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News

Cain accuser Sharon Bialek has been sued a half dozen times and filed for bankruptcy twice

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Photo of Sharon Bialek
Photo of Sharon Bialek

See this link? It will take you to Robert McCain’s post on the Cain press conference. McCain has been following Cain before his campaign even started. He knows everything about Cain’s campaign. He has links to a half-dozen news sources with reactions in his post.

McCain writes:

It is too early to analyze or evaluate the long-term impact. The immediate reaction toward Cain’s press conference has been generally positive. If he didn’t “hit a home run,” as they say, he at least got a solid stand-up double. And his vow that he will continue the campaign, without regard to his accusers or their accusations, is perhaps the most important thing he said during the press conference.

Here’s the press conference:

Part 1 of 3:

Part 2 of 3:

Part 3 of 3:

Sharon Bialek’s background

Here’s a press release from the Cain campaign talking about the Sharon Bialek’s background.

Excerpt:

In the courts, Ms. Bialek has had a lengthy record in the Cook County Court system over various civil lawsuits. The following cases on file in Cook County are:

  • 2000-M1-707461 Defendant against Broadcare Management
  • 2000-M1-714398 Defendant in lawsuit against Broadcare Management
  • 2000-M1-701522 Defendant in lawsuit against Broadcare Management
  • 2005-M1-111072 Defendant in lawsuit against Mr. Mark Beatovic.
  • 2007-M1-189176 Defendant in lawsuit against Midland Funding.
  • 2009-M1-158826 Defendant in lawsuit against Illinois Lending.

Ms. Bialek was also sued in 1999 over a paternity matter according to ABC 7 Chicago (WLS-TV).  Source: WLS-TV, November 7, 2011.

In personal finances, PACER (Federal Court) records show that Ms. Bialek has filed for bankruptcy in the Northern District of Illinois bankruptcy court in 1991 and 2001. The respective case numbers according to the PACER system are 1:01-bk-22664 and 1:91-bk-23273.

Ms. Bialek has worked for nine employers over the last seventeen years. Source: WLS-TV, November 7, 2011

More from the Chicago Tribune.

Excerpt:

Records show she twice has filed for personal bankruptcy, first in 1991 and then again in 2001. In the latter case, she claimed $5,700 in assets and more than $36,000 in liabilities. Among the creditors seeking payment was a management firm demanding back rent of $4,500, four credit card companies and a lawyer asking for his legal fees.

After the case was discharged, she accused a former boyfriend of harassing her for repayment of a loan, court records in the bankruptcy case show. Bialek borrowed $4,500 from William Concha, though Concha now believes she had no intention of paying him back, according to his brother, Mario.

Reached Monday night in Spain, William Concha declined comment.

At least two liens have been filed against Bialek, according to records from the Cook County recorder of deeds.

The IRS filed a tax lien against her in 2009 for nearly $5,200. In August, the Illinois Department of Revenue claimed Bialek owed the state more than $4,300, including penalties and interest, relating to income taxes from 2004, according to county records.

Court records also show creditors took legal action against her during the past decade, including at least one lawsuit filed in Cook County.

More from the Chicago Tribune.

Excerpt:

Records show she twice has filed for personal bankruptcy, first in 1991 and then again in 2001. In the latter case, she claimed $5,700 in assets and more than $36,000 in liabilities. Among the creditors seeking payment was a management firm demanding back rent of $4,500, four credit card companies and a lawyer asking for his legal fees.

After the case was discharged, she accused a former boyfriend of harassing her for repayment of a loan, court records in the bankruptcy case show. Bialek borrowed $4,500 from William Concha, though Concha now believes she had no intention of paying him back, according to his brother, Mario.

Reached Monday night in Spain, William Concha declined comment.

At least two liens have been filed against Bialek, according to records from the Cook County recorder of deeds.

The IRS filed a tax lien against her in 2009 for nearly $5,200. In August, the Illinois Department of Revenue claimed Bialek owed the state more than $4,300, including penalties and interest, relating to income taxes from 2004, according to county records.

Court records also show creditors took legal action against her during the past decade, including at least one lawsuit filed in Cook County.

It’s not surprising to me that a woman like this would make such accusations – she is getting a lot of attention, and possibly is being paid off by another candidate. There might even be a nice book deal for her.

Consider a parallel case, featuring Mariah Yeater’s paternity suit against Justin Bieber.

Excerpt:

The 20-year-old woman who claims teen idol Justin Bieber is the father of her child originally told her ex-boyfriend that he — and not Bieber — was the baby-daddy, the New York Post reported Friday.

“She came back here from California telling me she was pregnant with my child and I said this is impossible, you’ve been in California two months and back here for only a week,” said Las Vegas resident John Terranova, 19, about his ex-girlfriend Mariah Yeater, 20, who has sued Bieber for support for the son she later bore.

“After I told her that’s not my kid, you’ve only been here for a week, then she told me, ‘No, I got pregnant before I left by you,” Terranova told The Post. “But it didn’t make sense because she had a doctor’s note saying she wasn’t pregnant enough for that to be possible. It didn’t add up.”

Terranova said he had dated Yeater for nearly four years after meeting her at a Las Vegas high school that caters to students who had been thrown out of other schools. He said he broke up with her after he learned she had cheated on him.

Terranova scoffed at Yeater’s claim that it was the then-16-year-old Bieber who impregnated her in October 2010 during a 30-second sex session after the singer performed in Los Angeles.

“I know it’s not Justin Bieber,” Terranova said. “She just wants money. It’s a scam.”

His girlfriend Lacy Jensen, who herself is pregnant now, agreed.

“Poor kid. He’s worked so hard for his career and to deal with this. She just wants to get her name out there,” said Jensen.

“She’s a gold digger and just wants someone to take care of her,” Jensen said. “She was a really big party animal who got around a lot. She was a big slut. She’s scandalous.”

Yeater was arrested for battery last December for allegedly slapping Terranova in a jealous rage after she returned from her sojourn in California to find him dating a new girlfriend, Jensen.

I see no reason to think that this Bialek’s claims have any more validity than Yeater’s claims. It seems plausible to me that both women are making false claims for the same reason – they want fame and money.

Do women ever make false claims about sexual matters? Its more common than you might think. Studies show that false allegations are made about 20-40% of the time, depending on the study. These sorts of false accusations are usually made in order to 1) get attention or money, by trying to appear as an innocent victim, 2) in order to get an alibi for something the woman has done wrong (see below), or 3) to get revenge on someone who has mistreated the woman, as with the Duke lacrosse scandal.

Consider this case of a Hofstra student Danmell Ndonye who invented a false rape accusation.

Excerpt:

The Hofstra freshman who had a raunchy restroom romp and then cried rape made up the twisted tale because she didn’t want her schoolmates — particularly her new boyfriend — to think she was easy, the beau told The Post yesterday.

“I think she needs a psychologist. She probably felt like, ‘They’ll think I’m a slut,’ ” her boyfriend, who asked not to be identified, told The Post.

Danmell Ndonye, 18, who had accused five men of gang rape, admitted the truth only when prosecutors confronted her after learning of a cellphone video that captured the whole sordid episode and showed she had willingly participated, officials said.

She created her outlandish tale when her boyfriend, a Hofstra student who’s been dating her since the semester began a few weeks ago, demanded to know where she had disappeared after a wild frat party early Sunday.

The two had been dancing together at the Alpha Kappa Alpha mixer at the school’s on-campus club, Hofstra USA, but got separated when a fight broke out.

The boyfriend said he called her repeatedly, but she didn’t answer her cellphone, so he went to her seventh-floor dorm room at Estabrook Hall. Moments later she appeared.

“As I was about to leave, she comes up and she has no shoes on, she is holding them in her hands. She looked like she just finished hot sex,” he said. “I said, ‘Where were you? What were you doing?’ She told me, ‘Nothing.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, nothing?’ ”

Ndonye then dropped a bombshell.

“I said, ‘Don’t lie to me, what’s going on?’ And she said, ‘Oh, I just got raped,’ ” he said.

“It didn’t seem real to me. She was calm,” he continued. “Then she started crying and saying, ‘I was raped.’ She lied to me. I think she was embarrassed. I said to her, ‘You have to call public safety.’ She hesitated. It seemed like she didn’t want to.”

She then tried to backpedal.

“Oh, you know, no, it’s OK,” she told him, but he was incredulous.

“How could it be OK that you just got raped?” the boyfriend said.

So she relented — and a four-day nightmare began for four innocent men: Stalin Felipe, 19, his stepbrother, Kevin Taveras, 20, Jesus Ortiz, 19, and 21-year-old Rondell Bedward, a Hofstra senior who had invited the others to the party.

Cops also hunted for a fifth man, who has not been publicly identified.

False allegations of abuse are routinely used in divorce custody hearings. They virtually never go to trial.

In the absence of ANY evidence, why think that these anonymous charges against a black conservative who is leading in national polls are anything but greed and attention-whoring? Surely, we need to see some charges laid against Cain that where brought forward in a real criminal trial, so we can see the evidence. Otherwise, it just seems to me like another case of false paternity claims and false sexual allegations. We need to see real criminal charges, with real evidence and real witnesses from a real trial, before we can draw any conclusions.

My previous post analyzed the media bias evident in how this story is being covered.

Commentary

Irony: the young men who voted for Obama now suffer from record unemployment

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This article from the Wall Street Journal explain why men are in decline. (H/T Mary, Tom)

Excerpt:

Few groups were hit harder by the recession than young men… The unemployment rate for males between 25 and 34 years old with high-school diplomas is 14.4%—up from 6.1% before the downturn four years ago and far above today’s 9% national rate. The picture is even more bleak for slightly younger men: 22.4% for high-school graduates 20 to 24 years old. That’s up from 10.4% four years ago.

[…]The share of men age 25-34 living with their parents jumped to 18.6% this year, up from 14.2% four years ago and the highest level since at least 1960, according to the Census Bureau.

Suzanne Venker comments on the consequences of this data for women for National Review.

Full text:

New data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows the percentage of men between the ages of 25 and 34 living at home rose from 14 percent in 2005 to 19 percent in 2011. Women, on the other hand, are doing just fine. Not only do they dominate today’s college campuses, they have little trouble staying away from mom and dad’s place. That’s because women are flourishing in the workforce while men are not. Writers and pundits blame this phenomenon on the economy, but the trend reflects a much larger sociological problem. America is in the midst of a sea change: Never before has it been more difficult for men and women to find their way to one another, settle in for the long haul, and build strong families together.

To read about it, you’d think the entire mess is out of our hands. You’d think the circumstances involving the roles of men and women in society have happened to us, rather than the other way around. The truth is that we created this new world — and while we may not be able to undo it, we can certainly stop the freight train from running off the tracks.

Hardly a day goes by that we aren’t made aware of this heartbreaking reality. It is so acute we now have not one but six new television series dedicated to men’s social demotion. In these programs, husbands are made to look like fools — while the wives wield a power so ugly it’s no wonder marriage has become so elusive. The modern generation has been sold a bill of goods about human nature, and the result is that men now have no idea how to be men. Why? Because women won’t let them.

There is a large and powerful group of women who see this shift in gender roles as a good thing. Hanna Rosin’s provocative piece in The Atlantic, called “The End of Men,” and Kate Bolick’s new piece “All the Single Ladies” (which may now become a TV series) make light of the demise of masculinity and the role men once played in society. They represent the kind of movers and shakers who help lead the feminist fight. Pointing to the latest statistics about men, they’d be likely to respond, “See how hopeless men are? Everything we’ve been saying about men all these years has proven to be true.”

But the laugh will be on them — if not for their own families, then for their children’s. The feminist policies that were put in place to help women flourish outside the home have suffocated men’s opportunities for economic self-sufficiency. In short, men’s desire to be good workers and family providers has been undermined. This is more than unfortunate; it is a loss of catastrophic proportions, for it is men’s consistent, full-time, year-round work that women depend on in order to live that ever-coveted “balanced life.” What too many women don’t understand (because they’ve been unduly influenced by feminist groupthink) is that male nature is ultimately beneficial to them, for women continue to put family — not career — at the center of their lives and are thus dependent on men to pick up the slack at the office.

It is a dangerous thing to create a society of frustrated young men. Feminists have no idea what a can of worms they’ve created — and what it’s about to do to our nation.

I think if we want men to marry, not only do we have to ask why the recession is affecting men disproportionately, but why the education system isn’t working for boys. We need to ask whether men learn better from female teachers or male teachers. We need to ask whether boys learn better in all-boys schools or in co-ed schools. We need to ask whether the promotion of sex education and contraception, which produces freely available sex, is the best way to encourage young men to prove themselves to women by trying hard to fit the traditional roles of protector, provider and moral/spiritual leader. We need to ask whether the denial of male-female differences encourages men to take on traditional male roles, and whether women are encouraged to prefer men who take on those roles. We need to ask whether our energy and economic policies favor job creation in areas dominated by men. We need to ask whether stimulus programs should be slanted towards industries dominated by women.  We need to ask whether affirmative action for women in education and at work helps men to be able to provide for a family. We need to ask whether men are well-served by no-fault divorce laws and biased domestic violence laws that promote false charges – especially during custody hearings. And lastly, we need to ask whether church serves men when it accepts or rejects postmodernism, anti-intellectualism and moral relativism.

But can’t we just tell men to “Man Up”?

The answer to the discincentives facing marriage-minded men is not a lazy, ignorant pronouncement for men to “Man Up”. That doesn’t solve any of the problems that cause men not to marry.

I think the desire of certain people to remove every incentive and capacity for men to perform as husbands and fathers – and then to nevertheless demand they marry and take on the traditional roles of men anyway without incentives or capacities – is the height of narcissism. Men are people too – we are not inanimate objects. We are not sperm donors and wallets. And if society decides to go in a direction where the traditional roles of men are replaced with  government social programs funded by high taxes and deficit spending, then marriage will die in this society.

Podcasts

Brian Auten interviews Dr. Angus Menuge on philosophy of mind

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Click here for the interview. It’s up at Apologetics 315!

Details:

Today’s interview is with Dr. Angus Menuge, Professor of Philosophy  at Concordia University, and author of Agents Under Fire: Materialism and the Rationality of Science. He talks about his background and work, the philosophy of mind, what reason (or reasoning) is, what materialism is as a worldview, things excluded from a materialistic worldview, methodological naturalism and materialism, accounting for free will, materialistic accounts of reason, the epistemological argument from reason, the ontological argument from reason, finding the best explanation for reason, problems with methodological naturalism, implications of materialism, practical application of the argument from reason, advice for apologists, the International Academy of Apologetics, and more.

If what Dr. Menuge says in this interview is true, and I think it is, then a person who believes in materialism can neither ground free will nor rationality! So atheism wouldn’t really be freethought so much as it would be… un-free… non-thought.

In case people don’t want to listen to the podcast, then I’ve got some things for you to read below.

The ontological argument from reason

Dr. Menuge presented a paper at the real Evangelical Philosophical Society conference for students and professors of philosophy, and you can download the paper here in Word format. (here’s a PDF version I made)

Here is the introduction to the paper that Dr. Menuge read at the EPS conference:

The argument from reason is really a family of arguments to show that reasoning is incompatible with naturalism. Here, naturalism is understood as the idea that foundationally, there are only physical objects, properties and relations, and anything else reduces to, supervenes on, or emerges from that. For our purposes, one of the most important claims of naturalism is that all causation is passive, automatic, event causation (an earthquake automatically causes a tidal wave; the tidal wave responds passively): there are no agent causes, where something does not happen automatically but only because the agent exerts his active power by choosing to do it. The most famous version of the argument from reason is epistemological: if naturalism were true, we could not be justified in believing it. Today, I want to focus on the ontological argument from reason, which asserts that there cannot be reasoning in a naturalistic world, because reasoning requires libertarian free will, and this in turn requires a unified, enduring self with active power.

The two most promising ways out of this argument are: (1) Compatibilism—even in a deterministic, naturalistic world, humans are capable of free acts of reason if their minds are responsive to rational causes; (2) Libertarian Naturalism—a self with libertarian free will emerges from the brain. I argue that neither of these moves works, and so, unless someone has a better idea, the ontological argument from reason stands.

The paper is 11 pages long, and it is helpful for those of you looking for some good discussion of one of the issues in the area of philosophy of mind.

You may also be interested in Alvin Plantinga’s epistemological argument from reason, which is related to this argument. It shows that even to have the ability to think, you have to have a certain anthropology and you have to have mental faculties that are designed for reason, not survival.

Methodological naturalism

Dr. Menuge also wrote an article entitled “Is methodological materialism good for science?”.

Intro:

Should science by governed by methodological materialism? That is, should scientists assume that only undirected causes can figure in their theories and explanations? If the answer to these questions is yes, then there can be no such thing as teleological science or intelligent design. But is methodological materialism a defensible approach to science, or might it prevent scientists from discovering important truths about the natural world? In my contribution to The Waning of Materialism (Oxford University Press, 2010), edited by Robert Koons and George Bealer, I consider twelve of the most common arguments in favor of methodological materialism and show that none of them is convincing.

Of these arguments, perhaps the most prevalent is the “God of the gaps” charge, according to which invoking something other than a material cause is an argument from ignorance which, like a bad script writer, cites a deus ex machina to save our account from difficulty. Not only materialists, but also many Christian thinkers, like Francis Collins, worry that appeal to intelligent design commits the God of the gaps fallacy.

As I argue, however, not only is an inference to an intelligent cause not the same as an inference to the supernatural, it is a mistake to assume that all gap arguments are bad, or that only theists make them. If a gap argument is based solely on ignorance of what might explain some phenomenon, then indeed it is a bad argument. But there are many good gap arguments which are made both by scientific materialists and proponents of intelligent design.

So how do you make an argument like that?

As Stephen Meyer has argued in his Signature in the Cell, intelligent design argues in just the same way, claiming not merely that the material categories of chance and necessity (singly or in combination) are unable to explain the complex specified information in DNA, but also that in our experience, intelligent agents are the only known causes of such information. The argument is based on what we know about causal powers, not on what we do not know about them.

Since the inference is based on known causal powers, we learn that the cause is intelligent, but only further assumptions or data can tell us whether that intelligence is immanent in nature or supernatural. It is a serious mistake to confuse intelligent design with theistic science, and the argument that since some proponents of design believe that the designer is God, that is what they are claiming can be inferred from the data, is a sophomoric intensional fallacy.

If you think this is interesting, then do have a listen to the podcast. Dr. Menuge is not an ordinary academic – he is very direct. He calls materialism “a catastrophe” in the podcast! Not a shrinking violet.