13 Senate committee backs Xenophon campaign

In a breakthrough for Senator Nick Xenophon’s campaign against Scientology, an Australian senate committee has backed his call for closer monitoring of groups that enjoy tax-exempt status.

An Australian senate committee has endorsed Senator Nick Xenophon’s call for a charity commission to monitor charities and religious groups that enjoy tax-exempt status – a keystone of his campaign against Scientology.

The Senate’s economics committee called for the new body to apply a public benefit test, like the one already used in Britain and New Zealand, to ensure that groups deserve their tax-exempt status.

Xenophon had already proposed this in a private members bill.[1]

But the report said: “The Committee views the bill … as too narrow to respond to the broad range of issues identified by the Committee.”

It therefore went beyond the tax issues covered in its inquiry and called for a review of cult-like organisations and their effect on individuals and society.

It noted in particular the work of the French government’s cult watchdog Miviludes.[2]

A statement from Senator Xenophon’s office welcomed the committee’s report.

“This is a win for all taxpayers who have unknowingly been supporting organisations with no proof that they deserve charitable status,” he said.

“More importantly, this is a huge win for people whose lives have been significantly damaged by the actions of certain organisations who have been enjoying tax exemption under the label of 'charity' or 'religion', but whose behaviours have been far from charitable,” he added.

He called for the Committee's recommendations to be implemented as soon as possible.

“… time for action”

The committee was clearly impressed with the testimony of some former Scientologists who did not think the movement deserved tax-exempt status, quoting some of them at length in the report.[3]

The report quoted what former member James Anderson told the committee on this point:

One should be able to clearly identify groups who do good works, because they see the results.

If one cannot see those results, that particular group should be deemed to be highly suspect and should be treated as such.

I guarantee if you asked the same taxpayer what good works Scientology do and what they are known for, they would actually struggle to give you an answer. I know I do.

That was one of the things I found very difficult to reconcile in my association with Scientology over 25 years. I  in fact found them to be quite self-serving and not really directed at the external environment.

The committee quoted another former member, Carmel Underwood, whose letter to Senator Xenophon helped persuade him to launch his campaign.

… as a former Scientologist I believe that the Church of Scientology is a prime example of why this tax amendment is required.

As I outlined in detail in the attachment to my submission, the Church of Scientology is a tax-exempt organisation which, one, enjoys tax-exempt status while it only serves itself at the detriment of others.

It does not even serve its members. Its members actually serve it.

Two, it is fraudulent. It deceives and heavily coerces its people in order to obtain so-called donations.

It often does not deliver what is promised, and in some cases it uses those funds for purposes other than what is stated.

This is fraud and it is a crime.

Three, it is an organisation which threatens its people with ‘pay up or else’. This is extortion.

And perhaps most shocking of all, it quoted former member Janette Vonthenthoff:

The experiences include bullying and harassment; two coerced abortions; Scientology justice procedures, including court hearings resulting in removal of freedoms; forced financial donations; severe financial stress; working a minimum of 40 hours and up to 70 hours a week for no pay; removal of my Australian passport while studying for Scientology in the US, so I was unable to leave; working under duress all night on many occasions while my young children were forced to stay at the office and sleep on the lounge; threats of loss of my family if I tried to leave; psychological abuse; being forced to sign a suicide waiver, freeing Scientology of all responsibility if I caused myself any harm, when I made it clear how much I wanted to leave; and interrogation regarding my personal life and sex life.

The summary of the report made it clear that time for talk was over.

“The Committee agrees with the view expressed to it that there comes a time when a government has to make a decision either to do something or to stop saying that it is going to do something, because the matter has been on the agenda for many years.

“It is now time for action.”

The French connection

In its reference to France’s Miviludes, the committee said:

The Committee recommends that the Attorney-General's Department provide a report to the Committee on the operation of Miviludes and other law enforcement agencies overseas tasked with monitoring and controlling the unacceptable and/or illegal activities of cult-like organisations who use psychological pressure and breaches of general and industrial law to maintain control over individuals. The report should advise on the effectiveness of Miviludes and other similar organisations, given issues that need to be addressed to develop an international best practice approach for dealing with cult-like behaviour.[4]

This goes substantially further than the public benefit test around which Xenophon had based his private members’ bill.

That test drew on existing British legislation, which takes a more moderate approach in this area than France.

France’s Miviludes takes a far tougher line on the issue of the groups it is happy to call cults, reflecting the fiercely secular nature of French society.

France goes further than most countries in having legislation that allows for the banning of a cult if convicted of serious criminal activities – though the law has yet to be applied to a major movement.

There is no suggestion that Australia is preparing to go down that path.

It is nevertheless remarkable progress for Xenophon’s campaign, which started less than a year ago.

On November 17, the senator delivered a withering attack on Scientology, citing in detail from letters he had received from former members.[5]

His speech, in which he described the movement as a criminal organisation masquerading as a religion, called for a Senate inquiry into its tax-exempt status, something the previous government denied him.

His revised approach, focussing on a broader public test for all charities, has had greater success however.

Australia’s Labor Party today confirmed its position as the new government, albeit with a majority of only one vote in the lower house of parliament, after winning the backing of two independent MPs.

The outgoing Labor administration under Kevin Rudd did not back Senator Xenophon’s original campaign.

But last month the incoming government indicated that it was ready to take a closer look at regulation of the “not-for-profit” sector.

What is significant about the economics committee’s recommendations is that they have the support of both the main parties.

With Labor's attitude having already shifted on this issue, it seems that much more likely that  the government will look favourably on the committee's recommendations.

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[1] The Tax Laws Amendment (Public Benefit Test) Bill 2010.
[2] MIVILUDES is the French acronym for the Inter-ministerial Mission for Vigilance and the Struggle against Cult-like tendencies. It is attached to the French prime minister's office.
[3] The following are from pp 47 and 48 of the report.
[4] Pages 3-4 of the committee’s report.
[5] See Australian Senator attacks ‘criminal’ Scientology elsewhere on this site, and the subsequent articles in the same series.

6 Disconnection

By the early 1990s years of over-work and lack of sleep were taking their toll on Maureen Bolstad’s health. Scientology’s solution was to force her to disconnect from her mother.

For everyone who worked in Scientology Sea Organization, particularly at the International Base, near Hemet, in California, the priority was to “make it go right”.

Every Sea Org member knew that their superiors did not want to hear about their problems: they only wanted solutions.

But this gung-ho, can-do attitude meant staff pushed themselves beyond their natural limits. This was as true for Maureen Bolstad as it was for any of the others.

On one occasion in 1988 she worked four days and four nights without sleep. She and her film crew colleagues had been told they could not go home until a job had been done.

She was on her fifth day up when she fell asleep at her computer terminal. A colleague tried to wake her up, she recalled in a posting to the Ex Scientologist Message Board.

“I heard his voice like it was coming from a tunnel and he was calling me from far away… [b]ut I was struggling to get myself to wake up and just get my eyes open.

“Everything was really fuzzy. When I woke up, I was gasping for air and my lungs and throat were burning.

“My whole body had this strange tingling feeling like a hand or a foot that had fallen asleep and was waking up, but it was all over my whole body.

“My head was throbbing and my chest and lower neck area felt like someone had punched me really really hard. It was all cramped up…”

While that was perhaps her longest period without sleep, pulling overnighters were fairly common at the base – and seven hours’ sleep a night was just a dream for most of the staff there.

A year later, in 1989, she was tidying up some video cables, cutting off the excess ends when one of her superiors took it upon himself to start bawling her out.

Flustered and distracted, she turned back to her work – and a wire from the cable went into her left eye.

But she still had to finish the job.

The next day, running a high temperature and with a splitting headache, she was given antibiotics and an eye patch and told to rest.

Within an hour – and despite being in a great deal of pain – she had been pulled back to work.

Although her eye eventually healed, she lost her 20/20 vision.

Enturbulation

Like many of her colleagues Maureen Bolstad had for years soldiered on despite a crushing workload, little or no sleep and virtually no time off.

Then in 1991, when discipline at the base tightened, Bolstad started getting into trouble.

She was missing too many of the obligatory musters, the roll calls that had been introduced as part of the new “get tough” regime.

She was still a key member of film crew and her colleagues tried to cover for her, explaining that she was sick – which by this time was no more than the truth.

But that just generated more problems.

Rather than attribute her illness to overwork and lack of sleep, her superiors decided the real problem was “enturbulation” – a Hubbardism for commotion and upset – from the outside world.

They explained to her that her mentally ill mother’s constant depression, her chronic sickness, was a sure sign that she was “below 2.0” on the tone scale.

The tone scale is a chart of Hubbard’s devising – and so by definition infallible. It is supposed to chart the range of emotional states, assigning numerical values to each one: from “body death” at zero on the scale to “Serenity of Beingness” at 40.

Maureen’s superiors showed her passages from one of Hubbard’s early works, The Science of Survival (1951) to explain why being below 2.0 (“antagonism”) was so serious.

“I was shown chapters … about how terrible people are below that tone level,” she said. “It implied that she was indeed a suppressive person by virtue of the fact that she was chronically ill.”

Her superiors wanted her to break off contact from her mother.

But one of the main reasons she had got involved in Scientology was the recruiter's promise that the skills it offered might help her cure her mother’s mental illness.

For Scientology however, the fact that her mother was being treated by a psychiatrist – and taking psychiatric drugs – meant that she was beyond help. For only high-tone people were able to advance up Scientology’s Bridge to Total Freedom.

During her 18 years at the International Base, Maureen had managed to get clearance to visit her perhaps three times, each time for less than a week. “Because my mother was seeing a psychiatrist I was discouraged from seeing her at all.”

Now however she was being told to sever all links with her.

Disconnection

Bolstad had already had a taste of how devastating the disconnection process could be.

Early on in her Scientology career, she had been told to break contact from her step-father, who had been unhappy that her mother had let her join the Sea Org.

Bolstad was devoted to her step-father: he fixed her up when she messed up a knee skateboarding; he bought her first dictionaries for her; and his coaching in maths and science helped her shine at school. Her step-father had been there for her when she needed him.

But her superiors in Scientology had decided he was suppressive.

They gave her a draft of a letter and made her copy it out: in it, she said she told him she would have no more contact with him.

It was only later that her sister, who had followed her into Scientology, told her the effect the letter had had on him. He had been devastated, reduced to tears – something she had never imagined.

It was her first real taste of Scientology’s ethics system. And even if later, she had been permitted to re-establish contact with him, it left its mark.

Now she was being told to cut off contact with her mother.

“I was informed that disconnecting would be better for her too, because then she would not feel guilty for dragging me down with her,” she recalled.

In 1992, under pressure from her ethics officers, Maureen did as she was told and disconnected.

“I actually wrote her a formal letter,” she recalled. “I didn’t want to send it, I chickened out, but my sister had already sent hers and I thought, ‘Oh shoot, I guess I better send mine,’ and I did – and I so regretted it because it upset my mother so much...

“That just totally ruined everything: I disconnected from my mother, which is the whole reason I was there.”

Eventually however, the guilt proved too much.

By 1994 she was back in touch with her mother, writing letters and even managing to get one phone call past her supervisors. She wanted to make it up to her mother for having cut her out of her life. She even planned to visit.

Again, her superiors intervened.

This time they quoted Scientology’s ethic code, warning her that she could be expelled if she did not disconnect once and for all.

“…dispose of them…”

Since her mother was considered suppressive because of the psychiatric treatment she was receiving, Maureen had already been labelled PTS – a “potential trouble source” – for having resumed contact.

“I had all these restrictions placed on me … I was no longer allowed to make phone calls on my own or to come and go from work without an escort or special authorization.

“There was an Ethics Officer who said this was a serious matter. He showed me the Hubbard policies I was in violation of by being in touch with my mother.”

Hubbard, in his Introduction to Scientology Ethics, lists a series of “suppressive acts”, deeds which in themselves are enough to merit being cast out of the movement. One of them is Failure to handle or disavow or disconnect from a person demonstrably guilty of suppressive acts.  

“The Ethics Officer put the dots together and the picture to him was that I was not just harming myself, but all of Scientology by remaining in communication with my mother.

“My mother wasn’t hurting anyone – she just wanted me to visit, that’s all.  She never gave me a hard time about my involvement in Scientology – she could have but she didn’t.  She just needed to see me, give me a hug and I needed to see her too.”

“I didn’t want to disconnect again, I didn’t think it was right, I tried to get my mother to stop taking psychiatric drugs and seeing a psychiatrist.

“I was shown other Hubbard references about how psychiatrists were evil, how mental illnesses are things that they make up and that the drugs my mother was taking were doing more harm than good. I had to get her to take vitamins instead.”

Since Maureen still believed that Scientology was the only true path to spiritual freedom, the threat of being cast out of the movement weighed heavily on her.

“I was being threatened with an SP [Suppressive Person] declare, and being barred from all future Scientology services... So I tried to ‘handle’ my mother and get her to stop her medications.”

As soon as her mother came off her lithium however, she started hearing voices again and was soon committed to a mental institution.

Maureen’s superiors never did manage to get her to make a definitive break with her mother, and this issue was one of factors in her eventual decision to quit her staff post in the movement.

“I felt let down by Scientology completely, because it had done nothing but cause my mother heartache and worsen her situation and life.

“The promises made to me in the beginning were just a bunch of lies to get me to work for them for nothing.”

But it had taken her years to realise that Scientology did not have the answer for her mother’s condition, despite what her recruiter had told her.

                                                        

It took a little longer before she realised that Scientology did not have the answer to her own problems either.

In fact, Hubbard did set a solution for people like her mother who registered low on his tone scale. In The Science of Survival, he wrote that they should not have civil rights “of any kind”.

And since such people could not be reasoned with, there were only two other options, he argued.

One was to try to raise them up the tone scale through Hubbard’s Dianetics processing, he wrote. “The other is to dispose of them quietly and without sorrow.”

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12 Xenophon Ups the Ante

Senator Nick Xenophon is calling for a judicial inquiry into Scientology after fresh allegations of abuse from an ABC investigation.

Australia’s Senator Nick Xenophon has returned to attack and is calling for a full judicial inquiry into Scientology following further revelations about the movement.

His call comes a week after he won a Senate committee inquiry into his private member’s bill, which proposes a public interest test for charities and religions claiming tax breaks.[1]

The change of tactics came after revelations in two reports from Australia’s ABC television that corroborated allegations the senator made in a speeches to the Senate in November.[2]

A first report from Lateline interviewed Scarlett Hanna, who grew up in Scientology as the daughter of members of the elite Sea Org.[3]

“It was just an incredibly lonely childhood,” said Hanna, whose mother is Vicki Dunstan, president of Scientology in Australia, and the movement’s former director of public affairs, Mark Hanna.

 “I had no one to talk to, or to look after me, or to ask me how I was after school – or any of those things that most of us take for granted.”

She told how children of Sea Org members were treated like cattle: living in overcrowded dormitories they were looked after by nannies and saw very little of their parents.

Food and medical care was inadequate and the movement actively deceived social services when they conducted inspections, she added.

Scientology has denied the allegations: a Scientologist who grew up with Hanna told Lateline said her account bore no relation to what she had experienced.

But a second report from ABC was even more damning.

It corroborated a former Scientologist’s allegation that the movement covered up child sexual abuse by one of its members.

This case was first cited by Senator Xenophon in the November 2009 speech to Senate that launched his campaign for an investigation into the movement.

At the time, he was careful to omit any identifying details.

But Carmen Rainer, the victim of the abuse, has gone public in an interview with Lateline.[4]

She told how, between the ages of seven to 11, she was molested by her then step-father. Both her mother and step-father were Scientologists at the time.

Carmen’s mother Phoebe went to Scientology’s chaplain when her daughter disclosed the abuse.

Both now say that Scientology executives put pressure on them to keep it from the police.

“They told me it was my fault because I'd been bad in a past life,” Carmen told Lateline. “I’d probably done something bad in a past life so I pulled it in.”

And she believed them, said Carmen.

“I was 11. That's what I knew. I grew up believing what they believed.”

Both mother and daughter accuse Jan Eastgate, a senior figure in the movement, of having coached them on how to lie to police.

Eastgate was at the time head of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights in Australia, the Scientology-founded organisation that campaigns against psychiatry. She now heads up the CCHR internationally in Los Angeles.

Xenophon learned of this incident last year from former Scientologist Carmel Underwood’s letter to him.

Underwood wrote that when she discovered that both mother and daughter were being drilled to lie to the police about the abuse, she had tried to object but was over-ruled.[5]

“I was told it was none of my business,” she told the Lateline investigation.[6]

As Lateline makes clear – and Scientology acknowledges – police records show that the man in question finally confessed to the abuse.

In their statement rebutting the Lateline report, the movement said he went to the police because they had pressured him to come clean.[7]

But as Phoebe Rainer told the programme, this was 13 years after the abuse took place – and only after she herself had started legal action against them.

Scientology has nevertheless dismissed the allegations in the Lateline report as “false, highly defamatory” and “vigorously denied”.

Corroborating evidence

The ABC reports find echoes not just in the letters from former Scientologists that launched Senator Xenophon’s campaign last year, but from other testimony further afield.

Hanna’s account helps corroborate claims found in the original letters to Xenophon.

Ex-Sea Org member Aaron Saxton wrote to the senator describing how as a Sea Org officer for the movement in Florida, he disrupted family life among the staff members.

He banned parents from visiting their children during working hours, knowing that most of them did not get home before 11:00 pm.

“This resulted in broken and dysfunctional families,” he wrote.

Saxton described how he fabricated paperwork to fool the authorities that children based at the Florida base were being properly educated.[8]

And Carmel Underwood described how the children of Scientology’s management staff were exploited, put to work for the movement after school.

“These children… were expected to perform like adults, and were treated as such. They saw their parents for maybe an hour, maybe once or twice a week,” she wrote.

The boys had a particular hard time of it, receiving “bare minimum food rations” and made to do hard labour, she added.[9]

Similar claims regarding the exploitation and abuse of children form the core of some of the lawsuits filed in California.

Laura DeCrescenzo, for one, was recruited into the Sea Org at the age of 12; and John Lindstein says he was doing manual labour for the movement from the age of eight, was working 15-hour days from age 10 and received no formal education from the age of 12.[10]

Nor is this the only case of Scientology covering up abuse or criminal activity to protect its reputation.

Paul Schofield, another former member, confessed in his letter to Senator Xenophon to having collaborated with the movement in the cover-up of his own daughters’ deaths.

But he also cited other cases of child abuse that Scientology either covered up, or at the very least failed to report.[11]

And in her recently published book Scientology – Abuse at the Top Amy Scobee tells how, at the age of 14, while working at a Scientology centre in the United States, she was raped by a 35-year-old colleague, a married man, Darryl.[12]

Somehow, Scientology executives found out and she was summoned for a meeting.

“I sat down with the Ethics Officer and she told me that I was in a condition of treason for my involvement with Darryl and I was to write up my lower conditions,” she wrote.[13]

Senator Xenophon’s new call for a judicial inquiry focuses specifically on Scientology: the committee into his private member’s bill, while it may end up focussing on the movement, is more broadly based.

But while the evidence submitted to the committee inquiry will enjoy the legal protection afforded official government proceedings – parliamentary privilege – a judicial inquiry is a sharper-edged weapon.

“Too many people have come forward with sickening tales of systemic abuse within this organisation…” the senator told the Australian media.

“We have allegations of child abuse, coerced abortions, false imprisonment, bullying and extortion. Surely the victims of Scientology deserve a proper inquiry,” he added.[14]

Xenophon tried and failed earlier this year to get a Senate investigation into the allegations against Scientology, based on the evidence provided to him by former members.

At the time, Scientology was quick to celebrate. The decision was a “victory for religious” freedom, said Vicki Dunstan in a March 11 statement.[15]

None of the allegations made by Xenophon against the movement had been proved, she said.

That last claim sounds rather less convincing in view of the latest allegations: all the more so because one of the main sources for the Lateline exposé was Vicki Dunstan’s daughter, Scarlett Hanna.

Scientology ethics

Amy Scobee, writing of her rape ordeal, explained how Scientology blamed and punished her for what had happened.

Her attacker was not removed from his post, but she was transferred to work at another Scientology centre nearby. Neither she nor the Ethics Officer told her parents about what had happened.

“There was this sort of agreement amongst the Scientology staff to keep such ‘internal situations’ to ourselves, thus concealing anything that could potentially reflect badly on the church if it were made known – an unspoken policy still firmly in place and very prevalent to this day,” she wrote.[16]

But it does not take too much to tease out the internal thinking behind such behaviour from the writings of Scientology’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard.

Hubbard’s system of Dynamics, a particularly perverse form of utilitarianism, makes it clear that the survival of Scientology, the group, is more important than that of the individual.

Hubbard claimed that the first dynamic was the individual, the second the family, the third the group: and the fourth, he wrote, was the species.

Hubbard convinced his followers that Scientology was nothing less than humanity’s last, best hope.

By this logic then, the movement’s needs take priorities over those of individual members, their relationships or even their families, which explains a lot about the harsh regime in the Sea Org.[17]

Amy Scobee found this out the hard way, as she writes in her book.

She writes about getting to phone home to wish her mother Happy Holidays on Christmas Day, 2004, after more than a decade in the Sea Org without ever having been given permission to take leave to see her family.

Her mother is clearly upset during the phone call, and Amy knows she doesn’t believe her promise that she will arrange to get a leave of absence to come visit – she’s been 17 years away, after all.

Then she gets a note from her mother, who makes it clear that saving the world is not a good enough reason to neglect her family.

“I know you’re terribly busy, but sometimes fuck the planet and the universe – what about us?”

And Amy realizes that she is right.

I sat there and thought this over, she writes in her book. I could not figure out what was wrong with any mother wanting to talk to their daughter. It made me so upset that my mum felt she had to apologise for wanting to talk to me!

This attitude is hammered in by the church where the group is all and the individual is nothing and anything that cuts across 100 percent dedication to the cause is an enemy…

Which is part what of helped her to leave the movement.[18]

All this thinking has its roots in Hubbard’s Introduction to Scientology Ethics, which also sets out the list of high crimes: suppressive acts that would justify expelling the offender from the movement.

Hubbard here pays lip service to the legal proprieties: it is a high crime in Scientology to commit a felony, for example. But it is also a high crime to:

n      give public statements against Scientology;

n      testify hostilely before state or public inquiries into Scientology to suppress it;

n      report or threaten to report Scientology or Scientologists to civil authorities in an effort to suppress Scientology of Scientologists…;

n      deliver up the person of a Scientologist without justifiable defence or lawful protest to the demands of civil or criminal law.[19]

When Scientology is faced with denouncing abuses within its own ranks, Hubbard’s system has conflicting priorities.

Having listed his high crimes in Introduction to Scientology Ethics, Hubbard repeats that none of the above should be construed as a justification for violating the laws of the land.

But this is clearly just window-dressing: for if Scientology is the last, best hope for humanity as his followers believe, then his law of dynamics dictates that its needs must come first.

Hubbard even defines high crimes explicitly in terms of what is bad for Scientology – not for society as a whole.

“Suppressive acts are clearly those covert or overt acts knowingly calculated to reduce or destroy the influence or activities of Scientology or prevent case gains or continued Scientology success and activity on the part of a Scientologist.”[20]

And once you cut through the jargon, his definition of ethics is equally clear: again, it’s about what is good for Scientology.

“The purpose of ethics is to remove counter intentions from the environment” he wrote in one policy letter. “And having accomplished that the purpose becomes to remove other intentionedness from the environment.”[21]

Former Scientologist Gerry Armstrong, now a veteran critic of the movement, translated that in a 2004 affidavit.

“In other words, anyone or anything that was ‘counter intention’ to Scientology’s intentions or activities, and anyone with an intention that differed from the organization’s intentions was unethical and was to be removed from the environment.”[22]

In his 1996 affidavit, former Sea Org member turned critic Martin Ottmann had already reached a similar conclusion.

“The purpose of Scientology-ethics is therefore to impose one’s will on others. The purpose of the Sea Org, which is to get ethics in on the planet, is therefore to dominate the world,” he wrote.

“Scientology has exposed itself as a fascist organization, [which] reaches for world domination and nothing else.”[23]

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[1] See the previous posting, 11 Xenophon wins Committee Inquiry.

[2] See the posting that opened the section of this site, 1 Australian Senator attacks ‘criminal’ Scientology.

[3] Broadcast last Monday, May 18, the full transcript is available here.

[4] The second report went out May 19, the following night: ABC link here, transcript will presumably follow.

[5] Page 28 of the letters here. Note that in the copy of the letter submitted to the Senate, Senator Xenophon was careful to redact any identifying details, thus protecting not just the family involved but people accused of the cover-up. For my summary of the letter, see elsewhere on the site.

[6] She explained to Lateline that she found out about this after inadvertently walking in on Eastgate coaching Carmen Rainer.

[7] Mark Bunker has a link to their statement at his site.

[8] See 3 Aaron Saxton’s letter: in the US.

[9] See 8 Carmel Underwood’s Letter II.

[10] See 14 Laura DeCrescenzo’s Lawsuit, and 3 Laura DeCrescenzo’s Speech; and 16 John Lindstein’s Lawsuit elsewhere on this site.

[11] See 5 Paul Schofield’s Letter, elsewhere on this site.

[12] Scientology: Abuse at the Top. Scobee Publishing 2010.

[13] Page 13. And as she told Lateline, she later heard that the man had been promoted to be an Ethics Officer himself, which is to say he was entrusted with taking care of discipline and good conduct among his fellow Scientologists.

[14] From The West Australian, though the original source appears to have been the Australian Associated Press.

[15] You can find statement at the Scientology Australia website.

[16] Pp13-14.

[17] Hubbard’s system of dynamics run up to eight: the Supreme Being. And some of his writings give the impression that he had himself in mind for that post. But let’s not get into to that one this time around.

[18] Scientology: Abuse at the Top. Scobee Publishing 2010: pp 182-183.

[19] From Hubbard’s Introduction to Scientology Ethics, Chapter Seven: The Ethics Code, in the section on Suppressive Acts, pp 206 to 223 of my edition.

[20] Op. cit. p 223

[21] Hubbard Communications Office Policy Letter, June 18, 1968.

[22] Gerry Armstrong, Complaint Report, February 16, 2004.

[23] Martin Ottmann’s affidavit, April 19, 1996: the conclusion to Section to C.