Yesterday's on this day...and today's...

Medicine charge filed; bond given
Date: Monday, 5 September 1955
Publisher: Gazette (Phoenix, AZ)
Main source: link (57 KiB)

A man accused here of practicing medicine without a license, was free today on $1,000 bond after being named in a complaint filed in Northwest Phoenix Precinct Court.

He is Edd Clark, 56, of 1811 N. First Ave., who allegedly accepted payments totaling $55 from a police woman and a secretary from the county attorney's office.

Romona Wacker, the police woman, and Eythel Deuel, the secretary, said they made the payments to Clark after accepting his advice on how to cure their nonexistent. Clark claims to be a practitioner of the Church of Scientology. He says he practices dianetics, which he describes as application of mental health principles.

Suicide verdict on South African
Date: Thursday, 5 September 1968
Publisher: The Times (UK)
Main source: link (47 KiB)

A verdict of suicide was recorded at an East Grinstead inquest today on a South African, Johannes Hermanus Scheepers, aged 29, described on his alien registration card as a student of scientology.

Mr. Scheepers was said to have been staying at the home of Mr. David Gaiman, Harwood House South, Harwoods Lane, a mile from the scientologists' international headquarters at Saint Hill Manor, East Grinstead.

Mr. Gaiman, aged 35, a senior executive of the cult, denied on oath that the dead man had been student of scientology at Saint Hill.

Asked by Dr. Angus Summerville, the East Sussex coroner, why Mr. Scheepers had come to Britain, Mr. Gaiman said: "I assume that he came to gamble. That was the activity that took his interest."

Mr. Gaiman said he was introduced to Mr. Scheepers two-and-a-half months ago. Mr. Scheepers had stayed at his house in Harwoods Lane for a short time and then left, saying he was going to Brighton.

On Thursday evening, August 29, Mr. Scheepers arrived at his house and said he was flying back to South Africa on Saturday. A bed was wade up for him. "Scheepers had mentioned casually to my wife that his gambling system had broken down, and from that I gathered the impression he was broke", Mr. Gaiman said.

Police-constable Albert Walker said Mr. Scheepers was found on August 31 in a car parked in Harwoods Lane. A plastic pipe wedged into the exhaust entered the car by a window. Dr. Albert Sachs, a pathologist said the cause of death was carbon monoxide poisoning.

Police-constable Colin Daffiest, the coroner's officer, said Mr. Scheepers left two letters, saying he was going to take his own life and that this had nothing to do with scientology or being a member of the group. His flight back to South Africa had been cancelled.

After the inquest Mr. Gaiman said a check had shown that Mr. Scheepers had not been registered at any scientology establishment in Britain.

Sign-waiving Scientology foe courts arrest during demonstration 

Courts clear the way for Scientology probe 

Her time to speak has come
Date: Tuesday, 5 September 1989
Publisher: Wisconsin State Journal
Author: George Hesselberg
Main source: link (78 KiB)

It is not so unusual to buy silence.

It's what you have to pay that is sometimes unusual.

Sometimes, it is simply a threat of harm.

Sometimes, it is money.

And, sometimes, it is both.

In 1981, when Marjery Wakefield was working as a waitress in Madison, three people showed up at her apartment to dissuade her from filing a lawsuit against the Church of Scientology.

They stayed for three days and gave her $16,000, which she used to pay back her parents for the money she spent on Scientology counseling sessions. She was also forced to sign an agreement promising not to sue the church.

At the time, the Church bought a lot for $16,000. Wakefield was once a true believer, had traveled the country in pursuit of her religion, living alternately in slums and nice apartments, working for little and then a lot, always for the church.

She ended up mentally abused, she claimed, by her church, a controversial organization founded by the late science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard.

Despite the payment, Wakefield returned in 1982 to Clearwater, Fla., the church's headquarters, and sued the Scientologists anyway. She claimed the church fraudulently promised to cure her mental illness and, instead, mentally abused her. She had paid them $20,000 for counseling sessions.

A musician and computer programmer, she had been recruited to Scientology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1968 and worked as a waitress in Madison in the 1980s.

I have talked with Wakefield several times, most recently in 1986 when she settled her lawsuit for a reported $200,000 and an agreement, once again, not to speak against the church.

Even then, she called the settlement a "hollow victory" because of the gag agreement.

"The real facts are that what Scientology presents on the outside, when you first get into it, is a long way from the really bizarre practices you end up with," she said in 1986.

"I really wanted the lawsuit to be brought through the legal system and (have the church) exposed, to have the system consider what was going on and make a decision on that," she said.

"OK, so I have my money back," she said then. "But they are still doing what they were doing. I think I could have done more to let other people know that this thing is a really big danger to mental health."

News came recently that Wakefield's silence has been broken again.

The Washington Post reported that Wakefield is being taken to court by the Scientologists, who want her to keep her mouth shut.

"I'm prepared to go to jail," she told the Orlando Sentinel.

"In fact, it may not be the worst thing. It would be an act that would get a lot of attention, and my purpose is to raise the awareness of people in this area about the church," she said.

Despite that gag order, Wakefield broke the agreement in 1987 (and, actually, in 1986 when she talked to me about her settlement) when she gave a television interview about cults. The church asked for a gag order, which the court granted last May.

Now, Scientology wants the court to find her guilty of 10 counts of criminal contempt and to punish her for each offense with six months in jail or a $500 fine. They also want her to be held in contempt and fined $240,000 for "damages against the church."

You can put it into a court order, you can threaten all you want. You might be able to guarantee silence for a short time.

Wakefield was silent for 12 years while she was in the church.

Now, she can't keep quiet.

She's paid for the right to talk about her years of silence.

Scientology branded a 'criminal organisation' and may face charges

Unmasked

Scientology's ridiculous explanation as to why 9 years previously they crept into Clearwater, Florida with the sole intent of taking the town over...

Letters to the Editor // On Scientology
Date: Thursday, 6 September 1984
Publisher: Clearwater Sun (Florida)
Main source: link (104 KiB)

Editor:

Scientology is basically an applied religious philosophy. Scientology traces its religious roots back 2500 years to a man named Gautama Siddhartha, better known to the Western world as Buddha. Buddha was concerned with increasing the individual's awareness of himself or herself as a spiritual being. He achieved this increased awareness for himself and devoted the remainder of his life to helping others achieve the same state. In Scientology today, we have an extension and expansion of Buddha's work with the added exactness of the Western scientific method. Mr. Hubbard's research has centered on developing counseling methods that free an individual's attention from the material aspects of existence and allows that person to rediscover the spiritual aspects of his or her life.

As Scientology's religious roots are in the Eastern tradition, the practice of our religion has its unique aspects. Eastern religions, by and large, believe that the Kingdom of God lies within the individual. That is, the knowledge of oneself as a spiritual being is resident within the person although largely or completely hidden. The Eastern religions provide training and advice to the individual that allows him or her to conduct an inward search to recover this knowledge. Western religions are "revealed" religions. That is to say, the Knowledge of God and of oneself as a spiritual being comes from the Books of the Bible, the Prophets and the life and teachings of Jesus, and is communicated to the individual from an external source. Scientology takes the Eastern approach pioneered first by Buddha and helps the person to conduct his or her own inward search to recover the knowledge of themselves as a spiritual being. Our counseling and training remove the barriers to this knowledge, inherent to one degree or another in each of us. Thus, the focus of our religion is not in the communal forms of worship, although we do have Sunday services and other types of group worship. The emphasis in Scientology is on the individual counseling and training that assists the perm in the recovery of knowledge of himself or herself as a spiritual being.

Since such an inward search is, by its very nature, individual, we are not a doctrinaire church. There is no requirement that anyone adopt or give up a particular belief system to participate in Scientology counseling or training. We give the person the responsibility for rediscovering his own unique spiritual identity, and charge him or her to live according to that identity. Many of our members, in Clearwater as in other places, attend another church of their choice in addition to participating in Scientology counseling and training. Their exposure to Scientology many times increases their reality and awareness of their innate spirituality in their own religious setting outside of our church.

Our church believes that man is basically good, although he sometimes acts badly. This non-optimum behavior comes from a person's desire to survive (a basic purpose of almost any living being) and is influenced by certain past experiences where that person had to choose a course of action and may have misjudged (and thus acted badly). Scientology counseling straightens all this out for the individual and frees the person to act more ethically and rationally as a spiritual being, and thus increases his or her survival potential. A society composed of individuals who are more ethical becomes, itself, also more ethical. Thus the overall situation in the world improves.

Scientology provides the only road to total freedom for the individual. It can change conditions int person's life for the better and has done so for millions of people across the world.

I hope this provides some idea of the religious basis for our church and its practices. We are more than happy to show anyone the Fort Harrison and describe the basic tenets of our church and let them see for themselves what we are doing in Clearwater.

RICHARD HAWORTH
Church of Scientology Clearwater

Behind an Internet message service's close
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