BDSM RTV NEWS!!!!

22 april 2009


Former KOIN director sues over losing job


Source: www.oregonlive.com The Oregonian - OregonLive.com - Portland,OR,USA


Jeff Alan insists the whole thing is a huge misunderstanding. Or something much worse.

“A blatant, malicious, personal attack on me,” he thunders.
Still, there are a few things Alan has to admit.

He was the proprietor of a Web site called the House of Sir J. The “lifestyle” described on the site involves the sexual practices known as BDSM, which stands for bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism.


He doesn’t quite describe his role in the creation and sale of Sir J’s line of handmade products (collars, leashes and floggers). He’s more eager to explain how the enterprise -- since closed, but now replaced by a similar site he also owns called Getting In Safely -- is part of a yearslong, multimedia investigation into a variety of American subcultures. “Including,” he notes, “bikers, lesbians, gays, the BDSM community and other avenues.” The work involves many other researchers, all of whose identities must be protected. Which, he says, is why we can’t speak to them.

Still, Alan continues, he told his employers about his side project. And former KOIN station manager Marty Ostrow confirms Alan informed him.
Two ex-spouses and one former employee say Alan’s interest in bondage is something other than academic. Alan insists the whips and floggers are part of his research, but one thing seems obvious: Call him Sir J, call him Jeff Alan or Jeff Alan Brent, he’s led quite a colorful existence.

• • •
In 1999, Alan, long divorced from his third wife, married a publicist he’d met in St. Louis, and they moved to his next assignment in Houston. The relationship ended in divorce after a few years, and when he was in Pittsburgh, Alan met another woman, Patrice Bailey.

They eventually moved in together, and in 2005, Bailey’s mother, Betty Wallo, came to live near the couple, then accompanied them to Portland in 2006.

Wallo, who is physically and mentally compromised enough to have been ruled legally incapacitated, requires a caregiver. She hasn’t a lot of money, but it flows in from month to month. Alan volunteered to serve as financial guardian. He was granted power of attorney in 2005. But according to testimony, along with allegations just resolved in Michigan’s probate courts, Alan and Bailey wielded other, more sinister powers over Wallo.

The couple, according to a document filed by Patrice’s brother, William Wallo, “kept (Betty) heavily sedated, they failed to help her with personal needs and hygiene, (and) their disregard for her health and welfare resulted in (Betty) Wallo dropping to about 85 pounds.”

“There weren’t any improprieties,” Alan says simply.

Betty had another son, Michael Wallo, in Portland, but he rarely visited, either because of his own lack of interest (Alan’s interpretation) or, according to the other Wallos and Alan’s housekeeper, Sandi Lessman, because Alan and Bailey preferred to keep Betty apart from the rest of her family.

What they agree on is that Michael Wallo visited Alan and Bailey’s house on Mother’s Day 2007, and filed a complaint about his mother’s treatment with Multnomah County Adult Protective Services. A subsequent investigation cleared Alan and Bailey, but Michael returned to the house in July, and the visit turned into a violent confrontation between brother and sister. Betty got knocked out of her wheelchair, hitting her head hard enough to be sent to the hospital.

Michael Wallo was convicted of misdemeanor harassment. Nevertheless, when Betty was discharged, the hospital sent her to a nursing home, rather than Alan and Bailey’s home. In October 2007, Wallo’s other son, William, took his mother back to Michigan. She reportedly is healthier and more lucid.

And in March 2008, Oregon courts ordered Alan to pay all of the charges on Betty Wallo’s credit cards when he controlled her finances, a decision echoed last week by a Michigan probate court.

Alan has his own version of the events surrounding Betty Wallo’s tenure in his home. His concern for his girlfriend’s mother was genuine, he says, and his care for her nothing less than selfless.

“All the documents here (in Oregon) show a completely different picture than they do in Michigan.”

He shrugs. He sighs. He has other problems.

• • •

Maybe Alan’s talk of malice and personal attacks is a trifle overblown. Maybe the people who accuse him of so many things all make legitimate points. Or maybe all those people are working an angle, wreaking havoc against Alan for some other reason. Or maybe that strikes you as a bit far-fetched. But then you have to ask yourself: Why are so many so evasive? And even hostile?

I consider this a threat! one man proclaims in response to an e-mail query. Stop stalking me! a woman writes. I can’t end up in court! frets another. Voices shake. Telephones slam. E-mail exchanges end abruptly, and permanently. I’ve built a good life, someone blurts out. PLEASE don’t drag me into this!

They have seen this coming. Alan, on the other hand, says he’s surprised by everything that has happened to him in the past few months.

In August 2007 the Montecito Broadcast Group sold KOIN (6) and three of its other TV stations to Atlanta-based New Vision Television. A new station manager took over, and a few months later Alan learned his contract would not be renewed.

Hired, fired, rehired. TV business as usual. But that wasn’t how Alan saw it.

Instead, he thought back to the previous summer when, he asserts in a complaint he would file in Multnomah County Circuit Court, New Vision chief Jason Elkin, on the verge of buying the station, allegedly used his influence to fire KOIN’s longtime sports anchor Ed Whelan. Alan says in his complaint that he resisted the move, and also tried to stop Elkin from dictating the hiring of Kacey Montoya, a young reporter from Palm Springs, Calif. Montoya didn’t have the right experience, Alan says. But what truly offended him was that she had once posed for revealing photographs, some of which were marketed on the Internet.

Again, Elkin prevailed. Alan met his fate a few months later.

Maybe he would have been fired no matter what. But with Whelan (a 61-year-old African American who had recovered from a stroke) and Montoya (posed in a bikini, cradling an assault rifle) serving as moral pillars, Alan, then 57, tossed in his own age discrimination claim and launched a wrongful termination lawsuit against KOIN’s owners, New Vision Television.

Alan filed his papers in August 2008. And a few weeks later his personal life erupted into public view. Someone got wind of Alan’s connection to the House of Sir J Web site and sent the information to a media insiders’ site called News Blues. It ran a story Aug. 26, 2008, and very quickly heard from David Wohl, an ambitious lawyer-slash-legal commentator from California. Who, as it happened, had worked alongside Montoya in Palm Springs.

Wohl rode the story to Fox News (where he contributes to the cable channel’s legal show, “Kelly’s Court”), pointing out the stark contrast between Alan’s dudgeon regarding Montoya’s Internet identity and his own Sir J-related doings.

Then, in mid-December, Jolie Brent, the littlest of the girls Alan abandoned in 1986, came back into his life.

Now in her late 20s, Jolie blanketed KOIN’s e-mail baskets with a vibrantly worded and illustrated e-leaflet that connected the man they knew as Jeff Alan with Jeff Alan Brent, the father she had never quite known.

“He did a really good disappearing act,” Jolie Brent says. “I haven’t ever seen or heard from him.”

• • •

Alan hadn’t used his birth name for years, and all action on his original Social Security number had ceased. It was easy to imagine he was dead.

In 1993 Jolie’s mother, Deborah Brent, had Jeff Alan Brent -- or JA Brent, as the forms read -- declared deceased. This entitled the girls to survivors’ benefits from the Social Security Administration, but mostly it closed the last page of a particularly unhappy book.

Alan, for his part, points out how visible he was: using his own, long-ago established name, working in a high-profile industry, writing books and promoting them on national television. Indeed, it’s something other than an underground existence. Still, Deborah Brent says she couldn’t find him.

“I spent a lot on private detectives,” she says. “There was no Internet then, no Google, no way to track down people besides private investigators.” The detectives she hired, she says, never found evidence that her ex-husband was still alive.

But that’s not how their family saga ended.

Diana, the daughter from his first marriage, saw him on TV in 2004. Alan was older, but she knew his eyes and that warm, engaging voice. She tracked down his information, then picked up her telephone and dialed.
Whatever they said stayed between them. But Diana passed their father’s number to Brandye, her half sister, and then she called her long-lost father, too. He greeted her, she said later, as if she were an old college buddy.

You can imagine how it upset her. You can sense the long-buried anguish and outrage, the jagged scar left by a father who didn’t take the time to say goodbye.

• • •

Alan is still talking, still moving, still reinventing himself.

Lately he has made news as chief investigator for the Cascade Policy Institute. He’s not an official employee, but is a leading figure in a campaign to uncover what Alan says is voter fraud widespread enough to corrupt the state’s vote-by-mail system. Alan has published essays and op-eds on the subject, and recently traveled to the state Capitol to meet with Secretary of State Kate Brown. Alan dropped off an official complaint noting the names of voters whose ballots were counted despite the fact the individuals who cast them were identified in some official records as being deceased.

Brown’s office found no evidence indicating crimes by the first 15 voters Alan submitted, but other cases are pending.

And maybe it’s easy to see why Alan seems so haunted by the potential holes in Oregon’s electoral system. Because he knows how easy it is for someone to change his name. How swiftly a person can move and vanish, take on new identities, even new Social Security numbers. You can do the most surprising things, for years or even decades, and no one will seem to notice.

Researcher Lynne Palombo contributed to this report