CLEARWATER, Fla. - Dec 6, 1998 - "I am L. Ron Hubbard," the woman on the hotel room bed announced in a robotic voice. "I created time 3 billion years ago." She rambled on and on, every outburst dutifully scribbled down by those assigned to watch her. "I can't confront force . . . I need my auditor . . . I want to take a toothbrush and brush the floor until I have a cognition." The jargon of Scientology was ...

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 ...

Cancelbunny and Lazarus battle it out on the fontier of cyberspace–and suggest the limits of social contracts. "Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man....It may peradventure be thought there was never such a time nor condition of warre as this; and I believe it was never generally ...

YOU ARE PERHAPS SICK OF HEARING that Kate Ceberano, Nicole Kidman, Tom Cruise, John Travolta and various other luminaries owe their glittering fame and wealth to Scientology. You may also have noticed that Scientology is taking ads on buses. The days of the kids with clipboards eyeballing you on the street to ask if you would like to do a personality test are fading. Scientology is moving to big business and the Internet. The Church of Scientology tends to live by ...

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, ...

Why did Lisa Marie Presley and Michael Jackson get married? Love, if you believe her press release, the one pledging to "dedicate my life to being his wife." Or, goes the speculation from Hollywood, Jackson is rehabbing his image and simultaneously consummating the ultimate entertainment empire merger. But another possibility is circulating among the conspiracy-minded former members of the Church of Scientology. It's an astounding theory – that the church itself helped arrange the Presley-Jackson union – but these defectors say ...

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 ...