Most taxpayers would not be rewarded if they tried to intimidate the Internal Revenue Service into giving them a break. They also would be kicked out the door if they barged into the office of the head of the IRS and demanded to be seen without an appointment. But most taxpayers are not the Church of Scientology, which succeeded in doing both. The decision by the IRS in 1993 to give the Church of Scientology the tax exemption granted to churches ...

On Oct. 8, 1993, 10,000 cheering Scientologists thronged the Los Angeles Sports Arena to celebrate the most important milestone in the church's recent history: victory in its all-out war against the Internal Revenue Service. For 25 years, I.R.S. agents had branded Scientology a commercial enterprise and refused to give it the tax exemption granted to churches. The refusals had been upheld in every court. But that night the crowd learned of an astonishing turnaround. The I.R.S. had granted tax exemptions to ...

A web of intrigue surrounds the high-stakes legal brawl between FACTnet and the Church of Scientology. Strange things happen around Lawrence Wollersheim. His businesses collapse. His Boulder apartment gets raided by federal marshals, his computers seized. When college students offer to help him rebuild his computer bulletin-board system, they receive threatening phone calls–anonymous voices urging them to stay away from Larry. A California judge who presided over a lawsuit in which Wollersheim was the plaintiff told reporters he'd encountered a lot ...

BERLIN — “Historically inaccurate and totally distasteful." Strong words from Madeleine Albright, who had good reason to apply them. America's new secretary of State was referring to the widely publicized statement by Oliver Stone, Dustin Hoffman and other Hollywood celebrities equating Germany's current treatment of the Church of Scientology with the Holocaust. When she met with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl last week, Albright was committed to bringing up U.S. "concerns" about Germany's treatment of Scientologists. At the same time, she clearly ...

Clients of deprogrammer Rick Ross call him a savior. Perhaps that's why people he's branded cult leaders want to crucify him. Rick Ross is describing how Arizona's cults use mind control to exploit their members. He warns about 70 people gathered at Arizona State University's Memorial Union that they are prime targets for groups that tend to prey on university students. The Moonies have a house on North Central. Scientology has a church in Mesa. There's Scottsdale's CBJ, whose members believe ...

In a lawsuit to stop deprogrammers from trampling on religious sect members' rights, a Bellevue man yesterday told a federal jury that four men "ambushed" him to get him to quit his fundamentalist church. Jason Scott is suing the Cult Awareness Network and the four deprogrammers hired by Scott's mother for unspecified damages. The mother was trying to get Scott — then 18 — to leave the New Life Tabernacle Church, a member of the United Pentecostal Churches. The attempt failed, ...

There is a story that Steve Tisch, producer of the 1983 coming-of-age classic Risky Business, the film that would eventually vault Tom Cruise into the warm aerie of megastardom, likes to tell. After a tough day of shooting, Cruise approached Tisch, his partner Jon Avnet and the film's director, Paul Brickman. It seemed Cruise was concerned: He felt that his costar, Rebecca DeMornay, a newcomer who had snatched the part of sexy hooker Lana from Michelle Pfeiffer, was miscast. Things just ...

Rick Ross, self-confessed "cult deprogrammer" and ATF advisor in the Waco holocaust has been charged, in the United States, with the 1991 abduction of a Christian teenage boy. Ross and his accomplices, Mark Workman and Charles Simpson, were charged in July with unlawful imprisonment in the abduction of Jason Scott. If convicted they face a maximum penalty of 5 years in prison. The charges against the three were the most recent in a string of legal actions brought against deprogrammers by ...

Some of Cocolat's ex-workers claim that the company's newest ingredient is Scientology by Erin McCormick of the Examiner Staff It was once the sweetheart of the Bay Area business world - a woman-run chocolate company that grew from a single storefront to a national success. Now, two years since an employee's embezzlement forced the sale of Cocolat Chocolate Co., an unlikely mix is brewing at the company's Hayward plant: Scientology and chocolate. The mixture has been volatile. Cocolat is the latest ...

BOSTON — Scientologists, long a target of deprogrammers, have gone to court to try to turn the tables, claiming that they were illegally barred from joining an anti-cult group. In a flurry of lawsuits filed around the nation, dozens of members of the Church of Scientology said they tried to join the Cult Awareness Network but were rejected because of their church affiliation. Many of the lawsuits were filed last week after a federal grand jury indicted three alleged members of ...

The Church of Scientology uses private detectives and bulldog litigators to pursue its numerous detractors. It also hires low-key establishment lawyers who work quietly within the system. So who is directing the $416 million libel suit against Time? On April 27, 1992, lawyers for the Church of Scientology International filed a $416 million libel action in federal court in New York against Time Warner, Inc., Time Inc. Magazine Company [Time Warner is a partner in American Lawyer Media, L.P.], and writer ...

A personal aide to Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard for eight of her nearly 20 years with the group says that fluoxetine (Prozac) and therapy have finally stopped the depression and suicidal ideation she had suffered since 1976. "I have to speak out." Hana (Eltringham) Whitfield told The Psychiatric Times. "The Scientologists choose the most prominent psychiatrists and the most successful drugs to attack. That's why they attacked Ritalin, and that's why they are now attacking Prozac." Although ...

By all appearances, Noah Lottick of Kingston, Pa., had been a normal, happy 24-year-old who was looking for his place in the world. On the day last June when his parents drove to New York City to claim his body, they were nearly catatonic with grief. The young Russian-studies scholar had jumped from a 10th-floor window of the Milford Plaza Hotel and bounced off the hood of a stretch limousine. When the police arrived, his fingers were still clutching $171 in ...

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 ...

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court, rejecting an appeal filed by the Church of Scientology of California to obtain government tax records, ruled Tuesday that the public has no right to get information kept by the Internal Revenue Service. The tax agency "has no duty under the Freedom of Information Act" to disclose internal records, even if names and other confidential information could be easily deleted, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist said. Civil rights attorneys denounced the unanimous decision, saying the ruling ...

Description of video is in italics. VO=VOICEOVER shot of Church of Scientology, Los Angeles; apparently group of ex-members VOICEOVER: The Church of Scientology, one of the largest and richest new religious movements, is being sued for a billion dollars by former members for fraud and breach of trust. They regard Scientology as a dangerous cult. group of Scientologists VO: Yet the church goes on expanding, making converts and claiming it is "The Road to Total Freedom". ''"Panorama" opening credits; while music ...

Former members of the Church of Scientology filed a $1-billion class-action lawsuit against the organization Wednesday, accusing its late founder, L. Ron Hubbard, and a cadre of his most trusted aides of plundering church coffers, intimidating critics and breaching the confidentiality of sacred confessional folders. The lawsuit was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court at a time when the church had hoped that its legal wars with its critics had been put largely to rest. Two weeks ago, the organization reached ...

[Picture / Caption: Commander Hubbard] ''[L. Ron Hubbard] has now moved on to his next level of ... research. This level is beyond anything any of us has ever imagined. It is a level, in fact, done in an exterior state, completely exterior from the body. In this level ... the body is nothing more than an impediment, an encumbrance to any further gain. ... Thus, at 2000 hours, Friday, the 24th of January, A.D. [1986], L. Ron Hubbard discarded the ...

The Minutemen at the Ready [A 'suppressive person' is] Fair Game. May be deprived of property or injured by any means by a Scientologist without discipline of the Scientologist [sic]. May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed. —L. Ron Hubbard [Picture / Caption: "Minutemen" line courthouse halls.] On February 15, six police officers stood near the door of Leo Baeck Temple, awaiting the confrontation. They had been called by leaders of Freedom for All in Religion (FAIR), a group ...

On September 5, 1980, as U.S. District Court Judge Charles Richey was recuperating from two pulmonary embolisms and exhaustion, lawyers for the Church of Scientology and the Justice Department gathered before Judge Aubrey Robinson, Richey's successor in the two-year-old conspiracy case against 11 members of the Church of Scientology. Judge Richey had already convicted and sentenced nine of the original 11 defendants, but the remaining two, recently extradited from England, were about to go on trial. "Particularly from the standpoint of ...

[...] MAJOR TARGET: To plant grossly false information in government agencies, especially security services files, for later public retrieval and ridiculing exposure. [...]

DONOVAN BESS Mr. Bess is on the staff of the San Francisco Chronicle. San Francisco This is the year of Apollo 11. It is also the year in which that psychological sophisticate, Richard Alpert, came back from his guru in India to reap a big following of inner-space explorers with his story of spiritual conversion. It is a lime of burgeoning meditation societies on the college campuses, and of passionate rebellion against the amorality of our technology. Thus it ...

[Transcription of the meaningful parts of the 1023 form as submitted by the Church of Scientology International to the IRS. For the complete document, see PDFs] [Coming soon]