Anton LaVey was a mediocre douchebag
Or: "How the Church of Satan founder was a piece of shit in lots of boring ways, too"
The original title for this was "Satanic rule of earth #9: Do not harm little children*" but then it expanded on us as a project.
We're going to talk about three things in order, with the purpose to prove with evidence that — far from being a diabolical, monstrous villain of infamy and atrocious deeds — the author of The Satanic Bible was just boringly and commonly horrible, as so many shitty dudes you already know are shitty.
1. "Anton LaVey's first marriage to a 15-year-old girl was pretty fucked up, huh?" Initially that's all it was supposed to be. Grown man grooming and marrying a child. But of course it's worse than that and doesn't stop there.
2. "Oh, damn LaVey was gross." LaVey being a weird little guy who liked smellz is somewhat well-known, sure. But in the process of working on this, we just kept running across more examples of LaVey's romantic relationships being shitty and even abusive in the mundane ways so many men are, and that on top of the physical unpleasantness of not bathing or brushing his teeth. Really unpleasant dude.
3. "Wow, Anton LaVey did not give a shit about child sexual abuse going on." Mind you, this is not in a "ritual abuse" way. Nothing so salacious or lurid as that. We mean the typical, "Eh, what's the big deal?" when people around him hurt children, especially when it was powerful people and those he considered his friends.
And that's why this is so fucking long. Anton LaVey is a mediocre douchebag, and it starts way back and goes on until the day he fucking dies.
1. "Anton LaVey's first marriage to a 15-year-old girl was pretty fucked up, huh?"
This was the first and initially only issue we wanted to talk about. That said, we were not able to definitively answer this original question about California state law:
The age of consent in California has been 18 years old since 1911, but what are (and circa 1950 were) the loopholes as far as adults being able to lawfully marry minors?
California Codes Text Search
CHAPTER 1. Rape, Abduction, Carnal Abuse of Children, and Seduction [261 - 269] ( Chapter 1 enacted 1872. ) 261.5. (a) Unlawful sexual intercourse is an act of sexual intercourse accomplished with a person who is not the spouse of the perpetrator, if the person is a minor. For the purposes of this section, a “minor” is a person under 18 years of age and an “adult” is a person who is 18 years of age or older. (b) A person who engages in an act of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor who is not more than three years older or three years younger than the perpetrator, is guilty of a misdemeanor. (c) A person who engages in an act of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor who is more than three years younger than the perpetrator is guilty of either a misdemeanor or a felony, and shall be punished by imprisonment in a county jail not exceeding one year, or by imprisonment pursuant to subdivision (h) of Section 1170. (d) A person 21 years of age or older who engages in an act of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor who is under 16 years of age is guilty of either a misdemeanor or a felony, and shall be punished by imprisonment in a county jail not exceeding one year, or by imprisonment pursuant to subdivision (h) of Section 1170 for two, three, or four years.
(See also, FineLaw.com and George Mason University.)
For years, the standard Church of Satan line about Anton LaVey's first wife Carole Lansing is that, despite four decades of statutory law, it was actually totally cool and normal back then for a 21-year-old man to marry and then impregnate a 15-year-old girl in California in 1950.
@/ChurchofSatan 13 Sep 2024 LaVey’s first wife Carole Lansing was 15 when they were married in 1951, he was 21. This was not an uncommon age for marriage at the time and her parents approved of the wedding. They were happily married for 9 years before going their separate ways on good terms. Trying to apply contemporary morality to normal relationships 3/4ths of a century ago is ridiculous. His relationships were always consensual and with women whose age was comparable to his own. It’s not worth wasting your time with this troll, they been making ignorant baseless claims since the start and are just trying to bait people into replying.
And it may even be true that her parents went along with it in 1951.
But.
This Rolling Stone article from 1991 pushes their ages back a year further.
LaVey drifted to San Francisco, and it was here, in 1950, that he met a tiny teenage blonde named Carole Lansing. They married a year later, even though Carole was only fifteen. The Korean War was going on at the time, and in order to evade the draft, LaVey signed up to study criminology at San Francisco's City College. His first daughter, Karla, was born in 1952. ... The first time the name LaVey - or actually, La Vey - makes an appearance in the official records is the wedding application filed in Reno on September 4th, 1951, between Carole Lansing and Howard Anton La Vey. They were divorced in 1962. Karla LaVey says that her mother died in 1975.)
That's a pretty big difference.
Anton LaVey was born April 11, 1930. If it's correct that Carole Louise Lansing was born Aug. 20, 1936, that means that — depending on when in the year they met in 1950 — Carole Lansing was 13-14 years old while LaVey was 19-20. Imagine for a moment the two met in June. That's a 20-year-old man and 13-year-old girl. Think about yourself at those ages, or people you know now. How do you feel about that?
From above, they get married in September 1951 (Carole 15, LaVey 21), and about 11 months later, their daughter Karla is born July 31, 1952.
So someone looking to defend Anton LaVey in terms of adhering to LaVeyan Satanism's "law and order philosophy" would have to say, yeah, the 20-year-old man met the "tiny teenage blonde" in 1950 and then had a completely chaste relationship with her up until the point where he secured her parents' legal permission for marriage and took her across state lines to Reno to do it for some reason, consummating it within a few months but after they were husband and wife and it was all completely legal by the letter of the law.
There is also a simpler explanation, and that's that Anton LaVey, the noted Ayn Rand-appreciator and in many ways bog-standard right-libertarian was also bog-standard in that way, too: chafing at any government regulations forcing their girlfriend to sit in a car seat.
We don't have dates to go along with these photos, but just giving it the eye test, some things about this sorta don't change.
From Burton Wolfe's 2008 book The Black Pope, we do have this, as well for Carole Lansing:
Wolfe has some issues, and we'll get to the bit about Anton LaVey remarrying later.
Anyway, at least the "Eleven Satanic Rules of Earth" that also appeared in 1969's The Satanic Bible explicitly state, "Do not harm little children," so we do have to give that to LaVey that.
(Then again, "little"?)
It's not really a stretch to see the similarity and consilience between a "law and order philosophy" and "age of consent by territory" aficionados traveling to other countries and exploiting their poverty and laws. "No, no, no officers. I waited to make sexual advances on the child prostitute until after I got the mating signal, you see. That makes it legal and Satanically ethical."
OK, you might say, "That's all a reach," or agree with the Church of Satan's official line above that, laws aside (and, for example, the cratering of Jerry Lee Lewis's career when he at 22 married a 13-year-old in 1958), it was a different time. What's the big deal?
Importantly, an apologist may argue, LaVey continued to pursue relations with younger women from then on, sure, but mostly not teenagers anymore. And they were “student witch” groupies coming to him, or whatever. He did not habitually or by preference seek out 13-year-olds after his first marriage.
But.
As fun and easy as it is to dunk on the Catholic Church for stuff like this, this is more a feature of the level of power and influence one organization has over society versus the other.
Josh Markey: "The Church of Satan protects rapists and child abusers" Church of Satan: "You must be confusing us with the Catholics"
A description of opportunity is not really a statement of virtues of values, and statements mean little when set next to real actions.
We've shown before that LaVey was politically weird and off-putting. That is, in terms of larger politics, neo-Nazi and white nationalist ties were allowed and even cultivated by Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan for years. Antifascist researcher Spencer Sunshine, PhD's latest book goes into much exhaustive detail, if you need a better authority than us.
But self-evidently, you don't get to the point of recording this alternate take with white nationalist cartoonist "A. Wyatt Mann" as a lil' whoopsie.
CW: uncensored slurs
However, here we also specifically mean Anton LaVey was off-putting in terms of older men and younger women and girls when the older men were neo-Nazis.
"Do not harm little children," remember? But in reality, Anton LaVey and his church did not care if you did.
From that previous article:
Mason is a man called the the "Godfather of Fascist Terrorism" but also a pretty open child predator, eventually arrested on charges of possession of child pornography for nude photos of one of the 15-year-olds he was "dating", although the plea deal ultimately didn't include that in his conviction. Mason was 40 years old in 1992.
This seems like a diversion, and you may even argue it’s too tenuous and therefore unfair, but this same thing is going to come back around again and worse, don't worry.
2. "Oh, damn LaVey was gross."
First, let's rewind a little bit.
LaVey is 21 years old when he marries 15-year-old Carole Lansing. It doesn't work out, but remember, the Church of Satan's official narrative is "They were happily married for 9 years before going their separate ways on good terms."
OK, but what actually happened specifically?
By age 29, Wolfe's book says LaVey was trying to make ends meet playing organ music at Mori's Point Inn:
One Sunday evening [in 1959] the manager of the Seavue Theater in Pacifica brought a seventeen-year-old usherette with long blond hair to the inn as his dinner date. One of the names by which she became known, along with Diane LaVey, was Diane Evelyn Hegarty, because her biological father was James Cornelius Hegarty, a jockey and trainer of horses owned by the Aga Khan and Colonel Robert McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune. Had the theater manager taken Diane to the inn just that one time, she might never have become a part of Anton’s life. But he kept returning, and if he wanted to keep Diane for himself, that turned out to be a mistake. She became entranced with Anton.
Peter H. Gilmore's 2005 introduction of The Satanic Bible puts it the other way, "LaVey met and became entranced by Diane Hegarty in 1959."
Hegarty is born July 10, 1942, so if that's true, she's 16 or 17 then when meeting 28- or 29-year-old LaVey, who cheats on his now 23-year-old wife Lansing — the mother of his 7-year-old daughter Karla — leading Lansing to divorce him the next year.
(Also, this is still California, so as above, the age of consent is still 18.)
This is how a happy marriage ends? Your husband six years older than you starting an affair with a girl six years younger than you?
This is not to diminish that girl. Hegarty would go on to co-found the Church of Satan with LaVey, she typed and edited The Satanic Bible and other early publications with him, and she was a bookkeeper for the Church of Satan as a legal entity. She's written out of the history now, but she is why that org kept going and producing anything at all for many years. LaVey sure as fuck wasn't going to do that yeoman’s shit.
But LaVey's and Hegarty's own relationship ended in 1984 when, Hegarty alleges, LaVey's occasions of verbal and physical abuse escalated to a point where she feared for her life and she had to flee their home, the infamous San Francisco "Black House" at 6114 California Street.
If you've only heard of "The Black House" and never seen a picture of it with its neighbors before, how shabby it actually looked may come as a surprise. But it is really important for re-framing all of what else there is to see here.
CW: domestic violence
From the "First Amended Complaint" by Hegarty against LaVey, Dec. 7, 1988 (via early Church of Satan figure and Temple of Set founder Michael Aquino's 2009 edition of his Church of Satan book):
Between the dates of April 1962 and April 1984, while plaintiff and defendant continued to live together, plaintiff was periodically subjected to physical and verbal abuse by defendant LaVey.
Because of defendant’s violent and abusive behavior, plaintiff left the family residence in fear for her life on or about April 30, 1984. Plaintiff sought and obtained restraining orders against defendant LaVey in San Francisco Superior Court Case #825962. Said orders, which are effective for one year from date of issuance, were renewed on October 21, 1985 and October 29, 1986. Defendant has not stopped harassing and threatening plaintiff despite the existence of said orders. Defendant has made both oral and written threats against plaintiff between the dates of April 30, 1984 and present.
In the 1998 article "Anton LaVey: Legend and Reality," Zeena LaVey — his daughter by Hegarty — made a lot of allegations about her father, and characterizes this night in this way:
LEGEND: ASL presented himself as a loving family man. REALITY: ASL violently beat his wife Diane throughout their marriage. In 1984 a police report was made describing Diane being strangled into unconsciousness by ASL, who was in such a murderous rage that his daughter Karla had to pull him off Diane and drag her outside the house to save her life. ASL routinely physically beat and abused those of his female disciples with whom he had sex, forcing them into prostitution as part of his "Satanic counseling" and collecting their earnings. In 1986 ASL was a passive witness to the sexual molestation of his own grandson by a longtime friend who was later convicted of sex crimes with minors. In 1990 ASL informed a mentally-ill stalker of his daughter Zeena of her whereabouts and the time & location of a public appearance she was scheduled to make, deliberately endangering her life. SOURCES: San Francisco Police records of ASL attack on Diane LaVey, Zeena LaVey, Diane LaVey, Stanton LaVey.
Not everything that Zeena accuses her father of feels equally plausible, and she's gone through some wild ideological swings in her life, some of them with her then-partner "Nikolas Schreck" (Barry Dubin), who can safely be described as an esoteric fascist but also many worse things. The pair have done the exact opposite of earn "just take my word for it," basically.
In any case, even without access to the cited San Francisco police records, Zeena LaVey's statement certainly does act as another piece of support for Hegarty's account.
Aquino's 2009 edition The Church of Satan also includes an except from a Sacramento Bee article of Sep. 22, 1988:
All hell broke loose between the couple in 1984, when Diane moved out of LaVey’s California Street house, claiming LaVey had beaten her. Hegarty alleged in her lawsuit that LaVey applied a hammerlock to her neck, lifted her off the ground, and rendered her unconscious … “I pounded out the Satanic Bible on a $29 typewriter,” said Diane. “I edited it. I added to it. I ran the Church with Anton. Then he left me with nothing. “Anton refused to support me. For four years I have been scrambling to survive, doing temporary office work. I could hardly put my skills at Satanic rituals on a resume.” Diane left LaVey in 1984 to escape his alleged physical abuse. She says she fled in fear of her life after she was beaten and choked. She won a partial property settlement in 1985 but claims that LaVey reneged on it …
We're still trying to figure out which lawsuit it is where Hegarty claimed that specifically since the First Amended Complaint that Aquino includes in his book is filed a few months later and doesn't contain that. It would be nice to find if Carole Lansing's daughter Karla LaVey ever spoke about that night with Hegarty, rather than just Zeena LaVey secondhand account, since it seems like she wasn't there. In short, though, we'd say there isn't really any good reason to doubt that Anton LaVey was a shitty, abusive dude whose preference was to have much younger, less powerful women around him he could exploit for their labor, including sexual labor like bearing him children.
Enter "Blanche Barton" (Sharon Densley).
From a 1998 SF Weekly article by Jack Boulware:
She [Barton] says she discovered The Satanic Bible as a teenager living in San Diego, and kept it in mind through college. She met Anton LaVey while vacationing in the Bay Area with her family in 1984, and, she says, has been with him and the Church ever since.
Barton was born Oct. 1, 1961, and began a relationship with Anton LaVey, also in 1984. Let's assume she waits until Hegarty is out of the house in April 1984, so she's 22 or 23 now with the 54-year-old LaVey. Legal, sure, but boy is that icky as a general dynamic... and also in this specific practice.
From an interview in Burton's The Black Pope again:
Burton: Why did Anton pick Blanche Barton as the name for you? What is its significance, if any? [Barton]: He wanted me to have a name that was antithetical to that of an intellectual. Blanche Barton sounded like that to him.
In 1993, Barton gave birth to son "Satan Xerxes Carnacki LaVey," and she was with him until Anton LaVey died in 1997, possibly from the heart disease exacerbated by never brushing his teeth.
(From Burton and Aquino both quoting the same Sep. 3, 1991 declaration by Hegarty: "During the 23 years I lived with defendant LaVey, his health was always a pivotal issue. Though he refused to attend to his teeth or his personal hygiene – never bathing or seeing a dentist – he worried constantly about his hypertension and his heart murmur, diagnosed by Dr. Irving Warner in 1970.")
When LaVey died, Barton lost her home, too, because LaVey's abuse of Hegarty and inability to do basic shit contesting her claims in court meant that when Hegarty left and sought her own part of their joint holdings, LaVey got wiped out and bankrupted.
This is even more embarrassing than it looks at first glance because, it turns out, the infamous "Black House" at 6114 California Street had been bought by LaVey's parents, and then gifted to LaVey and Hegarty for nothing.
LaVey and Carole Lansing had been living in that house since 1956 when LaVey's parents bought the property and then LaVey and Hegarty lived in together from 1960 to 1984, making it look spookier and occult. The home came into LaVey and Hegarty's possession in 1971 via agreement, Hegarty says, with LaVey's dad that Hegarty and LaVey would "pay any indebtedness previously incurred against the property" by Levey, and then it was just theirs.
Which is quite a gift for a couple! Especially given how San Francisco real estate would turn out in the subsequent decades.
So, by the late 1980s, Hegarty wanted what she was legally owed and she was willing to sue to get it, and she got legal judgments in her favor to make it happen. By the early 1990s, LaVey still hadn't sold the home to be able to pay her what she was owed, and the only person he was willing to sell to was, Hegarty alleged, low-balling what it was worth as a way to be spiteful toward her.
This 1999 SF Gate article by Don Lattin, summarizes it this way:
LaVey lost ownership of the Black House in 1991, when a San Francisco judge ordered him to sell the property, along with his satanic memorabilia, and split the money with his estranged wife. Included among the devilish artifacts were a shrunken head, a reproduction of King Tut's sarcophagus, and a stuffed wolf. Despite the liquidation sale, the Black Pope was able to remain in the Black House by selling the property to a friend, San Francisco real estate developer Donald Werby, who let LaVey live out his final years in the notorious home.
So LaVey's friend Don Werby did him a kindness by buying the house, doing so in such a way that it screwed Hegarty out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and then letting LaVey stay there in the same house his parents had let him move into for free in the 1950s and gifted to him in the 1970s.
What a loser. What a piece of shit. What a pathetic fucking person to hold up as "Magus LaVey," "Doktor LaVey". Christ. (Anti-Christ?)
And what a horrible and needless position to put his partner and young child who survived him in given that there was apparently no plan in place for taking care of them after his death.
He didn't even bother to take care of the home itself while he was alive and had his fans and groupies seeking him out. Again from the SF Gate article:
Werby, the owner of the property, has his own troubles. He pleaded guilty in 1990 to two misdemeanor counts of statutory rape of underage prostitutes and to two misdemeanor counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor by offering a place for drug use. Executives at Werby's Grosvenor Properties referred questions about the Black House to Werby's son, Todd, who said the home has been devilishly difficult to sell. "We've talked to a few brokers, but it's not easily marketed as a house," he said. "It is in such a state of disrepair."
3. "Wow, Anton LaVey did not give a shit about child sexual abuse going on."
Eagle-eyed readers will wonder why we skipped over the "has his own troubles" part about Don Werby. Fear not, we will get there. It seems roundabout, but it does tie together.
That SF Weekly article by Jack Boulware published Jun 17, 1998, also included this section on the pre-history of the Church of Satan:
In the late '50s and early '60s he gave weekly lectures at his home on eccentric topics, among them vampires, cannibalism, and lycanthropy (i.e., humans who take the form of wolves). The building itself, he claimed, was once a brothel operated by Barbary Coast madam Mammy Pleasant. Regulars called themselves the “Magic Circle.” The group included aging socialites, sci-fi writer Forrest J. Ackerman, filmmaker Kenneth Anger, realtor Donald Werby and his wife Willy, who was heiress to the Chock Full o'Nuts coffee fortune, and a dildo manufacturer. Members of the group claimed to once have sampled portions of a human leg, prepared by LaVey's wife, Diane, and obtained from a doctor acquaintance.
Donald Werby's wife Willy did not appreciate this. Aquino's 2009 The Church of Satan includes this letter to the Editor to S.F. Weekly for the week of July 1-7. 1998, responding to the article claims.
My husband Don and I became friends of Anton LaVey in 1958, years before he - or his PR man - thought up the Church of Satan. At the time we were involved with Camera Obscura Film Society and shared his interest in movies. We were never involved with the Church of Satan in any way. Never joined. Never attended a mass or ceremony. And we emphatically did not dine on a human leg (yuck!). I never even heard of a “Magic Circle”, nor Forrest Ackerman, nor a “dildo manufacturer”. Mr. Boulware, who showed such intelligent skepticism about the famous LaVey background, accepted these details with utter credulity. The book in question - I forget the title - was written by someone named Burton Wolfe, who got all his “facts” directly from Anton, without checking them. The closest we came was attending Anton’s Halloween parties - until a group of guys showed up in Nazi uniforms, which made us uncomfortable - and we ended the practice.
So for the record, Willy is not a fan of Wolfe or his book (probably she meant The Devil's Avenger), but also, the Werbys go way back with LaVey and the Church of Satan (and she helpfully offered up yet another example of LaVey's Nazi shit).
One more excerpt, quoting Michael Aquino's The Church of Satan again, this time a 1991 interview with Edward M. Webber, a professional publicity agent who helped form the Church of Satan org in 1966, then we'll get there:
MA: In the original edition of Arthur Lyons’ book Satanism in America, Anton is quoted as “referring mysteriously to the ‘blinding flash’ of his own Satanic dawning” where the founding of the Church of Satan is concerned. EW: Well, it might have been a blinding flash called Ed Webber and Tony Kent! I know for a fact that the idea of a church had never even entered Anton’s mind. At the time he was very comfortable with 20 people and $5-10 worth of donations on Friday night and doing his little social sort of thing. I had some background in churches and charters and tax considerations, and I felt that this was the way to create a vehicle for people to learn about Satanism. I knew that nothing like a Satanic church existed at the time, because we researched that pretty thoroughly too. During the next few weeks I invited a number of people here in San Francisco - real estate people such as Don and Willy Werby, nightclub people such as Al Williams, a couple of public relations people such as Anthony Kent - agent for Leslie Caron - and a columnist to come and hear Anton. I started bringing a lot of media contacts, and then some celebrities I knew who’d be in town. Everyone agreed that it’d be a lot more interesting if he’d form a Church of Satan.
Again, you may be asking, "Why are you talking about this?"
Because unlike neo-Nazi terrorist and convicted child predator James Mason mentioned above in the previous section, it is undeniable that Anton LaVey knew Donald Werby for decades, and Donald Werby was not bad just because he was rich and into real estate; he was bad because he was a fucking monster who preyed on children for sex.
All credit to The Temple of Set High Priest Setemheb for digging deeper and making this story accessible with their 2023 article "My Lack of Respect for Anton LaVey as a Person".
I will be blunt. Anton LaVey spent his entire life, from 1958 until he died in 1997, in a questionable financial situation with Donald Werby. Werby was a significant real estate figure in San Francisco. Gus Russo alleges in Supermob (2008) that Werby was connected with the Chicago Mafia’s move into the city. Werby was indicted on 22 counts of pedophilic rape for involvement with a prostitution ring focused on runaway teenage girls addicted to crack. As a result, Werby pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor charges of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Werby agreed to pay a $300,000 fine and was sentenced to three years probation. All the felony sex charges, with their potential for prison time, sex offender registration, civil commitment, etc., were quietly dropped. A nearly 600 page transcript of the Grand Jury hearings were publicly released going into the details of his actions. The original charges were brought in 1988, with the Grand Jury phase in 1989. By 1990 Werby had paid his pittance and moved on. He would die in 2002... LaVey was well aware of Werby’s proclivities as his arrest, indictment, and payout were the subject of considerable media coverage, as demonstrated by a simple search of Newspapers.com. LaVey knew precisely who and what Werby was and was more than comfortable accepting his financial support until his death.
"Oh! That's just a Temple of Set guy. You know you can’t trust those theistic weirdos to be normal when it comes to the Church of Satan."
OK. Here is SF Weekly in 2007:
For example, one of his [Bruce Brugmann, San Francisco Bay Guardian's] investors was Donald Werby, described in business publications as a billionaire real estate tycoon in San Francisco. Werby, who passed away in 2002, was a friend and patron of Anton LaVey. Werby underwrote LaVey's efforts at the Church of Satan (no, really). In 1989 Werby was indicted on 21 counts of having sex with underage prostitutes and paying for it with cocaine. One 13-year-old told the grand jury about smoking crack with the 63-year-old Werby.
Paul Wright for Prison Legal News in 2003:
In 1990 millionaire San Francisco hotel owner Donald Werby avoided child rape charges in their entirety by pleading guilty to two misdemeanor charges of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Werby agreed to pay a $300,000 fine and was sentenced to three years probation. Originally, a grand jury had indicted Werby on 22 felony sex and drug charges stemming from his hiring of underage prostitutes and furnishing them with crack cocaine for sex. All the felony sex charges, with their potential for prison time, sex offender registration, civil commitment, etc., were quietly dropped.
The Los Angeles Times from Aug. 27, 1989:
San Francisco hotel owner and real estate developer Donald E. Werby, 63, at first pleaded not guilty but then withdrew the plea at his arraignment on 21 counts of having unlawful sex with minors and paying for it with money and drugs. Werby, owner of the elegant Four Seasons Clift Hotel, entered the plea in Superior Court but withdrew it on the advice of his lawyer, James Collins, who told the judge that he wanted time to study the transcript of Werby’s indictment. Werby, married with three children, came under investigation last year when Roger Boas, former San Francisco city chief administrative officer, was indicted for soliciting sex from teen-age prostitutes. Boas pleaded guilty, was fined $100,000 and sentenced to trash pick up duty. Werby is free on $100,000 bail.
And the Los Angeles Times from Aug. 28, 1990:
The race: Attorney general. Whose ad? Republican Dan Lungren. The 30-second spot scores Democratic candidate Arlo Smith, the district attorney in San Francisco, for allowing businessman Donald E. Werby to plead guilty to four misdemeanors after being indicted on 22 felony drug, sex and bribery counts. Elements of the Lungren ad, with an analysis by Times staff writer Paul Feldman: Ad: "A grand jury indicted reputed billionaire Donald Werby for sexually molesting 13-year-old girls, providing crack cocaine to kids and attempted bribery." Analysis: Grand jury testimony accused Werby of picking up teen-age prostitutes in downtown San Francisco and taking them to his home, where the offenses were said to have taken place. Werby was also charged with trying to bribe one of the teen-agers who testified against him. As for Werby's financial condition, he insists he is merely a millionaire. Ad: "But San Francisco D.A. Arlo Smith allowed Werby to plea bargain. No jail, just some community service and a fine." Analysis: In a negotiated plea bargain approved last month, Werby pleaded guilty to misdemeanor counts of statutory rape and contributing to the delinquency of minors. In exchange for the plea, involving girls 15 to 17 years of age, a Municipal judge ordered 18 other counts dismissed and sentenced Werby to three years of probation. The judge also ordered Werby to undergo psychiatric counseling, perform nine months of community service and pay a $300,000 fine to a program aimed at aiding homeless youths. Smith said the plea bargain was the best disposition of the case due to problems with evidence in the case. Ad: "This, after Werby and his brother had given thousands to Smith's political campaign." Analysis: Werby, his brother, Robert, and their firms donated $7,500 to Smith's campaign for attorney general in early 1989. The Smith campaign eventually returned those contributions.
Now yes, Anton LaVey has a lot going on in his life in 1989. At that precise moment, things were really fuckin' bad for ol' Stinky Tony — lots of it due to his own choices, mind you. But he made another choice to let Werby be his sugar daddy for the rest of his life. You can argue that LaVey had no idea about the kind of man his friend was over the first three devades they knew each other, but he definitely knew for the last decade. "Do not harm little children" apparently did not extend to 13-year-old girls.
But then, we kind of already knew that about Anton, didn't we?
"Satanism is a law and order philosophy," and punishments ought to be harsher ("Lex talionis!"), but it seems like if you're willing to look the other way about your 63-year-old friend smoking crack and sexually assaulting runaway teenage girls — and you've already proven you don't care about neo-Nazis and white nationalists except that you enjoy promoting them and would like a few more of them to join your org — what even is the line for you?
Hey, people rightfully bristle at all of the bullshit Satanic Panic stuff that the Church of Satan has had to put up with for decades, including LaVey personally. The guy lied a lot for publicity early on and through his whole life, but he was not a cartoon monster in the "Satanic Ritual Abuse" sense. He was not that horrific — or even, it turns out, that exciting.
But Anton LaVey was a douchebag in the very banal and boring sense that you see around you everywhere. That is actually significantly worse than being a decent person who is banal and boring.
Some people even today will howl about all of the "sheep" in society, “the masses” and their "Goodguy Badges," which today would probably be called "virtue signaling".
From LaVey's essay in The Devil's Notebook:
Man is a selfish creature. Everything in life is a selfish act. Man is not concerned with helping others, yet he wants others to believe he is. Inasmuch as selfishness is akin to pride, and vanity considered the Devil's work, the first rule of the prideful is to make an exhibition of piety and charity, with a Goodguy Badge to pin to his lapel. Man cannot progress one step further towards his own godhood until he removes that Goodguy Badge.
We're going to offer this counter: maybe, just maybe, if you feel good when you help people, and you feel bad when you see people being hurt, and you act in the world to help people when no one else can act and accept their help when you can't do something on your own — this is all just straightforwardly fine and desirable. Maybe wanting people to think highly of you based on how you treat the people closest to you in life is good. Badge or no badge, this is just being human and alive and living in a society (bottom text).
"Oh no! You selfishly didn't abuse your long-time domestic partner because being kind and caring instead made you feel like a good person, too? That gave you joy? How will you ever recover?"
Anton LaVey was a douchebag, and fucking wearingly normal about it, too. He was a coward and a liar. According to people who knew him, he didn't brush his teeth, and according to them and by his own account, he didn't bathe, and he smelled unpleasant. He was a plagiarist. With the exception of Barton who has been able to hold on to the coattails of his legacy, it seems that everyone else in his family came to hate him. Regardless of how the Church of Satan tries to spin that, that says a lot about anyone.
Leaning on Wolfe's book for the personal anecdotes but still a scholar in his own right, here's how Ruben van Luijk summed it up in 2016.
The Church of Satan had been plagued by schism, waning appeal, and general decay since the late 1970s. LaVey had first envisioned it as mass movement, then as a select cabal of superior Satanist schemers; none of these options had materialized. Seemingly extinct forms of Christianity were on the rise again and spreading obnoxious rumors about Satanism, and LaVey himself led an increasingly isolated life as lone Übermensch in a barricaded Black House. ... LaVey met Hegarthy in 1959, when she was a blonde, seventeen-year-old waitress in the San Francisco restaurant where LaVey played the organ. Since then, she had been the most important woman in his life and provided indispensable help and support in running the Church of Satan. However, LaVey’s infidelities with “student witches”, his growing disrespect for personal hygiene, and his increasing general grumpiness had estranged Diane from him; by the late 1980s, she had filed for a divorce, claiming that LaVey hit her on at least two occasions. In January 1993, the year LaVey recorded this track, a Californian judge granted Diane the divorce with alimony, leaving LaVey financially and emotionally broke.
From the "apolitical" Pentagonal Revisionism that LaVey wrote in 1988:
Stratification The point on which all the others ultimately rest. There can be no more myth of “equality” for all—it only translates to “mediocrity” and supports the weak at the expense of the strong. Water must be allowed to seek its own level without interference from apologists for incompetence. No one should be protected from the effects of his own stupidity.
This is a man who, by the end of his life, was clearly looking up at achieving mediocrity.
The measuring stick he gave others when applied to him finds him to be a pathetic, unpleasant, disgusting edgelord — a crank who died broke in a shitty house gifted to him by the kindness of his parents, which he was allowed to stay in due to the kindness of a friend who was a sexual predator. And when Anton LaVey died, the crypto-fascists cried, but nothing of value was lost.
"Water must be allowed to seek its own level," indeed.
Fuck Anton LaVey, and rest in piss.
