Athens native Susie Scott Krabacher, ex-Playmate, rescues Haitian orphans

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November 29, 2007

Athens native Susie Scott Krabacher, ex-Playmate, rescues Haitian orphans

By Karen Middleton The News Courier Thu Nov 29, 2007, 09:26 PM CST

Susie Scott Krabacher calls her first return trip to North Alabama in 13 years a “bittersweet thing.”

“The smell of falling leaves, I loved that so much,” said Krabacher. “I remember jogging up and down these same streets.”

Krabacher, 43, who lived here briefly in the late 1970s, was in town Thursday for a book signing at Pablo’s on Market Street. Her recently published “Angels of a Lower Flight: One Woman’s Mission to Save a Country…One Child at a Time” recounts her life as a childhood victim of physical and sexual abuse to becoming a Playboy centerfold to founding a school and orphanage for abandoned children in Haiti.

“All the floods of memories,” she said of her life in Athens, most of which was spent in foster care. “I had such fears back then; we moved a lot. I had such insecurities.”

Krabacher also spoke at Athens State University Thursday night.

Still striking in her 40s, Krabacher has lost the baby-soft pout of Miss May 1983. Twenty-four years ago, skilled Playboy photographers captured an aura of sexual innocence when she first posed as a teenager. But what no camera could record was the innocence lost to a pedophile grandfather from ages 4 to 8.

Satan’s nursery

Krabacher first went to Haiti in 1995 at the urging of a man in her church who had seen the hellish conditions of the island’s abandoned children.

In her book, Krabacher recounts Haiti’s history from the time it was discovered by Columbus to all the cultures that came after, plundering, enslaving and eventually decimating the native population. She said according to local folklore, the enslaved inhabitants, who in time revolted, are said to have made a pact with the devil in which they promised to worship him forever if he helped them overthrow their oppressors.

Krabacher said that purported pact with the devil is the basis of voodoo, which is still widely practiced today in Haiti.

In a simple, declarative, straightforward writing style, Krabacher can make even the skeptical believe in the existence of hell. It lies 500 miles off the coast of Florida.

Belief comes through her descriptions of bodies piled like cordwood and crawling with maggots in a sweltering tropical morgue. Many of the decaying corpses are infants and children in a country where one in 10 children die before age 4.

Krabacher’s feet, shod in fashionable sandals, stick to the concrete floor in congealed blood and bodily fluids as she frantically searches for the body of a malnourished baby she had bathed, diapered, fed and cuddled just the night before in an ill-equipped hospital ward.

One of Hef’s girls

Juxtaposed against this scene from Dante’s Inferno are scenes of opulence and decadence in Playboy empire founder Hugh Hefner’s Los Angeles mansion.

“I have dined with celebrities and shoveled hell with demons,” she writes in the forward of her book.

Still not out of her teens, then Susie Scott, she was chosen to become the May 1983 centerfold, and learned in “Hef’s” world nothing was off limits.

“There was no such thing as the word ‘no’—nothing you couldn’t have or do,” she said Wednesday during a stopover at The News Courier.

In her book, Krabacher, who has been married to Aspen, Colo., attorney Joe Krabacher for the past 19 years, refers to Hefner as “that old man in pajamas.” Raised by an abusive, mentally ill, strictly fundamentalist mother, she writes that within the confines of the Playboy Mansion a lifestyle that at first shocked and embarrassed her soon became commonplace.

She learned to fit in by using drugs, being nude or acting promiscuously. Krabacher spent from 1964 to 1979 in the Cotaco and Lacey’s Spring areas of Morgan County and in Athens. She attended Athens Bible School, Athens High and East Limestone High. She returned to North Alabama shortly after the May 1983 centerfold to bask in her newfound fame, but there were things she had seen and done that she couldn’t tell anyone.

“Both worlds – Haiti and the Playboy mansion—are inaccessible to the imagination,” she said Krabacher Thursday.

Sunrise

After a series of encounters with unsavory people—one of whom she married—she moved to Aspen and met Joe Krabacher, a young attorney to whom she had gone for legal advice when she divorced her first husband.

In time, she married Krabacher and opened an antique store with her younger brother, Mark. She had also kicked her cocaine habit, but she felt a spiritual void in her life. A late-night TV documentary about starving children in the sewers of Mongolia piqued her interest and she called numerous international children’s aid organizations wanting to help.

Each one advised her to “send a check,” but not one offered the kind of hands-on involvement she craved.

At the invitation of a man in her church, she traveled to Haiti and found her calling in trying to save the lives of starving, diseased, malformed and abandoned babies and children. She also found a horridly corrupt society.

Because she was working independently and not under the auspices of a large, well-organized aid organization, she was repeatedly victimized by people she thought were sincere in wanting to improve the lives of their countrymen.

She encountered—and entrusted with tens of thousands of dollars—a “clinic” owner who diverted money she collected from churches and friends in Aspen to build a mansion in the hills above Port-au-Prince rather than build a feeding center and maternity wing.

She sent financial aid and supplies to an impoverished hospital. She trusted local medical workers and officials to care for the children in her absence, but soon found that sick and malformed children died while healthy children mysteriously disappeared. In time, she discovered that the healthy babies were being sold on the black market.

Mercy and Sharing

Although dispirited and grief-stricken by the treachery of those who betrayed her in Haiti and by the suicide of her beloved brother, Mark Scott, she persevered in her mission to help Haitian children.

The Krabachers founded the Mercy and Sharing Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization that supports her work in Haiti. She travels to the island nearly every other month.

For her efforts, Krabacher has been honored by the World of Children, an international children’s advocacy group. She received The Humanitarian Rose Award from The People’s Princess Charitable Foundation and the Gift of Life Award from Rotary International, among others.

“Angels of a Lower Flight” might also become a feature film. Proceeds from the book go to her foundation.

“In 2004, I was ordered assassinated by the secret police in Haiti,” she said. “That is when Aristide fled. My 62 children were held hostage and me and a few journalists were the only white people who were allowed to leave the island.”

Her story, told in several prestigious publications, captured the attention of officials with Participant Productions, which produced the blockbusters “Syriana” and “An Inconvenient Truth.” The company bought the rights to her story in 2004. She was recently informed that the script had been completed.

For more information, visit the Wed site at www.haitichildren.com.

To donate to the cause, write to Mercy and Sharing, 201 N. Mill St., Suite 201, Aspen, Colo., 81611-1557. Call the foundation at (877) 424-8454 or contact Susie Scott Krabacher at Susie@haitichilden.com.

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Athens native Susie Scott Krabacher, ex-Playmate, rescues Haitian orphans

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