Are there benefits to cultivating the idea that you have AIDS? Cassey Weierbach thought so, correctly, and allegedly defrauded the state of Pennsylvania of $66,000.
In addition to medical benefits, Weierbach's fake AIDS status inspired do-gooders to pay her rent, wash her clothes, and buy her groceries. It gave her a degree of celebrity. It allowed her to make an income on the lecture-circuit, partly through a group called Hope's Voice. "All I've ever wanted was to educate people about an illness that I live with every day," Weierbach told HIV Plus magazine. "I'm at the end of the disease, and I want to use the time I have left to put all I have into this project." She did that by speaking at colleges, high schools, and churches. The executive director of Hope's Voice cut ties with her when one night at a bar, during a speaking tour, Weierbach, supposedly in the final stages of full-blown AIDS, rose from her wheelchair, began dancing, and pounded shots.
But it was a local pastor who "outed" Weierbach as an HIV-negative individual. Reverend Lois Randolph, after leading efforts to help Weierbach, suspected that she was perfectly healthy, physically at least. She persuaded Weierbach to take an HIV test, and it came back negative. Weierbach denies she is HIV negative, and claims that her life as a lesbian caused a hateful preacher to destroy her life.
''It seems like she is going to make my life living hell,'' Weierbach told Allentown's Morning Call newspaper of Reverend Randolph. ''Do you hate me so much because I'm gay that you are willing to destroy my life?''
While it's easy to jump to the conclusion that the overall story supports the idea that AIDS no longer bears a stigma, a part of Weierbach's imaginative yarn, at least, undermines that notion. Weierbach claims she contracted the disease by being raped as a child. In other words, she didn't get the disease through behavior that parts of the population find objectionable. She became an AIDS victim through innocence--as a child, as a rape victim.
It's this part of the story that, psychologically speaking, is more intriguing, and perhaps more insulting to the groups traditionally afflicted with HIV. Weierbach felt comfortable claiming HIV status, but, for whatever reason, didn't concoct a more believable story about contraction, i.e., through drug use or chosen sexual activity. She said she was not only raped, but raped as a child. Naturally, this absolves her of the stigma of the disease even in the eyes of those most liable to stigmatize AIDS. Or, perhaps this con-woman knew, from observing the sympathy poured upon Ryan White, Mary Fisher, and others who had contracted the disease from means other than sex or intravenious drugs, what AIDS victims the public fawns over most. Since Weierbach still denies her clean bill of health, it's not likely that these answers will be forthcoming. Even if they were, deconstructing the motives behind those answers, rather than accepting the answers at face value, might be the unsatisfying result.
We know that Miss Weierbach claimed that she had AIDS when she didn't. We don't know why she claimed that she contracted the disease through a fantastic set of circumstances, when more readily believable explanations existed within her real life's behavior.
But why AIDS? Why not heart disease, multiple sclerosis, or some other horrible disease? Do they not pay, in terms of sympathy and dollars, the way AIDS does? Is there no lecture-circuit cash for, say, victims of cancer? Won't the government pay for the health care of all carriers of fatal illness? Cassey Weierbach knows the answers to these questions better than most.
HIV isn't what it used to be. It doesn't develop into AIDS and kill so quickly, and it no longer elicits such an awful stigma. Freddie Mercury, Eazy E, Liberace, and Rock Hudson saw no benefit in declaring their AIDS status to the world. But, unlike most other diseases, which inspire privacy in the afflicted, there is today a cottage industry of professional AIDS victims. That the disease is preventable, and can make life lonely among those in whom the disease is no longer preventable, makes such activity quite honorable and necessary. But, like everything, there's another side to things, another side where making a buck off such a horrible disease--a horrible disease that has an exalted status among diseases--stikes many as off-putting and unseemly.
AIDS isn't just a death sentence any more. For Cassey Weierbach, AIDS is a living--and a lucrative one at that.
Is there a link to the article on how she defrauded the state of Penn? It seems amazing they gave her free healthcare for AIDS without ever requiring an AIDS test.
Am I wrong to say that, in America, AIDS isn't really a big deal? Only 1 million folks have HIV/AIDS since 1985. Only 14,000 (700 per year) die. 50,000 people - 1,000 per state - get it.
Big deal.
OJ: Here's the AP article mentioning her allegedly defrauding the state of Pennsylvania:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/07/05/AIDS.fraud.ap/
Unfortunately, the local paper, which I link to in the piece, has taken down some of its earlier, in-depth pieces on the case.
