-Caveat Lector-
http://www.newtimesla.com/issues/1999-09-09/feature_p.html
New Times Los Angeles - News & Features
Front Page - September 9 - 15, 1999
Scientology's Revenge
For years, the Cult Awareness Network was the Church of
Scientology's biggest enemy. But the late L. Ron Hubbard's
L.A.-based religion cured that -- by taking it over
By Ron Russell
It was an idea whose time had come. That's how Priscilla Coates
describes the humble beginnings of the Cult Awareness Network,
founded two decades ago in the wake of the murders and mass
suicides in Guyana that claimed the lives of hundreds of the late
Jim Jones' followers. The concept was simple enough: set up a
nonprofit, national organization to assist the often desperate
loved ones of people caught up in the ever-proliferating cult
scene. On paper, at least, the group known by the acronym CAN
endures. But nearly a quarter-century later, neither Coates, who
ran the Los Angeles chapter during the organization's heyday, nor
anyone else who once helped nurture the network has anything to do
with it. That's because whenever people call CAN's hotline these
days, more likely than not someone from the Church of Scientology
answers the phone. Instead of warning people about suspected
cults, opponents say, the new group promotes them. As one
Scientology critic puts it, "It's like Operation Rescue taking over
Planned Parenthood."
The story of how the controversial L.A.-based church -- which
Time magazine once termed "the cult of greed" -- commandeered the
anti-cult group that was its nemesis is as bizarre as some of late
church founder L. Ron Hubbard's science fiction. It is also a
cautionary tale for anyone who goes up against Scientology, with
its penchant for harassing enemies in the courts, and its
rough-and-tumble reputation for retaliating against "suppressives,"
those deemed as having ridiculed Scientology's teachings. Those
teachings include Hubbard's decree that humans are made of clusters
of spirits, called "thetans," who were banished to Earth about
75 million years ago by an evil galactic ruler named Xenu. A pulp
fiction writer who had served a troubled stint in the Navy, Hubbard
hit it big in 1950 by coming up with the concept of Dianetics,
which he dubbed a modern science of mental health. It remains
at the core of Scientology practice. One of its staples is a
simplified lie detector called an E-meter, which is supposed to
measure electrical changes in the skin while subjects discuss
intimate details of their lives. Hubbard claimed that unhappiness
sprang from mental aberrations, called "engrams," and that
counseling sessions with the E-meter could help get rid of them.
Scientologists refer to the extensive (and expensive) process of
"clearing" the mind in order for this to occur as "auditing."
But during the 1970s, the Internal Revenue Service conducted some
auditing sessions of its own and accused Hubbard of skimming
millions of dollars from the church, laundering it through dummy
corporations, and stashing it in Swiss bank accounts. And although
he died before the case was adjudicated, his wife and 10 other
former church leaders went to prison in the early 1980s for
infiltrating, burglarizing, and wiretapping dozens of private and
government agencies in an attempt to block their investigations.
With its sprawling headquarters on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood,
the church has assembled a star-studded roster of followers that
includes actors John Travolta, Tom Cruise, and Kirstie Alley; jazz
musician Chick Corea; and soul singer Isaac Hayes. To help shed
its fringe-group image, it has retained public relations powerhouse
Hill and Knowlton, runs a plethora of ads on television and in
top-drawer news and business journals, and recruits academics
and other professionals through a network of consultants whose
ties to the church are typically hidden. Its members also include
high-profile media types. Greta Van Susteren, the CNN legal
correspondent, and her husband, influential Washington Beltway
attorney John Coale, are Scientologists. They even played a
minor role in Scientology's assault on the Cult Awareness Network
by representing an Ohio woman who sued a cult-deprogramming
organization named Wellspring, whose executive director also sat
on the CAN board.
In hindsight, officials of the former CAN -- whose alleged
involvement with kidnapping and deprogramming individuals from
suspected cults created its own controversy -- say they should have
seen Scientology's assault coming. Especially after an L.A. lawyer
prominent in Scientology attached himself to a civil lawsuit
against CAN in suburban Seattle several years ago. No one could
have imagined that the suit, brought on behalf of a young man named
Jason Scott -- who had been kidnapped and deprogrammed from an
evangelical Christian sect -- would produce judgments totaling $5.2
million and hasten the anti-cult group's financial ruin. Nor could
they have guessed that on the day in 1996 that its logo, furniture,
and phone number were auctioned off at the order of a bankruptcy
judge, a Scientologist would appear out of nowhere to place the
winning bid.
But the ultimate indignity for the anti-cult crusaders occurred
earlier this year in a Chicago courtroom. Already having
vanquished CAN, appropriated its name, and moved its offices from
Illinois to within blocks of Scientology headquarters in Hollywood,
lawyers with ties to the church moved to take possession of 20
years' worth of CAN's highly sensitive case files. Filling more
than 150 boxes, the materials contained names, addresses, and
detailed information on thousands of people who had turned to CAN
for help in rescuing their friends and relatives. The list of
organizations targeted by the old CAN read like a who's who of
fringe culture. Among them were the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan
Nations, dozens of obscure fundamentalist and evangelical Christian
groups, the Church of Satan, the Unification Church of the Reverend
Sun Myung Moon, followers of political extremist Lyndon LaRouche,
and, of course, the Church of Scientology.
A judge had earlier excluded the materials from the bankruptcy
liquidation, ordering that they be held in storage while the former
CAN's officers sought court protection to keep them out of the
hands of its enemies. Bankruptcy judges are often leery of turning
over the assets of one group to another, especially where rivalries
exist. But Scientology lawyers appear to have devised a strategy
to get around the problem. By purchasing the judgments against the
penniless CAN, a Los Angeles man named Gary Beeny had become the
bankrupt organization's chief unsecured creditor. And so it was
to Beeny that a judge in May awarded ownership of the files,
the last vestige of CAN's once-abundant resources. Beeny is
a Scientologist, according to sources and The American Lawyer
magazine. And in short order he transferred custodianship of the
files to a Scientology-backed group, the Foundation for Religious
Freedom. The foundation had already become the entity officially
licensed to operate the new CAN after another Scientologist, Steven
L. Hayes, of Los Angeles, bought the logo and other appurtenances.
In fact, the lawyer who represented Beeny was none other than
Scientology attorney and high-profile spokesman Kendrick L. Moxon.
He is the same lawyer who represented Jason Scott in the case that
led to CAN's bankruptcy. (Scott now says he was used as a pawn of
Scientology and has disavowed Moxon.)
Incredibly, the foundation's chairman, who is also the chairman
of the new CAN, is the old CAN's most indefatigable enemy, a
self-described Baptist minister named George Robertson. And in
yet another piece of perverse symmetry, the new CAN's executive
director, Andy Bagley -- who was once L. Ron Hubbard's secretary --
was a chief antagonist of the old CAN's last executive director,
Cynthia Kisser. Bagley had turned his attention to Kisser while
heading a branch of Scientology's Office of Special Operations,
the church's CIA-like intelligence unit, in Kansas City. "We're
talking about a strategic conspiracy of grand proportions, an
unabashed tragedy," says Ed Lottick, a Pennsylvania physician and
a director of the old CAN. "And now that they've got the files,
God only knows the havoc they'll wreak."
Lottick shouldn't have to wait long to find out.
Since transporting the files to L.A. barely two months ago, the new
Scientology-backed CAN has begun the arduous task of organizing and
archiving them. It intends to hand over to each of the many groups
targeted by the old CAN copies of all the documents that pertain to
those groups, says Nancy O'Meara, the new CAN's treasurer and
office manager. A 25-year veteran of Scientology, O'Meara sees the
old CAN as made up of hate-mongers bent on persecuting any group
they didn't like. Citing the old CAN's "reign of terror," she
scarcely conceals her glee at the prospect that some of the
formerly targeted groups may want to use the newly obtained
materials to pursue lawsuits or even criminal prosecutions.
Already, the top lieutenant to once-jailed cult leader Tony Alamo
-- the flamboyant one-time L.A. street preacher who combined his
messianic pronouncements with a lucrative business in sequined
leather jackets -- has flown in from Arkansas to obtain copies of
the files pertaining to Alamo. "The documents are amazing,"
O'Meara says. "They're really going to open some eyes, and we
think they will -- or should -- generate a lot of media interest."
Understandably, where they are being held is a carefully guarded
secret. As for specifics, she referred questions about the files
to Moxon, the Scientology lawyer who was a key figure in the old
CAN's demise and the person whom she says is responsible for
overseeing the files. But when approached for an interview, Moxon
expressed more interest in asking questions about this article than
in discussing the Cult Awareness Network. "I've seen a lot of
shitty things [about Scientology] in New Times," he said, before
hanging up on a reporter. "And I don't trust you."
---------------------------------------------------------
For the old Cult Awareness Network, the end was swift.
Ben Hyink, who represented CAN in the bankruptcy, recalls the
somber mood on that day in 1996 when he escorted Cynthia Kisser
into a Chicago courtroom on what proved to be a fool's errand.
Kisser had spent nine years at the helm of the organization, and,
like the captain of a sinking ship, desperately wanted to cling to
it for as long as possible. She had arrived naively hoping to buy
the group's assets. Even more naively, she hoped that they
wouldn't cost much. Even if successful, hers would have been a sad
mission. The aim was to scoop up the trade name, post office box,
help-line number, and service mark merely to retire them and thus
put the beleaguered CAN out of its misery. But there was another
suitor in the courtroom that day -- Steven Hayes, the
Scientologist, who had come all the way from L.A. with different
ideas. The bidding started at $10,000, and a nervous Kisser
quickly offered $11,000. Hayes raised her $1,000. "I will bid
$13,000," she said. "Fourteen," snapped Hayes. Kisser kept going
-- to $19,000. But when Hayes upped her again, Kisser responded:
"No more." The trustee conducting the sale asked if she'd like to
take a break, and she said that would be fine. He told her that if
she wanted to make another offer to come back within three minutes.
But as Hyink recalls, the pause was pointless. Kisser could go no
higher. "I will accept the offer of Mr. Hayes for $20,000," court
records show the trustee proclaimed.
And it was over.
But Scientology's takeover of CAN had been years in the making.
Starting in 1991, CAN had been forced to fend off at least 50
lawsuits filed by Scientologists in state and federal courts around
the country. Coates, the former L.A. chapter head, recalls being
hit with a half-dozen suits in the span of just two weeks in 1992.
"It became so routine that you felt like you knew the process
servers," she says. At the same time, Scientologists filed dozens
of discrimination complaints against CAN with state human rights
commissions nationwide, requiring the services of a battery of
lawyers.
Although individual Scientologists had filed the suits, many of
them contained almost identical language. And there was another
common denominator: Many of the lawsuits were drafted by Moxon's
law firm. The plaintiffs' claims fell into one of two categories.
Either they had been denied membership in one of CAN's local
affiliate groups, or they had been refused admission to CAN's
annual conference. "You'd have to be an imbecile not to see that
it was part of an orchestrated effort," says Dan Liepold, a Santa
Ana attorney who defended CAN in three dozen of the lawsuits and
who has often butted heads with Scientology. His files contain
scores of letters written by Scientologists to CAN, requesting to
join it. In many of them, the language is virtually identical as
if they were churned out using a common model. The extent of the
orchestration became clear, he says, when he began to depose
individual plaintiffs and discovered that some hadn't even applied
for membership in CAN before they sued. Others, he says, didn't
know who was paying for their lawyers or how the lawyers had been
selected. For Coates, the letter-writing campaign held no mystery.
"There was nothing spontaneous about it," she says. "The letters
started arriving in huge numbers, all of them saying pretty much
the same thing. It didn't take a rocket scientist to see that
[the church] was getting ready to come after us." Bagley, the
former Hubbard secretary, confirms as much. After being rebuffed
numerous times by Kisser in an effort to discuss with her
"the lies [the old] CAN was fomenting" about Scientology, he says,
he informed Kisser in a phone call that he wanted to join CAN
"in order to reform [her] organization from within."
Exactly what prompted Scientology to turn its considerable
resources against the tiny anti-cult group when it did --
beyond Scientologists' longtime hatred of CAN -- is a matter of
speculation. But that it did so is hardly surprising. According
to Scientology policy, opponents are viewed as fair game for
retaliation. Hubbard's own teachings spell out the importance of
waging legal war against perceived enemies, even when the purpose
is to intimidate and discourage rather than to win. As a
consequence, lawyers hired by the church have filed hundreds of
lawsuits over the years. (Among the high-profile attorneys who've
represented the church is L.A. Police Commission President Gerald
Chaleff.)
As for the attack on CAN, a May 1991 issue of Time, headlined
"Scientology: The Cult of Greed," couldn't have helped. In it,
Kisser offered some particularly disparaging remarks about the
church. In any event, Scientologists made no secret of their
contempt for her. For example, a 1995 issue of Freedom magazine,
a church publication, bore the cover title: "CAN: The Serpent of
Hatred, Intolerance, Violence and Death." Inside, it likened CAN
to "a hate group in the tradition of the KKK and neo-Nazis" and
referred to Kisser as the "mother of the serpent." The same issue
contained the accusation that before she became the group's
executive director in 1987, Kisser had been a topless dancer in a
Tucson, Arizona, nightclub -- an accusation Kisser has publicly
dismissed as "ludicrous." (Kisser declined numerous requests for
an interview with New Times. Friends and former colleagues
describe her as personally devastated by the demise of CAN and by
what she perceives as the church's continued harassment of her.
They say she is trying to begin a new life and is attending law
school in Chicago.)
Despite the Scientology onslaught, CAN managed for a time to go
about its business. Coates says the group fielded roughly 20,000
requests for information in a given year and that the rate didn't
diminish much after the legal barrage began. But the litigation
took its toll. "It wasn't that there was any great [legal]
scholarship on the other side to overcome," says Hyink, the former
CAN attorney. "It was more a war of attrition." By 1993, CAN was
paying out $10,000 a month in legal bills, and Coates says the
figure would have been higher had it not been for pro bono work.
As it was, even some of the lawyers who billed CAN did so with the
expectation that they would never be paid. But there was a deeper
problem. After getting cut off by liability insurers, CAN's donor
base began to dry up. Coates says that would-be contributors were
reluctant to fund a group that was spending so much of its money
on lawyers, adding, "it wasn't difficult to understand their
rationale." The Scientologists had put the Cult Awareness Network
in a vulnerable spot -- teetering at the brink of collapse, where
a body blow could topple it. The crucial push proved to be a 1994
lawsuit that was very different from all the others. Jason Scott
was not a Scientologist but a member of an evangelical church when,
at age 18, he became the victim of a failed cult deprogramming.
The basic circumstances of the case weren't disputed. Katherine
Tonkin, a mother of seven who had twice remarried after Jason was
born, had in 1989 joined the Life Tabernacle Church, a small United
Pentecostalist congregation in Bellevue, Washington. But she soon
grew disillusioned with the church's teachings, which declared TV
and movies off-limits and discouraged women from wearing pants or
jewelry. She quit the church, but Jason and his two younger
brothers, aged 16 and 13, chose to stay. She later testified
that she was worried church leaders were trying to turn the boys
against her.
Her concerns increased in 1990 after the two oldest boys moved in
with the families of two of the church's leaders, and her youngest
son left to live with his grandmother. Not sure where to turn,
Tonkin called a crisis hotline and was given the number for Shirley
Landa, a CAN volunteer in Seattle. After listening to Tonkin's
story, Landa gave Tonkin another number -- that of Rick Ross, a
Phoenix-based expert on cults who had been involved in scores of
deprogrammings. In December 1990, Ross flew to Seattle. He
subsequently deprogrammed each of the boys. But Jason, who was
already 18 when his mother hired Ross, would prove to be
problematic. As he would later testify, on the day that the three
men assisting Ross grabbed him, handcuffed him, and forced him into
a van, he screamed that they had no legal right to abduct him.
According to court testimony, his abductors slapped duct tape on
his mouth, held him down on the floor of the van, and drove him
four hours away to a secluded beach house on the Washington coast.
For five days, Ross and others forced Scott to watch videos on
religious cults and tried to get him to renounce the church,
until he finally told them what they wanted to hear. But when the
entire group, including Jason's mother, went out for what seemed to
be a celebratory dinner, Scott bolted from the restaurant and
called the cops.
Coates and others associated with the old CAN continue to say what
they said then: that the group only supported legal means for
getting people out of cults and would have never knowingly made a
referral for a forcible deprogramming. It's an assertion greeted
with considerable skepticism in some quarters. "I think [the old
CAN] did a tremendous amount of harm to the extent that they
cooperated or linked people up with these deprogrammers," says
Newton Maloney of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena.
Maloney, a clinical psychologist who is also a United Methodist
minister, sees the new CAN as doing positive work in trying to
reconcile family members with people who've joined groups their
relatives don't approve of. He acknowledges that his nonjudgmental
view toward the Scientology-backed new CAN has caused him to be
regarded as a cult apologist within the anti-cult movement.
(The Church of Scientology, partly owing to Maloney's influence,
financed a conference on religious tolerance at Fuller earlier this
year that was attended by church president Heber C. Jentzsch.)
Others with a sympathetic view of the new CAN go even farther.
In an affidavit that the Church of Scientology ballyhoos, Lowell
Streiker, a family counselor and United Church of Christ minister
from Northern California, asserts that 80 percent of all
deprogrammings he was aware of were set up by the old CAN's
national headquarters or its chapters. His claim was reprinted
in a Scientology booklet entitled: "The Cult Awareness Network:
Anatomy of a Hate Group."
The critical factor in determining the legality of Jason Scott's
abduction and deprogramming was his age. Had he been a minor, like
his brothers, the incident would have scarcely attracted attention.
And while to some the connection may have appeared tenuous, it was
a CAN volunteer who had helped put Scott's mother in touch with
Ross. Indeed, Ross went to trial on criminal kidnapping charges,
but when Tonkin took the stand to accept responsibility for hiring
Ross, it was obvious that there would be no conviction. Rare is
the jury willing to throw the book at a mother desperate to rescue
her teenaged children from a suspected cult, even if one of them
is of legal age. But while the criminal trial was in progress,
something ominous happened with respect to the Cult Awareness
Network.
A lawyer from distant L.A. called Jason Scott and began to argue
that he had a civil case against CAN. The lawyer, Marcello Di
Mauro, was a colleague of Kendrick Moxon's. Soon, according to
Scott's later assertions, Di Mauro flew to Seattle, took Scott to
dinner, and began talking to him about the potential millions of
dollars that a successful civil suit might bring. Scott wouldn't
meet Moxon, who would actually try the case, until months later.
But his decision was made. The day after Rick Ross' acquittal on
the kidnapping charge, a Scientology lawyer filed the lawsuit that
would prove to be the old CAN's undoing.
CAN's defense lawyer in the civil trial, Mary Steele, quickly
became convinced that Scientology was behind the Scott case and
concluded that it would be crucial for a jury to learn about the
long-standing enmity between Scientology and CAN. But on the eve
of trial, U.S. District Court Judge John Coughenour stunned the
defense team by ruling that she could not introduce anything about
Scientology as evidence. He then denied her motion to dismiss the
case on summary judgment. In tactical terms, it was a royal
mismatch. CAN couldn't afford to hire an expert witness, or even
fly more than a couple of its board members in to testify, Coates
says. Moxon and his team, meanwhile, brought in cult apologist
Anson Shupe from Indiana University, a frequent expert witness
on behalf of Scientology, who told the jury he had spent years
studying CAN and that it had a history of attacking unconventional
religious groups. CAN was so broke it couldn't even afford to pay
its defense lawyer and never did. Asked if she felt outgunned in
terms of resources, Steele responds, "I don't think I could come up
with any words to describe the extent to which that was true."
In the end, a jury assessed judgments of $1.8 million against CAN
and $3.4 million against Ross. But Scott would see only a smidgen
of the money. After all, there was nothing more to squeeze out of
CAN. Once he and Moxon had parted company, Scott ended up selling
his judgment against CAN to Beeny for $25,000. Within hours after
the sale, Scott's new lawyer, self-styled L.A. anti-cult attorney
Graham Berry, says he received a call from Moxon on behalf of
Moxon's new client -- Beeny. "Moxon's interest was in taking
Jason's judgment, not in negotiating a compromise and payment,"
asserts Berry. "[Moxon's] real interest was in forcing CAN into
bankruptcy and seizing the assets for Scientology." When
approached by New Times a second time and asked specifically to
comment on Berry's allegation, Moxon criticized Berry as a
Scientology basher, pointing out that an L.A. Superior Court judge
last month found Berry to be a "vexatious litigant" in another
matter related to the church. "The old Cult Awareness Network was
a hate group," Moxon says. "It engaged in kidnappings. It engaged
in denigration of minority religious beliefs. The new group is not
like that. The new group is endeavoring to promote
interdenominational dialogue."
Meanwhile, Scott settled his judgment against Ross for a reported
$5,000. According to Scott's mother, Tonkin, the two men are now
friends. Living in Northern Arizona, Scott, now 27, sees himself
as having been used by Scientology as an instrument to destroy CAN.
"Jason was double-brainwashed," says his mother. "First, by the
cult we became involved in, and second, by Moxon and the
Scientologists who used him as a way of bringing down the
Cult Awareness Network." Explaining her son's refusal to be
interviewed, she adds, "He just wants to forget the whole thing
and go on with his life."
---------------------------------------------------------
Even if George Robertson had never heard of the Church of
Scientology, there's ample reason for him to be resentful of
the original CAN.
As an associate of the Reverend Carl H. Stevens Jr., founder of
a now-defunct religious ministry called The Bible Speaks, the
58-year-old Robertson had been affiliated with a group that CAN had
persistently decried as a dangerous cult. Stevens, a one-time
bakery truck driver who claimed that his every utterance was
inspired of God, had moved the headquarters of The Bible Speaks
from Maine to Lenox, Massachusetts, in the late '70s. Robertson
set up a ministry affiliated with Stevens in his native Florida.
"He was always kind of sucking around Pastor, as we used to say,"
recalls an ex-Bible Speaks cleric who observed Robertson during
stints in Lenox. "He was constantly around Carl. He was one of
those guys who felt the need to get close to the king, to feel
the sensory aroma of royalty."
The Bible Speaks' troubles erupted with Betsy Dovydenas, heiress to
the Dayton-Hudson department store fortune (which includes Target
stores). Dovydenas joined Stevens' church in 1982 and was soon
persuaded to leave her husband and two children and to turn over to
The Bible Speaks $6.6 million of an estate then estimated to be
worth $20 million. Flush with cash, Stevens' operation expanded to
a wooded 85-acre campus on the outskirts of town, complete with
state-of-the-art radio and television studios, an assembly center,
and a new home for the Stevens College of the Bible. But in 1986,
Dovydenas' husband and parents pried her away from the group long
enough to have a cult deprogrammer convince her that she had been
mesmerized. The next year she sued the church to get her money
back, claiming undue influence. The case went all the way to the
U.S. Supreme Court, and, although she eventually won, the victory
was largely empty. The Bible Speaks had declared bankruptcy.
Among other things, court records show that Stevens had used some
of the money to buy a fancy Florida condo. The heiress ended up
with a white elephant -- the former church's headquarters campus.
"I got brainwashed," recalls Dovydenas, 47, of the experience.
She refers to Stevens as a "bogus, sleazy preacher," adding,
"I find it incomprehensible that anyone in the hierarchy of his
organization could be sincerely motivated."
Yet, the controversy didn't end Stevens' career or Robertson's
affiliation with him. Stevens shuttered the Lenox operation and
moved to Baltimore. Robertson had gone ahead to open a church
there that would play a key role in his mentor's survival as a
religious figure. Using Robertson's church as a beachhead, Stevens
established a new ministry called the Greater Grace World Outreach.
In 1987, the church bought an abandoned shopping center in
Baltimore for use as its headquarters and as the campus for the
church-affiliated Maryland College of the Bible and Seminary.
Robertson is the school's vice president. Scores of The Bible
Speaks' adherents had followed Stevens to Baltimore, and former
students at the bible college in Lenox transferred to the
unaccredited Maryland school. "[Stevens] just set up shop in a
new place and pretended that The Bible Speaks never existed," says
Doris Quelet, who was active with the original CAN's Baltimore
chapter. "The new entity enabled them to protect their assets
from the [Dovydenas] judgment." Although it may not have attracted
any rich heiresses, Stevens' ministry has made inroads among
wealthy athletes. For example, the Reverend John Love, a Stevens
subordinate, has done much to burnish the image of the NBA's New
York Knicks as the "god squad" by leading postgame prayer huddles
at center court.
For its part, the old CAN and its supporters continued to torment
Stevens and Robertson after the men moved to Maryland. They
accused Stevens of obtaining his doctor of divinity degree from a
diploma mill in Tennessee. "His credentials aren't worth the paper
they're written on," contends David Clark, the exit counselor who
deprogrammed Dovydenas. Clark says a colleague applied for one of
the now-defunct school's sheepskins by mail and was able to obtain
one -- for his dog. Meanwhile, Clark says, a private investigator
sent to Georgia to locate the seminary where Robertson reputedly
earned his theology degree found an abandoned storefront "that
looked like it hadn't been used in years." Asked about his
credentials, Robertson describes the bible college he attended as
small -- "it had only about 50 students" -- and said that it was no
longer in operation, having been "swallowed up by another seminary
which was later swallowed up by yet another seminary." Although
describing himself as Baptist, Robertson was not ordained by,
nor has he ever been associated with, any Baptist organization,
he says. "I'm independent. I don't believe in denominations."
He describes Greater Grace, where he is a minister, as having
an "independent evangelical orientation that recognizes Baptist
teachings." Against that backdrop, Robertson seems perfectly
suited to have done Scientology's bidding as an anti-CAN
propagandist.
For a dozen years, until the original Cult Awareness Network
ceased to exist, he crisscrossed the country railing against
the organization. He popped up at seminars on college campuses,
crashed CAN conventions, shadowed its officials at speaking
engagements, and protested alongside Scientologists outside
members' homes and elsewhere. Claiming that CAN's membership
was made up largely of Jews and psychiatric professionals opposed
to organized Christianity, he was once quoted in a New Jersey
newspaper as saying that "All Christians are cults to the Jews."
Another time he lashed out at the group as the "KKK of religion."
Patricia Ryan, the daughter of the late Congressman Leo Ryan, who
was murdered by Jim Jones' minions in Guyana, and who herself is
a past president of CAN, recalls Robertson in a crowd of
Scientologists who picketed her home in suburban Maryland in the
1980s. Others say he led a ruckus at a hotel near Los Angeles
International Airport in 1992 in which a group of Scientologists
tried to force their way into a CAN gathering. "It got really
ridiculous," says Ryan. "They actually tried to shove their way
into the elevators and follow some of our guest speakers up to
their rooms to intimidate them." Another time, in Oklahoma City,
he arrived along with a contingent of Scientologists who, Coates
contends, rented rooms at the group's hotel convention site and
used electronic surveillance equipment to eavesdrop on
participants. Once, during a visit by Kisser and other CAN
officials to Florida, Robertson even turned up at a newspaper
office where they were being interviewed. His role that day was
to escort a prominent local Scientologist who demanded to be heard.
At a Hollywood ceremony presided over by Scientology leader
Jentzsch and cohosted by soul singer Hayes in 1993, the church
bestowed one of its Freedom Human Rights Leadership awards on
Robertson. It cited his "accomplishments in promoting religious
freedom, tolerance, and working against the violent act of
deprogramming and other religious hate crimes." Robertson bristles
at the suggestion from Coates and others in the anti-cult movement
that he is merely a lackey of the Scientologists.
"My issue is freedom of religion," he says. "CAN is totally
independent of the Church of Scientology."
---------------------------------------------------------
Yet the new CAN appears to be run by Scientologists, for
Scientology. Its two most visible representatives and those
responsible for its day-to-day operation, O'Meara and Bagley, are
members of the church. Robertson says the five-member board of
directors meets quarterly via a conference call and holds at least
one face-to-face meeting each year. But when asked who the board
members are besides him and O'Meara, he referred the question to
her. During an interview, she provided a stack of materials
pertaining to CAN in which she said the directors' names could be
found. But they weren't there. Instead, most of the information
consisted of news clippings and other materials denigrating the old
Cult Awareness Network. Although neither O'Meara nor Bagley would
confirm it, the man who holds the title of CAN's president, or at
least did as recently as 1997, according to the Washington Times,
is another Scientologist: Westside businessman Isadore Chait. In a
separate interview, Bagley, the executive director, claimed not to
know who the board members were, other than Robertson and O'Meara.
He said he believed the board also included a Scientologist from
Minnesota and a Buddhist from New York, neither of whom he was able
to name. Incredibly, when approached a second time, Robertson
professed that he wasn't even aware that Bagley was CAN's executive
director. "Who told you that?" he asked. Informed that Bagley,
as well as O'Meara, had identified Bagley as holding the position,
an agitated Robertson responded, "Well, we'll see about that."
An energetic woman in her 40s, O'Meara explains the new CAN's
mission as helping to dispel fear and misunderstanding about
unconventional religious groups. "When someone calls about
Scientology -- and they do -- the first thing I tell them is, 'Oh,
listen, don't get upset but I'm a Scientologist. We need to talk.'
" She presides over a cramped one-room office on the fourth floor
of the Taft Building, rising at the southeast corner of L.A.'s most
legendary intersection, Hollywood and Vine. The room is almost
bare, except for some folding tables, a few phones, a computer,
and a fax machine. On a wall is a map of the United States that
shows the locations of academics and other experts to which O'Meara
and others who answer CAN's phones link callers needing more
information. The list is a who's who of what the anti-cult
movement would describe as cult apologists: Maloney, Shupe,
J. Gordon Melton at UC Santa Barbara, and a dozen others,
including CAN's very own Robertson. Listening to her, one gets
the impression O'Meara has never met a cult she didn't like.
The new CAN takes pains to avoid even the use of the word "cult."
"It's a pejorative that's lost its meaning," she explains.
Such a view appears incongruous for a group whose name, after all,
is the Cult Awareness Network. But there's a strategic reason for
it. "The name is a service mark," O'Meara says. "We only use it
to keep it from going back into the public domain." (Or, as
Priscilla Coates suggests, to prevent anyone associated with the
vanquished CAN from getting dibs on it.) Surprisingly, among those
who see the current CAN's name as a misnomer is none other than
Robertson. He acknowledges that upon becoming (ostensibly, at
least) the top official of the new CAN, he moved to dump the
moniker and pressed to have the group use the name of the parent
entity, the Foundation for Religious Freedom. "I was overruled,"
he says. He declines to say by whom.
For the Cult Awareness Network's new handlers, no detail has seemed
too small in making life miserable for the church's critics. After
Coates and her husband sold their home in Glendale and moved to
upstate New York, she says "swarms of private investigators,"
whom she is convinced were hired by the church, descended on her
community, asking neighbors about her and her husband, staking out
their farmhouse, and, for a time, tailing her wherever she went.
More eerily still, back in L.A. the new CAN called the phone
company to request Coates' abandoned home telephone number. When
New Times called the number recently, Bagley, the Scientologist,
answered, "Cult Awareness Network." Although incensed at the idea
of Scientologists fielding calls from unsuspecting clients, Coates
says she has accepted that there's nothing she can do about it.
"It's a tragedy," she says, "but we take comfort in our belief that
the word is spreading about what [the new] CAN really is."
O'Meara steadfastly insists that the church played no role in the
predecessor group's downfall. "[Scientology] didn't destroy the
[original] Cult Awareness Network," she says. "The Cult Awareness
Network destroyed itself by its flagrant disregard for the rights
of others." Stacy Brooks, the ex-wife of former Hubbard right-hand
man Robert Vaughn Young, scoffs at such declarations. As a former
operative in the church's Guardian Office, which later became the
Office of Special Operations, Brooks says she personally headed a
mission to disrupt the anti-cult group's activities and those of
Coates in particular. "We used to sit around and review what we
were doing to CAN on a weekly basis," she says. "We harassed
Priscilla in any way that we could." Now friends with Coates, she
and Young abandoned Scientology in the early '90s, becoming some of
the highest-ranking insiders ever to do so.
Still, to the victor belong the spoils. As the embodiment of
Scientology's triumph over its nemesis, today's Cult Awareness
Network doesn't shy away from promoting Hubbard's teachings.
Among the first publications bearing its imprimatur was a pamphlet
that had nothing whatsoever to do with cult awareness. Or did it?
Its title: Fact vs. Fiction, Scientology: the Inside Story at Last.
(c) 1999 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved.
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