# 25 Scott Nesson locks poor family out of their home over $12.50 debt

Scott, here is another family you know. The parents of the family that is – Pheng Heng, aged 60,and his wife Pok Poq, aged 52.  You locked them out of their home last month because they were $12.50 behind in rent owed to the Cambodian Children’s Fund.

$12.50!

Pheng Heng and Pok Poq

The Cambodian Children’s Fund  has three of Pheng Heng and Pok Poq’s children in care. Given that virtually all CCF kids have at least one sponsor, this means that CCF is generating between $300 and $450 a month in income from this family without providing any financial assistance to the rest of the family.

$300 a month is 3 times Pheng Heng’s monthly wage when he has a job. He doesn’t have a job at the moment because he was badly injured in a traffic accident and has been unable to work. So what do you do, Scott, when an impoverished family is $12.50 behind in their rent? A family whose children CCF is caring for? Lock them out of their house during the rainy season.

What kind of man are you?  Such insensitive, mercenary (and dare I say, inhumane) behavior is certainly not of the variety you boast about on Facebook or talk about when interviewed in your jet-set travels around the world to remind everyone what a wonderful man you are to have given up your $1 million a year job in Hollywood to help poor rubbish dump families.

How many other families have you locked out of their homes over sums as petty as $12.50?

You will not answer this question, of course, and I can only hope that in due course the media will start to ask such questions and, when you refuse to answer them, report this – along with testimonies from families you have locked locked out or families that have suffered other human rights abuses at the hands of the Cambodian Children’s Fund.

Locking families out of their homes is not the only way that your mercenary callousness reveals itself. In my last blog entry I wrote of Tath Raksa – the 15 months old baby that CCF is determined to ‘rescue’ from his loving but very poor dump-working family.

Just three days ago CCF staff went to the home of Tath Pheng and Kim Tath (the grandparents) to apply yet more pressure on them to hand over baby Raksa. Has there been any offer from the Cambodian Children’s Fund to help Raksa’s intellectually handicapped mother, his grandparents; the entire family? No, it is baby Raksa CCF is offering to help; not the family.   You want Raksa for your CCF nursery. Is there a spare bed that needs to be filled?

No doubt, in due course, if you had your way, a photo of you and baby Raksa  (a photogenic boy with big brown eyes) would appear on your Facebook page and hundreds of people would ‘like’ the photo, refer to you as an ‘angel’ and in various other ways heap praise on you for being such a kind and generous man. A saint!

Until such time as some arrangement can be made to help the entire family, I will be supporting it so that the grandparents can afford to resist your high pressure tactics to take baby Raksa from them.

Please tell your staff to stop pressuring Tath Pheng and Kim Tath to give Raksa up. Tell them to back off. You should not be harvesting babies in this way, anyway, Scott. You should be helping entire families.

I can only hope that it will not take as long as it did with Somaly Mam for the fraudulent aspects of the Cambodian Children’s Fund to be exposed to public view. I hope that you are exposed  before TIME or some other magazine puts a photo of you on its cover, hailing you as the savior of Cambodia’s poor and powerless – a selfless man who gave up his $1 million a year job etc.; before yet another hagiographic documentary is made by filmmakers who have not bothered to do basic research into how CCF is actually run, as opposed to how your marketing machine presents is as being run.

If you desperately need a baby, Scott, find a woman you can have one with. Stop stealing other people's babies.

# 24 Scott Neeson complicit in 'Stolen Generation' of Cambodian children?

Scott

You know this family. You wanted to take the baby from its mother and grand-parents and raise Tath Raksa in your CCF nursery; present Raksa to the world as a child you had ‘rescued’ from poverty.

Raska is a good looking child so his smiling face would have melted the hearts of sponsors and donors and the money would have flowed in – both swelling CCF’s coffers and your own ego: Scott Neeson, the $1 million a year film executive who gave up his high life in Hollywood, hob nobbing with Mel Gibson and other superstars, to help poor families working in the Phnom Penh rubbish dump!

This is how your post-Hollywood life began, Scott, and I have no reason to doubt the purity of your original intentions. Things have gone badly awry, however, and you are now trapped by the all-too-successful funding model you have created for the Cambodian Children’s Fund. You need a constant supply of children to ‘rescue’ to feed the appetite of your sponsors. Otherwise they may lose interest or take their charity dollars to some other NGO  that is also in the business of ‘rescuing’ children – from poverty, child exploitation and the sex trade.

The cuter the child the more in need of rescue it is!

Unfortunately, the model you have in place necessitates that you remove many of these children from their families. Housing them in an institution makes for great photo opportunities – gaggles of smiling kids in class, eating food, playing sport.  Always smiling. (No shots of the dormitories in which they sleep 3 and 4 to a bed though!) 

Your funding model must create the illusion that you are offering these children a much better life (albeit institutionalized) than any alternative available to them. Without you, without the enormous sacrifice you have made, giving up your Hollywood life,  their lives would be miserable! This is where you are wrong, Scott. So wrong. Worse than just wrong!

Take the family in this photo, for instance. You know their story. Raksa’s mother, Lim Kheav Eak is intellectually handicapped. She was raped a couple of years ago. Nine months later Raksa was born. Eak loves Raksa. So do her parents – That Pheng (grandmother) and Tath Kim (grandfather). Grandma and grandpa, along with Eak, work in the Phnom Penh rubbish tip. During the day, Raksa is taken care of by an 8 year old girl, whose name escapes me just now.

The Cambodian Children’s Fund offered to take Raksa off the family’s hands, raise him in the CCF nursery and give him a ‘good life.’ CCF did not offer to help the whole family – only the one cute member of it; only the one that could be used as propaganda in your relentless pursuit of more and more money from sponsors and donors.

Yes, the family would have loved some help from CCF but they love baby Raksa and would not give him up to CCF. The result? No offer of help for the whole family! The message you sent to this family was: “Give us Raksa or you’ll get no help from us.” They opted for ‘no help’.

Many other parents do not take the ‘no help’ option, They choose, instead, to give their children to the Cambodian Children’s Fund in the hope that their children will be well fed, get a decent education. The Cambodian Children’s Fund then gets most of these parents (but not all) to sign a contact – the terms of which they do not have explained to them. The parents are not given the option of showing the contract to a lawyer or human rights group or anyone who can point out the fine print to them before signing it.

Once the parents have signed the contracts with their thumb prints, they are not allowed to retain a copy of it. CCF retains the only copy and is then in a position to tell the parents, further down the track, that the contract contains whatever conditions and clauses suit CCF. The parents are then intimidated into silence.  If they kick up any kind of fuss, they will be punished by CCF. The instances in which this has occurred are numerous. As with the Mafia, you only need to knee-cap one person for their neighbours to get the message that you don’t mess with the Mafia.

These poor illiterate mothers and fathers have no idea of their legal rights and this is just how you want it. Mothers and fathers aware of their rights are not so easily intimidated. And one of the legal rights that these parents have, under Cambodian law, is to have their children returned to the family if such a request is made to CCF. This does not occur, as I discovered when Ka and Chuan asked for their daughters to be returned to their care and you refused, citing the contract you had entered into with them. They claimed that there was no contract. You refused to produce us so who knows if there is a contract or not. However, regardless of what the contract says, if there is one, they were entitled (as are all parents of children in Cambodia) to have their daughters returned to them whenever they asked for this to occur.

CCF has become so confident in its capacity to abuse the human rights of parents that it often does not bother with the formality of entering into any contract with the parents of kids it takes from families. No doubt, upon reading this, you will ensure that your staff get contracts with all mums and dads quick smart.

I have asked this question before but I’ll try again:

“Could you please make public, Scott Neeson, the contents of the pro forma contract that you get parents to sign before removing the children from their families and raising them in one of your many institutions?”

One day, when true democracy comes to Cambodia, I hope that a legal class action suit is initiated - suing the Cambodian Children’s Fund and all other NGOs who have engaged in the theft of children from their families; in the creation of a Cambodian ‘Stolen Generation.’

# 23 Were you a participant, Scott, in Peter Hogan's plot to see David Fletcher jailed regardless of overwhelming evidence in support of him his innocence of the crime of rape?

Dear Scott

A few more questions for you to go on record:

On the Khmer440 blogsite earlier this year I asked you, in a very public forum, a few questions. The proprietor of the site, Peter Hogan, very quickly banned me from making any further posts or from making comments on other unrelated posts.

Such a ban was understandable given that Peter Hogan is a friend of yours. Also, as owner of Khmer440, he had a right to turn away whomsoever he chose.

This year Khmer440 passed out of Peter Hogan’s hands and into those of a new proprietor. However, I find myself still banned from Khmer440.

It occurs to me that there may be some truth to the rumour going around that you are the new owner of Khmer440; that Khmer440 has become part of your Cambodian empire. So, my first question for you today is:

“Are you the new owner of Khmer440?”

And now to a more serious matter, Khmer440 being primarily a vehicle to be used by expatriates angry with life and needing some outlet for their spleen!

You will recall, back in June 2010, speaking the following words to Andrew Drummond – in Cambodia for 72 hours to do an ‘in depth’ story about David Fletcher:

 “There is little doubt Fletcher devotes his time to grooming young girls….The fact is these children can be bought. It’s difficult to stop it. The British Embassy have been told about Fletcher. Many organizations have files on him, but nothing has happened. If you can get this guy sent packing you are doing a service to the children here.” Scott Neeson, speaking to journalist Andrew Drummond in June 2010. Fletcher was ‘sent packing’ one month later and has been in jail ever since.

“Little doubt!” is one of those slippery expressions intended to vilify but which leaves you with a ‘Get Out Of Jail Free’ card of sorts if it turns out that there is no evidence that Fletcher devoted “his time to grooming young girls.”

My second question for the day:

“Do you still believe, in October 2014, that David Fletcher was grooming young girls? If not, do you intend to offer him a public apology for having defamed him?”

Whether a public apology will be sufficient to stop David Fletcher from suing you for defamation I do not know. I suspect that it would be given that his major concern right now is to have his reputation returned to him - his reputation having been shattered by the allegations that he was ‘grooming’ young girls and that he raped Yang Dany.

There is, incidentally, no evidence of ‘grooming’ to be found in Andrew Drummond’s 20^th June 2010 article:

“Preying On The Garbage Dump Children”.

“Convicted child sexual abuser runs ‘charity’ for rubbish dump kids in Cambodia.”

Nor is there any credible evidence to be found in the court documents I have read that David Fletcher was ‘grooming’ young girls. And there is certainly no credible evidence in the court files that David Fletcher raped Yang Dany on 15^th and 22^nd March 2009; no evidence that would stand up in a properly constituted court whose proceedings were in accordance with the Cambodian Code of Criminal Procedure. Indeed, there is to be found in the court files credible evidence that Fletcher could not have raped Yang Dany. It comes in the form of a medical report, prepared for the court, in which the examining doctor declared Yang Dany to be a virgin – her hymen still intact after two ‘brutal rapes’. This extract from the September 2010 doctor’s report, prepared for the Phnom Penh Municipal Court, speaks for itself:

I will get to why I am relating all this to you shortly but before doing so some context is required for those who are reading this on my blog.

I learnt through my research into your own (CCF’s) illegal removal of children from the homes of poor Cambodian families that back in the early days of the Cambodian Children’s Fund, when you started helping families living in the Phnom Penh rubbish dump, that you had a ‘competitor’ – David Fletcher. Fletcher was also helping families in the dump. There was no love lost between you and Fletcher – for reasons that are only of marginal anecdotal interest and need not be gone into here.

You were, however, a friend of Peter Hogan’s – the then owner of the blogsite Khmer440. And here is where joining the dots becomes interesting.

Here is Peter Hogan, on Wed 2^nd Oct 2013, at 3.33 pm posting a under the moniker ‘keeping it riel’ - in celebration of David Fletcher’s recently announced jail sentence:

“Cold drinks will most certainly be taken this evening to toast Fletcher's first night in his new abode.

I recall that 4(!) years ago when Grandslam and myself hatched our plan, we made a sequential list of desirable outcomes beginning with getting his 'charity' closed then moving onto having his shithole-in-the-wall bar closed, having him outed in the press (and fuck, did we achieve that one!) etc etc.

Today, the last box on the sheet ('Fletch in Prey Sar') was finally ticked off so I'll allow myself a few strong drinkies in celebration and will be raising my glass to Grandslam back in the UK.

Goodnight Cambodia and good mental health.”

Elsewhere on Khmer440 Hogan makes reference to other friends of his who were privy to his plan to nail Fletcher.

“Were you privy to Peter Hogan’s plans, executed over a period of four years, by his own admission, to see 'Fletch in Prey Sar'?”

From September 2010 onwards, both the Phnom Penh Municipal Court and APLE were in possession of a medical report declaring that Yang Dany remained a virgin after the alleged rapes. Both decided that Yang Dany’s virginity was not going to stand in the way of proceeding with the prosecution (dare I say ‘persecution’) of David Fletcher. A trial was conducted based on the premise that Fletcher had raped Yang Dany, whilst both the Phnom Penh Municipal Court and APLE knew that no rape could have taken place.

I have just one more question for you, Scott. For today at least:

“At what point, on what date, did you discover that Yang Dany remained a virgin after the alleged rapes?”

You may find the most recent post on my Cambodia440 blog of interest:

http://cambodia440.blogspot.com/2014/10/14-aple-complicit-in-perverting-course.html

best wishes

James Ricketson