I haven’t mentioned this so far because I’m concerned that it might be construed as victim-blaming but I also feel a little dishonest leaving this piece of information out. Although I didn’t know Kenny Klein I have met him before.
You may remember that Galina and I took a trip to New Orleans over the winter break and while it was mostly for pleasure we were also there to conduct business and meet two parties. First was Monte and Gypsy Plaisance, heads of Temenos Thessaly and organizers of the subsequently canceled Hellenic Revival Gathering. We were looking forward to getting to know them off the internet, visiting their temple and fleshing out our involvement in the Gathering but unfortunately a medical emergency put the kibosh on that.
The second meeting was with Kenny Klein and had been set up for us by a third party who was interested in having him come on our show. We didn’t really know anything about him beyond the fact that he was a folk musician, an author published through Llewellyn and a fixture in the local New Orleans pagan scene. Not really the sort of person we normally have on Wyrd Ways Radio but we try to represent the diversity within the pagan and polytheist communities by bringing on guests from a variety of traditions and hey, it’s always good to do a favor for a friend. But we’re not stupid so we decided to meet him before agreeing to have him on and so towards the end of our visit we went to a little café in the French Quarter.
Kenny sidled in about fifteen minutes late and was instantly recognizable by his gaudy jewelry and peacockish ways. (We had spent the intervening time playing “Spot the Wiccan” since we didn’t really know this guy from Deukalion.) He sat down and proceeded to share his curriculum vitae – which may have been because he was “auditioning” for the show but we suspected from the way he gave the spiel that this was something he subjected every new person he met to. He was extremely impressed with himself (constantly name-dropping which had little effect since most of the names were Wiccan and thus meant nothing to us) and a little miffed that we weren’t oohing and ahhing at what he was telling us. (He was particularly peeved that neither of us read his blogs or had him friended on Facebook.) We moved the conversation along to local sights and history and he volunteered to show us around, which left us scrambling for a way out. I got so fed up with the self-aggrandizing posturing and oversharing of intimate spiritual and sexual experiences that I excused myself and went across the street for a smoke, just to get away from him. Everything about him felt grating and polluted and I had a difficult time maintaining eye-contact because it made my skin crawl to look at him too long. I considered texting Galina that I was heading back to the hotel and she could finish up the interview but figured she’d probably kill me for that, so returned to the café after nursing my cigarette for as long as I possibly could.
In my absence we had been joined by his girlfriend who struck us as an intelligent, sweet girl with a poor sense of self worth, something that became exceedingly apparent in the subtle interactions between the two of them. He was constantly undermining her with barbed comments and pregnant looks and was clearly jealous of her intellect which far surpassed his own. Afterwards as Galina and I were going over the meeting in our hotel room it came out that we had both wanted to take her aside and say, “Girl – you can do better than this man!” Despite that we took to her much better than to him and spent most of the time discussing history and literature with her and doing our damndest to ignore Kenny. At one point he even got up to hit on some pentacle-wearing young girls not long out of their teens which struck us as in particularly poor taste since his girlfriend was sitting right there at the table.
As we were leaving the café Galina and I, in unison, whispered “That fucker is not coming on Wyrd Ways!” and then we took a long, meandering walk back through the French Quarter to shake off the filth and frustration of the encounter. Of course that put us in a bit of a quandary since our mutual friend had set us up and would be expecting, at the least, for us to blog about the meeting since we had been keeping a pretty thorough account of the trip up to then. We chose the better part of valor and didn’t say anything and perhaps picking up on that our friend never asked us about Kenny coming on the show again.
Obviously at the time we had no way of knowing what Kenny had been up to, though it was clear he was using his religion to prey on young women for sex. Within minutes of meeting him we recognized that he was a disgusting human being and we wanted nothing further to do with him. We just assumed it was because he was your standard Wiccan with loose morals, no discernible theology, a poor grasp of boundaries and a massive fucking ego. Since this describes about 90% of the Wiccans I’ve met over the years we really didn’t think much about it at the time – though in hindsight he wasn’t doing a whole lot to hide his predatory habits.
If I seem a little ready to accept the allegations that have been coming forth since his arrest and confession for possession of child pornography it’s because, having met the man, nothing I’ve read surprises me in the least. What does surprise me is that it took so long for all of this to come out and that others weren’t able to spot this about him, particularly those in his local community. The only thing that I can think is that these character traits and behaviors are so endemic within the culture of neopaganism that you have to go to extraordinary criminal lengths to really stand out.
Considering how badly Kenny craved attention I suspect he’d be quite happy to know that people are finally talking about him on a community-wide scale.
Tagged: paganism, polytheism, wiccan pedo gate
