what does it matter to you people if Bob and Eliza want to build a school in New Guinea? at least tehy're doing something!
For four years some of us helped support the school Eliza Taylor enthusiastically promoted. She placed herself in photo after photo with those kids. She told us how important this school was to her. She had co-workers join her in public support. She brought a lot of goodwill for the school and herself.
Following her marriage to Morley, things changed. She was less open in supporting the school. Morley never made a visible visit to it. Behind the scenes, Wyndham, the on-site partner, dealing with the day-to-day realities of the school and mountains of problems with the Thai government, still wanted to expand, even getting an American lawyer (Gina Fraterneli) to start Friends of Koh Tao Primary as a non-profit in the US.
In early 2020, as The 100′s run started to wind down, as rumors of Bob Morley’s erratic behavior on set started to spread, as Arryn Zech’s statement on their past relationship made media, as Covid hit the planet and devastated country after country, taking lives and closing businesses and tourism (a huge hit for Thailand), a huge change for KTP was on the horizon. Taylor had wanted FoKTP to have a name change to Little Hearts Learning. Soon, other people none of us know, would become involved.
A woman named Michele Gorman, a Christian Conservative who runs Refuge House, a small foster care charity in Texas, and no one anyone of us had ever heard of before, paid a visit to Thailand in March. Not long after, she was tweeting dubious psychoanalysis about Bob Morley’s ex, Arryn Zech, who accused him of abuse. How did she fit into the picture? How would the Morleys have met someone like her? Not long after, she’s suddenly an official part of LHL as their treasurer (in spite of her own charity, RH, showing a failing score on Charity Navigator and her taking around a quarter of the charity’s earnings for herself). Gina Fraterneli, after issuing caustic tweets critical of at least one new board member for LHL (presumably Gorman), quits.
And it all goes downhill from there.
For a long time fans expressed criticism about things like the infamous “bed selfie” which was supposed to be auctioned off for Jo Garfein’s Cancer Gets Lost Charity (and if you go far enough back, Garfein came under fire for continuing to support Jason Rothenberg, , seemingly abandoning the LGBTQ community in favor of sucking up to celebrities), but the auction was canceled; a year later it showed up, unannounced for another auction and went for thousands of dollars. A photograph. Went. For. Thousands (but that would look like nothing compared to Zoom calls with the Morleys that started last year, for hundreds if not thousands of dollars a pop, again, to supposedly support the school). Jokes that the bed selfie paid for the Morley’s wedding were crass (and likely not at all true), but also showed how easily a joke can become the rumor, can become the norm.
Fans also expressed criticism of the Morleys themselves, for the abuse and cheating allegations mostly, for Morley’s questionable (and frankly Scientologist-like) leanings against traditional mental health (the danger to young, impressionable fans cannot be understated), racist subtext in his tweets and his general hiding behind his new wife who was suddenly doing all the work of talking about and explaining their relationship (in glowing terms), in spite of long rumors of these two not getting along on the set. “Bellarke” fans evolved into “Beliza” stans taking their cultish devotion to Morley (and previous hatred of Eliza) and started weaponizing it in their defense. A head-scratching mess of seemingly disparate personalities.
In other words, a lot of shit was stirring around this couple and it wasn’t leading anywhere good.
By the summer of 2020, with Gina Fraterneli quitting, there was no one left working at Little Hearts Learning who was connected to Claire Wyndham and her school, save Eliza herself. What Claire would describe in a video a few days ago as American corporate charity types, had taken over LHL and the decision was made to cut ties with KTP. The charity LHL had initially been setup to support.
The 100 now ended, and Wyndham suffering huge health problems of her own, financial support for the school was in jeopardy. Fraterneli expressed concern that the money made from the Zoom calls wasn’t being passed on to the school. It looked like maybe the money was being withheld with increasing suggestion (though never a direct statement), that KTP or Claire (one and the same) had messed up accounting that made KTP a liability. Again, NOTHING specific was said, it was all implied via behavior. Tweets from people who were not associated with the school and would have no reason to know anything about its financial status, only its legal one: something not Wyndham’s fault, but more in the hands of the Thai government. FoKTP was setup to help solve those problems. The suggestion was that LHL was protecting itself from the very school it was supposed to help. But why?
I ask again: was Gorman’s visit to Thailand in March just a vacation for her and only a coincidence, or was she doing something else there? How did this person get involved in the first place? From small-time Texas to hanging with young Hollywood celebs is kind of a leap. She literally went from:
So, instead of using FoKTP/LHL to support KTP, instead of using her new board of American professional corporate charity types to help KTP with its problems with licensing and the Thai government, instead of working to save the school both she and Claire called “their lives,” Taylor’s name is removed from anything and everything to do with the school. Claire can’t even mention her by name without legal trouble from LHL’s board. Suddenly, Taylor can’t read, she doesn’t know them.
Why? Why stoop so low to allow your fans to spread rumors of wrong-doing instead of helping your friend and those kids, with what should have been new and stronger resources, right? I mean, take Gorman up there, the advocate and scholar and founder of charities, including one that supposedly supports foster kids, shouldn’t someone like her be all about protecting the kids, putting them first? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ If things were so bad in Thailand, if things can get that tough, what will happen if they get tough in, say, Papua New Guinea?
Why did Taylor say NOTHING to stop the spread of rumors, which have likely done a great deal of damage to the reputation of the school (and, thus, harm, to those children)? The twitter timelines of most of these folks from LHL express no involved interest in children’s issues. I mean, if you’re an advocate, wouldn’t you be out there tweeting up a storm about kids in cages at the border or the like? These people only seem interested in “children” as a concept to build a business charity around.
Now LHL is branding itself as a slick little operation that’s going to help bring power to...Papua New Guinea. A place, that, as far as we know, none of the LHL people, including the Morley’s, has a personal connection to. KTP was a personal project for Taylor, once. Setting up a program in PNG (did they ask?), now announced as “an education center”, looks like standard-issue Christian-American White Savior Feel Good Hero BS in the Third World.
It begs questions: what sort of curriculum will this “education center” have? An international one like KTP or will it be...Christian-based? Who will run this education center? Is this with cooperation from the PNG government or some other entity? How did they decide on PNG? What *is* LHL now? Are the Morley’s involved beyond being the celeb faces to promote it? Are they, like Gorman with her RH charity, receiving “compensation” from LHL? There is currently no financial information available, no Charity Navigator score. Nothing for the public to see.
It all drops to the biggest question: why should anyone trust them when they took over Claire Wyndham’s expansion idea, then took over FoKTP, thus abandoning KTP? You can’t paint yourself as Big Philanthropist Types Doing it for the Kids when your first attempt at it was thrown away like it never mattered. Those kids deserve better and the school really is struggling now, with only six children being sponsored and staff being laid off. There won’t be a proper school if they don’t get help.
LHL is currently surrounded by an increasingly Maga-like cult of celebrity toward the Morley’s, something LHL does nothing to dissuade; in fact, the way they run their charity looks a lot like the way we see cult develop: there is an Inner Circle and focus on Positivity (tm), ignoring any and all legit criticism, allowing their followers to “protect” them from outsiders, painting themselves into a corner that is going to be hard to get out of. See, it isn’t just the Morley’s/LHL abandoning KTP that is awful, its the fact that they took so many others with them.
How fickle are these “fans” that they’d drop support without question? Without asking what was going on? “Clexa” fans, or those of us supporting from the beginning, got shit thrown at us for caring, for asking questions, for being critical of the changes. That is an essential difference between a cult and an independent group of thinkers. And right-wing cults are kind of outspoken, right now. There’s a lot going on, and if you’re not paying attention, you’re going to get abandoned, too.
