Posts tagged Algarve

From Rotten Roots come Rotten Fruits | This is a story I have held off telling for sometime, as it has taken me quite a while to process it.  I have finally grasped the lesson I was meant to learn, and thus, I share my journey and insights of this particular thread of my reality, which in effect, ties into a number several other blogs posts, where I have chronicled our challenges within our current reality.

As a community outreach effort, I began giving away bottles of my LUNAR SILVER in 2018, to the community here in the Algarve, with the intention of having natural remedies circulating and accessible to anybody who needed them.  I have a great belief in being kind and caring, within the limitations of my available resources.  I met some lovely people through this process of sharing health and healing elixirs, and indeed, it was through this project that I met a very kind elderly Dutch lady who took me up on my offer of a free bottle of my LUNAR SILVER.  This elderly Dutch lady moved within the local community of animal lovers, and she would take her dog from Bensafrim to Albufeira every Wednesday for training, and would pass through Lagoa where I live, and we would sometimes meet for lunch.  Through this Dutch lady, I was introduced to the Dog / Animal rescue crowd, and in particular, I was introduced to a British woman by the name of Joanne Eastman, who lived Lagoa not to far from me, and who rescues dogs, having multiple dog kennels in her back yard.

Joanne Eastman took an interest in my knowledge and my products, and I was invited around to her home to deliver some of my produce, and we initially seemed to get along very well.  We exchanged products, information, ideas and connections, and I was even invited on one of her boozy girly lunches with two other local ladies who are also animal lovers.   Joanne Eastman then invited me to host one of my Algarvian Life Cheese and Wine parties at her home in December 2019, which is something I had been doing with several other people I know.  It was at this party that a lady by the name of Lisa showed up, a woman I had never met before, and who had not been invited to this party.  I was eventually going to go on to take over Lisa’s apartment in Carvoeiro, which came with many problems, which I thus chronicled in my blog post entitled THE TOLL OF 2020.

Joanne Eastman prided herself on being a “connector of people”, and tried in earnest to connect me with as many relevant people as she could.  As it turns out, every single person I met through this British woman, was totally toxic, with some of them being total scammers, hence the title of this blog FROM ROTTEN ROOTS COMES ROTTEN FRUITS.  At the time I thought she was trying to help me, but as I was soon to realise, she had an ulterior motive.  Joanne Eastman wanted in on my extended circle of international contacts, and she was palming off her dodgy connections onto me with the hope of reciprocation.

In January 2020, after she had come back from a holiday in Thailand, we met for lunch at Algar Seco in Carvoeiro, where this Joanne Eastman pitched an idea to me, which she made out was meant to be a total benefit to me.  The idea was that she wanted to sell her house, and she wanted me to introduce her to my international network of connections in order to do so, whilst offering a paltry 1% commission in the event of my connections purchasing her home.  The local estate agencies in the area charge at least 5% commission, and this woman did not want to pay that commission to the Estate Agency that was marketing her property.  I proposed that in order to market it independently, she needed a website, which is something that my husband’s business consultancy company does.  It was decided at this lunch, where she drank down several glasses of wine very fast, that we would have another lunch meeting and bring our husbands along to discuss the potential collaboration.

I had briefly met Joanne Eastman’s husband Karl Eastman previously, but only in passing whilst coming in and out of her house, and my first impressions of him were not positive.  Karl Eastman was aloof and unfriendly, and I honestly did not like him right from the get go.  My initial instincts were warranted when we met for lunch at Club Nau in Ferragudo.  From the moment we sat down, this Karl Eastman began to insult her in a violent way, and this was the ongoing tone throughout our luncheon.  The more he drank, the worse he got.  Joanne  tried to shrug it off as banter, but it made my husband and I very uncomfortable, as we do not communicate with each other in such a nasty and derogatory way.  We eventually finished lunch, and my husband paid the majority of the bill, with a paltry contribution from the Karl Eastman.

It was suggested that we move from Club Nau over to Harry’s Bar in Carvoeiro, where two of my husband’s business associates joined us for drinks.  Joanne Eastman had gotten so intoxicated, that in front of her equally inebriated, unpleasant husband Karl, she ask my husband’s business associates how big their penises were, which they did not take kindly to, and later expressed to me in private that they felt as if they had been sexually harassed.  Needless to say I was very embarrassed to find this out and to be associated with such behaviour.  At a certain point, my husband had to leave with his business associates for a further business meeting, and they went to Chef’s Kitchen.  I was left with Joanne and Karl Eastman, who were by this stage both totally intoxicated with alcohol.  The moment my husband left, Karl Eastman turned his attention from attacking his wife with verbal insults, to attacking my husband and I in a most cowardly fashion, almost as if he had been waiting for my husband to leave before emotionally abusing me.  One of his comments about my husband was that my husband was a “cheap skate”, which I found rich, considering that my husband had paid the majority of the lunch bill of a lunch, where they were trying to manipulate my husband and I into working for them for free.  I sat for about two hours listening to this vile attack, and even tried to defend some of it.  Talk about cheap.

During this boozy session at Harry’s Bar, the Karl Eastman went on to brag about how much money he had spent gambling, and how he had left the UK to avoid paying 1.5 million pounds in income taxes.  He bragged about all these dodgy escapades as if it was meant to impress me.  At a certain point I realised that this guy was utter trash as he comes across like a typical gangster thug, and he was very course and uncouth.  This was most certainly not the kind of people I was used to hanging out with, having grown up in a wealthy home with a snobby mother who only surrounded us with other such people.  I have however tried to cultivate a more open heart and humble attitude without judgement and thus, I have opened myself up to many of the wrong sort, and Joanne and Karl Eastman are definitely the wrong sort.

It became clearly obvious that Karl Eastman was a toxic narcissist, and by the end of my encounter with Joanne Eastman, I realised that she is no better.  She just tries harder to hide it, whereas Karl Eastman simply does not give a damn that nobody likes him.  I recalled a conversation I had had with Joanne Eastman about her husband over the before mentioned boozy girly lunch, where she moaned through the entire lunch about how much she disliked Karl, and how she could not wait for him to die, so that she could live her life.  She also stated that the only reason she was still with him was for his money.  She had also mentioned that her husband had no friends, and that they rarely socialise with other couples, and I could fully see what that was the case.  In fact, the Cheese and Wine I hosted at her house was specifically scheduled to coincide with her husband’s trip out of town.

Furthermore, I had been purchasing Joanne Eastman’s raw pet food for my cats, which she made at her home, and which had poisoned one of my cats to so badly that we nearly lost him.  The food was contaminated with bacteria, which came as no surprise, given that I had experienced several incidences at her home where there was a clear lack of hygiene.  One such incident involved one of Joanne Eastman’s rescue dogs biting me on the ankle, and she did not even so much as offer me any anti bacterial to clean the wound.  As a result, my ankle swelled to twice its size, and I still have a lump on the area of the bite.  This same dog bit my husband to the point of bleeding, through his jeans, the night that we hosted our Cheese and Wine party at her house, so clearly this dog was an issue.  Then too, my husband was not even offered so much as a sterilising agent to clean the bite wound.  Considering we had given this woman LUNAR SILVER, which would have been the perfect anti bacterial to use for cleaning a dog bite, we were surprised that she did not even offer it to us to clean out infected wounds.

At a certain point during this horrible session where I was subjected to the abuse of a toxic narcissist and his inelegant gold digger wife, I had had enough, and I got up and left to join my husband down the road at his meeting, arriving clearly traumatised by the abuse I had been subjected to at the hands of Karl Eastman.

Shortly after the boozy lunch with Joanne and Karl Eastman, we fell out.  I began to realise that her external locus of identity, which was heavily invested in being a dog rescue fanatic, is nothing more than a very thin pseudo veneer masking Joanne and her husband’s dodgy business and practices where they were actually using and abusing people, profiting off the labour of others without adequate compensation for said labour.   One such business included a massage parlour in Carvoeiro called Pure Sensations, where the Thai slave labour were not paid a salary.  Upon speaking to an other contact, who was an animal behavioural expert I had met through the Eastmans, I learned that they had a habit of trying to get people to work for them for free.  I mean, it is one thing to love dogs and to rescue them, but that does not make you a good person when you do not treat people correctly and compensate them adequately for their work.

It also became clear to me that this trashy British couple had a severe drinking problem.  When I confronted this Joanne with several matters that I found concerning with regards to her conduct and practices, she become threatening and abusive, and began a smear campaign, threatening to destroy my humanitarian projects.  The eventual fallout with them over their drunken antics was so traumatic, that I decided to give up drinking alcohol, and I have barely touched a drop ever since this incident.

I have since heard stories of how Joanne and Karl Eastman have a reputation for public drunken brawls and making a public spectacle of themselves often when they go out drinking, with one incident even resulting in Joanne Eastman flipping a table at Harry’s Bar in a drunken rage.  Hearing the stories around Carvoeiro about Joanne and Karl Eastman, made me realise that they are definitely people you do not want to get mixed up with, as they are utterly toxic, no matter how much of a humanitarian facade Joanne Eastman puts on.  Furthermore, Joanne claims she is a connector of people, and introduced me to many people.  Initially I thought she was being nice, but I came to realise that she was doing this so that I would introduce her to my extended international networks.  Being a “connector of people” as she claimed to be, was not done for any other reason than to get something back in return.

Very recently, one of the people I met through them, a lady Elaine Archer, who sells CBD products here in the Algarve, scammed me by selling me dodgy CBD oil, which I had purchased hoping to treat my cat for dermatitis.  In fact, every single person I met through Joanne Eastman was so dodgy, that they have either scammed me, or brought nothing but drama and negativity into my life.  Indeed, FROM ROTTEN ROOTS COMES ROTTEN FRUITS.

I have learned so much though this particular cosmic entanglement, and all the periphery drama that was associated to it, including the fact that at no point is it ever beneficial to entertain toxic people in my reality.  I have written much about this in my blog called THE GREAT DETOX.  Fortunately I am the kind of person that does not lose.  I either win or I learn

The moral of the story is, now more than ever, we need to be discerning about who we let into our lives.  It takes only a moment to say or do something nasty and hurtful, and a lifetime to heal the damage.  There is nothing wrong with having standards, and I do not care if people call me a snob, because the truth is, that is my background. That is where I come from.  I am simply used to better quality people, and indeed, I advocate for being brutal in defining your boundaries of what you will and wont put up with, and that is not just about class, that is relevant to emotional intelligence and integrity too.  Never lower your standards, because when you play with pigs, you will get dirty.  Following the fallout which included some rather hostile Facebook messages from Joanne, I got to see just what a nasty, low class piece of trash she and her husband Karl really are.

The most important lesson I have learned is how to hold my head up high no matter what gossip is going around from the lips of nasty toxic people with vendettas.  At the end of the day, they are only spreading lies, and they cannot prove any of the malicious falsities they put in an attempt to put me down so that they may elevate themselves.   I won’t be bullied into shame when I have nothing to be ashamed of.  I know who I am and that I am a good person from a high profile, wealthy family, and I do amazing humanitarian focussed work, having a sizeable international following and the respect of far better people than the Eastmans.  Fortunately for me I have developed a thick skin from many years of investigative journalism, which has taught me to know myself, and never to let myself be defined by the opinions of others.  I am far too strong in my own being to allow myself to be bullied out town by the trashy antics of two classless, violent alcoholics, which is clearly Joanne Eastman’s intention, as she has taken much pleasure in trying to humiliate my husband and I by spreading malicious lies and gossip.

One of the positive aspects of this story is that I gave up drinking alcohol completely after seeing what it did to the Eastmans.  Furthermore, I will no longer hang out in bars and other places that serve alcohol, as they tend to attract toxic people with toxic habits, and as a result, exhibit toxic behaviours which can be hurtful and even outright damaging to other people.  Another positive aspect is that I appreciate my husband so much.  Over our 20 year marriage, we have struggled from time to time with various aspects of our reality, but at least he is a good, kind and pleasant person, and we only ever speak well of each other to other people.  We laugh together, we cry together, indeed, we do everything together, and I would not have it any other way.  Not for all the money in the world would I ever get with or stay with a man like Karl Eastman, a man who, from the moment we sat down for lunch that day at Club Nau, attacked and belittled his wife in a violent way.  Love, respect and appreciation is everything in a marriage, and all the money in the world can never replace that, in my humble opinion.