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Karen Handel is back, and she’s bringing 304 pages with her. Susan G. Komen For The Cure’s ex-vice president of public policy, who resigned in February after an enormous flap over Komen’s attempt to pull its funding from Planned Parenthood, is writing a tell-all, to be published in September by Howard Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Its full title: Planned Bullyhood: The Truth Behind the Headlines about the Planned Parenthood Funding Battle with Susan G. Komen for the Cure.
Now-departing Komen CEO Nancy Brinker and Handel herself both insisted at the time that the Planned Parenthood decision wasn’t engineered by Handel. In a voluminous public resignation letter, Handel wrote: >
[T]he decision to update our granting model was made before I joined Komen, and the controversy related to Planned Parenthood has long been a concern to the organization. Neither the decision nor the changes themselves were based on anyone’s political beliefs or ideology. Rather, both were based on Komen’s mission and how to better serve women, as well as a realization of the need to distance Komen from controversy. I believe that Komen, like any other nonprofit organization, has the right and the responsibility to set criteria and highest standards for how and to whom it grants.
However, Komen insiders told the Huffington Post and The Atlantic that Handel had specifically and aggressively pushed for Planned Parenthood to be defunded since she was first hired in April 2011.
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Now another raft of anonymous sources are talking to New York magazine about what the publication deems Nancy Brinker’s “pseudo-exit.”
“According to a high-level insider, she never seriously entertained the idea of leaving the organization,” Lea Goldman writes, adding that while Brinker “hoped the management shuffle would mollify her critics, it has instead stoked claims that she is wildly out of touch with her constituency.”
“”She’s trying to put it behind her, but what she doesn’t get is that you can’t just decide a crisis is over because you want it over,” a Komen official tells Goldman, adding “Nancy will be there until she takes her last breath.”
