to think Camila Batmanghelidjh must be lying when she says she has done nothing wrong in her spending of Kid's Company Charity Funding?

[LuluJakey1]

She is like Jimmy Saville in that what she has been doing has been under all of all our noses and we have refused to speak up about it or believe it.

It is not just the luvvies who have been up close and personal with her- involved with the charity and CB at a very close level, some even Trustees. It is also the employees and the parents of children, the children themselves, the volunteers. We are not talking about a hidden mis-use of funding. We are talking aout a whole culture of open waste and self-indulgence.

I know it is from The Daily Mail but it is actually an interview with het.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3199527/My-heart-clear-says-Kids-Company-boss-Batmanghelidjh-admits-charity-paid-school-fees-employees-children-denies-wrongdoing.html

£5000 a month rent on an Art Deco House with private swimming pool - which houses a member of staff, and the swimming pool is used by CB but hot by any children- they are 'not allowed' (her words)

£40,000 chauffeur- now a specialist worker (according to CB). also has private school and therapist funding for his 2 children.

Staff( how many?) have their children sent to private schools because the job is stressful and it is part of a 'staff well-being package'

The Chauffeur's sister is also employed - now as a 'brilliant accountant', last summer as 'the woman who does my sewing' (mind you that would be a full-time job in itself, but it does imply the charity pays for those vile outfits much as I suspected)

25 young people given £769,000 a year funding - £31,000 a year each, to do nothing. They are CB's specially selected young people- many of whom have received funding for many years. She describes them as 'like a family, hanging round the house'. She deals with their funding herself.

Yet STILL CB complains staff should not have spoken up about any of this and implies those who have will suffer for it.

In my view this woman and her behaviours are corrupt, dishonest and immoral.

Are my views unreasonable? I feel this could be jus the tip of the iceberg in terms of what is yet to emerge and prosecutions will be very likely.

I think there should be a down- to the -bone, in-depth investigation of every aspect of the work of this charity and of CB. Not simply any concerns that have now been raised but a complete trawl of the spending, the practices and the behaviours of CB herself.

Lazy, I am on genes reunited and I found no record of her siters death. GR is quite comprehensive and has 99.99999 records of all births and deaths in the UK more that 8 years old.

Mothers name is Homayounfar, sounds rather Arabic.

Oh definitely. Like how a (if not the most) democratic middle eastern country after WW2 had the US (with UK complicity) overthrow their elected government, and replaced with the distinctly undemocratic Shah.

All in the name of oil.

Well I don't know that those are the things most relevant to CBs immigration history, but I suppose more knowledge is always a good thing. You don't have to agree with the Shah or anything he stood for to understand that people who'd previously supported him and their families would've been potentially at risk in Iran after the revolution, and fall within the scope of the Refugee Convention.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/07/the-real-me-at-18

She certainly looks different in that picture. It seems the clothes were the costume of her pantomime life.

Well, that Personal Statement piece in the Guardian clearly says she's used an oven...

"I have every disability under the sun".WTF? She's a complete fantasist.

"I have every disability under the sun".WTF? She's a complete fantasist.

She says things in interviews that the interviewer never questions. Its like nothing bad could be said against her.

She has claimed to have a pituitary gland disorder, which would cause growth and metabolism issues..... so let's keep it clean just in case it's true

Her worldview seems very consistent. Her 'unconditional love' treatment of troubled youths and her mantra of neuroscience-flavoured woo all peddles the idea that the children she worked with were never responsible for their actions as trauma and abuse had left them brain-damaged. In a very similar way, none of this epic cock-up seems to have been her fault; instead it's a conspiracy of people trying to shut her up because she Knows Things. And all the way back it seems she has been appropriating disabilities left right and centre to excuse her own behaviour.

Still, I think the thing that has irritated me most of all was the march by KC employees and clients from Camberwell to Downing Street to protest the closure of KC. I watched footage of it and thought 'hang on a minute, isn't it closing because CB has closed it? And hasn't it had to close because she managed its finances badly and didn't meet the requirements set out in the bail-out package that had previously - against the advice of civil servants - explicitly been approved by MPs? So how is this the government's fault???

I gather she swanned up in person to that demonstration, to greet and thank her acolytes for their assiduousness in blaming anyone but her for her cockup. What I didn't get was why they weren't marching to protest outside her house, seeing as the whole situation was her fault.

Chilli, there was another child Sharmine Batmanghelidj born in 1958 in exactly the same area but to a mother with a different surname, again another Arabic name. I wonder if her father practised polygamy?

Given the implausible stories and fudging of I suspect that one of either Lila or Sharmine is actually Camila.

Her Dad seems to have been a bit of a woo charlatan too.

But I think in Camila-land no-one is ever held accountable for their actions a bit like in MN land. In Camila-land, there is always a trauma, an illness, an evil oppressor or some other factor which means no-one every has any agency or responsibility for their own behaviour.

Manatee, I just think she is shrewd enough to know that at the moment if you blame the Tories for something there are a large number of people who will blindly agree just because it's the Tories.

The fact is it's been an embarrassment for the Tories as they really bought into her stuff and only gave up when it became absolutely clear it would discredit them even more than helping them limp along further.

IMHO CB likes to have tags like : refugee, disorder, disability, disease, dyslexic, sister's suicide, Oxford reject, victim, saviour etc used in descriptions of her. It helps to reinforce her myths about herself. It creaes a barrier- people sympathise with her or are intimidated by her, are uncomfortable about 'digging' into personal issues and she just goes unchallenged.

I rather feel she is actually a huge con artist who has convinced herself of her own myths and publicity.

Well I don't know about any of the rest, but it's not particularly outrageous for someone who is a refugee to want to be described as such. It's actually politically very important for some of them, although of course there are plenty of others who prefer to try and forget about it and not discuss things. Both responses are normal and legitimate.

I thought we'd moved away from questions about her immigration history now anyway, but can those who don't believe she's really been recognised as a refugee tell us why? Like, is there any actual reason from anyone who knows something about the subject, or are people just shit stirring? If the latter, why not just stick to things we know she's done wrong, like her awful racist comments about black mothers?

The fact is it's been an embarrassment for the Tories as they really bought into her stuff and only gave up when it became absolutely clear it would discredit them even more than helping them limp along further.

Yeah I think this is a good point in contrast to some of the other bilge over the past couple of pages. This whole thing actually is potentially even more huge than it already is, because it's a really good rebuttal to Cameron's Big Society shit. I saw posted somewhere, possibly here I'm not sure, that the KC debacle gives the lie to the idea that there are enough properly qualified people ready and willing to act as trustees for charities, so it's fine if we devolve everything to the voluntary sector to save money. Because I think at a minimum, whatever anyone feels about CB's clothing or methods, she's clearly not done an adequate job running KC and/or arranging for someone suitably qualified to do it. And this is potentially a risk you're always going to get with charities, speaking as someone who's worked with more than one.

All the insinuations about her family history are not helpful IMO - there's enough that's on public record about the financial and management shambles of KC, the paid-for 'academic' endorsements, the allegations of sexual offences by employees and clients, and the inconsistencies in the accounts CB has given of these things without going all amateur sleuth on her background in a way that suggests (a) she's made up a terrible bereavement and (b) her family weren't real refugees because they had money. That kind of speculation will just fuel her remaining fans' claims about witch hunts.

The only two things about her background that are relevant, IMHO, are that she misrepresented the timeline of her education (falsely claiming to have been Regent college's youngest-ever psychotherapy postgrad student, when in fact she was still doing her drama BA at Warwick at the time - a move presumably designed to bolster her credibility as an exceptionally gifted psycotherapist) and that her father was a quack who made amazing claims for revolutionary cures unknown science and which appeared to have been based on no actual research (an approach his daughter increasingly appears to have run with in her own career).

I do think it's relevant, because she's claiming that an event occurred which should have an official record but don't, and other inconsistencies about basic facts like her families nationalities, background etc. Pretty fundamental stuff to lie about. And it demonstrates exactly how flexible her relationship with the truth is.

This is a woman who is currently casting aspersions on other people's mental health and is insinuating she knows people who have committed crimes against children and alleging an establishment cover up. I really do think that it's worth discussion as it casts doubt on how reliable her claims are.

Just doing a bit of googling it appears that she adds a new embellishment each time she tells a story.

LazyLohan- one of the now many interviews I've now read she implies that her brothers are half brothers which does suggest her father had more than one wife, at least at different times.

I think her credibility is a huge part of this. If she can't be trusted to tell the truth about herself why should we believe anything she says?

"I have a non-conventional approach to hiring my staff........I'm not interested in skills.."

www.glamourmagazine.co.uk/celebrity/celebrity-galleries/2015/05/camila-batmanghelidjh-interview-2015-kids-company-and-place-2be

In this www.theguardian.com/society/2013/feb/22/camila-batmanghelidjh-interview she says she sneaked food out of her house and put it on poor people's doorsteps. But in other interviews she says she never walked on pavements.

It's astounding now how no one ever put all these contradictory interviews together.

In this www.theguardian.com/society/2013/feb/22/camila-batmanghelidjh-interview she says she sneaked food out of her house and put it on poor people's doorsteps. But in other interviews she says she never walked on pavements.

Like fuck she did.

Squatted behind the dustbins and scoffed the lot, more like.

Absolutely FatherReboola. 100%. A lot of the posters on this thread don't realise they're giving her ammunition.

I understand the points about credibility, but equally people have to take responsibility for their own ignorance as well. The immigration history she's given might be a load of crap, but it's also actually entirely consistent with what we know about her family background. I guess it's possible she made it up, but equally it is a common enough timeline for wealthy, Westernised Iranians who supported the Shah. I would think we all agree her dad fell into that category. Someone questioning whether she's a refugee because she emigrated to the UK is doing so at least partially because they don't understand that you can have done both. Someone implying that her refugee status is inconsistent with going to boarding school is doing so at least partially because they don't realise there are rich refugees. Someone saying she couldn't be a refugee because her mum is Belgian (and is she, anyway, where did that come from?) is doing so at least partially because they don't know anything about Belgian nationality law. There are many things that are CBs fault, but these are not amongst them.

Yes I can see that my previous post wasn't helpful to the discussion and has helped to divert the focus of the thread - sorry.