FACTNet & Scientology Litigation

Scientology has been selected as the first database to concentrate on because we feel that by doing so we can do more good for more victims and do it faster.

Scientology is involved on a global level in more current civil and criminal litigation than any other organization using coercive psychological systems.

Scientology appears to have been involved in more past civil and criminal litigation than any other organization using coercive psychological systems. Over the last forty years, total worldwide lawsuits may run in the tens of thousands.

Scientology is considered by many experts to be the world's most dangerous and destructive organization using coercive psychological systems.

Scientology's fanaticism has probably seriously hurt and alienated more people who were in Scientology or who were not in Scientology than any other global organization using coercive psychological systems.

Scientology is considered one of the worst harassers and abusers of its victims, ex-members, or anyone who dares to expose its practices or exercies their First Amendment right of free speech. Forty-four lawsuits have been filed against the Cult Awareness Network alone for speaking out against Scientology.

Scientology is considered one of most brutal and worst abusers of the legal system and the legal process when individuals dare to speak against its use of coercive psychological systems or its other abuses by filing lawsuits or initiating investigations.

Joe Yanni was a key attorney working for Scientology until 1987. He defected from the Scientology's legal team when he says he was asked to help church officials steal medical records to blackmail Charlie O'Rielly, the plaintiff's attorney in Wollersheim v. Scientology.

From his previous working experience inside Scientology, Joe Yanni now believes the church "has so subverted the justice and judicial system that it should be barred from seeking equity in any court."

Since Yanni quit representing the church, he has been the target of death threats, burglaries, lawsuits and other harassment.

Scientology's legal policies are designed to overwhelm its government and nongovernment adversaries in onerous costs, impossible workloads and deliberately created confusion.

Scientology is at war with the outside world, as concerns "freedom of information" and the rights of a free press.

Scientology spends the most money and is probally the most active organization using and defending coercive psychological systems. It engages in programs to "rewrite history" and suppress all critial information about itself. By hiding its crimes and continuous abuses, Scientology tries to avoid necessary social awareness, censure and punishment.

It uses repeated frivolous and expensive lawsuits to deter individuals or the media from stating anything hostile to Scientology, whether factual or not.

It has tried to use federal trade secret laws designed for business use to try to silence anyone exposing information critical of Scientology.

It has tried to establish new interpretations of copyright laws to silence factual information hostile to Scientology (the recent "Hubbard biography" copyright precedent). These interpretations originally hindered the publishing industry's free press rights to present important biographical facts about Hubbard that the public has a right to know and needs for its protection.

It has attempted to seal or successfully sealed court cases and records during or after litigation. Church of Scientology v. Armstrong No.C. 420153 Cal. Super. CT.(1984) is typical of Scientology's many actions in this area.

It has tried to use copyright laws as justification for unreasonable search and seizure, to inhibit its adversaries and supress archival material on Scientology. To.prevent access to evidence, Scientology lawyers have been temporarily successful in restricting freedom of information requests for access to the thousands of documents seized from church headquarters in an authorized search by the FBI.

While Scientology sponsors "freedom of information" attacks on its adversaries, it will not tolerate the same basic freedoms when someone seeks proper legal redress against itself or its members.

If Scientology is allowed to continue with these information sealing and supressing tactics, and its other techniques of intimidation and harassment, no one will be informed enough to make rational decisions about Scientology.

Scientology keeps much of the factual information about itself and its true intentions and activities hidden among those highest inner few who have passed extensive security and loyalty tests.

The vast majority of lower level Scientologists (not involved in covert operations and not in high level staff positions) know nothing about the "big picture" and the actual facts of the organization that exploits them.

Because Scientology insiders use elaborate security codes, coded language, and other intense security procedures to prevent the outside world from discovering or understanding their activities, the compartmentalized pieces of the mosaic can only be assembled by a cooperative effort among high level ex-members who understand the codes and the context of their use.

The "Big Picture" is vital to Scientology's victims, who need all possible information and evidence to ensure the highest probability of success and the lowest risk when going against Scientology's Gestapo-style intelligence apparatus.

Scientology keeps detailed Gestapo-type intelligence files on current and former adversaries.

Many former adversaries allege that years after they were involved in disclosing Scientology's wrongdoing, harassment or spying operations are still run on them. Many believe that once you have been declared an enemy of Scientology, you will always be looking over your shoulder and will need to be security conscious for the rest of your life.

These are not the people we want to create the world our children will live in.

Scientology uses phobia induction to keep former members silent about their knowledge of Scientology's unethical and illegal activities.

F.A.C.T.'s staff and associates are directly networked to more ongoing Scientology lawsuits, plaintiff attorneys independent and governmental investigations relating to Scientology than those of any other known organization. F.A.C.T.'s staff is networked through trusted personal connections to the most recent and highest level defectors from Scientology. Before leaving Scientology, several of F.A.C.T.'s associates were top level internal archivists for the Scientology organization.

The F.A.C.T. computer bulletin board (BBS) will contain the largest and most effective collection of Scientology exit counseling materials and resources ever assembled, to help victims back into normal life and independently decide if they want to disclose their compartmentalized piece of the Scientology puzzle.

F.A.C.T.'s key staff has a rock solid reputation for uncompromisable integrity and security awareness and security sensitivity. F.A.C.T.'s key people have positive public reputations and also are highly trusted in the victim assistance networks and advocate organizations. These are the people most likely to be able to obtain needed information, if it is not already in F.A.C.T.'s archives.

The key staff of the F.A.C.T. organization have been tested under adversity and pressure. They have a proven and long history of being able to withstand Scientology's notorious harassment actions. They have a total of more than 80 years of knowledge and successful experience concerning Scientology.

The F.A.C.T BBS and team can show you how to minimize Scientology's overwhelm-and-confuse tactics, and how to use them to forward your own positions. Success creates success and F.A.C.T.'s associates have the best success record against Scientology, including legal judgments and settlements in civil litigation against Scientology. Others have been highly successful in legal and public relations actions against Scientology.<R><R>When you connect to F.A.C.T. you connect to successful experience and success-creating attitudes.

F.A.C.T.'s first data base project will empower anyone or any organization seeking ethical means to combat Scientology's unethical and illegal activities. It will empower attorneys, governments, corporations (and their public relations and legal divisions), citizen investigators, and individuals or private organizations involved in investigations or litigation involving Scientology. Using the BBS, thousands of individuals around the world can effectively work on solving and researching the Scientology problem without time or distance limitations. They can multiply their efforts and resources synergisticly and geometrically.

The largest electronically searchable archive ever assembled on Scientology will cut legal and research costs and improve the probability of success. It is designed to become the total knowledge and experience of everyone who has had to deal with Scientology, right down to Scientology's settlement strategies and their past and current settlements and offers.

With this collected knowledge and experience easily accessible, Scientology will no longer be able to force onerous legal and discovery expenses onto those just learning about Scientology's tactics. Millions of dollars in litigation and public relations work will be at each victim's fingertips.

This knowledge and experience will empower the PR and legal departments of major corporations involved in litigation with Scientology, to ethically contain Scientology in the media and in the courts.

With the 24-hour availability of this database, Scientology will lose its ability to financially overwhelm adversaries by forcing each one separately to "reinvent the wheel" every time a new case is filed against Scientology. Scientology's efforts to overwhelm and confuse the under-informed and under-financed will be counterbalanced.

Because Scientology spends millions to suppress knowledge about its history and activity, few people have realized that Scientology is horribly unsuccessful in its court litigation. Scientology either settles secretly and seals the cases or loses or drops the case or gets the opposing party to settle or drop the case by forcing onerous expenses on them . Since its inception, Scientology has had no significant legal victories, despite all their mischaracterizations of legal outcomes and their bluff and brazen bravado.

Most of Scientology's noise about how good they are is their own empty PR legend. Scientology hammers down and overwhelms the "nail that stick up the farthest" hoping we won't catch on to just how vulnerable they would be if we stood together and shared information in ethical collective security.

The Work to be Done Now

 The assembly of all relevant information about Scientology into a searchable electronic database creates a tool of unprecedented scope. (The technology that F.A.C.T. will use has only been available for about 18 months.) Given proper input and organization, this electronically searchable database should reveal many new patterns of illegal activity and much new information. This will "even the playing field" and remedy the disadvantage and disenfranchisement currently suffered by Scientology's victims and critics in current and future civil and criminal litigation.

Consider all of Scientology's filed briefs, testimony, interrogatories, and affidavits becoming analyzable and comparable with automated text search software and the compare functions in new generation word processors. It would not be surprising to find Scientology's multi-country, multi-state, multi-jurisdictional court documents and complaints, and other submissions, to contain not only many important factual discrepancies and contradictions but also provable perjuries. Evidence may be obtained concerning the frivolous, insincere, and malicious pattern of Scientology's litigation and perhaps outright fraud. This high technology data base analysis of all of Scientology's legal and related documents may yield documentation necessary to bring new RICO criminal charges and grand jury investigations against Scientology.

When the victims of Scientology are ethically empowered and cooperatively and ethically networked, more of them will come to understand how they were manipulated and become willing to share the information needed to end an ongoing pattern of injustice and exploitation. With Scientology's victims no longer cowed, the cult will continue to lose in the courts and settle at a rate many times faster than now.

Only an abundance of judgments, settlements, and punitive damage awards will force Scientology finally to change its behavior for real. It will do this only when the profit is taken out of coercive psychological manipulation of the hopes and needs of good people.

It's as simple as that. When we take the profit out of Scientology's unethical and illegal activities through ethical use of the justice system and cooperation for our collective security, Scientology will stop those activities.

The success of this project depends on the courage of Scientology's victims, their willing to learn about and face what was done to them rather than rationalize it ("the organization was bad but the tech was good"), and finally to speak up and take action.

F.A.C.T. has decided to focus on Scientology because there is a massive back pressure at all levels for governments and other global justice systems to ethically demonstrate to Scientology and to society that Scientology is not "above the law." There is a snowballing awareness that only an intense worldwide cooperative effort to apply justice in criminal and civil actions against Scientology will create collective security for all of its victims, its critics, and for future generations.

"Scientology critics contend that the U.S. needs to crack down on the church in a major organized way". <R> Time Magazine, May 6, 1991

Off the record, a judge who sat on a Scientology case stated his belief that "no individual plaintiff, lawyer, or civil suit alone can handle Scientology." So the government also has to act and F.A.C.T believes that various underfinanced and understaffed government agencies are acting and will act. But they need to be helped by the victims of Scientology. The victims need to ethically cooperate and help locate, analyze, interpret, and prepare the information and evidences that resource-short government agencies need to forward their investigations and our defense.

The victims of Scientology need to realize that they must do most of the work when dealing with government agencies. The agencies are simply too backlogged by current crime rates and discouraged by the costly legal harassment tactics of Scientology. It is the victims of Scientology who must hand the government an airtight case, boxed and gift wrapped with a pretty bow.

That is the work to be done and F.A.C.T. is a tool to help you do it.

In 1982, at the Supreme Court of Victoria, where religious status was denied during its Board of Inquiry into Scientology, Australian Justice Brookings made a telling closing statement that continues to be a harbinger of the ongoing Scientology phenomenon