A crowdfunding site has raised more than $100,000 for Mark Judge, Charles Johnson reports. Judge “simply wants to live a private life,” a site called Funding Morality tells potential donors: During his high school friend Brett Kavanaugh‘s nomination battle, it says, Judge “became collateral damage” and “lost his apartment, his job, and several writing contracts, leaving him with massive unpaid legal and other bills.”
Judge has led a life on the margins of DC publishing for years. As the Washington Post reported in September, Judge lived “for years in the basement of his parents’ home in Potomac” and his jobs in addition to freelance writing include “substitute teaching, housesitting, and most recently, at a liquor store.”
Interestingly, as Johnson points out, Funding Morality is a project of the Jewish Institute for Global Awareness, an organization that sprang from another group called Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing, or JONAH, which agreed to shut down after a New Jersey jury found that it committed consumer fraud by offering “gay conversion therapy.” The jury in that case, New York Jewish Week reported, heard that JONAH’s methods included a party “where a group of men danced naked in the woods, threw cake at each other and rolled in the mud before washing off in a group shower.” The Southern Poverty Law Center, which brought the suit, reported that JONAH’s “Male counselors advocated ‘healthy touch’ sessions that included prolonged cuddling.”
In another suit, witnesses told the court JONAH employed a “‘life coach’ who claimed to have subdued his own homosexual attractions, routinely ‘invited’ young men he was counseling to strip in his office and then ‘physically feel’ their masculinity.”
JONAH’s founder, Arthur Goldberg, is a trustee and co-director of Funding Morality’s parent organization, according to records filed with the IRS. During court proceedings for the suit that shuttered JONAH, NJ.com reported in 2015, Goldberg admitted to not keeping statistics on his organization’s success rate despite advertising that it “healed” up to 75 percent of its clients, had his credentials revoked by the American Psychotherapy Association after “failing to disclose his felony conviction as a Wall Street municipal bonds manager,” and “acknowledged he has not corrected people who refer to him as ‘doctor.'”
The Jewish Institute for Global Awareness has the same phone number, office, and principals as JONAH, Think Progress reported this March, and continues JONAH’s “therapy” efforts. Other projects on Funding Morality include a fundraiser for the Reverend Paul Kalchik, who lost his job after burning a rainbow flag, and an attempt to hire an editor for a memoir by David DeJiacomo, who says he was able to “liberate himself from the addictions that bound him to the gay lifestyle.” Judge’s fundraiser has raised more money than any other of the current projects.
Despite his apparent desire for a private life, Judge has long publicly expressed fascination and hostility toward gay people. In 2006, he published a story making the case that gay men were “pathological sexual predators.” After failing to get a job at the now-defunct local news site TBD.com, he wrote that the news organization, where I was arts editor, was “gay and leftist.” During one of his brief and unhappy stays at Washington City Paper he told an editor who rejected a pitch that he hoped he died in a similar manner to Matthew Shepard. The editor at the time, David Carr, told me in an 2011 email that Judge apologized “after I said I was on his way to his mom’s house to pull him out of the basement and kick his ass.”
Andrew Beaujon joined Washingtonian in late 2014. He was previously with the Poynter Institute, TBD.com, and Washington City Paper. He lives in Del Ray.
