A Brief Summation of the Website Who Is Marc Gafni
This website clearly establishes the nature of the smear campaign waged against Dr. Marc Gafni by a group of people who have worked in concert over the decades. It decisively refutes the claims of sexual harassment as false. It exposes the group of people who have driven this attack on Dr. Gafni over the years—as a disgruntled former employee, former student, former wife, etc.—who have found each other through the internet and other social ties.
As is typical in the structure of this sort of thing, a small group like this can be organized to orchestrate a smear campaign, making it appear spontaneous, and hide both their affiliation with each other and the simple fact that the claims are substantively false.
A senior member of the Integral Institute investigated these claims of sexual harassment on behalf of Ken Wilber and concluded there were substantively false in an Integral Institute report. The same person wrote a substantive article debunking the false claims, entitled Anatomy of a Smear. The claims above were shown in that article to have been organized behind the scenes by parties with malicious intent.
Here is a one-page letter by Ken Wilber, leading philosopher and ethicist, affirming his partnership with Dr. Gafni after looking into these issues.
Here is a joint one-page letter by Sally Kempton, leading teacher of feminine spirituality, and Ken Wilber together affirming the false nature of the claims.
A general overview of the false claims and their refutation can be found in leading teacher Sally Kempton’s article Who is Marc Gafni.
The most egregious false claim is that Dr. Gafni slept with a 14-year-old girl. The way the story is told it appears like a 50-year Dr. Gafni was sexually engaged with a 14-year-old. The truth of the story, as validated by polygraph, is that it involved fully mutual teenage necking, forty years ago, between a teenage Marc Gafni and a teenage girl. Marc Gafni has publicly refuted this false claim. The woman who made this claim over the last decades, like the others involved, is closely associated with the group of disgruntled associates who have driven the smear campaigns in the past. She is now in her mid-fifties. The oft quoted sentence that is attributed to Marc in response to this story, “she was 14 going on 35 and I never forced her” is, as Gafni has stated for decades, a gross and heinous distortion which he utterly disavows.
The facts of this claim have been refuted by Dr. Gafni in an article in the Jewish Forward in multiple other articles based on extensive research, for example a thorough refutation by Chahat Corten et al, which appears on Medium.com.
Here is a set of polygraph tests, initiated by Dr. Gafni, with the leading polygraphers in the world, affirming Marc Gafni’s refutation of the false claims. Dr. Gafni took the polygraphs because often that is the only way to refute a claim made on the internet without evidence.
There are multiple essays on the web by leading figures which refute the false claims and provide a context for how they emerged. Included in that is Injustice via the Internet: Myths, Facts, & Smear Campaigns in the Marc Gafni Story and Social Murder on the Internet.
For a detailed exploration of Marc’s personal reflections as well as critical exonerating information, see Marc Gafni Controversy and Additional Resources.
Wikipedia’s pages covering public figures are notorious in the review literature for their misinformation and slander. Marc Gafni’s page is no exception. For a correction of the slander on Marc Gafni’s Wiki page, written in three short and concise articles, please click here.
The Wikipedia editors on Marc Gafni’s Wikipedia page have operated in functional sync with the perpetrators of the false complaints. Another expression is the egregious distortion on the Wiki page on the facts of Dr. Gafni’s ordination. For more information in this regard please click here.
Here is a summation video with Dr. Gafni and Dr. Phil in a special show initiated by Marc, where Dr. Gafni sat down one-on-one with Dr. Phil.
This is Dr. Phil’s summation at the end of the one-hour show with Dr. Marc Gafni:
This is a beautiful interview of Dr. Marc Gafni, his partner Dr. Kristina Kincaid and Aubrey Marcus discussing the pain and the politics of experiencing false claims:
It’s of course also worth exploring Dr. Gafni’s work and teachings directly:
- About Dr. Marc Gafni
- Center for World Philosophy and Religion
- Weekly broadcast One Mountain, Many Paths
- Book: A Return to Eros: the Experience of Radical Aliveness
- The Great Library
- Podcasts featuring Dr. Marc Gafni
- Weekly essays on Substack
- Weekly episodes on Marc Gafni YouTube