Last week, a New Jersey jury found that Jews Offering New Alternatives For Healing (JONAH), one of the most notorious “conversion therapy” outfits, violated the state’s Consumer Fraud Act by telling people they could be “cured” of their homosexuality. JONAH has said it will appeal a decision that may have the effect of making the entire business model for “pray away the gay” outfits illegal. However, the Southern Poverty Law Center recently released a video deposition of one of JONAH’s “success stories” that suggests any appeal might be a waste of time. He revealed that part of the “therapy” crafted by JONAH founder Arthur A. Goldberg includes behavior that any fair-minded person would consider horribly debauched and degrading.
In the deposition, recorded in 2014, Jonathan Hoffman described a wild weekend in the woods that he says helped him realize he wasn’t really gay. Watch an excerpt here.
Hoffman said that he was often part of groups of men who walked around naked together, showered together, and touched themselves. He described a “wild party” where everyone was “having a lot of fun together experiencing their wild side.” Among the activities was a naked gay cake orgy–apparently without actual sex.
After the wild party, everyone went to the showers to clean up from “all the cake being thrown around, and mud, and all the carefreeness.” They were awakened the next morning by “the archetype boy who plays fun games with them.” Later, they were “asked to evaluate their bodies” while in a room. Everyone was blindfolded, and the “camaraderie” led the participants to “touch themselves” as the “masculine energy in their body” surged. He also described an “impromptu skinny-dipping,” saying that they “remain as boys” because “that’s what boys do.”
If that isn’t nauseating enough, Equality Files has the full transcript of Hoffman’s deposition. In it, Hoffman reveals that he has a new connection to his Orthodox Jewish heritage; he had interrupted his studies at an Israeli yeshiva to fly back to the States for the deposition. However, he all but admits that JONAH’s therapy didn’t work; he still feels sexually attracted to men.
Incredibly, Goldberg’s program was actually endorsed by several Orthodox rabbis. In 2004, the Rabbinical Council of America, the nation’s largest group of Orthodox rabbis, endorsed JONAH and suggested that rabbis refer congregants there. Indeed, Hoffman was referred to JONAH by his rabbi in 2006. In 2011, a group of 200 rabbis signed the Torah Declaration, which not only endorsed JONAH, but declared that conversion therapy was the only way to heal the “childhood emotional wounds” that triggered same-sex attraction. If this deposition is any indication, the most charitable conclusion is that these rabbis were conned.
That’s fitting, since JONAH is led by a convicted swindler. As I mentioned in February, before his association with JONAH, Goldberg was best known for bilking several cities into buying $11 million in worthless municipal bonds in the 1980s. Most of his victims were impoverished cities with large minority populations; indeed, he joked that he was “selling bonds to cannibals.”
As a measure of how devastating Goldberg’s actions were, when he was finally indicted on 52 counts of bilking several towns on the island of Guam in 1987, the trial had to be moved to Los Angeles. He’d bilked so many of the Pacific island’s residents that there was no way a jury could be empaneled there. Now that’s bad, brother. He ultimately pleaded guilty to those charges, as well as separate charges in Illinois, and served 18 months in prison.
When five former clients first sued JONAH in 2012, I believed that this was a case of an unrepentant con man moving to another con–and finally getting caught. Based on this deposition from Hoffman, it looks like I was right.
