Ten Years After Jonestown, the Battle Intensifies Over the Influence of ‘Alternative’ Religions (1988)
by Bob Sipchen - November 17, 1988 - Los Angeles Times
Eldridge Broussard Jr.’s face screwed into a grimace of such anger and pain that the unflappable Oprah Winfrey seemed unnerved. It hurts to be branded “the new Jimmy Jones” by a society eager to condemn what it doesn’t understand, the founder of the Ecclesia Athletic Assn. lamented on TV just a few days after his 8-year-old daughter had been beaten to death, apparently by Ecclesia members.
At issue were complex questions of whether the group he had formed to instill discipline in ghetto youth, and led from Watts to Oregon, had evolved into a dangerous cult. But Broussard couldn’t have found a less sympathetic audience than the group gathered around the TV in the bar of the Portland Holiday Inn.
There last month for the annual conference of the Chicago-based Cult Awareness Network were people whose kin had crumpled onto the body heaps at Jonestown, Guyana, 10 years ago, and people who believed they or family members had lost not their lives, but good chunks of them, to gurus and avatars less infamous but no less evil than Jim Jones.
One group’s cult is another’s “new religious movement,” though, and in the 10 years since Jonestown, a heated holy war of sorts has been mounting over the issues of how to define and contend with so-called cults.
The battle lines aren’t always well defined. Ongoing guerrilla actions between those who see themselves as crusaders against potential Jonestowns and those who see themselves as the persecuted members of outcast religious groups comprise the shifting legal and political fronts. On the outskirts of the ideological battleground is another loosely knit force that sees itself as the defender of a First Amendment besieged by vigilantes all too eager to kiss off the Constitution as they quash beliefs that don’t fit their narrow-minded criteria of what’s good and real. As one often-quoted definition has it: “A cult is a religion someone I don’t like belongs to.”
“It’s spiritual McCarthyism,” Lowell D. Streiker, a Northern California counselor, said of the cult awareness cause. To him, “the anti-cult network” is itself as a “cult of persecution,” cut from the same cloth as Colonial witch hunters and the Ku Klux Klan.
The key anti-cult groups, by most accounts, are CAN, a secular nondenominational group of 30 local affiliates; the Massachusetts-based American Family Foundation; the Interfaith Coalition of Concern About Cults and the Jewish Federation Council’s Commission on Cults and Missionaries.
Although they contend that their ranks continue to fill with the victims of cults or angry family members, they concede that the most significant rallying point came in the fall of 1978 when the leader of one alleged cult put a rattlesnake in an enemy’s mailbox and another led 912 people to their deaths.
Even though nothing so dramatic has happened since, cults have quietly been making inroads into the fabric of mainstream American life, and the effects are potentially as serious as the deaths at Jonestown, cult critics say.
With increased wealth and public relations acumen--with members clothed by Brooks Brothers rather than in saffron sheets--the 1,000 or more new cults that some estimate have sprung up in America since the ‘60s have become “a growth industry which is diversifying,” said Dr. Louis Jolyon West, director of UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute. “They have made steady progress on all fronts.”
Uglier Connotations
In the broadest sense, Webster defines a cult as simply “a system of religious worship or ritual.” Even before Jonestown, though, the word had taken on broader and uglier connotations.
To make a distinction, critics use the term destructive cult, or totalist cult. The issue, they say, pivots on the methods groups use to recruit and hold together followers.
CAN describes a destructive cult as one that “uses systematic, manipulative techniques of thought reform or mind control to obtain followers and constrict their thoughts and actions. These techniques are imposed without the person’s knowledge and produce observable changes in the individual’s autonomy, thoughts and actions. . . .”
A 1985 conference on cults co-sponsored by the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute and the American Family Federation came up with this definition:
“A group or movement exhibiting a great or excessive devotion or dedication to some person, idea, or thing and employing unethically manipulative techniques of persuasion and control . . . designed to advance the goals of the group’s leaders, to the actual or possible detriment of members, their families, or the community.”
The “manipulative techniques” in question are what cult critics call mind control or brainwashing.
To critics of the critics, on the other hand, brainwashing amounts to hooey.
And both sides say the weight of evidence is on their side.
New Beliefs, Personalities
Cult critics often point to classic surveys on brainwashing, which catalogue methods which they say are routinely used by cults of every color, religious and secular, to manipulate unsuspecting people into adopting new beliefs, and often, in effect, new personalities.
Among the techniques are constant repetition of doctrine; application of intense peer pressure; manipulation of diet so that critical faculties are adversely affected; deprivation of sleep; lack of privacy and time for reflection; cutting ties with the recruits’ past life; reduction of outside stimulation and influences; skillful use of ritual to heighten mystical experience; and invention of a new vocabulary which narrows the range of experience and constructs a new reality for cult members.
Margaret Singer, a former professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, describes psychological problems that have been attributed to cultic experiences, ranging from the despair that comes from having suddenly abandoned ones previous values, norms and ideals to types of “induced psychopathy.” Other psychologists and lay observers list similar mental and emotional problems linked to the indoctrination and rituals of cults.
Sociologist Dick Anthony, author of the book “Spiritual Choices,” and former director of the UC Berkeley-affiliated Center for the Study of New Religions, argues the exact opposite position.
“There’s a large research literature published in mainstream journals on the mental health effects of new religions,” he said. “For the most part the effects seem to be positive in any way that’s measurable.”
He and other defenders of new religions discount so-called mind control techniques, or believe the term has been misappropriated by anti-cult activists.
“Coercive Persuasion is a bombastic redescription of familiar forms of influence which occur everyday and everywhere,” said Streiker. “Someone being converted to a demanding religious movement is no more or less brainwashed than children being exposed to commercials during kiddy programs which encourage them to eat empty calories or buy expensive toys.”
“An attempt to persuade someone of something is a process protected by our country’s First Amendment right of free speech and communication,” said attorney Jeremiah Gutman head of the New York City branch of the American Civil Liberties Union and an outspoken critic of the anti-cult groups. “What one person believes to be an irrefutable and obvious truth is someone else’s errant nonsense.”
‘Fraud and Manipulation’
But anti-cult spokespeople say they have no interest in a group’s beliefs. Their concern is when destructive cults use “fraud and manipulation,” to get people to arrive at those beliefs, whatever they may be. Because people are unaware of the issues, though, cults have insinuated themselves into areas of American life where they are influencing people who may not even know where the influence is coming from, they contend.
The political arena is the obvious example, anti-cult activists say.
Followers of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh had a major impact on the small town government of Antelope, Ore., and Jim Jones had managed to thrust himself and his church into the most respectable Democratic party circles in San Francisco before the exodus to Guyana, for instance.
But recently the process has expanded, with the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church the leading example of a cult that is quietly gaining political clout, they say.
“What Jim Jones did to Democrats in San Francisco, Sun Myung Moon is doing to Republicans all across country now,” Kisser said.
Moon’s most obvious stab at mainstream legitimacy, critics say, was his purchase in 1982 of the Washington Times, a D.C. daily newspaper, and his financial nurturing of the paper’s magazine Insight--both of which have an official policy of complete editorial independence from the church.
In September, 1987, the conservative American Spectator magazine published an article titled “Can Buy Me Love: The Mooning of Conservative America,” in which managing editor Andrew Ferguson questioned the way the political right is lapping up Moon money, citing, among many examples, the $500,000 or more the late Terry Dolan’s National Conservative Alliance accepted in 1984. When the church got wind of the article, the Spectator received a call from the executive director of the Unification Church’s World Media Assn. warning that if it ran, the Times “would strike back and strike back severely,” Ferguson wrote in an addendum to the piece.
‘Everyone Speaks Korean’
Therapist Steven Hassan, a former “Moonie” and the author of the just-released book “Combatting Cult Mind Control,” estimates that the church now sponsors 200 businesses and “front organizations.”
Moon “has said he wants an automatic theocracy to rule the world,” explained Hassan, who, on Moon’s orders, engaged in a public fast for Nixon during Watergate and another fast at the U.N. to protest the withdrawal of troops from Korea. “He visualizes a world where everyone speaks Korean only, where all religion but his is abolished, where his organization chooses who will mate, and he and family and descendants rule in a heroic monarchy.”
Moon “is very much in support of the democratic system,” counters John Biermans , director of public affairs for the church. “His desire is for people to become God-centered people. Then democracy can fulfill its potential”
Besides, he said, “this is a pluralistic society, people of all faiths inject their beliefs into the system on every level . . . Using terms like ‘front groups’ and ‘insinuating,’ is just a way to attack something. It’s not even honest.”
Some observers dismiss concern about alleged Unificationist infiltration as self-serving hysteria whipped up by the anti-cultists.
“How much actual influence (the Unification Church) has seems questionable,” said David Bromley, a professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, and the author of the 1981 book “Strange Gods, the Great American Cult Scare.”
Bromley estimates, for instance, that the church brings $200 million a year into the U.S. from abroad. But he sees no evidence that the money, much of it spent on all-expense-paid fact-finding tours and conferences for journalists, politicians and clergypeople, is money well-invested as far as political impact goes.
The church, he estimates, is losing about $50 million a year on its Washington Times newspaper and the ranks of Unificationists, and most other new religions, in America are thinning as well.
Veterans of the anti-cult front, however, say that the appearance that cults are fading is an illusion. “Like viruses, many of them mutate into new forms,” when under attack, West of UCLA said. And new types of cults are arising to fill the void, they say.
Cult critics point, for instance, to the rise of such groups as the est offshoot called Forum, and to Lifespring and Insight--all of which CAN characterizes as “human potential cults” and all of which are utilized in mainstream American business to promote productivity and motivation.
Observers such as Gordon Melton of the Institute for the Study of Religious Institutions in Santa Barbara explain that many of these New Age-type trainings have their roots in the old fashioned motivational pep talks and sales technique seminars that have been the staples of American business for decades.
But critics see the so-called “psychotechnologies” utilized by some of these groups as insidious. For one thing, they say, the meditation, confessional sharing, and guided imagery methods some of them use are more likely to make employees muzzy-headed than competitive.
Other critics say the trainings violate employee’s rights. Richard Watring, a personnel director for Budget Rent-a-Car, who has been charting the incorporation of “New Age” philosophies into business trainings, is concerned that employees are often compelled to take the courses and then required to adapt a new belief system which may be incompatible with their own religious convictions. As a Christian he finds such mental meddling inappropriate for corporations.
He and other cult critics are heartened by recent cases, still pending, in which employees, or former employees, have sued their employer for compelling them to take trainings they felt conflicted with their own religious beliefs.
Most observers scoring the action on the broader legal battlefield, however, call it a toss-up, and perceived victories for either side have often proved Pyrrhic.
Threats of Litigation
Richard Ofshe, a sociologist at UC Berkeley, fought three separate legal battles with the drug and alcohol rehabilitation organization Synanon over research he published on the group. Although he ultimately won the suits, he said the battle wound up costing the university $600,000. And evidence obtained in other lawsuits showed that Synanon had skillfully wielded threats of litigation to keep several other critical stories from being published or broadcast, he said.
Similarly, a recently released book “Cults and Consequences,” went unpublished for several years because insurers were wary of the litigious nature of some of the groups mentioned, said Rachel Andres, director of the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles’ Commission on Cults and Missionaries and the book’s co-editor.
But the most interesting litigation of late involves either a former member who is suing the organization to which he or she belonged, or a current member of a new religious group who is suing a deprogrammer who attempted unsuccessfully to persuade the person to leave the group.
The most significant case, everyone agrees, is last month’s Molko decision by the California Supreme Court, which anti-cult groups have cheered as a major victory.
In that reversal of lower court decisions, the justices agreed that David Molko and another former member of the Unification Church could bring before a jury the claim that they were defrauded by recruiters who denied they had a church affiliation and then subjected the two to church mind control techniques, eventually converting them.
Mainstream religious organizations including the National Council on Churches, the American Baptist Churches in the USA and the California Ecumenical Council had filed briefs in support of the Unification Church, claiming that allowing lawsuits over proselytizing techniques could paralyze all religions.
“What they’re attacking is prayer, fasting and lectures,” said Biermans of the Unification Church. “The whole idea of brainwashing is unbelievably absurd. . . . If someone had really figured out a method of brainwashing, they could control the world.” The church plans to appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary. Paul Morantz, the attorney who was struck by the rattlesnake placed in his mailbox by the “Imperial Marines” of Synanon, gave pro-bono assistance to the plaintiffs in the Molko case.
“For me, it was a great decision for freedom of religion and to protect against the . . . use of coercive persuasion,” he said.
Morantz currently is defending Bent Corydon, author of the book “L. Ron Hubbard, Madman or Messiah” against a lawsuit by the Church of Scientology. He said he’s confident of how that case will turn out.
But he shares the belief of others on several sides of the multifaceted cult battle, in concluding that education rather than litigation should be the first defense of religious and intellectual liberty.
He’s not, however, optimistic.
“If anyone thinks they’re ever going to win this war, they’re wrong,” he said. “As long as we have human behavior, there will be sociopaths who will stand up and say ‘follow me.’ And there will always be searchers who will follow.”
Unification Church case: “Freedom of religion does not protect fraudulent recruiting” ruled by California Supreme Court.
▲ Boonville
The lawyers opposing the Unification Church were Paul Morantz, Stanley Leal and Ford Greene (ex-member).
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New York Times
California Court Backs Suit of Moon’s Church
AP October 19, 1988
Two former members of the Unification Church can sue it on charges of deception and brainwashing because freedom of religion does not protect fraudulent recruiting, the State Supreme Court has ruled.
A lawyer for the National Council of Churches called the ruling, issued Monday on a vote of 6 to 1, “a real blow” to freedom of religion. The lawyer, Kathleen Purcell, said it was the first such ruling by a high court in any state.
Justice Stanley Mosk said in the court’s decision: “The challenge here is not to the church’s teachings or to the validity of a religious conversion. The challenge is to the church’s practice of misrepresenting or concealing its identity in order to bring unsuspecting outsiders into its highly structured environment. That practice is not itself belief – it is conduct subject to regulation for the protection of society.”
Kenneth Ross, a lawyer for the church, said he would recommend an appeal to the United States Supreme Court.
Reversing two lower court rulings, the state’s highest court decided that two former church members who filed the suits, David Molko and Tracy Leal, could seek to convince a jury that they had been brainwashed and were unable to exercise independent judgment when they joined the church headed by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon.
Brainwashing and Conversion
In a dissent, Judge Carl Anderson, an appeals court judge assigned to the Supreme Court for the case, said religious conversion, whether or not it involves “brainwashing,” is constitutionally protected from court scrutiny.
“‘Brainwashing’ and religious conversion are not really distinguishable,” Judge Anderson said, noting that the plaintiffs had not asserted that force or threats of violence were used.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs, whose lawsuits had been rejected in San Francisco Superior Court and by a state appellate court, hailed the ruling.
The court recognized “the rights of people who have been exploited by the dishonest and unethical practice of religion,” said Ford Greene, lawyer for Mr. Molko.
Stanley Leal, the attorney for his daughter, Tracy, said: “Until this case was decided, cults had taken the position that they could do whatever they chose to do with respect to deception and fraud in their recruitment activities and claim that they were immune from responsibility by virtue of the First Amendment.”
But Ms. Purcell, a lawyer for the American Baptist Churches as well as the National Council of Churches, which filed written arguments supporting the Unification Church, called the ruling “a real blow to both free exercise of religion and the separation of church and state.”
“It lashed out, too quickly for me to react. I could see its mouth open, its fangs sink deeply into my wrist. I screamed…”
… and watched in horror as more than four feet of snake dropped to the floor and recoiled, poised to strike again.”
The snake stuffed in attorney Paul Morantz’s mailbox by acolytes of Synanon, a once-hailed drug rehabilitation center that had devolved into a paranoid, militaristic cult, was an early strike in what would become a 35-year war with nearly every major cult movement this country has ever known. Mr. Morantz has been involved – under frequently bizarre circumstances – with such infamous sects as the Charles Manson family, Patty Hearst and the SLA, Jim Jones and the People’s Temple, the Moonies and the strange world of Scientology. His efforts have helped many escape from lives of torment and contributed to a sea change in how courts deal with the little-understood issues of brainwashing and cults.
Now, in this important and compelling book, Mr. Morantz offers a comprehensive account of the origins and activities of cults and how they prey on society’s most vulnerable elements. It also recounts the very intimate tale of how these confrontations with threatening and often violent forces cost him the woman he loved and nearly, life itself.
Paul Morantz is an attorney living in Pacific Palisades, California. His legal career focuses almost exclusively on the issues of cults and brainwashing. He is the only attorney ever certified to testify in court as an expert witness on these subjects.
Escape: My Life Long War Against Cults
Paperback: 328 pages
Publisher: Cresta Publications (26 Sep 2013)
ISBN: 978-0615848693
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Chapter 11: Escape from the Moonies
Fresh from the Temple University School of Law, 27-year-old David Molko passed the Pennsylvania Bar Exam and decided to reward himself with a trip to San Francisco. Knowing that the city in 1979 was a melting pot for off-kilter cults, he was on the alert for proselytizers.
At a bus stop, he chatted with a group of 21 young men and women who said they were socially conscious people who lived in an international community that existed solely to stimulate discussion of important issues. While he was suspicious, they assured him the group had no religious affiliation, so when they invited him to dinner, he accepted. After a lecture on general social issues, a slide show about Boonville—the group’s serene rural getaway—and plenty of fawning attention from his friendly and caring young hosts, an impressed Molko agreed to visit, unaware that he was headed to an indoctrination center for the Unification Church.
He was promptly herded into a van with 11 other recruits and transported to Boonville, where he was deposited in a barracks-like building and handed a sleeping bag. By morning, the building was teeming with recruits—and their shadows, members of the group who accompanied them wherever they went, including the bathroom.
The first day was crammed with activities: calisthenics, breakfast, a lecture on morals and ethics, lunch, more exercise, more lectures, dinner, testimonials, singing and group discussions. By the end of the day, Molko was exhausted and uncomfortable, but he was convinced to stay for the important discussions to come.
The next few days were exactly the same, right down to the lectures, which were repeated verbatim each day. The hectic schedule, with little sleep and little time for reflection, continued day after day. Speakers discussed brotherly love and social problems, with frequent references to God and prayer. When he asked again about the group, he was told it was named the Creative Community Project and drew its teachings from many philosophical sources, including Aristotle, Jefferson and the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Molko again asked to leave on Friday, when the group headed to another retreat, Camp K. He was again convinced to stay a few more days. The exhausting exercise-and-lecture routine continued at Camp K throughout the weekend, with additional group discussions in which recruits were pressed to confess past mistakes. After the weekend, the group returned to Boonville.
On the 12th day, the recruits were finally told about the group’s connection to the Unification Church and Rev. Moon. Deceiving recruits in this way was necessary, group leaders said, because of all the negative press the church had received. They even had a name for it —“Heavenly Deception.” It was a church doctrine that permitted lies and deception in the name of saving souls or advancing the Kingdom of God on earth.
By now, the exhausted Molko was disoriented and depressed and didn’t know what to believe. He agreed to stay to work out his confusion.
For the next five to seven weeks—the days passed in a confused jumble—Molko received “advanced training” at Camp K that changed little from his initial training. By the time his parents arrived from Florida to urge him to leave, the brainwashing was nearly complete. Told that his parents were agents of Satan, he refused to leave. Eventually, he was deemed fit enough to sell flowers and bear witness for the church in San Francisco. As a sign of his commitment, he donated $6,000 to the church.
Church leadership urged him to take the California bar exam so he could serve the church as a legal advisor. But as he left the final session of the exam, he was abducted by deprogrammers hired by his parents. For three intense days, the team challenged the Moonie programming while holding him prisoner in a motel room, providing him with facts about the Unification Church and surrounding him with familiar family love. Eventually, they convinced him to renounce his association with the church.
In June of 1979, 19-year-old Tracy Leal, daughter of trial attorney Stanley Leal, completed an unhappy freshman year at San Diego State University and set out to visit Humboldt State University in Arcata, Calif., with an eye towards transferring. While waiting to change in San Francisco, she was approached by a Unification Church member, who similarly concealed his affiliation, and fell into the same trap Molko did. For nearly three months, she went through the same brainwashing regimen at Boonville and Camp K, with some extra training in Boulder, Colorado. Eventually, she, too, ended up selling flowers on the streets—this time, in Los Angeles. She, too, was reclaimed by deprogrammers hired by her parents.
One of the deprogrammers was David Molko.
* * * * *
Thus began what I consider the most important case of my career. It would alter the legal landscape regarding cults and brainwashing, but along the way, it proved to be the legal version of the Perils of Pauline, with the case constantly clinging precariously to a ledge high above a deep ravine, with almost everyone expecting a calamitous fall. Everything seemed to be against us and I frankly didn’t think we could win. But with the stakes so high, we had to win.
Both Molko and Leal sued the Moonies for fraud and the psychological damage caused by the group’s brainwashing tactics. The church filed a cross-complaint against Molko and deprogrammer Neil Maxwell, alleging the church’s federal and state civil rights were violated by their efforts to break the psychological chains that bound Moonies to the church.
I wasn’t involved in the litigation at that point, but given the intense scrutiny cults were getting in the wake of Synanon, Jonestown and the Center for Feeling Therapy, the issue of brainwashing was ripe for judicial review. Certainly, there was no clear-cut judicial position on the subject, but the existing case law wasn’t promising. Patty Hearst tried to use brainwashing as a defense in her criminal trial, but the judge didn’t support the theory, the jury didn’t buy it and she was convicted. A trial court in a case (Katz) that also involved the Moonies granted conservatorship over adult children to their parents because they were allegedly brainwashed, but an appellate court overturned the ruling in 1977, arguing that California law didn’t permit the granting of an involuntary conservatorship based on a claim that the person was brainwashed. It was, unfortunately, the right decision—the statute permitted a conservatorship only in cases where the subject couldn’t care for himself or posed a danger to himself or others. That hadn’t been established. Moreover, the appellate court also stated in dictum—which means it was a finding not necessary to the decision—that the initial hearing to determine if the followers were brainwashed violated the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom by challenging the validity of the church’s beliefs. That, in my view, was just plain wrong. Beliefs weren’t the issue, just the methods used to impose those beliefs.
While a finding in dictum didn’t necessarily establish this principle as a legal precedent, it effectively became one as courts started citing it in other cases. Arguably, this gave cults carte blanche to do whatever they wanted to impressionable recruits.
While I had alleged brainwashing against Synanon, the People’s Temple and the Center for Feeling therapy and other cases, I always made sure there were other winnable claims, since I couldn’t be sure that higher courts would permit me to sue for brainwashing. They, too, could dismiss it as a violation of the defendants’ constitutional rights; protection of religion is, after all, in the Bill of Rights, and persuasion, no matter how coercive, could be considered protected free speech, whether religious or not. Or they could simply rule it was an unproven theory; in those days, most people preferred to think that people in cults had mental problems and everyone else was immune.
Law makers, meanwhile, ignored the topic entirely, preferring not to be exposed to the political fallout from a bill that would affect not only destructive cults, but all religious groups. Of the Moonie followers placed in conservatorships set up in the prior case, three eventually renounced the sect; the fourth suffered from a mental illness. To me, those were positive results that not only showed that brainwashing was real, but that its effects could be reversed. That alone could have justified the passing of a new law. The unchallenged appellate ruling effectively left kidnapping and deprogramming as the only avenue left for parents seeking to rescue their children.
It’s a heart-tugging quandary for parents. Kidnapping is illegal and the tactics used by deprogrammers to wean victims away from destructive cults can be brutal. If applied to people who aren’t truly brainwashed, the process can lead to psychological damage. Yet I have talked to young people who say it saved their lives. What would I do if I was the parent? I once heard that even a judge resorted to hiring a kidnapper. These are complicated issues the legislature should have tackled, but never did.
Because of the ruling in the prior Moonie case, the Molko and Leal cases were nonstarters. Neither trial judge would accept testimony from experts explaining that the church’s sophisticated indoctrination tactics rendered both plaintiffs incapable of exercising their own judgment. Both judges couldn’t get past the fact that the plaintiffs stayed even after learning of the church’s deception and testified that the church had “satisfied” their personal concerns. And, leaning on the dictum in the Katz case, both judges ruled that the lawsuits were unconstitutional inquiries into the validity of religious beliefs.
At that moment, I realized that I could no longer seek damages for a client who had been brainwashed by a destructive cult. Before I could ever get the issue into an appellate court, it appeared that the cause—and this little legal niche that I had turned into a career—had been lost.
So I offered my services pro bono to the attorneys handling the Molko and Leal case, hoping for rewards in the afterlife (I certainly wouldn’t mind 72 virgins of my own). I helped write a petition for Leal asking the California Supreme Court to hear the case and Ford Greene wrote one for Molko. Getting a case in front of the high justices was no sure thing. They aren’t required to review any decision; you must convince them that an important legal or social issue requires clarification for the benefit of society.
I argued that the lurid recent history of dangerous cults cried out for a reevaluation of the finding in the earlier Moonie case. For the sake of public safety, the court needed to determine whether thought reform existed and, if so, under what circumstances could victims seek legal redress.
The High Court agreed to hear the case. …
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Read more on Paul Morantz’ website
A conversation with Paul Morantz – presented by the University of California College of Law
VIDEO: Paul Morantz on Cults, Confession and Mind Control
Paul Morantz, crusading lawyer once attacked with rattlesnake, dies at 77
“An official of the Moonies was a periodic dinner guest of Synanon’s legal department.”
Unification Church leaders met up with Synanon and Scientology leaders to deal with “persecution”
The Oakland Unification Church ‘Project Volunteer’ gave food to the Synanon cult!
▲ Los Angeles policeman Richard Grotsley shows the 4 ½-foot rattlesnake which bit Morantz.
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Moonwebs by Josh Freed (the book was made into a movie)
Ford Greene – the former Moonie became an attorney
RIP Paul Morantz 1945-2022. He took a case against the Moonies to the California Supreme Court – and won
In this video, attorney and cult expert Paul Morantz shares some very good insights. Note his speech is a bit strange due to poisoning from a rattlesnake murder attempt on him.
Paul Morantz (paulmorantz.com) outlines the practical methods of bringing someone into a cult. Thought reform, etc.
He was the “rattlesnake guy”
Paul Morantz died on October 23, 2022 at a hospital in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 77.
Obit: Paul Morantz, crusading lawyer once attacked with rattlesnake, dies at 77
“It lashed out, too quickly for me to react. I could see its mouth open, its fangs sink deeply into my wrist. I screamed…”
How to be a Cult Leader
“Socialization techniques through which the UC members were able to influence” – Geri-Ann Galanti, Ph.D.
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Escape from the Unification Church
Dedicated to Ford Greene
by Paul Morantz (C) Nov. 2010
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Ford Greene – the former Moonie became an attorney
Paul Morantz on Cults, Confession and Mind Control
Attorney and cult expert Paul Morantz outlines some of the processes of inducting someone into a cult.
Paul Morantz was the “rattlesnake guy”
In 1978 he nearly died after being bitten by a 4 foot rattlesnake that was put in his mailbox by the Synanon cult. Ever since Paul’s speech and body have been affected.
One of his most important cases involved serving as pro bono appellate counsel in Molko vs Unification Church in 1988 wherein the California Supreme Court recognized the existence of brainwashing and the right for victims of it to sue for damages. From this he argues today, if we recognize the victimization why are we not applying it in consideration when such victimization is the encouragement of criminal acts by the victims.
www.paulmorantz.com
Paul Morantz: Escape from the Unification Church
– the story of the Molko and Leal court case and more
Unification Church case: “Freedom of religion does not protect fraudulent recruiting” ruled by California Supreme Court in 1988.
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“Socialization techniques through which the Unification Church members were able to influence” – Geri-Ann Galanti, Ph.D.
The BITE model developed by Steven Hassan, PhD.
Robert Jay Lifton’s Eight Conditions of Thought Reform
Sensibly Speaking Podcast: Terror, Love and Brainwashing ft. Alexandra Stein
“It lashed out, too quickly for me to react. I could see its mouth open, its fangs sink deeply into my wrist. I screamed…”
… and watched in horror as more than four feet of snake dropped to the floor and recoiled, poised to strike again.”
The snake stuffed in attorney Paul Morantz’s mailbox by acolytes of Synanon, a once-hailed drug rehabilitation center that had devolved into a paranoid, militaristic cult, was an early strike in what would become a 35-year war with nearly every major cult movement this country has ever known. Mr. Morantz has been involved – under frequently bizarre circumstances – with such infamous sects as the Charles Manson family, Patty Hearst and the SLA, Jim Jones and the People’s Temple, the Moonies and the strange world of Scientology. His efforts have helped many escape from lives of torment and contributed to a sea change in how courts deal with the little-understood issues of brainwashing and cults.
Now, in this important and compelling book, Mr. Morantz offers a comprehensive account of the origins and activities of cults and how they prey on society’s most vulnerable elements. It also recounts the very intimate tale of how these confrontations with threatening and often violent forces cost him the woman he loved and nearly, life itself.
Paul Morantz is an attorney living in Pacific Palisades, California. His legal career focuses almost exclusively on the issues of cults and brainwashing. He is the only attorney ever certified to testify in court as an expert witness on these subjects.
Escape: My Life Long War Against Cults
Paperback: 328 pages
Publisher: Cresta Publications (26 Sep 2013)
ISBN: 978-0615848693
Chapter 11: Escape from the Moonies
Fresh from the Temple University School of Law, 27-year-old David Molko passed the Pennsylvania Bar Exam and decided to reward himself with a trip to San Francisco. Knowing that the city in 1979 was a melting pot for off-kilter cults, he was on the alert for proselytizers.
At a bus stop, he chatted with a group of 21 young men and women who said they were socially conscious people who lived in an international community that existed solely to stimulate discussion of important issues. While he was suspicious, they assured him the group had no religious affiliation, so when they invited him to dinner, he accepted. After a lecture on general social issues, a slide show about Boonville—the group’s serene rural getaway—and plenty of fawning attention from his friendly and caring young hosts, an impressed Molko agreed to visit, unaware that he was headed to an indoctrination center for the Unification Church.
He was promptly herded into a van with 11 other recruits and transported to Boonville, where he was deposited in a barracks-like building and handed a sleeping bag. By morning, the building was teeming with recruits—and their shadows, members of the group who accompanied them wherever they went, including the bathroom.
The first day was crammed with activities: calisthenics, breakfast, a lecture on morals and ethics, lunch, more exercise, more lectures, dinner, testimonials, singing and group discussions. By the end of the day, Molko was exhausted and uncomfortable, but he was convinced to stay for the important discussions to come.
The next few days were exactly the same, right down to the lectures, which were repeated verbatim each day. The hectic schedule, with little sleep and little time for reflection, continued day after day. Speakers discussed brotherly love and social problems, with frequent references to God and prayer. When he asked again about the group, he was told it was named the Creative Community Project and drew its teachings from many philosophical sources, including Aristotle, Jefferson and the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Molko again asked to leave on Friday, when the group headed to another retreat, Camp K. He was again convinced to stay a few more days. The exhausting exercise-and-lecture routine continued at Camp K throughout the weekend, with additional group discussions in which recruits were pressed to confess past mistakes. After the weekend, the group returned to Boonville.
On the 12th day, the recruits were finally told about the group’s connection to the Unification Church and Rev. Moon. Deceiving recruits in this way was necessary, group leaders said, because of all the negative press the church had received. They even had a name for it —“Heavenly Deception.” It was a church doctrine that permitted lies and deception in the name of saving souls or advancing the Kingdom of God on earth.
By now, the exhausted Molko was disoriented and depressed and didn’t know what to believe. He agreed to stay to work out his confusion.
For the next five to seven weeks—the days passed in a confused jumble—Molko received “advanced training” at Camp K that changed little from his initial training. By the time his parents arrived from Florida to urge him to leave, the brainwashing was nearly complete. Told that his parents were agents of Satan, he refused to leave. Eventually, he was deemed fit enough to sell flowers and bear witness for the church in San Francisco. As a sign of his commitment, he donated $6,000 to the church.
Church leadership urged him to take the California bar exam so he could serve the church as a legal advisor. But as he left the final session of the exam, he was abducted by deprogrammers hired by his parents. For three intense days, the team challenged the Moonie programming while holding him prisoner in a motel room, providing him with facts about the Unification Church and surrounding him with familiar family love. Eventually, they convinced him to renounce his association with the church.
In June of 1979, 19-year-old Tracy Leal, daughter of trial attorney Stanley Leal, completed an unhappy freshman year at San Diego State University and set out to visit Humboldt State University in Arcata, Calif., with an eye towards transferring. While waiting to change in San Francisco, she was approached by a Unification Church member, who similarly concealed his affiliation, and fell into the same trap Molko did. For nearly three months, she went through the same brainwashing regimen at Boonville and Camp K, with some extra training in Boulder, Colorado. Eventually, she, too, ended up selling flowers on the streets—this time, in Los Angeles. She, too, was reclaimed by deprogrammers hired by her parents.
One of the deprogrammers was David Molko.
* * * * *
Thus began what I consider the most important case of my career. It would alter the legal landscape regarding cults and brainwashing, but along the way, it proved to be the legal version of the Perils of Pauline, with the case constantly clinging precariously to a ledge high above a deep ravine, with almost everyone expecting a calamitous fall. Everything seemed to be against us and I frankly didn’t think we could win. But with the stakes so high, we had to win.
Both Molko and Leal sued the Moonies for fraud and the psychological damage caused by the group’s brainwashing tactics. The church filed a cross-complaint against Molko and deprogrammer Neil Maxwell, alleging the church’s federal and state civil rights were violated by their efforts to break the psychological chains that bound Moonies to the church.
I wasn’t involved in the litigation at that point, but given the intense scrutiny cults were getting in the wake of Synanon, Jonestown and the Center for Feeling Therapy, the issue of brainwashing was ripe for judicial review. Certainly, there was no clear-cut judicial position on the subject, but the existing case law wasn’t promising. Patty Hearst tried to use brainwashing as a defense in her criminal trial, but the judge didn’t support the theory, the jury didn’t buy it and she was convicted. A trial court in a case (Katz) that also involved the Moonies granted conservatorship over adult children to their parents because they were allegedly brainwashed, but an appellate court overturned the ruling in 1977, arguing that California law didn’t permit the granting of an involuntary conservatorship based on a claim that the person was brainwashed. It was, unfortunately, the right decision—the statute permitted a conservatorship only in cases where the subject couldn’t care for himself or posed a danger to himself or others. That hadn’t been established. Moreover, the appellate court also stated in dictum—which means it was a finding not necessary to the decision—that the initial hearing to determine if the followers were brainwashed violated the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom by challenging the validity of the church’s beliefs. That, in my view, was just plain wrong. Beliefs weren’t the issue, just the methods used to impose those beliefs.
While a finding in dictum didn’t necessarily establish this principle as a legal precedent, it effectively became one as courts started citing it in other cases. Arguably, this gave cults carte blanche to do whatever they wanted to impressionable recruits.
While I had alleged brainwashing against Synanon, the People’s Temple and the Center for Feeling therapy and other cases, I always made sure there were other winnable claims, since I couldn’t be sure that higher courts would permit me to sue for brainwashing. They, too, could dismiss it as a violation of the defendants’ constitutional rights; protection of religion is, after all, in the Bill of Rights, and persuasion, no matter how coercive, could be considered protected free speech, whether religious or not. Or they could simply rule it was an unproven theory; in those days, most people preferred to think that people in cults had mental problems and everyone else was immune.
Law makers, meanwhile, ignored the topic entirely, preferring not to be exposed to the political fallout from a bill that would affect not only destructive cults, but all religious groups. Of the Moonie followers placed in conservatorships set up in the prior case, three eventually renounced the sect; the fourth suffered from a mental illness. To me, those were positive results that not only showed that brainwashing was real, but that its effects could be reversed. That alone could have justified the passing of a new law. The unchallenged appellate ruling effectively left kidnapping and deprogramming as the only avenue left for parents seeking to rescue their children.
It’s a heart-tugging quandary for parents. Kidnapping is illegal and the tactics used by deprogrammers to wean victims away from destructive cults can be brutal. If applied to people who aren’t truly brainwashed, the process can lead to psychological damage. Yet I have talked to young people who say it saved their lives. What would I do if I was the parent? I once heard that even a judge resorted to hiring a kidnapper. These are complicated issues the legislature should have tackled, but never did.
Because of the ruling in the prior Moonie case, the Molko and Leal cases were nonstarters. Neither trial judge would accept testimony from experts explaining that the church’s sophisticated indoctrination tactics rendered both plaintiffs incapable of exercising their own judgment. Both judges couldn’t get past the fact that the plaintiffs stayed even after learning of the church’s deception and testified that the church had “satisfied” their personal concerns. And, leaning on the dictum in the Katz case, both judges ruled that the lawsuits were unconstitutional inquiries into the validity of religious beliefs.
At that moment, I realized that I could no longer seek damages for a client who had been brainwashed by a destructive cult. Before I could ever get the issue into an appellate court, it appeared that the cause—and this little legal niche that I had turned into a career—had been lost.
So I offered my services pro bono to the attorneys handling the Molko and Leal case, hoping for rewards in the afterlife (I certainly wouldn’t mind 72 virgins of my own). I helped write a petition for Leal asking the California Supreme Court to hear the case and Ford Greene wrote one for Molko. Getting a case in front of the high justices was no sure thing. They aren’t required to review any decision; you must convince them that an important legal or social issue requires clarification for the benefit of society.
I argued that the lurid recent history of dangerous cults cried out for a reevaluation of the finding in the earlier Moonie case. For the sake of public safety, the court needed to determine whether thought reform existed and, if so, under what circumstances could victims seek legal redress.
The High Court agreed to hear the case. ...
Read more on Paul Morantz’ website
Paul Morantz, crusading lawyer once attacked with rattlesnake, dies at 77
A conversation with Paul Morantz – presented by the University of California College of Law
Video: Paul Morantz on Cults, Confession and Mind Control
“An official of the Moonies was a periodic dinner guest of Synanon’s legal department.”
Unification Church leaders met up with Synanon and Scientology leaders to deal with “persecution”
The Oakland Unification Church ‘Project Volunteer’ gave food to the Synanon cult!
▲ Los Angeles policeman Richard Grotsley shows the 4½-foot rattlesnake which bit Morantz.
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Moonwebs by Josh Freed (the book was made into a movie)
Ford Greene – the former Moonie became an attorney
