years and on that site are comments from those who either love me or hate me. One person left a comment after Burning Taper announced my most recent SPJ award. He called me "the Goddess of Truth."

That's much better than being subjected to hate speech and told to "drop dead."

In our email exchanges you mentioned an upcoming court hearing. What was the purpose of the hearing?

The hearing had to do with the defamation lawsuit, which was settled out of court last March. Now, I've been named in a motion filed a few weeks ago in the federal lawsuit involving the Jesters fishing trip to Brazil. I guess the attorneys for the plaintiff got a hold of the owners of Newsvine, MSNBC, and tried to have one of my Jester articles censored offline.

But this sends the signal "We want to shut you up and stop you from reporting about what we're doing." It just makes me wonder, again, "What are you trying to hide."

What's this about an email written specifically to try to silence you?

I looked at the numbers and have received a total of 131 comments from the first 21 articles I wrote about the Shriners for an average of six comments per article. The seven articles I've written about the Jesters have gotten 172 comments for an average of 24.5 comments per article. Additionally, it appears that 33 people created Newsvine accounts for the sole purpose of making negative comments, harassing me and launching flame wars.

The nature of these comments makes it clear that they have not read the 21 previous articles about the Shriners and that they are part of the "shoot the messenger" campaign.

I posted an email that was sent by a Shriner, who created one such account, to a Shriner email list. He told "all brothers" to mark my articles as "inaccurate" in an effort to spam the administrators and stop me from posting.

The "sock puppet" comments, or as I call them, "flying monkey" comments, usually say something like "Why are you so negative because the Shriners are so good." Someone left a comment like this on one of my Jester prostitution articles.

Hello?

How can someone write about the Shriners good works in order to minimize or negate what has been reported in court documents about the Jesters and prostitution?

The comments generally don't address what has been reported about the court documents or what has been reported in other media. These guys feel that they have the right to use the comment sections to cause trouble and I simply won't allow it.

One of the most disturbing things is the fact that Shriner governing documents include a statement that Shrine law does not include the law of the land. It seems that these guys think they can act as if they are above the law because they have this weird sense of entitlement and self-importance.

This defeats the purpose of our non profit system.

What I've found is a trail of sloppy, incomplete tax returns that fail to report things like personal mortgages, affiliations and over $100,000 raised through illegal gambling. This investigation has gone from exploring the possibility of massive tax fraud, retaliation against whistleblowers and corruption within the Shriners to covering court activity linking their secret sub-group, the Royal Order of Jesters, to prostitution.

Apparently, this news coverage threatens some of these guys to the point that they want to shut me up.

So, they log on and try to fight or argue or criticize me personally or whatever. I dismiss their comments because they are ignorant of what this investigation is all about. They totally miss the focus on non profit transparency, disclosure and accountability.

For some reason, these Jester articles are getting a lot of attention. Since I ran my first one on February 15, I've gotten some good traffic.

The past four months, these articles have gotten nearly 74,000 visits from 153 countries with over 114,000 page views. The top ten countries are U.S., Canada, UK, Australia, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa, France and Brazil.

Tens of thousands worldwide are reading these articles, yet a handful want to deny them the chance to make up their own mind through online censorship.

What is it that these guys are so desperate to hide?

Why focus on the Shriners as opposed to other groups like them? Is it simply a matter of you followed the whistleblowers?

Yep, I followed the whistleblowers. I didn't know much about the Shriners nor had any
preconceived notions about them.

What really got my attention was that the Orlando Sentinel investigated the Shriners twenty years ago.

Apparently, some Shriners blew the whistle after seeing circus tickets being resold and the newspaper found that those who organized the circus and those police responsible for investigating were also Shiners, so nothing happened.

The newspaper's investigation pointed out that the issue at hand was not how much money the Shriners passed on to their hospitals but how much the temples kept for themselves.

This came to the attention of Ann Landers who was so shocked that she wrote "I was distressed by the information contained in that prize-winning story" including how the Shriners kept 71% of the circus proceeds, spent the money on food, travel, entertainment, fraternal ceremonies and fund-raising and that the records showed that less than 2 percent went to the medical care of the children.

I searched for media coverage since the Orlando Sentinel's investigation and found none. So I began verifying another aspect of their investigation, which is that charitable proceeds were used to fund executive and employee mortgages. Documents showed that not only did the charity provide mortgages to these executives and employees but, as they were paid back, the Shriners failed to report the mortgage satisfactions to the IRS on their tax returns.

Then I discovered other mortgage documents that showed that some Shriner executives had been taking out personal mortgages on their homes and had paid them back in unusually short times.

Like repaying $150,000 in three months.

This is when I realized that something was not right.

I've found that things haven't changed that much from what the Orlando Sentinel had found twenty years ago. In fact, things seem to be much worse.

Put another way, are you suggesting through your reporting that the Shriners are in any way worse than other groups of that type or is it just you're focused on the one you know the most about.

Compared to other non profit scandals, this might be the biggest non profit scandal of our time. I don't know of another non profit investigation that began with the possibility of massive tax fraud and ended up covering how members of a secret sub-group were popped by the FBI for prostitution and how other members might be involved with child sex tourism.

Now, it's up to law enforcement to investigate the Shriners and/or Jesters. But ultimately, it's up to the readers to make their own decisions as they assess the information that's presented. Fortunately, as they read along, they can click on links that take them to the documents being discussed. This helps them better understand what is being presented and that is a good thing.

At your article announcing your journalism award one guy made this comment:

And I posted a response saying, "Does that mean that coverage of the other .01 percent is not warranted or acceptable? " Do you think that a) most Shriners are good and b) did I sum up your argument for your coverage?

Yes, I've written over and over and over that this investigation is not about the seventy-something Shriner who gets up early to field day his temple. It's not about the Shriner who carefully puts on his clown makeup and drives across town to put a smile on the face of a burned or crippled child.

This is not about those who are good or those who are bad.

Ann Landers made the point that "Thousands of Shriners were appalled when the Orlando Sentinel made its findings known. They had no idea as to the financial workings of their fraternity."

It's more about those Shriners who have asked questions about financial accountability and reported crimes but end up themselves punished instead of those committing the crimes.

I've gotten so many comments that I should stop investigating because of all the good that the Shriners do.

Isn't that like the Catholic Church asking the media to ignore the pedophile priests because of all the good that the church does?

If 19 Jesters are called to testify about minor prostitution in Brazil, isn't that newsworthy?

If one Shriner and/or Jester pleads guilty to violating the Mann Act, which happened last March in the FBI prostitution case, isn't that newsworthy?

Isn't it a journalist's job to ask questions like "How did we get here?" and "How could this happen?" and "What are they trying to hide?" and report what they find?

In closing, I want to thank Newsvine and MSNBC for providing such a progressive and forward-thinking news site to publish my work as well as for defending my right to do so.

And thanks to you, Scott, for taking the time to interview me.