FOLLOW ME ON
Daily Notifications
Sign up for free emails to receive the feature story every morning in your inbox at tonyortega.substack.com

Categories

VERDICT: Scientology’s Quebec rehab facility violated human rights of David Love and 2 others

David_Edgar_Love2David Edgar Love and two other former patients of a Canadian drug rehab facility run by Scientology’s front group, Narconon, have won a stunning victory from Quebec’s human rights commission.

More than three years after Love complained about the way he was treated as a patient and employee of the Narconon Trois-Rivières facility (now closed), the Quebec Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse has produced a scathing finding of fact that Narconon did violate Love’s human rights.

“This is a big win,” Love told us during a Skype conversation Wednesday night.

Over several years, Love has won several victories against the Narconon facility, which was closed down in 2012 by Quebec health officials who were acting on Love’s complaints and voluminous documentation. He also had earlier won a labor settlement over his work at the facility, and convinced the Quebec College of Physicians to ban a doctor from the facility. But it was the human rights commission that Love especially wanted a result from. (See our previous story with extensive background on his experience as a Narconon patient and employee.)

Love was able to bring a complaint to the commission because it investigates cases of discrimination against the “disabled” — and Canada’s supreme court has found that drug addicts fall under that designation. (Narconon fought that application in this case, Love says, but the commission ultimately sided with him.)

“They went out and interviewed people right across Canada,” Love says. And he thinks the commission’s decisive statement of findings will reverberate across the country and internationally.

Advertisement

“Here Scientology has a ‘Citizens Commission on Human Rights,’ and what happened? They were found to be violating human rights. After a three and a half year investigation, it was found that Narconon violated the human rights of three people. I think this will help people down south and around the world,” he said.

The commission agreed with what Love has been saying since he left the Narconon center in 2009 — that the rehab facility’s operations were based in deceptive business practices which put its patients in danger. The commission’s report lays out a damning litany of conditions that were imposed on Love and the other patients…

— Charging him considerable amounts for a detoxification program which was not scientifically approved and which involved health and safety hazards;

— Failing to provide him with care suited to his medical condition, despite the sums he paid;

— Providing information, before and during treatment, which could be misleading as to the likelihood of a successful outcome, and which gave the impression that the results were guaranteed;

— Charging him large sums for a service provided by unqualified people;

— Forcing him to work and perform various tasks without pay….

— Forcing him to submit to humiliating and degrading practices;

— Failing to properly bear the responsibility for confidential information obtained from the complainant after prompting him to open up about personal aspects of his life;

— Using controversial teaching methods that were not based on any scientific study;

— Submitting him to poor living and food conditions;

— Submitting him to forced confinement and coercion.

It’s a powerful indictment of a Scientology front group that is also under investigation or facing lawsuits in Georgia, Oklahoma, Nevada, and California. (Narconon insists that it is independent of Scientology whenever it finds itself in trouble or has to respond to media inquiries. But there’s simply no question that Narconon was developed by Scientology to burnish its image and operates under umbrella groups staffed only with Scientology “Sea Org” workers. Scientology’s leader, David Miscavige, always touts Narconon as a Scientology project when he’s speaking at private church events.)

Love and the other two former patients were each awarded “moral” and “punitive” damages by the commission. (The amounts are redacted in the copy of the report we’ve posted, below.) But Love explains that the commission lacks enforcement power. It gave Narconon a deadline to pay the damages, and that deadline passed on April 4. The commission will have to file suit against Narconon in order to force it to pay the damages.

Short of that, the commission’s attorneys have been encouraging Narconon to work out a settlement with the three victims. Love says Narconon offered to pay him 20 percent of what he had been awarded, but required all three victims to agree to a confidentiality agreement. Love refused. He says Narconon has said it will file for bankruptcy if the commission takes it to court, so if Love continues to refuse, none of the victims will see a dime.

“If I don’t sign, the other victims don’t get their money. That’s weighing on me a lot,” he says. But he explains that he hasn’t come this far to sign what amounts to a gag order — not when he’s trying to publish a book about his experiences.

In the meantime, Love has been the subject of a ferocious “fair game” campaign, with anonymous websites smearing him regularly. Recently, he says he went on a date, and a photograph of him strolling with his companion showed up on one of the smear sites, with language suggesting that his date was in danger.

“The ‘dead agent’ attacks are pretty unbelievable. It’s been hell,” he says. “They’ve posted this stuff all over the Internet about me.”

For now, however, he’s happy to have the commission’s findings, even if the prospect of getting any money from it are complex and perhaps nonexistent.

“I’m not in it for the money,” he says.

Here, then, is the document which condemns Narconon’s treatment of David Love in no uncertain terms…

 

David Love report, Quebec Human Rights Commission

 
——————–

The joys of Super Power

Black Rob posted this video yesterday at WWP and also sent us a copy. What a hoot. Mr. Minnesota says he’s Grade Zero, so that puts him only a modest way up the Bridge, but he decided to do the Super Power rundowns and it “fixed everything.” Yes, it’s the usual vague Scientology happy talk about how these processes filled them with…something. Anyway, we heard him say that he’d done “six intensives,” which means he purchased six 12.5-hour blocks of processing to get through the Super Power rundowns. According to a 2007 price list we have, six intensives (75 hours) of Flag auditing above OT III runs $38,025.00, so we sure hope this guy is transparent, glowing, and can levitate. (By the way, anyone have a price list for Super Power intensives?)

 

 
——————–

Posted by Tony Ortega on April 11, 2014 at 07:00

E-mail your tips and story ideas to tonyo94@gmail.com or follow us on Twitter. We post behind-the-scenes updates at our Facebook author page. Here at the Bunker we try to have a post up every morning at 7 AM Eastern (Noon GMT), and on some days we post an afternoon story at around 2 PM. After every new story we send out an alert to our e-mail list and our FB page.

Learn about Scientology with our numerous series with experts…

BLOGGING DIANETICS (We read Scientology’s founding text) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25

UP THE BRIDGE (Claire Headley and Bruce Hines train us as Scientologists) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43

GETTING OUR ETHICS IN (Jefferson Hawkins explains Scientology’s system of justice) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14

SCIENTOLOGY MYTHBUSTING (Historian Jon Atack discusses key Scientology concepts) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46

PZ Myers reads L. Ron Hubbard’s “A History of Man” | Scientology’s Master Spies | Scientology’s Private Dancer

 

Share Button
Print Friendly, PDF & Email
ADVERTISEMENT