There’s a reason Scientology earned a reputation as one of the most litigious organizations on earth, and one that turns any court fight into a bruising slugfest.
People who have found themselves in litigation with the church often complain that Scientology plays dirty, and gets away with murder in America’s courts.
What’s unusual is not hearing that Scientology is up to its old tricks in a lawsuit currently going on in the Atlanta area that involves Scientology’s drug rehab program Narconon, but that the judge in that case has called out Scientologist executives in the case for reprehensible behavior.
Yes, that’s right: for once, a judge is calling a Scientologist’s lies what they are — lies.
We want to thank Robert Berrington, a South African reader, who sent us some rare documents — records of his own Scientology excommunication.
Berrington learned that at the end of last year he was “declared a suppressive person” by the church — in other words, he’d been kicked out, and all church members who want to remain in good standing will be forced to now “disconnect” from him or risk being declared themselves.
We have copies of Berrington’s “declare,” his responses to its charges, and also a letter from the church he recently received when he asked for a refund of money that he had on account for services that he cannot now use.
Lots going on here at the underground bunker this morning, and we didn’t have time for a regular Monday post. While we check up on other developing stories, we’ll share with you this entertaining homage to L. Ron Hubbard’s masterpiece, Dianetics.
We have to hand it to our tipsters. Not only have they come through yet again, but we’ve heard from our Australia sources after things had gone quiet Down Under for some time.
On Sundays, we like to share with you the Scientology fliers and mailers that have been forwarded to us during the week. It gives us a good idea of what’s happening up to the minute for church members, who are constantly being hit up for cash.
Let’s take a look at the come-ons that arrived this week!
We’ve written about Lori Hodgson a few times previously. In the photo here at the right, you see her in happier times with her two children, Jessica and Jeremy Leake.
Since that photo was taken, however, Lori did the unforgivable in the eyes of her kids: she left the Church of Scientology and spoke publicly about it. Declared a “suppressive person” by the church (Scientology’s equivalent of excommunication), Lori became someone her kids had to avoid at all costs or risk being declared “SP” themselves.
But Lori never gives up. She sent us an open letter she wants to get to her children, and asked us to post it. We agreed.
A year ago, we were sent something really unique — a collection of daily dispatches that Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard wrote to his shipboard crew as he ran the organization while sailing the Mediterranean and Atlantic during the years 1967 to 1975 (our documents cover a period from late 1968 through 1971).
Since last November, we’ve been posting short excerpts from these fascinating documents, which give us a glimpse of what it was like as Hubbard ran Scientology from the bridge of the yacht Apollo.
Full of maddening jargon and bureacratic minutiae, on occasion an “Orders of the Day” shows us a glimpse of Hubbard’s thinking on diverse subjects. So let’s take one last look at these revealing documents, this time looking at the week of October 28 to November 3.
Florida attorney Ken Dandar filed a federal lawsuit yesterday against the Church of Scientology and its attorneys, asking for injunctive relief and a jury trial over what he says has been a violation of his civil rights.
Dandar’s suit is the latest twist in a dauntingly complex history of litigation that goes back to a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family of Lisa McPherson, a church member who died at Scientology’s Fort Harrison Hotel in Clearwater, Florida, in 1995.
In the aftermath of that suit, which was settled in 2004, Dandar found himself in a bizarre legal Catch-22 several years later: a federal judge ordered him to continue representing a client in a lawsuit against the church at the same time that a state judge was telling him he had to quit that case or be sanctioned up to $1,000 a day. Dandar ultimately extricated himself from that mess, but Scientology is now asking the state court for $1 million in court fees, Dandar alleges.
So now he’s gone back to the federal court system to ask for relief: stop the Church of Scientology, he’s asking, which is trying to bury him for doing his job.
Last night, television journalist Nathan Baca returned to Scientology reporting with a two-part report on Scientology’s drug rehab program in Nevada, a Narconon center about 150 miles north of Las Vegas in the small town of Caliente.
Baca is known for a hard-hitting 2009 series he did about Scientology’s International Base as a reporter for a Palm Springs, California station, and he didn’t let what he learned in that experience go to waste as he turned his attention to the church’s controversial and ailing drug rehab operation.
We talked to Baca last night about his special report, and about the church’s reaction when it learned he was back on the case.
