leonard cohen, man next door

When I look back 30 years on this sordid episode in a California Zen Center -- the last time I ever set foot in any of Roshi's communities around North America -- I'm amazed at what went down in those 5 months in 1996. A famous singer had molested his daughter for years and then bought her silence when she grew up and told his friends - Ignoring the chaos this caused in his old neighborhood, he moved his daughter to LA where he proceeded to take over a Zen community by buying off the monks. He moved into the mountain Monastery and soon the world was coming to interview him in his cabin under the pines. His brilliant wit and winning charm had most of them convinced they had found a celebrity successor to the 90-year-old Japanese Master who had selflessly taught Zen to Americans for 30+years. When a woman who had witnessed the abuse of young girls and others by the famous man, shows up, he demonizes her as a "scorned ex-girlfriend" and gets her banned and shunned...

An Outlandish Journey Memories of Dianne - November 12, 2025 Here's what i remember about Dianne Lawrence whom I met in May 1996 at Rinzai-ji Zen Center on Cimarron Street in Los Angeles. She was tall and came from Toronto. Her mother was Latvian and her dad was a black American soldier. We were the same age and got on quite well at first. Soon after I arrived we drove to Malibu Beach where she brought up "Leonard Cohen". I think this was a fact-finding mission for the Zen Center and Leonard who was its major funding source. I told her I was in LA to speak to him, if possible -- I wasn't optimistic because back in Montreal his daughter Lorca had overdosed after telling a bunch of his friends he had molested her in childhood. I lived next door and the toxic fallout from her near-death was making my life very unpleasant. I had been broken into twice and was the object of a slander campaign. I felt he should own up to causing the gossip that swirled around Lorca's ...

People who never knew Leonard Cohen have repeated the rumor that I "stalked" him so often it has taken on a life of its own. Lately two women on Twitter started a new smear campaign around this false claim, with nothing to support it but more hot air and envy. It's sad to see women who, had they ever got as close to him as I did, would likely have concluded he was a predatory creep and run the other way. Back in 1977 when I met him in Montreal (he phoned me one night in November out of the blue, or more accurately I guess, out of the dark) many women found him repulsive and dangerous. I was warned to stay away from him and several times had refused to engage when we crossed paths in the street. The fact that I'm 6 feet tall has always been a protection. Leonard was 5'8" - but he could project dominance and a friend who met him at a party said he was sexually aggressive with her to the point that she had to leave to get away. In 1977 he was 43 which seemed pr...