[See also other articles by Gustavo Arellano.]

Over the years I've covered the Catholic Diocese of Orange sex-abuse scandal, I've found few people braver than Joelle Casteix . She's one of Orange County's most prominent sex-abuse survivors (a choir director repeatedly raped Casteix while she was a student at Mater Dei High during the 1980s) and frequently stands outside churches to demand clueless Catholics hear the voices of the Orange diocese's molestation victims. For her work, Casteix has endured taunts, slurs, screams and even the occasional shove—and on Navel Gazing, anonymous cowards leave snide remarks .


Now, Casteix must deal with anonymous faxes to me.

Late last Friday, someone sent the Weekly a fax of an op-ed piece Casteix wrote as a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the early 1990s regarding the abortion she underwent due to the abuse. "I assume you have never seen this article," a cover letter stated, and the sender went on to rail about Casteix's supposed hypocrisies. "Joelle has made a career out of being a victim of 'rape' and professes to want to protect other children from the administrator who failed to protect her almost 20 years ago," the anonymous faxer wrote. The person then suggested I ask Casteix why she never brought criminal charges against her molester, why she allows Santa Margarita High Assistant Principal of Admission Lucretia Dominguez to continue working since the writer claimed Dominguez knew about Casteix's abuse yet did nothing about it, and some other crap.

So I called Casteix and asked her those questions. "I've been protesting against Lu for years!" she said in her ever-chipper tone. Same thing with her abuser. The sending of her long-ago UCSB Daily Nexus piece makes her think a Mater Dei apologist sent the anonymous fax: "The only people with knowledge of that article who would care enough to send it out are [Orange] diocesan officials, people who have seen my case files, or people who hate me for my activism."

We'll wager on the latter—also included in the cover sheet was this cryptic remark:

I have always felt [Joelle] deliberately waited for the criminal statute of limitations to expire before going after the church so the testimony of other witnesses would not interfere with her public version of events.

Hey, anonymous coward: you're obviously reading this blog, as the subject header for your cover sheet was " Barkley Blog and Joelle Casteix." So, tell us: who are you? Why are you so adamant about attacking Casteix that you resorted to sending me a fax that not only didn't state where it was coming from, but took enough care so that our fax machine couldn't register your fax number? And what's your point in sending me the Daily Nexus article, of which I already had a copy (it's called reporting, pendejo)? The article only proves Casteix was raped by a teacher — nothing more, nothing less. Cretin.

E-mail: GARELLANO@OCWEEKLY.COM