CLEARWATER — On the day Lisa McPherson signed herself out of Morton Plant Hospital's emergency room, fellow Scientologists promised to take good care of her. "Her friends at Scientology will watch her 24 hours a day and be sure that she gets the care that they want her to have and the patient wants to have," physician Flynn Lovett wrote in McPherson's medical records on Nov. 18, 1995. "I told them I felt this was OK." McPherson left with members of ...

CLEARWATER — After spending half her life as a member of the Church of Scientology, Lisa McPherson told friends she was ready to get out. At 36, she yearned to reunite with her mom and old friends and start a new life in Dallas. She hoped to visit them at Thanksgiving and vowed to be home for good by last Christmas. "She said she couldn't get into it over the phone but she said she had a lot to talk about," ...

Title "The S Files" [S as in Scientology Logo] [Presenter Dermot Murnaghan (DM henceforth) no relation to any other DM] Tonight we're going to expose serious financial crime in one of the Scientology cult's most successful operations in Britain. We show how they cooked the books, made false statements to obtain bank loans, and changed invoices to fiddle their VAT. [Extract from "Trust" ad] This advert for the Church of Scientology was recently shown on cable TV. It was a major ...

The founder and former head of the Church of Scientology in Lyons was convicted of fraud and involuntary homicide today in the death of a church member who committed suicide after going heavily into debt to pay the sect for counseling sessions. A French tribunal sentenced the defendant, Jean-Jacques Mazier, to serve 18 months in prison, with an additional 18 months suspended, and fined him $100,000. The eight-day trial, in the first week of October, also examined charges of fraud, attempted ...

PARIS: The Church of Scientology is battling charges in a Lyon courtroom that it is a manipulative and fraudulent cult that practices false medicine and hounded one of its followers to his death. The case could derail the sect's campaign to be accepted as a mainstream faith in several European countries. Last week, it began beaming satellite television advertisements to Britain, its biggest recruiting ground in Europe, despite not being recognized there as a bona fide religion. The advertisements stress a ...

GRAHAM E. BERRY, State Bar No. 128503 GORDON J. CALHOUN, State Bar No. 84509 LEWIS, D'AMATO, BRISBOIS & BISGAARD 221 N. Figueroa Street, Suite 1200 Los Angeles, California 90012 Telephone: (213) 250-1800 Attorneys for Defendants UWE GEERTZ, PH.D. UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT CENTRAL DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA No. CV 91-6426 HLH (Tx) DECLARATION OF VICKI AZNARAN RE: MOTION FOR COSTS Date: APRIL 4, 1994 Time: 10:00 a.m. Courtroom: 7 CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY INTERNATIONAL, Plaintiff, VS. STEVEN FISHMAN and UWE GEERTZ, Defendants. —– ...

[This appears to be an OCR'ed version of a paper document. I wish to find a copy of the original document in order to fix the typos troughout.] —– To Whom It May Concern To the best of my memory - I, Lorna Levett was a Scientologist from 1961 to 1974, from 1966 to 1974 full time, from 1968 to 1974 a franchise holder and received rewards for being the top recruiter on the planet 1969 to 1970. In late 1969/early ...

They loved 79-year-old Suzine Van Sickle and brought her back home to live out her days, they said. But Van Sickle's caretakers — her daughter and granddaughter — yesterday were convicted of poisoning, then smothering her. A King County jury found Jimmie Jean Shumway, 59, the daughter, and Alexis Shumway, 29, guilty of premeditated first-degree murder in the bizarre killing last November that they kept secret for three months. The two showed no emotion as the verdict was read yesterday. Deputy ...

Church: The lawsuit accuses them of waging a 33-year campaign against the organization and a large number of its members. It seeks $120 million. The Church of Scientology International filed a $120-million federal lawsuit against 17 Washington- and Los Angeles-based Internal Revenue Service officials Monday, accusing them of waging a 33-year campaign of illegal acts against Scientology and a large number of its members. According to the suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, documents obtained under the Freedom ...

On a 3,000-acre ranch in rural Humboldt County, devotees of Church of Scientology-founder L. Ron Hubbard are building a 375-foot-long underground vault. The vault is being built on the Sunset View Ranch in Petrolia, a small town located about 20 miles south of Ferndale, by the Church of Spiritual Technology (COST). COST is linked to the controversial Church of Scientology, whose operations, according to court documents, include a lack of financial records, public policy violations, deceptive practices and the maintenance of ...

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 ...

PARIS — The president of the French branch of the Church of Scientology and five colleagues have been arrested in a probe of alleged fraud and illegal practice of medicine, court and church officials said Saturday. The president, Daniele Gounord, was arrested Friday in Paris along with the church's treasurer and the head of a church foundation. They were placed under court supervision, but not jailed Three officials of the Scientologists' branch in Lyon were arrested there in the last 10 ...

Among its many adversaries, the Church of Scientology's longest-running feud has been with the Internal Revenue Service. So far, neither combatant has blinked. Over the past three decades, the IRS has revoked the tax-exempt status of various Scientology organizations, accusing them of operating in a commercial manner and of financially benefiting private individuals. From the late 1960s through mid-1970s, IRS agents classified Scientology as a "tax resister" and "subversive," a characterization later deemed improper by a judge. In 1984, the IRS's ...

It was a triumph of galactic proportions: Science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard had discarded the body that bound him to the physical universe and was off to the next phase of his spiritual exploration — "on a planet a galaxy away." "Hip, hip, hurray!" thousands of Scientologists thundered inside the Hollywood Palladium, where they had just been told of this remarkable feat. "Hip, hip, hurray! Hip, hip, hurray!" they continued to chant, gazing at a large photograph of Hubbard, creator ...

Hubbard's image was crafted of truth, distorted by myth. To his followers, L. Ron Hubbard was bigger than life. But it was an image largely of his own making. A Los Angeles Superior Court judge put it bluntly while presiding over a Church of Scientology lawsuit in 1984. Scientology's founder, he said, was "virtually a pathological liar" about his past. Hubbard was an intelligent and well-read man, with diverse interests, experience and expertise. But that apparently was not enough to satisfy ...

Deep in hiding, Hubbard kept tight grip on the church. Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard often said that man's most basic drive is that of survival. And when it came to his own, he used whatever was necessary — false identities, cover stories, deception. There is no better illustration of this than the way he secretly controlled the Church of Scientology while hiding from a world he viewed as increasingly hostile. Hubbard was last seen publicly in February 1980, in the ...

Initially labeled a blues-rock singer, Edgar Winter went on to record popular hard-rock albums like "Frankenstein," "They Only Come Out at Night" and "Shock Treatment" during the 1970s. Winter has been out of the spotlight lately, but he has kept busy touring with former Doobie, Brothers singer Michael McDonald as well as singer-songwriter Leon Russell. He also performed on David Lee Roth's rendition of Winter's 1974 hit "Easy Street." Recently Winter returned to the recording studio to record in album titled ...

SAN LUIS OBISPO — The once-contested multimillion-dollar estate of Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard has been settled, and control of it was given to the top church official Hubbard had named as executor. Superior Court Judge William R. Fredman on Tuesday ordered the estate turned over to Norman F. Starkey, who besides his position in the church was a longtime friend of Hubbard. The estate is valued at more than $26 million, but the value of the assets that ...

DUNEDIN — Authorities believe a man who drowned in Clearwater Harbor on June 30 was a Swiss man taking classes at the Church of Scientology in Clearwater. Dunedin police found the man's body along the shore off Victoria Drive. Clearwater police Lt. Jack Dowling said Peter Ernst Frei, a Swiss citizen, was reported missing to Clearwater police on June 29 by a church acquaintance. The description of Frei and his clothing matches that of the drowning victim, Dowling said. Dowling said ...

DUNEDIN — Police have released a sketch of an unidentified man who apparently drowned in Clearwater Harbor. The body was discovered about 10 a.m. Thursday along the shore off Victoria Drive near Main Street and may have been in the water about eight hours, police said. Officials believe the man drowned, based on a medical examiner's preliminary test results. The man is described as white, 35 to 45 years old, 5 feet 7 inches tall and weighing 144 pounds. He had ...

DUNEDIN — The body of an unidentified man was found floating in Clearwater Harbor Thursday morning by an off-duty police officer. [...]