LOS ANGELES — The Church of Scientology International sued Eli Lilly & Co. for $14.7 million, alleging the pharmaceutical maker pressured a public relations firm to drop the church as a client. The church and Eli Lilly have long been at odds over the drug maker's sale of Prozac. The scientologists say the antidepressant can be harmful, even fatal. The suit, filed Friday in federal court, names as defendants Lilly, the British advertising conglomerate WPP Group, its chief executive officer, Martin ...

And now, the next Walt Disney Studios— the Church of Scientology! That is, if entrepreneurs connected with the Hollywood based cult can muscle into the film business with their proposal to homogenize films by tailoring them to the tastes of the unwashed masses. It all began last July, when Future Films, a new, eccentric studio, began running ads in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter touting its revolutionary ideas. No one knew what to make of it all. The grand concept, to ...

Police last month arrested Allan Anthony Buttnor, a minister and director of special projects for the Church of Scientology in Edmonton. They claimed he was working at the church offices last November 30 when he fondled the chest of a church member's 10-year-old daughter. They also alleged he had picked up the girl in his car near her home on March 7 and repeated the act. Last week, after a crown prosecutor told the court that there is no evidence to ...

Internal documents from the Church of Scientology, the parent organisation of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, indicate that behind the church's public battle to expose abuses of psychiatric patients lies a hidden plan of retribution. The documents contain evidence that some Australian Scientologists apparently have remained committed to a 30-year-old doctrine of revenge and intimidation against people the church describes as enemies. And while church members in Australia have been speaking out against psychiatric abuse, courts in the United States ...

WHEN a royal commission last year exposed atrocities at Chelmsford Private Hospital in New South Wales, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights scored dual victories: one public, one private. The first came with the release of Mr Justice Slattery's 12-volume report into the nightmarish "cuckoo's nest" of Chelmsford — a private hospital where the commission found that at least 24 people died as a result of deep-sleep therapy. Another 24 patients survived the treatment but later took their own lives, 19 ...

The Scientology Story. Today: The Making of L. Ron Hubbard. First in a six-part series. The Times today begins a six-part series on the Church of Scientology, the controversial religion founded by the late author L. Ron Hubbard. Since its creation nearly four decades ago, Scientology has grown into a worldwide movement that, in recent months, has spent millions of dollars promoting its founder and his self-help book, "Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health." In the past five years alone, ...