General > Frauds

Daniel Foor

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RedRightHand:
Daniel Foor is a fraud and exploiter who learned incomplete and potentially dangerous fragments of ceremonies from other frauds and exploiters. He came here and real NDNs told him how he could make it right. We gave him time. Instead, he spat in the faces of those who would help him. He could have started making amends. He could have stopped. But instead he has just spent the past few years seeking out more terminology and imagery to steal, in efforts to spin-doctor, misrepresent, and refine his sales pitch. All he has learned is how to be a slicker salesman and insult additional cultures and communities in the process.

"May 2nd - Oct 10th, 2015 ... ceremony ... inipi (sweat lodge) ... $60/day or $250 for the full series"

Fraud.

ekhalfin:
Open Letter Regarding Daniel Foor & Ancestral Medicine
published Oct 19, 2020

"As of the publication of this letter, 26* students from the Ancestral Medicine practitioner training program have formally discontinued involvement and association with Daniel Foor and his business over explicit issues of misuse of power, and his failure to authentically follow through in a restorative process and to take personal accountability for his harmful behaviors. We firmly claim that Daniel Foor is unfit to be in a leadership role at this time. This is a public record so that people can make informed decisions about their involvement with the business of Ancestral Medicine. *26 students of 60 total, from cohorts 1–3."

Read the full letter here: https://medium.com/@openletteram/open-letter-regarding-daniel-foor-ancestral-medicine-c035f2823d1f

educatedindian:
I'm adding more of the letter, quoting at length from it. Bolding is mine.

-------------
Overall, we have experienced Daniel to enact harmful patterns of misogyny, white supremacy, classism, ableism and more, and has been actively and continuously resistant and incapable of engaging in any form of accountability/shifting/healing, even when offered a tremendous amount of support. Amidst this, Daniel has proclaimed to be, and presented himself to be actively working to shift these systems/patterns of oppression. Here are some more specifics of our collective experience:
Tokenizing people of color and leveraging other marginalized folks to raise his optical profile or deflect feedback
for example: offering opportunities and access specifically to people of color perceived as ‘loyal’ to him in order to boost his own status as ‘multicultural’; appointing BIPOC and LGBTQIA2S+ people to positions of advisory and conflict mediation regardless of their actual experiences or professional capacity in conflict-resolution; recognizing trans/non-binary folks during ritual selectively/when convenient or when perceived to be for his benefit but not at other times
Lacking willingness to do inner work with issues of power-over, privilege and racialized power dynamics
for example: resisting relationships of accountability to oversee his leadership, and focusing only on organizational policy changes
Invalidating and ostracizing those who challenge him or raise concerns about him or AM
for example: ; creating secrecy so that folks feel insecure about how they are being discussed and judged by others; claiming that it is against organizational ethics/principles to have any questions or criticisms of leadership or to talk about these things at all
Harnessing a culture of “with me or against me” and loyalty/betrayal and cult-like dynamics, creating a culture of mistrust, cognitive dissonance and disorganization, and exhibiting DARVO behaviors (deny, attack, reverse victim and offender)
for example: creating an inner circle of leadership who could not question his authority in a meaningful way; doling access to inner circle practitioners based upon perceived loyalty; drawing on advice from multiple practitioners and using triangulation to determine who is considered worthy, skilled or good enough to access opportunities such as teaching; publicly questioning/humiliating people who he perceives as a threat, creating an extensive application process for new prospective students framed to seek those most likely to not object to his leadership
Unethically taking ideas and practices from others without honoring their sources and positioning himself as an expert of areas that make him appear to be a master of culture
for example: claiming others’ contributions to his method as his own; appropriating others’ ideas/teachings without attribution or citation, while simultaneously fixating that others “properly” give him credit for his work; unethically offering supervision in areas in which he is unqualified to do so; asking practitioners to lead teachings and then incorporating their experiences into his public teaching without acknowledgment or consent; doing surface-level research and then claiming expertise in a practice or topic
Misusing power through ritual and energetic interventions without consent, using spiritual threats as a method of control, and extensively lacking psychic and personal boundaries with students and practitioners
for example: consulting a psychic to find out information on students without their consent, especially to gauge their “trustworthiness”; creating dual roles between AM and his spiritual Ifa community by gatekeeping access to opportunities in one through demands met in the other; involving students in troubles within his marriage, creating exclusionary dynamics around ritual based on “dangers” for people who are at the margins.
Misuse of sexualized energy
for example: grooming women by confiding intimate details of his personal and professional relationships; sharing about troubles in his marriage and making people feel like they were “special” because they were his ‘confidantes’; demanding constant validation, praise, guidance and emotional labor from femmes; non-consensually disclosing the details of someone’s sexual assault on a practitioner network-wide call while they were absent.
Enacting misogyny, ageism, transphobia and silencing of other voices not congruent with his decisions
for example: obvious disdain, invalidation, and dishonoring of older women, femmes, and trans folks when they give him criticism or feedback; favoring younger and/or less experienced people as ideal candidates for his trainings
Relying heavily upon others’ (mostly unpaid) emotional and volunteer labor
for example: asking others, especially those with marginalized identities, to defend or cover for him; soliciting students to create trainings to quell group challenge to his behavior; relying on his staff to write his responses to accountability requests
Enacting white body supremacy and white fragility through personal and organizational ways of doing
for example: regularly shifting into a narrative of victimhood as a power move; continually centering himself and his intentions above the expressed experiences of others; lack of humility and total defensiveness; overtly treating internal work around race and oppression as a waste of his time that he was not willing to engage with (outside of a particular format, and after a specific date); placing BIPOC and trans folks in leadership positions in order to deflect feedback about lack of diversity; erasing records of the failing accountability process; creating urgency, instability and lack of transparency in who gets to teach intensives; economic extraction by paying minimal wages to online course supporters and selecting people for roles and work based upon their status of owing money for trainings
Enacting ableism both in the framework and articulation of his approach and in his practices
for example: using “wellness” as a standard for engagement with ancestors and desired outcome; attempting to exclude people who are “lit up” (meaning emotional or with any intensity of feeling) from rituals, and group and organizational process; creating abstract and ungrounded requirements for people’s mental health to engage in trainings.
Actively resisting accountability processes, even with extensive support
please see below for more details

[Extended defense of Foor's New Age intent.]

....After extensive ongoing pressure and multiple internal call-outs, he eventually hired a Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) auditing team, part of which included engaging practitioners in a laborious feedback survey process.
Rather than taking accountability and following the recommendations of the audit, which highlighted his abuse of power and required personal work, Daniel Foor:
Dissolved all internal networks of practitioner communication, working teams and capacity to engage directly and transparently as a group.
Suppressed the DEI research and audit findings, failing to share the results....
Held a single 2 hour student network meeting to “apologize” and relay the accountability process results, in which all participants were muted, the chat function was disabled, and staff were communicating with him privately to help him navigate and be “less defensive”. He proceeded to respond to each claim brought to him (reading from a document primarily written by a staff member) with defensiveness and dismissal, lacking expression of an understanding of the harm caused, or a plan for how he would do better. He closed the call by claiming he was “done” working with these issues and would offer a final circle in which each person would get two minutes to air any final concerns....
Began to kick out of the organization anyone who did not follow a stringent and controlling set of rules around communication, particularly around any asks for accountability....

ekhalfin:
Update: Dec 3, 2020

In response to Daniel Foor’s statement --

On November 30, 2020, Daniel Foor posted a statement on his website regarding the Open Letter Regarding Daniel Foor & Ancestral Medicine published October 19, 2020.

Full text here: https://elsaasher.medium.com/in-response-to-daniel-foors-statement-e8ba286233f4

ekhalfin:
NOTE -- if the person who anonymously wrote the letter in 2009 that is quoted in the first post in this thread is open to being in email contact about their experience and hearing about ours, it would be helpful, because Foor said things about this person to try to discredit them, and because it's from 11 years ago, seeing the patterns of behavior over this long a period of time is really helpful. If you're this person or you know them and they're open to being in contact, they can email ancestralmedicineinfo@gmail.com. Thank you!

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