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October 31, 2006

Evangelical schools fight Quebec curriculum rules

Dave Rogers, CanWest News Service; Ottawa Citizen
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.html?id=41306533-a07c-45e8-b52b-f1467ed0f0e5&k=79636

Published: Saturday, October 28, 2006

OTTAWA -- The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada is fighting back against the Quebec Ministry of Education, which requires that unlicensed evangelical schools follow the provincial curriculum, including sex education and Darwin's theory of evolution.

That rule "squeezes religious freedom," says Janet Epp Buckingham, lawyer for the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada.

Epp Buckingham argues there must be a balance between provincial standards for private schools and the religious rights of parents and students. She said the rights of evangelical schools to teach according to parents' religious beliefs has been an issue since 1997 when Quebec divided schools along language instead of religious lines. Twenty evangelical Christian schools will have to negotiate with the Quebec ministry about what they are required to teach.

"There has been a growth in the private school system in Quebec so parents can continue to have a religious component in their children's education," Epp Buckingham said. "But the question remains:who should have control over education and what is being taught?"

Roderick Cornell, vice-principal of the licensed Emmanuel Christian School in Montreal, said unlicensed "church basement" schools use the U.S.-based Accelerated Christian Education program that does not follow the Quebec curriculum.

Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day used the curriculum from 1979 to 1985 when he ran the Bentley Christian Training Centre, an independent school of 100 students near Red Deer, Alta.

An Alberta government report on the curriculum in 1985 found it contained "a degree of insensitivity towards blacks, Jews and natives" and wouldn't allow it in public schools. The ACE program was rooted in a literal interpretation of the Bible and taught creationism over evolution.

Cornell said licensed private schools in Quebec must have qualified staff and follow the provincial curriculum. "You can add to the program but you have to tell students what evolution is all about because that is on the curriculum," said. "I have my doubts about evolution, but we still have to teach it."

Pierre Daoust, director general of the Coeur-des-Vallees school board inThurso, Que., located across the Ottawa River from the nation's capital, lodged the complaint that sparked a provincewide investigation.

Daoust said the school board is concerned about the education of 15 students at a school operated by l'Eglise evangelique near Saint-Andre-Avellin, Que., because the board could be held legally responsible if graduates' diplomas were not recognized.

In addition to those 15 students, another 40 attend an unlicensed evangelical school in Gatineau, Que., and there is a third in Hull, Que. The other school boards haven't complained, said Daoust.

Education Ministry spokeswoman Marie-France Boulay said this week the province will negotiate for several weeks with an unspecified number of evangelical schools to determine whether they can meet provincial standards that include the teaching of Darwin's theory of evolution.

Ottawa Citizen

Posted by Perry at 01:54 PM

Political group accused of cult-like practices; LaRouche Youth Movement said to brainwash, manipulate

The South End
http://thesouthend.typepad.com/tsenews/2006/10/political_group.html

October 31, 2006
Gloria Stamat
Contributing Writer

Members of the LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM) whisked Ed Capps and his friend, Katrina Fenton, away to their headquarters in Redford near the end of winter semester 2006. They were returned only after a six-hour indoctrination to get them to drop out of school and join their cause.
Brainchild of political activist Lyndon LaRouche, the LYM is a cultural movement that embraces Marxism and a reemergence of the classics. Though accused of being cultish in nature, the LYM has thousands of followers around the world.

How it all begins

Katrina Fenton, a political science and philosophy major at Wayne State, was approached by LaRouche Youth members. These members told Fenton that she had no respect for education or for thinking in general, and that her education did not equip her to solve even simple math riddles. She was urged to reconsider her education foundation. Being cold and hungry, Fenton pressed that she wanted to get some food at a restaurant, La Pita. A group member walked with her to the restaurant where she was meeting her friend, Capps.

After lunch, Capps and Fenton got into a van with six LaRouche members. Capps thought they were heading to the philosophy office on campus. Neither knew they were going 30 minutes away to Redford.

“So is this the part where we get locked in the garage and killed?” Capps asked. The LaRouche members emphatically denied being a cult.

The headquarters visit included reading LaRouche literature aloud in chorus, a general tour and listening to a LaRouche radio program. Capps was told that the group alternates between days recruiting at Eastern Michigan University, Wayne State University and University of Michigan. There was a discussion that LaRouche’s politics are the only way to save the world. Then the members pitched dropping out of school for the special education there.

Capps and Fenton were returned to campus afterwards. Capps didn’t give the LaRouche group his phone number. However, Fenton did, and has been receiving calls from the group ever since. She received about 20 phone calls last month urging her to come back.

How it can end

Jeremiah Duggan lived in England with his family. According to his mother, Erica Duggan, his school, the renowned Christ’s Hospital, called him a renaissance man, because he enjoyed science, math, literature, drama and so many other subjects. He later attended the British Institute in Paris. Then he decided to get two degrees at once by studying English at the Sorbonne and French at the British Institute. Duggan fell in love with a French girl in Paris who was a classical singer. He loved The Beatles, cinema and animals.

Despite studying history, and being part of a liberal Jewish youth group since he was 8, Duggan knew little about politics. After Sept. 11, 2001 Duggan became more interested in reading news and politics. In early 2003, Duggan came home for a visit and to introduce his new girlfriend. That was the last time his family saw him.

Erica Duggan wasn’t worried about her son because he was so independent.

According to his mother, Duggan bought a newspaper from a LaRouche recruiter outside of his school at the British Institute. He called her on the telephone and told her how impressed he was with the organizer, Benoit Chalifoux, and how he would like to write for the LaRouche publications. Duggan began to fear that the Iraq war would lead to a world war. So he believed he needed to go to Germany for what he thought was an anti-war conference to protest the war. Erica Duggan was unable to protect her son because the LaRouche movement was virtually unknown in England.

Duggan had no idea where he was headed with the group. He gave his girlfriend the names of three possible towns in Germany where he might be. Around March 22, 2003 Duggan attended the conference in Wiesbaden. Later, Erica Duggan found among his belongings, materials showing that week he was exposed to conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic statements. The last thing he wrote was, “Jewish leads to fascism leads to Bush leads to Cheney.”

On March 27, Erica Duggan said he called her for help, telling her he was under too much pressure and asked her to rescue him. Not an hour later, his body was found on a roadside near Wiesbaden.
German authorities concluded it was a suicide — that Duggan had jumped out into traffic. However, no proper investigation was conducted. The case was promptly closed with the evidence discarded.

The circumstances leading to his death are still unknown. Duggan had no history of mental illness.

According to his mother, there was a lot of blood seeping from his head, which got on to his clothing and pooled on the ground around him. Yet, there was no blood on the cars or on the roadway where he was supposedly dragged. She said she wonders whether her son was mentally tortured and driven to flee in front of cars, or even murdered and left by a roadside.

“They’ve taken from me my life. They’ve destroyed everything. I’ll never have any more joy in living. And not only have they taken my son, but on top of that, they’ve imposed on me the British, the German, the French, and perhaps even the American authorities — the fact that I have to investigate the death of my own son,” Erica Duggan said.

Erica Duggan is campaigning at justiceforjeremiah.com for funding to pursue legal means to a legitimate investigation into her son’s death.

How they do it

Chip Berlet, journalist and LaRouche researcher, believes that the main targets for LYM recruits are college campuses, urban inner cities and black communities. Students are attracted to the anti-war, anti-Bush and anti-Cheney rhetoric.

“They’re masterful at preying on the guilt of people, if you believe in helping the working class,” said Berlet.

Berlet said that the LaRouche group is a cult because a democratic or progressive group is not heavy-handed with indoctrination. But with LaRouche, his followers think he is the answer to all problems and is listened to without question.

“LaRouche is a crackpot,” Berlet said.

Dennis King, author of the book “The New American Fascism” about LaRouche, believes this group should be banned from college campuses. He feels they are deceptive and recruit aggressively, and that colleges should have orientations to warn students.

Paul McClung of Richland, Wash., is a former member of the LaRouche organization from 1978 to 2004. He dropped out of school to join the group. He said that young people are told that LaRouche is their only hope. They are told a dark age is coming and only LaRouche can lead them out.

“A young person who doesn’t know history would fall for this,” McClung said.

McClung had to change his phone number and move in with a friend to get away from the group. He warns that members are relentless in trying to reclaim those who leave.

“What most people don’t understand is that LaRouche sees himself as a God, and that he knows more than anybody, including his hero, F.D.R.,” McClung said.

Phil Fisher, a charismatic local organizer for the LYM, was told he could not give any official comments on the group. When asked basic questions like, “What are the group’s goals?” and “Why campaign so heavily on campuses?” he had no answers. Instead, the group released an advanced copy of a pamphlet against campus media, with sensationalist subheadings like, “The Campus Gestapo,” “Cheney’s Campus Stormtroopers,” and “The Bottom Feeders.”

According to Lt. Dave Scott of the Wayne State Police, he hasn’t heard any complaints about the LaRouche Youth Movement.

“We’re not going to stand around to screen people as to where they’re going, if it’s against their will or not. It’s a common sense issue,” Scott said.

Scott said that if people come forward about being taken off campus against their will, documentation would be needed to determine if a crime was committed or not.

And the answer as to which students are targeted lies with Katrina Fenton. Despite being harassed for over six months, she’s not ready to say, ‘down with LaRouche’ because she feels at least they are trying. She said she is tired of the general disinterest and apathy of young people today and feels that reform is necessary with our society. Yet, she is still unsure as to what LaRouche’s group is about. She wonders what LaRouche would put in place of the current political and economic systems.

Posted by Perry at 01:48 PM

October 30, 2006

God's love sustains family facing abduction charges

By Sharon Boase
The Hamilton Spectator
(Oct 30, 2006)

A man charged with forcibly trying to "deprogram" his daughter from the effects of an alleged religious cult says he and his family are being sustained by their faith in God.

"I don't want to come across as an overly religious fanatic or something but I think that there is a God and, in the end, God wins," Dr. Renato Brun Del Re told The Spectator yesterday.

Brun Del Re, a family physician, is charged with the kidnapping and forcible confinement of his daughter, Mirella, in an alleged attempt to lure her away from Dominion Christian Centre, a downtown Hamilton church.

Brun Del Re's son, Giancarlo, 25, faces the same charges, while his wife Lucie, a high school French teacher, is charged with forcible confinement. They are scheduled to appear in court Nov. 20

The family's bizarre yet compelling story was told in the season premiere of W5 Saturday night, an investigative news show on CTV.

It portrayed Peter Rigo, pastor at DCC, as an unorthodox religious leader who peppers his sermons with slang, swear words and even sexually explicit language as he portrays his church as superior to others.

The hour-long documentary quoted the Brun Del Res as heartbroken and desperate to rescue their daughter from an oppressive environment that has changed her profoundly.

They were charged after Mirella Brun Del Re was allegedly abducted by five men around 8:30 a.m. on Dec. 21, 2005, near the DCC on Park Street North. She was allegedly shoved into a van and taken to a location in Halton and later to her parents' Milton home where she eventually met with Tennessee-based cults expert and deprogrammer Mary Alice Chrnalogar.

The daughter eventually fled and contacted police.

Mirella Brun Del Re appeared calm and unperturbed at the prospect of her parents, brother and others facing possible jail terms over the affair.

W5 hosted a town hall-style meeting with dissatisfied former DCC-goers. Some 75 parents and young adults described a tightly- controlled atmosphere in which Rigo dictates all, including who may date whom.

Other Hamilton parents described watching their 20-something children cut ties with them as well as friends unconnected to the church.

Three others have also been charged with forcible confinement in the case. Being found guilty of forcible confinement carries a maximum prison term of 10 years, while kidnapping can net a life sentence.

http://www.hamiltonspectator.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=hamilton/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1162162211185&call_pageid=1020420665036&col=1014656511815

Posted by Perry at 02:17 PM

The Dominion Christian Centre is no ordinary church

The Pied Piper of Hamilton

Oct. 28 2006

Chad Derrick, Associate Producer, W-FIVE

CTV.ca, Canada

TORONTO --

There's a raging debate in Hamilton, Ontario about just what the Dominion Christian Centre is. But wide agreement on what it's not.

The D.C.C., as it's known, is no ordinary church. No hymns here. Every Sunday service begins with a one-hour rock concert - complete with power vocals, driving guitars and pounding bass.

The man on the drums is the pastor. Peter Rigo came to Hamilton, he says, "on a mission from God."

"When He said to come, He said - drop a plumb line and establish a people that know me and that live for me," Rigo told W-FIVE.

The pastor's voice drips with disdain and sarcasm when he talks about other churches and how they spend most of their time competing for parishioners.

"And then we compete with the world -our God is better than yours. Our girls give better b-jobs, that's right, we get laid twice as quick in Christian school. Our God's better than your God."

Sexual references aside, Rigo's version of Christianity could be seen as an extreme version of evangelical Christianity.

"My desire is to see every man and woman on earth come to know Jesus Christ as their lord and personal savior."

What sets him apart is the extent of Rigo's zeal for his version of the truth. W-FIVE challenged Rigo with the notion that, "some people might like nothing more than to turn the whole world into an Islamic state."

Rigos answer: "Yeah. And it's going to be a war right down to the end."

And that's how it is at the D.C.C. Black and white. For Rigo's followers, it's also pretty much a full time job. Spending every spare hour at the church--living the word of God. Unlike those 'other places.'

In his sermon at the D.C.C., Pastor Rigo says, "For the most part, Church is just a nice outhouse. You simply go once a week, move your conscience bowels, get a little relief and go back out and eat like a pig for another seven days. That's why churches mainly stink."

Rigo went to Bible College but never graduated. He was affiliated with the Open Bible Faith Fellowship, a network of evangelical churches across North America, but they recently kicked him out.

Rigo tells W-FIVE, "I don't accept what we've called Christianity to date. A lot of teaching goes on in the name of God. Very little living. So the standard that I read in a relationship of God and of the Word is - if you love me, you'll obey me. Not, if you love me, you'll learn about me."

The Brun del Re Family - Split Apart

Lucie and Renato Brun del Re have learned a lot about Peter Rigo's concept of obedience. They've been left with a huge hole in their lives - a hole left by their daughter Mirella.

Like many young people from religious families - Mirella was on a spiritual quest, and hungry for answers. That quest ended in Hamilton. She told her parents that she'd finally found what she was looking for.

Lucie explains, "After going through different churches, she came to me and said: 'Mama, I did find the church,' the right one, the true church, she called it."

At the Dominion Christian Centre, Mirella found truth and a place in the band as the violinist. What her family was finding was a very different Mirella.

Lucie recalls a conversation with her daughter, after she'd joined the D.C.C.

"`God is talking to me and is telling me that we are all going to be moving to Hamilton.' And I said, what do you mean, what are you talking about?"

Lucie started to worry.

"And you could see the transformation on her face, like someone was talking for her. So that's when I started to worry that something was wrong - the way she was thinking, analyzing, talking. And she became more distant."

The family was concerned about what was happening to Mirella. Giancarlo, Mirella's brother and also her best friend, decided to check out the D.C.C. for himself. He didn't like what he found one bit.

"I was just sitting there. And then the pastor starts singling me out in front of the whole church." Giancarlo continues, "And asking me if I'm saved and if I have Jesus in my life. And it was kind of intimidating because he's singling me out in front of everyone else. And it got to the point where he got closer and closer with his microphone in front of everyone and then he ended up kicking me out."

Publicly humiliated, Giancarlo walked out - expecting his sister to follow. She didn't.

Giancarlo says, "She waited another two hours until the service was done to come out, which struck me as odd. And so we're driving home, and I'm like Meece - we stick together on everything. Why didn't you come out? And she was like - the pastor was right."

By now Mirella was spending every spare minute at the D.C.C. - helping out in the kitchen, anywhere she was needed. Anywhere except with her family.

"I couldn't believe what was happening. It was like in a movie. You can't even try to make some sense out of it. It was so difficult," said her mother.

And as time went by, Lucie noticed that Mirella's indifference towards her family was turning into something darker.

"The hate she developed towards the siblings, the family - the arrogance, the hate towards us. Like we didn't mean anything any more. She was in another world," she said.

Her father, Renato, was starting to believe his daughter was being brainwashed. "She was fed a lot of information. And when you tend to go to church every day, or close to every day, there's a lot of time when you get indoctrinated."

Cole and Nettie Brown

Mirella's parents began to wonder if their daughter's thoughts were still her own. And when the Brun del Res began to ask questions, they found they weren't alone with those concerns. They met Cole Brown and his wife, Nettie - both former members. When he attended the D.C.C., Cole was Peter Rigo's right hand man.

At first, Cole found the D.C.C. to be a good and caring place. He remembers when things began to change, starting with Pastor Rigo himself.

"There's the old saying, power corrupts. And the more people who come, the more power you have," Cole told W-FIVE. "There was one way, or it was the highway. It was, do it like this - or there's the door."

Cole remembers that as Rigo began to exercise more and more control over the lives of his congregation, the Pastor's own behavior was becoming increasingly bizarre.

"I've seen him pick up chairs in the sanctuary and whip them across the room in a rage, an angry rage, trying to stop someone from doing a certain thing."

When Cole told Peter Rigo that he'd had enough and was leaving the church, Cole told W-FIVE that Rigo tried to separate wife from husband.

"He went to my wife and he told her that I'm leading her astray. I'm going to have an affair on her. He would tell her 'you better watch if your husband leaves the church, you're going to have to leave your husband.'"

It didn't work. The couple left the church together and remained together. But others were starting to raise alarms about the church and its Pastor.

When interviewed by W-FIVE, Peter Rigo insisted that there were never more than a few malcontents.

"This sound is being made by a handful. I can't name you more than five people in here that have any difficulty with their family. Yes, lots have come through and decided not to stay - parishioners." Rigo continued, "There's certainly far more people for us than against us."

Other Parents Speak Out

But that's not what W-FIVE discovered, when an invitation to attend a town-hall meeting was issued to anyone dissatisfied with the D.C.C. More than 70 people showed up, most of them devout Christians. And almost all said their lives had been negatively affected by the D.C.C. and by Peter Rigo.

Shared and disturbing experiences quickly began to emerge, mainly the separation of families.

"Over the space of a year, it was little by little by little. Until she came to a point where she went to my younger children and said: 'I'm sorry, I won't ever see you again,'" said Peter Spiering, who hasn't seen his daughter, Sherry, for more than seven months.

Other members had similar stories. "Nathan used to come to the house and he doesn't anymore. I have to pull his teeth. He refuses to come to dinners. And that's not the Nathan I knew," said Dave Rozon about his son.

And what does Peter Rigo have to say about all this? Basically, that it's all God's will.

He told W-FIVE, "The gospel separates families. Jesus said very clearly in His word: 'I did not come to bring peace and unity, I came to bring division with a sword. And whoever loves the father or the mother, their husband or wife, brother or sister more than me is not fit to serve in my kingdom.'"

Control

Another theme that emerged during our town hall was the complete control that many say Peter Rigo exercises over his congregation.

At the town-hall meeting, Sarah Muller talked about how D.C.C. members relied on the pastor to make decisions.

"And it came to a place where you didn't even know how to function without asking the Pastor - what should I do? Or, what colour should my hair be? You know, down to stupid things, you needed to ask them about everything."

From the most serious spiritual decisions to the most mundane details of life, Rigo said the ex parishioner controls it all. That included his restrictions on dating.

Kendry Bilston explained, "From day one, the day I walked in there, it was - girls and boys together is bad. You're not going to end up with anybody in here, you will not date, you will never be with a boy, it will never happen."

In W-FIVE's interview with Rigo, he defended his policies.

"When you talk about a standard, the standard is - there is nobody in here screwing around with each other. There is no couple sneaking off and doing stuff. It's clean here, and once water's clean, you don't really want to dirty it."

But what if you want to leave it? Again, another disturbing theme emerged from W-FIVE's town-hall meeting. According to the D.C.C.'s ex-members, Peter Rigo intimidated members who tried to leave.

Allen Bilston recalled a conversation he had with Rigo about leaving the D.C.C.

"If I leave, then some of these other young people might leave with you. You might as well just tie a stone around your neck. And he said - you might as well just cut your throat, because the Bible says if you lead any of these people out of here, you're as good as dead. You're going to hell."

Joe Ricottone told the town-hall what the pastor said when one particular member left to help set up another church.

"He went on a tirade and he basically said - who does he think he is? That man will die within a year of a heart attack. And that was how he blessed him when he left the church."

Other former members of the D.C.C. spoke up regarding the accusations they say Rigo had made against people who left or were thinking of leaving the church.

Sarah Muller described how Rigo affected her relationship to her father.

"It came to a place where I couldn't even be close to my father because I thought there was something going on there." She said that Rigo told her, "That my father saw me as a wife and lusted after me in inordinate affections. Because my father had gone to the church and he left."

Another ex-member of the D.C.C. added, "It's a dangerous place psychologically. And when you have a so-called man of God threatening death on people, they're scare tactics and people are living in fear in that environment."

Peter Rigo tells a different story. He told W-FIVE that he doesn't force anyone to stay -that he encourages the part-time Christians to leave, before they corrupt the full time flock.

"I actually saw people try to take them out, right within our own church. So you can imagine my message started to get stronger and stronger with - we got to live this, get in or get out. Find the floor, get a hold of God, or find the door."

A Cult?

An extreme interpretation of Christianity? Perhaps. But add to that the control, the isolation, the shunning of loved ones. And the people who attended W-FIVE's town-hall meeting came to one disturbing conclusion - they believe the D.C.C. is, without question, a cult.

"I think cult is ridiculous," responded Peter Rigo. "I went down Rick Ross's cult 10 warning signs of how to know that somebody is in a cult, in a religious cult. And we didn't match any of them."

The Rick Ross Institute is a U.S.-based organization that provides on-line information about what it considers to be destructive cults and controversial groups.

But the D.C.C. does match some of the warning signs listed by that website and by other organizations that inform the public about cults. Some of the warning signs? The church is everything. And those who don't belong, even family and old friends, are to be shunned.

Cole Brown believes that determining whether the D.C.C. is a "cult" is less important than understanding what actually goes on there.

"Spiritually, there's absolutely no accountability. No one to even ask him how he's doing or there's no one outside - no parents, no friends, no other pastors, no one. And again that makes for a very unsafe, unstable place."

Mirella's Story

But that's not at all how Mirella Brun del Re sees things. She agreed to sit down with W-FIVE and give her side of the story for the first time. Mirella insisted that she's not being used or controlled by anyone. She told W-FIVE that it's her parents, and all the other concerned families who are being manipulated by "the enemy."

"Who's the enemy? Satan is the enemy. You have the Devil who's against everything God is doing," she told W-FIVE.

It was eight o'clock in the morning on the Wednesday before Christmas, 2005. Mirella Brun del Re says she was walking to work in downtown Hamilton, Ont., when she was approached by a man, asking for directions. He wasn't alone.

"All of a sudden I realize there's five men that have surrounded me. They're all wearing black coats. Some of them are wearing toques and I'm looking around. I'm like - oh my gosh, I think I'm going to be robbed or raped, or something horrible is going to happen. I had no idea what was going on. I was just fighting and I was pushed into a van that just pulled up right beside me," Mirella told W-FIVE.

Mirella claims she was grabbed by a group of men, a black hood thrown over her head, and shoved into a waiting van.

"And I was just held back in the chair and I looked up and I was handcuffed."

Mirella claims that she was handcuffed to her own brother, and that she was driven to a cottage in the country where she was held a virtual prisoner for nine days.

"I was handcuffed all the time. So, eating, drinking, doing everything - I was handcuffed basically."

Mirella says that her family subjected her to an intensive deprogramming regime, showing her videos about cults and reading fromMary Alice Chrnalogar's book "Twisted Scriptures."

Mary Alice Chrnalogar makes her living as a full time deprogrammer--reversing the effects of brainwashing. She's an expert of Christian cults and wrote a book about them. It was to her that Mirella's parents had turned for help.

"They had a very good cause (to worry about) Mirella. Anybody that's in a cult goes through turmoil. You struggle. You struggle terribly. And I think that any parent should be concerned if they're in a group like this," Chrnalogar told W-FIVE from her home in Chattanooga.

"I think they're an extremely destructive cult. The kids are struggling to stay there. They talk about how they might have to leave, but they don't want to - because they may be condemned or go to hell."

The Brun del Res' worst fears were now confirmed. Their only daughter - part of a cult. Chrnalogar said she could help but she needed to be face to face with Mirella.

At the parents' request, Mary Alice Chrnalogar agreed to fly to Canada to see if she could help - but on the condition that Mirella would be free to leave if she wanted to.

Lucie Brun del Re admits that it didn't go well.

"So after talking to Mirella for four hours, finally Mirella says - are you finished now? So Mary Alice says, well we're not keeping you. She said, oh, you're not? Okay. So, she took her bag and she started walking out. And I was after her, holding her, and saying - where are you going? We're not finished. Wait for Papa. And I was in tears because I didn't want her to leave."

Mirella told W-FIVE that she understands her parents' motivation.

"I understand what they want. They want that old Mirella back. The one that lived the fa�ade of what religion is and just accepting life as is. And I don't want that life! I want to live true because now at this point I've - I've seen behind the curtain. I've seen that there is a real god and I have to live up to what I've seen." "Because I believe that and I want to believe that," she added.

Charges laid

Their daughter gone, it seemed that things couldn't get any worse for the Brun del Res. But they did. They were summoned to the Hamilton police station where criminal charges were laid, including kidnapping and forcible confinement.

W-FIVE asked Mirella about how she felt about the charges facing her parents.

"They could go to jail. Yes."

"That's up to the court to decide whether they should or not," Mirella continued.

The Brun del Res are devastated. Mirella - strangely matter of fact about the whole thing.

W-FIVE asked Mirella if she'd be willing to testify against her family.

"I may have to. Yes, I am prepared to do that. Absolutely."

The courts will ultimately decide the guilt of the Brun del Res.

At W-FIVE's town-hall meeting, some of the families indicated they'd thought about trying to rescue loved ones from the D.C.C.

Randy Fricker actually tried to rescue his son Josh.

"I phoned the lady down in Chattanooga who wrote the book, "Twisted Scriptures", and she said - if you can get him in the car and get him down here in four or five days, I can deprogram him."

But Randy only made it halfway to Windsor before his son bolted and ended up back at the D.C.C.

Randy recalled, "He was frantic. He didn't know what to do. He was like a fish out of water. I said - Josh, you have to trust me on this. I love you. I want to see you back home. This isn't right what he's doing. But all he knew was Rigo."

Mary Alice Chrnalogar feels that parents are justified in attempting to rescue their loved ones.

"Parents are absolutely justified. And if I had a child that got in a cult, I would not hesitate in going to get my son or daughter and give them information that maybe the rest of their life, that they could be free."

Chrnalogar worries that things could get worse at the D.C.C. and so do the families who attended W-FIVE's town-hall meeting.

"I'm not going to lose him," said Dave Rozon of his son Nathan. "Even if I have to fight for him, I will. And that's the truth and God be my witness."

And Kelley Wells, another concerned parent, admitted that she's scared to death of what her instincts are telling her.

"As a mother, you will do anything to try to save your child from something that extreme because we have a gut instinct that there's something wrong, and he's trying to push it away from us. We know what our kids are going through. And I ask - what will it take? Until one of these children commits suicide?"

Back at the Dominion Christian Centre, Rigo and his followers laugh off the suggestion that they are a destructive cult.

"I'm talking with the neighbor yesterday and he's like - if you're an f-ing cult, I'm joining it. I know you can't say that word on TV, but you sure can in the house of God," said Rigo during a Sunday service.

"People just say the word cult because it's something that they don't know. It's different and that's just what they can relate it to because they don't know it. They don't understand it. Oh, it's a cult," said one young man.

Another member challenged W-FIVE's reporter. "You've got a code of ethics and standards and probably a policy manual that you have to abide by. Well our policy manual is the word of God. It's the bible. So if that's a cult, yeah you know what, I'm in a cult," he said.

W-FIVE asked if anyone felt they were being forced to stay at the D.C.C, or if they were being controlled.

"Not at all," answered a young woman.

Another D.C.C. member, a singer in the rock band, added: "I'm here seven days a week. And I love this place. I mean, I work around here, I eat here. It's basically become my life out of my choice."

W-FIVE asked him if the D.C.C. is a place that people could participate in part-time.

"Well, I mean you can, but you definitely feel like an outsider after a while with all these people. Most of us live the same way. We're here all the time," he said.

One middle-aged woman added, "If this is controlling, it's absolutely wonderful, because before coming here I was very uncontrolled. I was going to church all my life but my life was out of control."

And they all insisted they're free to leave at any time. That's a refrain cult deprogrammer, Mary Alice Chrnalogar, says she has heard many times before.

"You don't feel like you're being controlled because you've been taught this is the right way, this is God's way, this is Jesus' way. And therefore you never feel like you're being controlled, even though you are," she said.

Chrnalogar believes that part of that control comes from being convinced to shun family and friends who don't belong to the church.

The D.C.C. members who spoke to W-FIVE after the church service confirmed Chrnalogar's, and their families, worst fears.

When W-FIVE asked about the cost of belonging at the D.C.C, one member said, "The cost of giving up life in the world. It has cost you friends. And it has cost us certain freedoms that, in the olden days, you could do whatever you want."

"It's cost me family. It's cost me my own way of thinking. But it's not really a cost. It's more of a privilege to lose those things," said another.

Those words are a red flag for Chrnalogar.

"It absolutely can get worse and more dangerous because they're a closed society. The only thing that's right, good and true is what comes from the leader. He calls the shots. And once you get into a closed system, anything can happen," said the cult expert.

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20061027/wfive_pied_piper_061027/20061028?hub=WFive&pr=showAll

Posted by Perry at 02:13 PM

October 27, 2006

Two more accused of child sex abuse at religious home

The Seattle Times
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/eastsidenews/2003321671_latin25e.html

October 25, 2006

By Peyton Whitely

Seattle Times Eastside bureau

Two more men were charged with sexually abusing children at a religious home operated by a group that had sites in Bellevue and Sammamish.

The charges were brought against Steven Kyle Kirkland, 24, of Duvall, and Donovan Patrick Olsen, 20, originally of Tucson, Ariz.

Kirkland is charged with two counts of first-degree child rape. Olsen is charged with one count of first-degree child molestation and one count of second-degree child molestation.

According to the filings made Monday, the abuses took place at a religious seminary known as the "Trident Latin Rite," which had been on Northeast Sixth Street in Bellevue and later moved to an address on Southeast 39th Street in Sammamish.

The charges originated with investigations that date to 2004 and earlier.

Court documents have described the facilities as a "religious home," and other accounts have described the operations as being part of a sect that broke away from the Catholic Church. Sect members first worshipped in a church using the name Tridentine Latin Rites, according to 2002 Seattle Times reports.

In the latest charges, Kirkland is accused of raping a child between 1996 and 1999.

The assaults began when the boy was 6 or 7, court documents say, and both Kirkland and the child were living in the seminary in the 15000 block of Northeast Sixth Street in Bellevue.

The boy said the assaults began when he would be taken to a bathroom and continued until he left the seminary when he was 14, according to court documents.

Olsen is accused of child molestation between 1998 and 2004 in one count and between 2003 and 2005 in a second count.
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Court documents contend that the assaults began when one of Olsen's victims was 6 or 7 and the other was 13 and the victims and Olsen all lived at the seminary.

The younger victim said the incidents began at the Bellevue address and continued when the seminary moved to Sammamish.

Arraignments for the defendants are set for Monday in King County Superior Court. Kirkland has been released on his personal recognizance, according to court records; bail of $50,000 was asked for Olsen, who is at large.

Two other defendants were charged with child molestation in September, following earlier charges brought in 2004. Both are awaiting trial.

The most recent investigations began after a woman in April 2004 told Bellevue police that her son had been sexually abused while living at the Bellevue home.

Posted by Perry at 06:38 PM

Clergy abuse victims seek treatment center of their own from Roman Catholic Church

International Herald Tribune
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/10/24/america/NA_REL_US_Clergy_Abuse.php

October 24, 2006

The Associated Press

COLUMBIA, Missouri Advocates for victims of clergy sex abuse are asking Roman Catholic Church officials in Missouri and Florida to help pay for a residential treatment center for abuse victims modeled in part after similar sites for troubled priests.

Known as Come to the Stable/The Stephen Spalding Foundation, the proposed center would be named after a former student at the St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary in Hannibal, Missouri. The seminary closed in 2002 amid accusations of rampant sexual abuse by a former instructor.

The accused priest, Anthony J. O'Connell, worked at the seminary from 1964 to 1983. He later spent 10 years as bishop in Knoxville, Tennessee, and four years leading the Palm Beach, Florida, diocese. He resigned after admitting improper contact with a former student and later settled a pair of lawsuits. He has since retired to a Trappist monastery in South Carolina.

"They have multimillion dollar facilities where priests can go," said Michael Wegs, a former O'Connell victim and St. Thomas Aquinas graduate who is leading the fundraising effort. "All we're asking for is some place where (victims) can go."

Wegs was one of the two former seminary students to win monetary judgments against O'Connell and the Jefferson City diocese. A third abuse victim settled out of court.

Wegs said he sent letters asking for support to the bishops now in charge of the dioceses in Jefferson City, Missouri, and Palm Beach, Florida.

Wegs, who has donated some of his $25,000 (€20,000) settlement to the foundation, hopes to raise $4 million (€3.2 million) by 2010, enough to purchase five acres (two hectares) at a location to be determined. Those in need of treatment could stay for a few days or up to six months.

A similar center near Louisville, Kentucky, known as The Farm, has received financial support from various dioceses, Wegs noted.

A spokesman for the Missouri diocese said Tuesday that its bishop had not yet received the letter from Wegs and could not comment.

An official with the Palm Beach Diocese acknowledged receiving the appeal but said church leaders had yet to fully consider the request.

"We really haven't had time to study the whole thing," said Lorraine Sabatella, chancellor of the Palm Beach Diocese.

Wegs said that the Spalding treatment center, while non-denominational, would serve as a place where abuse victims could "capture some of the spirituality they lost."

Susan Vance, a former Catholic school teacher in Knoxville now active in sex abuse prevention programs, said a residential treatment center would let abuse survivors know they are not alone.

"There has to be a haven where people who have been hurt can go to heal," she said. "The general population doesn't understand the ramifications of sexual abuse — especially sexual abuse by a trusted religious leader. Their whole relationship with God is thrown into chaos."

Posted by Perry at 06:33 PM

Zimbabwe cops raid cult, take away starving kids

Independent Online
http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=84&art_id=qw1161770221692B252

October 25 2006 at 12:22PM

Harare - Police in southern Zimbabwe have raided members of a cult who were living in the wild and refusing to eat until Jesus Christ came, it was reported on Wednesday.

Police on Saturday took seven children who were severely malnourished away from the cults camp and placed them in the homes of Christian pastors in Bulawayos Luveve suburb, said the state-controlled Herald newspaper.

Thirteen members of the cult, believed to be an offshoot of the popular Seventh Day Adventist Church, were also picked up and questioned by police, the report said. The cult members who would only give their first names were described as frail.

Some of the cult members were reportedly sweating profusely and coughing uncontrollably, said the newspaper.

They had been camped in a bushy area beyond Bulawayos Pumula South suburb, worrying nearby homeowners.

We picked them up after receiving complaints from Pumula residents who were not sure of the cults motives. The residents were afraid they could end up committing various crimes in the neighbourhood, said police spokesperson Langa Ndlovu.

The policeman added that the group was also removed for their own safety as they were frail, possibly due to starvation.

The cult members were told to go home, but police are doubtful they will obey.

Churches and sects have been gaining in popularity in Zimbabwe, where economic and social problems are biting hard. There has been widespread concern over the advertisements for so-called miracle crusades, where attendees are promised prosperity and healing from diseases.

Posted by Perry at 06:27 PM

Attorney general fears possible sex abuse in Bountiful

The Calgary Sun
http://calsun.canoe.ca/News/National/2006/10/24/2114380-sun.html

Tue, October 24, 2006

By CP

VICTORIA -- The possibility of children being sexually exploited or abused in the community of Bountiful is of more concern than the issue of polygamy, B.C. Attorney General Wally Oppal said yesterday.

But Oppal also said he is not ignoring polygamy charges may be available to Crown prosecutors for some members in the B.C. community.

"The fundamental issue here is sexual exploitation of children, sexual abuse of children and sexual assaults," Oppal said.

Posted by Perry at 06:22 PM

Cast out in shame

The Sunday Times
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2099-2407561,00.html

October 22, 2006

Investigation by Kimberley Sevcik

He ruled this small town in the name of the Lord. He took young girls and gave them to his cronies in multiple marriages. If a boy dared disobey him, he was sent into exile. The ‘prophet’ is now in prison, but what happened to the lost boys?

There were 13 teenagers sleeping on the floor of Sam Icke’s cramped flat on any given day. To get to work in the morning, he had to pick his way over their limp bodies and piles of clothes. The smell of dirty socks and stale beer clung to the matted carpet and ratty brown sofa. Nine hours later, when he got home, Icke would find those same bodies watching a high-speed car chase on the TV, getting stoned and doing shots of Bacardi. In the kitchen, cockroaches feasted on the remains of a pasta dinner.

It was 2003, and Icke was 19 years old. He was the only one in the run-down flat with a steady job, tiling floors for $300 a week in the desert town of Hurricane, Utah. Every week or two, another lad showed up at the door, desperate for somewhere to stay. Icke took them in – no exceptions, no questions asked. He understood what they were going through. Like him and hundreds of others, they had been banished from their homes and forbidden from seeing their families by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS), a radical offshoot of the Mormon church. Their families wept and protested under their breath, but none of them fought to keep their sons. They didn’t dare defy the orders of their leader, a self-proclaimed prophet whose followers believe him to be the earthly executor of God’s will.

God moves in mysterious ways, however: on August 28, Warren Jeffs was arrested after two years on the lam. He was charged with two counts of rape as an accomplice, by the state of Utah, and the state of Arizona plans to press similar charges. He had fled the FLDS stronghold of Colorado City, Arizona, in August 2004 after being indicted for arranging the marriage of an underage girl to an older man – one of many hundreds of such ceremonies he is believed to have organised and performed over the years.

As leader of the FLDS, he decided who married whom, and which men deserved multiple wives, using that power to induce obedience. Not everyone in Colorado City is deemed worthy of plural marriage. It is considered a privilege – not just because it gives a man variety, but because church doctrine says a man can’t make it into heaven without at least three wives. When the prophet received word from the Lord that it was time to hand out women, as he did every couple of weeks, it was always the names of the most solicitous men that seemed to crop up. Boys who broke the prophet’s rules were exiled from the community – leaving more women to go around.

The Utah attorney-general’s office estimates that Jeffs has thrown as many as 400 boys out of Colorado City. Many ended up in nearby towns like Hurricane. Most eventually find fellow exiles on whose floor they can crash, but that only makes life marginally easier. On a good day, they might pool their money to buy a couple of burgers. Or try out their new-found freedom by flirting with the girls who live up the street. But after growing up in the cocoon of Colorado City, where Jeffs encouraged community members to inform on their neighbours for unchurchly behaviour, it is hard for them to trust anyone.

The FLDS follows the same scripture as mainstream Mormons, but unlike them they adhere strictly to the final revelation of the church’s founder, Joseph Smith, instructing his followers to take multiple wives. In establishing a separatist community in Colorado City where they practice polygamy, they believe that they are the only true Mormons. The Mormon church, for its part, denies its historical connection to the FLDS in the way a person might pretend not to know a slightly deranged cousin.

With over 4,000 residents, Colorado City is the most densely populated town in the isolated wedge of chalky red desert north of the Grand Canyon and south of the Utah border. The town’s seclusion is no accident: after polygamy was formally renounced by the Mormon church in 1890, the early settlers sought a remote site where they could take multiple wives far from public scrutiny. Residents call it the Crick, for the creek that meanders through the town, and commonly refer to themselves as Crickers. Three-quarters of the town’s residents belong to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints; the other quarter to a more traditional breakaway sect – the Centennialists.

When Warren Jeffs officially inherited control of the FLDS in 2002, following the death of his father, Rulon, the first thing he did was marry 30 of his father’s youngest and prettiest wives. Then he set about tightening his reins on Colorado City, a town where the women dress like the cast of Little House on the Prairie, and the civic leaders are all subject to the prophet’s orders. Jeffs banned holiday celebrations, forbade followers from listening to music except for the droning spiritual chants that he himself recorded, and prohibited all forms of worldly entertainment, including sport – bowling, football, even snowball fights. Colorado City was run like a theocracy, with Jeffs its ayatollah.

Jeffs relied on the police, who acted as his personal morality squad to keep tabs on his followers. The police were loyal first to Jeffs and second to the state laws that they were sworn to uphold. They patrolled the community for violations of the prophet’s moral code, reporting infractions to their supreme leader. Until last year, when government officials in Utah and Arizona began investigating charges of underage marriage and tax fraud, Colorado City was in effect allowed to thrive outside the law. These days, the only restaurant in town, a family place called Mark Twain, is shut down. So is the petrol station down the road. The streets are deserted. Even the church parking lot is abandoned. After decades of allowing the FLDS to practise polygamy, the attorney-generals of Utah and Arizona have begun cracking down. Last July they moved to dissolve the United Effort Plan, the trust controlled by Jeffs that holds all property in Colorado City, stripping him of assets reportedly worth billions. They removed two members of the police force for serving the prophet rather than the law. And a grand jury indicted Jeffs on charges that he married off an underage girl to a married man.

Jeffs fled and was on the run for almost two years. The FBI put him on their 10 most wanted list, and offered a reward. Every few months, a police department in Florida or Texas or Colorado would receive a credible tip-off, but by the time officers arrived on the scene, there would be no sign of Jeffs. Last November, Jeffs’s brother, Seth, was pulled over in Pueblo County, Colorado, and charged with harbouring a wanted person after discovering $140,000 in cash in his car, hundreds of letters addressed to Warren and a donation jar, bearing Warren’s photo, labelled “Pennies for the Prophet”. Finally, in late August, a highway patrolman in Las Vegas pulled over the driver of a red Cadillac Escalade for a traffic violation. At the wheel was Warren Jeffs. In the back seat he had $50,000 and an arsenal of wigs. He was extradited to Utah, where he sits in jail awaiting trial on the rape charges, a first-degree crime that may carry a sentence of life imprisonment.

Even on the run, Jeffs ran the sect. He warned his followers not to talk to outsiders and instructed them to mount surveillance cameras on their homes. Other residents of Colorado City have reportedly fled to west Texas, where the church recently built a nine-storey temple.

To most Americans, Hurricane, Utah, is an unremarkable small town, little more than a fuel stop on the way to one of the country’s national parks. But to kids like Icke who grew up within the rigid confines of Colorado City, just 30 miles down the road, a town like Hurricane is Satan’s territory, a hostile and confusing place.

Icke, now 21, was expelled from the FLDS at 18. While building sets for a production of Little Red Riding Hood, he had befriended a girl in the cast. After weeks of flirtation, the teens indulged in a long snogging session. Convinced she was going to burn in hell, the girl confessed. Jeffs called Icke’s father and told him his son was to leave Colorado City, never to return. The next day, Icke threw some clothes into the back of his Honda Civic and left. “I was basically dumped on my head,” he says. “I had no understanding of how to live on my own.” One of the FLDS elders owned a small trailer, which he offered to Icke until he got on his feet. The trailer park was a refuge for crystal-meth addicts and prostitutes. Icke kept to himself, working long days laying tiles, then escaping at night into fantasy novels.

In many ways, Icke was 18 going on 12. He had none of the skills he needed to make it in the world – no idea how to cook, save money or rent a flat. Having grown up in a fundamentalist enclave where education is eclipsed by religious indoctrination, the young men banished from Colorado City are like wolf boys thrust into the suburbs. Their social skills are awkward, their grooming poor; most are culturally illiterate.

In the early days of his exile in Hurricane, Icke felt like an alien in the starched plaid shirts and unfashionable slacks the church had required him to wear. He knew the rumours about Colorado City circulating among non-Crickers: that Cricker kids are born with horns, and disabled children are taken into the tall grass and shot in the head. In Hurricane the girls wore almost nothing, so most of what you saw was their skin, glowing and coppery. Icke could hear the prophet’s words echoing in his head: all it takes to impregnate a girl is to look at her.

Even as a kid, Richard Black despised the prophet’s rules and restrictions –his hate-filled attitude toward homosexuals and blacks, his dismissal of women as “breeders”, his ban on women cutting their hair, and his insistence that men and women wear a full set of long underwear at all times, even when desert temperatures climbed to 110F. In school, Black sat in class, listening to recordings of Jeffs’s unmodulated voice pontificating about how to live well and prepare for the end times. Every Saturday he worked alongside the other men, constructing schools and churches and other public facilities, a form of enforced service that Jeffs liked to call “building the kingdom”.

Fed up with Jeffs’s indoctrination, Black dropped out of school at 12. And believing that destruction was imminent – according to the prophet, Russia and China were poised to invade America – everything seemed pointless. Everything except partying: “I figured if I’m going to die in a few years anyway, why not have some fun while I’m around?” Black recalls. That’s exactly what he and his friends did: drank a lot of beer, smoked a lot of pot, and roared around town on quad bikes. There was a trailer behind his mother’s house, and Black turned it into his personal party palace. Every few nights around midnight, two hours after the Colorado City curfew and his mother’s bedtime, Black and a dozen friends would huddle around his computer, watching DVDs, chewing tobacco, and flipping through Hustler and Playboy.

One night in 2001, when Black was 15, a policeman caught Black and his friends watching Scary Movie. A few days later, Black and his mother were summoned to Jeffs’s compound, a beige McMansion behind a 12ft wall plastered with “no trespassing” signs.

“How are you doing, Richard?” Jeffs asked from behind the expanse of his oak desk, fixing him with his notoriously unblinking gaze. He asked if Black had anything to confess. “Yeah, I watched a movie.” “Anything else?” Jeffs said. “Have you had sexual thoughts? Have you touched yourself? Have you touched anyone else?” “No,” Black insisted. Jeffs sighed and leant back in his chair. “You’re not doing so well, Richard,” he said, his voice ominously mild. “I think you need to pack your things and leave Colorado City and never come back.”

You would think that being banished from Colorado City would be bliss for a kid like Black – pot and porn all day, every day. And girls – real girls – with no creepy preacher trying to make him feel guilty about touching them. Granted the liberty to party like he’d never partied before, Black found himself wallowing in a fog of despair. He worked on building sites six days a week, then went back to his trailer and drank until he passed out. Lying in the trailer, all he really wanted was his mother. He talked to her on the phone once a week, but his sisters’ and nieces’ husbands forbade them from talking to him. He was an apostate, the most wicked creature on Earth, and they couldn’t risk his polluting the minds of the righteous. “I missed my family so bad,” says Black, now 20. “I went from being surrounded by lots of people who loved me to being totally alone in the world.” Some nights, he’d lie in bed and plot ways to kill himself: slit his wrists, jump off a cliff, run out in the middle of the road, hang himself.

As Jeffs exiled more and more boys, they began to wander the streets of the neighbouring towns, looking for work and getting into trouble. In February, five 19-year-old outcasts were arrested in St George, Utah, for growing marijuana, selling cocaine and stealing $20,000 worth of tools from a general store. “These kids aren’t used to being outside the closed community, and some don’t adjust well,” says Andrea Esquer at the office of the Arizona attorney-general. “They might start using meth, they might wind up homeless, they might end up prostituting themselves. They have to find someone who helps them transition, and that puts pressure on social-service agencies.”

Like immigrants in a strange new land, Crickers find it safer to cluster together than to integrate into the broader community. They desperately want to blend in with “gentiles”, as they call anyone outside the FLDS, but they know they’re perceived as oddities. That’s why, after a few months of bottomless loneliness in the trailer park, Sam Icke moved into the communal flat. As the oldest teenage resident, he soon became the boys’ de-facto guardian. A few of them picked up a little construction work, to contribute what they could toward rent – $10 here, $20 there – but for the most part Icke was supporting them all, struggling to make the $700 rent and keep the fridge full.

There were times when they ran out of food, and times the power was shut off and everyone sat around in the dark. “The kids I took in were like little brothers to me,” Icke says. “I loved them and I was doing everything I could to help them, but it was like trying to fill up the ocean with a teaspoon.” From time to time, Icke contemplated returning to Colorado City to try to redeem himself. When he left, his father had given him some of the prophet’s sermons on tape, in the hope that Icke would listen to them and repent. He never did.

About once a week, the local police would raid the flat and send the teenagers back to Colorado City, classifying them as runaways. After 21/2 months of police raids and financial stress, Icke started losing his temper. A lot. “I was acting like a woman with PMS,” he says. “I’d get pissed off and nobody could understand why.” He couldn’t take it any more – trying to keep afloat his own life and the lives of a dozen youngsters who were just as shell-shocked and clueless as he was. One day he came home from work, gathered his charges around him and said:. “I’m really sorry, but I’m going to give up this place, so you’re all going to have to find somewhere else to live.” The boys nodded and studied the floor. Banished again. Within two weeks they were gone.

In 2003, Icke fell in love and married a woman 14 years his senior. They moved to Salt Lake City, where he got a job laying carpets. When his wife became pregnant, Icke felt panic setting in. He was 19, with no job prospects beyond construction. “I couldn’t handle the stress of day-to-day life,” he says. “I felt I needed someone to guide me, because I clearly wasn’t figuring it out on my own.” In his third month in Salt Lake, a fellow Cricker advised him to seek help from the Lost Boys Foundation, which had been founded by Dan Fischer, a dentist and former member of the FLDS.

Fischer left the FLDS in 1993, after his children were thrown out of school because he financially supported a play critical of polygamy. Soon afterwards, he and his wife began taking in outcast boys. In 2003, Fischer turned his ad-hoc philanthropy into a formal nonprofit organisation. It was a fiasco. Fischer is a gentle man with deep pockets, and the kids smelt his gullibility. Giddy from the freedom of life in the world, Crickers would go to Fischer with sob stories about not being able to pay their rent or their bills, then blow the money on pot, whiskey and prostitutes. If phase one of leaving the Crick is loneliness and despair, phase two is indulgence. After being penned up in a place where pleasure is forbidden, expelled boys are suddenly free to indulge in every hedonistic thing they have ever dreamt of – and most do.

Fischer decided to regroup. He hired a stocky, take-no-prisoners man named Dave Bills as the foundation’s director and gave him a mandate to get tough. He warned that the young men had harassed the former director, calling her at all hours to ask her to order them pizza and prostitutes. Bills let the youths know that he wasn’t going to take any shit. “You want to call me up at 6am and order a pizza, I’ll get you a pizza,” he told them. “But you’ll find it hard to eat after I’ve shoved it up your ass.”

The first change Bills made was requiring the boys to sign a contract outlining his expectations of them. Every kid who got financial help had to be in school, pass their exams, keep his flat clean, and stay off drugs. “A lot of the kids thought I was an asshole,” Bills says.

“Some dropped out.” For others, though, the structure was just what was needed. Following rules was familiar, almost comforting; after all, they had grown up with mandates governing every facet of their lives. One year after meeting Bills, Icke has passed the necessary exams to get onto an accounting degree course at a Salt Lake City college. He now works part time as an engineer at Fischer’s company and shares a house with two friends – who also pay their share of the rent.

“If you’d told me when I was in that trailer park that in a few years I was going to be going to college, getting A’s and working a good job, I’d have said you were crazy,” Icke says. “Back then, the only thing I hoped for was not to die.”

Once the boys have been outcast, few want to return. They realise they were secretly sceptical about the prophet’s teachings – all that foolishness about the Destruction that never happened, and the arbitrary rules. Seeing it all from a distance only confirms their doubts. There is no way they can go back. They would be living a lie.

“Now that I’m out in the real world, I realise how much bullshit and corruption went on at the Crick,” Black says. Last December he married a woman named Brooke, a gentile. He drives a yellow sports car, listens to Eminem and 50 Cent, and hangs out with more gentiles than Crickers. But he is still nostalgic for the Crick, in a desultory way.

On a recent Sunday, he and Brooke decided to drive to Colorado City to visit the place where he grew up. As Black drove down the lifeless streets where he once lived, he spotted a boy riding an old-fashioned upright bicycle. The kid wore a red-and-blue checked shirt buttoned to the top, and had a neat side parting.

“There’s a plyg kid,” Black said, using gentile slang for “polygamist”. He spit out the word like a wad of stale chewing tobacco. He jerked the wheel of his car to follow the boy, who pedalled into the empty church parking lot, and Black followed close enough behind him to be slightly menacing. The kid glanced over his shoulder, sped up a bit. “He knows we’re from the outside,” Black said, a hint of glee in his voice. “No one here would drive a car like this.” Black rolled down his automatic window and craned his neck, preparing to yell “Plyg!” at the boy.

“Richard, don’t!” Brooke pleaded. “Why not?” he asked. “People used to do it to me.” “Exactly,” Brooke said. Black hesitated, his hand still hovering on the window switch. Then he pressed the silver button and the window closed, and he watched as the boy pedalled frantically toward a row of houses, not daring to look back.

Posted by Perry at 06:18 PM

Polygamist accuser aged 14 when forced to marry relative

The Calgary Sun
http://calsun.canoe.ca/News/World/2006/10/21/2086954-sun.html

Sat, October 21, 2006
By AP

SALT LAKE CITY -- The woman at the centre of a criminal case involving polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs was 14 when forced into a marriage with her first cousin, a source close to the case said yesterday.

At Jeffs' direction, she was married despite her objections in 2001 to the cousin, who was older than 18, the source said on condition of anonymity to protect the woman's identity.

The marriage was not polygamous, the source said.

"It was child abuse, plain and simple."

Jeffs, 50, is the leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a southern Utah-based church. The sect broke away from the Mormon church more than a century ago and has been disavowed by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Prosecutors charged Jeffs in April with two first-degree felony counts of rape as an accomplice for his suspected role in the marriage.

Jeffs was arrested in August during a traffic stop near Las Vegas. If convicted on both charges, he could face up to life in prison.

Posted by Perry at 06:10 PM

Police investigation into polygamist Bountiful community now with Crown

Macleans
http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/news/shownews.jsp?content=n1019103A

October 19, 2006 - 20:40

VICTORIA (CP) - A police investigation into the polygamist commune in Bountiful has been completed and is in the hands of the criminal justice branch.

The branch release a brief statement Thursday from Crown spokesman Stan Lowe, confirming the receipt of a report from the RCMP concerning the community, located near Creston in southeastern B.C.

The report was received by the branch on Sept. 28, 2006, and resulted from a lengthy and complex police investigation into alleged misconduct on the part of some residents of Bountiful, the statement said.

A "comprehensive charge assessment review" of the police report will be conducted by senior Crown counsel to determine if any Criminal Code offences have been committed.

The branch said that the assessment would likely take a long time to complete and no further comments would be made until there is a decision.

People at the commune are members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

There have long been allegations of sexual abuse at the commune and rumours of charges against leaders of the community such as Winston Blackmore have long been whispered.

Last summer, in a meeting with the attorneys general of Arizona and Utah, B.C. Attorney General Wally Oppal discussed common problems with polygamist communities.

The church is based in the state line communities of Colorado City, Arizona and Hildale, Utah, but it also has a sizeable branch in Bountiful.

Posted by Perry at 06:06 PM

Lost boys are the forgotten polygamy victims

Vancouver Sun
Daphne Bramham

It's simple arithmetic in polygamous, fundamentalist Mormon societies like Bountiful, B.C. Some men get many wives, others get none.

It's usually older men who get second, third and sometimes more wives, brides who are usually teenagers.

Left behind are angry, frustrated young men. Not only can they not choose their own mates, they've been told it's against the church's rules to date or even socialize with girls their age.

A few lucky young men do get wives. But it can feel like entrapment. One day they wake up and are told they're marrying a stranger for "time and all eternity," in the words of the faith's marriage ceremony.

The boys are often the forgotten victims of polygamy. But three of their stories are told in a documentary by Maureen Palmer and Helen Slinger called Polygamy's Lost Boys, which airs Saturday at 7 p.m. on Global Television.

All three stories are different. All are heart-breaking insights into the difficult transition from having no freedom to having almost too much.

Fundamentalist Mormons broke with the mainstream church when it renounced polygamy in 1890. Because polygamy is illegal in Canada and the United States, they live in cloistered communities where members' behaviour is strictly controlled. There are estimated 30,000 of them in North America and about 12,000 belong to the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints.

In Bountiful, about 500 people follow Jeffs and another 700 or so have remained loyal to Winston Blackmore, who was excommunicated by Jeffs nearly four years ago.

Ben Blackmore, 26, and his 20-year-old cousin Ray Blackmore grew up in Bountiful, under the thumb of their uncle and former bishop, Winston Blackmore. Tom Sam Steed, 20, grew up in Bountiful's Arizona twin, Colorado City. He was kicked out of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints five years ago by the now-jailed prophet Warren Jeffs. Steed's crime was watching movies like Charlie's Angels. The charges against Jeffs are for arranging marriages of under-aged girls to much older men.

Ray left Bountiful before his 18th birthday, fed up with lousy wages and frustrated about not being able to date. He now lives for the adrenaline rush of daredevil motorcycling. It's already landed him in hospital with a broken neck.

Like most of the boys from Bountiful, Ray never finished high school and has few job options. Right now, he's looking after horses and machinery for his girlfriend's father not far from Bountiful. For now, it's enough to buy beer and pay what he owes on his bike, his '95 Cougar car and his truck.

Tom Sam also struggles with freedom. Last semester, he failed almost every class at college, distracted by music, raves and fun. He vows it won't happen again. After a couple of years of homelessness and suicidal depression, he now lives in Boulder, Colo. near his mentor and best-selling outdoor adventure author Jon Krakauer.

But it's Ben's story that is the most complex and compelling. One morning six years ago, Ben was told that he was getting married the next day in Colorado City. He packed up and started driving the 1,200 kilometres south.

Ben and his 16-year-old bride, Suzann, had met. But they certainly didn't know each other.

"The thought that was going through my mind was that I'm going to get a hottie," Suzann says in the documentary. "Girls like me just don't get hotties."

Unlike many fundamentalist marriages, Suzann knew enough in advance that she had a white wedding dress -- albeit in a simple, puffed sleeve style.

Ben's uncle Winston performed the religious ceremony -- Blackmore is not licensed to perform legal marriages. Right after, the newlyweds packed up and drove north so Ben could go back to work at his uncle's company the following day.

They had three children in quick succession -- birth control is banned by the church. But when the church split in 2003, so did Ben and Suzann, who moved back to Arizona at Jeffs's command.

Unlike many other wives, Suzann was not immediately reassigned to another man and a few months later, Ben swallowed his pride and principles. He joined Suzann in Colorado City and tried for a few months to live under the increasingly bizarre diktats of the autocratic Jeffs.

But it didn't work out and within a few months, they were back in Canada and under the velvet-gloved control of Winston Blackmore.

Ben renounced the religion entirely in March 2004. But he hasn't been able to cut all his ties. With a wife and four children to support, he needs a job. Few people other than his uncle and his cousins are willing to hire guys with no high school education, and the wages reflect that.

Winston Blackmore is unapologetic about the low wages.

"Everybody was working and they were working for the good of each other," he says in the film. "We compromised on wages -- even I did. But why we compromised on wages was that everyone was employed."

But Ben resents getting so little money for the punishingly long hours he works as a log hauler.

He's never earned enough to be able to save anything or even pay off his debts. So, when he and Suzann needed $1,000 to rent a house, they had no choice but to ask Winston Blackmore for the money.

He gladly obliged. A kindness? Perhaps. More likely it was a way of regaining some control over one of the boys that he'd lost.

http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/columnists/story.html?id=4d7cd9a6-1c56-40d9-811b-185b9e5515c6&p=1

Posted by Perry at 05:51 PM

PROFILE OF PERFIDY

New York Press
http://www.nypress.com/19/42/film/jennifermerin.cfm

Documentary spotlights pedophile priests

By Jennifer Merin

Deliver Us From Evil Directed by Amy Berg

Amy Berg’s documentary, Deliver Us From Evil, is a compelling exposé of the Catholic Church’s schemes to cover up its clergy’s rampant child abuse. The film focuses on the history of Father Oliver O’Grady, the notorious pedophile priest who raped and sodomized hundreds of boys and girls aged nine months through adolescence, and one adolescent victim’s mother, over the course of 20 years. During this time, church superiors avoided exposure to scandal by reassigning him from one California parish to another, never punishing him and failing to prevent his ongoing predatory behavior.

O’Grady was eventually tried and incarcerated. He was deported to Ireland after his release from prison, where he now lives comfortably in retirement, still ordained, enjoying his pension, roaming freely.

Berg uses archival footage as well as new interviews to reveal O’Grady’s flippant attitude. Oozing indifference, he’s utterly without remorse about his heinous behavior and the devastation he caused his victims and their families. In contrast, as they recall O’Grady’s actions, the victims and their families erupt with anguish and anger—and enormous frustration that there’s been no prosecution of LA’s Cardinal Roger Mahony who, according to the film, knew of O’Grady’s crimes but did nothing to stop them. And it’s easy to understand their rage: Mahony still rules the LA Archdiocese.

The film traces the trail of deceit and shame all the way to Pope Benedict XVI, who’s been accused of conspiracy to cover up the crimes. The Vatican asked President Bush to grant the Pontiff immunity from prosecution—and got it. When O’Grady’s victims traveled to Rome to petition for mercy and justice, they were turned away without an audience. The Church also declined to be interviewed for the documentary.

Berg substantiates her public awareness agenda by interviewing theologians, lawyers, psychologists and other experts about clergy child abuse. Especially alarming are their statements that that the Church’s only solution for ending clergy child abuse has been to scapegoat homosexual priests. Further, as victim Leslie Sloan points out, Church superiors considered molestation of boys “obscene,” while they deemed abuse of girls to be “normal curiosity.”

Deliver Us From Evil stands out from the pack of moralistic docs because of its compelling stories of families devastated by O’Grady’s abuse. Bob Jyono’s expression of pain and guilt about not suspecting that his daughter was being raped by his trusted family priest and friend is heartbreaking, as is his daughter’s confession that she’s not been able to forget, forgive, nor marry. The film manages to deliver viewers to the point of moral outrage regarding clergy abuse—Catholic or not.

Posted by Perry at 05:43 PM

Judge Denies Motion To Ban Media From Sex Cult Case

http://www.kfmb.com/features/special_assignment/story.php?id=66879

10-17-06 at 6:25PM
SAN DIEGO, CA

A custody battle over a four-year-old boy whose mother is a member of a free-love religious sect exploded in a San Diego courtroom today. At issue, whether the group named The Family is a religion, or a cult.

There were heated words in family court Monday, where a mother and father are fighting for custody of their four-year-old son. The mother, 28-year-old Angie Staughton, is a member of a notorious religious sect called The Family.

The father, Paul Staughton, left the group because he disagrees with its philosophy of open sexuality to show love for Jesus. Current members of The Family call it a Christian missionary group, but many ex-members say it’s a cult.

“I’m asking Mr. Baumer to stop using the word ‘cult,’ because that is irrelevant. The issue is the child and the mother and the father, nothing more,” said Angie Staughton’s attorney Jeanie Cetlinski.

Formerly known as the Children of God, The Family is a Christian sect whose members live in communes like the one in Escondido where the four-year-old boy currently lives with his mother. Some ex-members say the open sex practices of The Family led to widespread child abuse in the 1970s and 80s.

“The organization itself does not protect the child from pedophiles,” said Paul Staughton’s attorney Robert Baumer.

Baumer worries some of those alleged child abusers are still members of the group.

“Some of them may practice this behavior on the children. In other words, sexual intercourse, or molestation with the children,” he said.

The Family says it outlawed sex with minors 20 years ago, and in court papers, Angie Staughton said she would never allow anyone to abuse her son.

“It’s not the religion at issue. It’s the best interest of the child and whether the mother is able to provide care for the best interest of the child,” Cetlinski said.

On Monday, the judge denied the mother’s request to seal the court record and bar the media from the courtroom. The case has gotten the attention of both local and national media.

Last month, the judge ordered a site inspection of the group’s commune in Escondido to see if it’s a safe environment for the boy. An inspection report is expected to be filed with the court sometime in January.

Posted by Perry at 05:24 PM

Behind the Brotherhood: The Elect Vessel, Bruce Hales

The New Zealand Herald
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10405885

Saturday October 14, 2006
By Patrick Gower

For Vincent Field, it was the highest honour a boy in the Exclusive Brethren could have - the chance to meet the Elect Vessel, the minister of the Lord in the Recovery, essentially God's man on earth.

So when John Hales graced Vincent's Christchurch congregation, the 10-year-old did exactly what he thought a boy in the Brethren should do.

He waited while other children and followers swirled around the Australian accountant whose face he knew from the pictures up in every Exclusive Brethren church and home. And when he came free, Vincent rushed up and gave him a $20 note.

"He barely even acknowledged me, he just took it and that was that," says Vincent, now 25.

"I still felt real cool though - it was like 'Oh wow, I just gave $20 to Mr Hales'."

Vincent has since left the Exclusive Brethren. Hales has died, the mantle of Elect Vessel passing to his son Bruce, a Sydney office supplies businessman.

These days, Vincent is nonplussed about the donation he once thought of as "bonus points for God".

"It was all a crock of shit of course," he says. "It is not like the guy needed money. The Hales family are rolling in the stuff and they got my twenty bucks tax free and all."

Other former members spoke to the Weekend Herald about how their congregations were asked to vary the size of their donations to leaders "so they didn't look like wages".

Then there are the "mules", those who spoke of ferrying to Australia envelopes of cash earmarked for the Elect Vessel or other leaders.

Yet the influence of Bruce Hales over his estimated 10,000 followers in New Zealand and 40,000 worldwide extends to much more than these systematic donations, or tithes.

Take their neighbourhood meeting room in Mt Eden's Ruapehu St, one of at least half-a-dozen dotted across Auckland city. Good for a meeting of no more than 50 people, it has no signs whatsoever, its boarded-up windows the only testament to its rarely seen congregation.

Trust deeds obtained by the Weekend Herald shows it to be in the hands of a clutch of male Exclusive Brethren members, all of whom can be removed if they are no longer in fellowship with the minister of the Lord in the Recovery - Hales. Other deeds, such as on their $2.6 million headquarters in Mangere and its nearby school property, say the same.

Hales therefore has the power to veto the trustees - and some kind of control - over a vast network of properties. Hales' spectre also looms over the 800 Brethren businesses spread across 40 New Zealand towns and cities.

Like the meeting rooms, the businesses are similarly nondescript. They are often to do with machinery, pumps, or office supplies, but their networking is now said to be more entrenched than basic business and beliefs.

A leaked document - signed last year by Hales and leading Wanganui-based Exclusive Brethren member Allan Davis - indicates that all Exclusive Brethren businesses worldwide are expected to give over their bookkeeping to an organisation called National Office Assist.

The document says this will mean they don't have to rely on "worldly" contractors and operate more efficiently without computers. There will be an email service, telemarketing, employment and training for young Exclusive Brethren and income will go back into things like schooling.

It means Home Office Assist - and therefore Hales and the sect's leadership, say former Brethren - will oversee the financial management information of all Brethren businesses.

All this adds up to what the former Exclusive Brethren call the "Hales system", envelopes of tax-free donations taken to Australia by the Brethren mules, businesses exempt from unionism, a network of 15 schools nationwide that get some taxpayer funding, and a swag of properties that don't pay rates because they are places of worship. And that is just the New Zealand end.

Exclusive Brethren members approached for this article did not want to discuss Hales or the way that their belief in him interacts with property and business.

One, prominent Auckland member, Neville Simmons, says he "won't lower" himself to comment on what he thought of the portrayal of Hales by those outside the sect, and simply laughed when asked to explain the role of the Elect Vessel.

"I really have got no comment on it," Simmons says. "It is a big subject that I really could not do justice to."

The Exclusive Brethren are as closed as their churches when it comes to the media these days, stung by the scrutiny of their secretive foray into politics. Emerging from that scrutiny were allegations this week of covering up sexual abuse.

When approached, some are friendly, some are smug and some are clearly shaken by the media interest, such as the two young men who spotted a Herald photographer taking shots of their new Cambridge church and chased her for 23km, sometimes tailgating her.

All decline to comment, but push hard enough and you might get nodded agreement to the following: that they are normal, law-abiding New Zealanders; that the media don't know them and don't talk to their friends, neighbours and people with whom they do business.

They also indicate that none of the $1.2 million used for campaigning against Labour and the Greens came from the Exclusive Brethren coffers overseas, that it was an entirely separate initiative by member businessmen here.

In Australia, Green Party senator Christine Milne has made claims about a British-registered company called Ratby Distribution Ltd, that she says has been funnelling money around the world for political donations.

Exclusive Brethren here say no such connection has been drawn, despite the number of times the question has been asked.

Yet the public record does not reflect true detachment, given the range of political activities by Exclusive Brethren members - whether putting up National Party elections hoardings, using a schoolboy to push-poll, or meeting with their man Don Brash.

Members even tried to split New Zealand First to help National get a majority during the coalition negotiations.

About all they haven't done is given up their belief of not voting.

And they haven't given up.

Despite eventually being shunned by National leader Dr Brash as a damaging electoral millstone, their distaste for Prime Minister Helen Clark is such that an Exclusive Brethren member hired a private investigator to spy on her, her husband, and Labour ministers and is said to be sitting on information that is "TNT times five million".

In the past two years the international picture has been the same. In Australia there have been the extremes of sect members abusing Green candidates while disguised by animal masks, and other members meeting Prime Minister John Howard.

In Canada they attacked civil union legislation, using postboxes in 7-Eleven convenience stores; in the United States they covertly funded support for the 2004 re-election of president George Bush.

In Sweden this year they have funded an advertising campaign reported to be worth millions of crowns supporting the centre-right Alliance for Sweden.

Their direct political involvement neatly coincided with the appointment of Bruce Hales as Elect Vessel in 2002.

Their previous public involvement in New Zealand politics consisted mainly of attempts over two decades to get exemptions from labour laws on spiritual grounds - granted by the Labour Party in 2000 but now in danger of being taken away because the concession was made on the grounds that there was no political motivation.

Aside from that, they seem to have gone no further than getting an exemption from the Minister of Education that their children need not take part in jazzercise.

The new push started tamely enough with a document titled Suggested Initiatives for Prosperity in New Zealand. It was sent to politicians, including Helen Clark, in 2003 and constitutes some of the earliest evidence worldwide of their political aims.

It was tame enough, with no mention then of opposition to same-sex marriages. It just expressed the desire to return New Zealand to its place in the world of the 1950s, through methods such as creating a "positive national mindset regarding immigration and population", that included increasing the refugee quota because "these people are motivated to work hard and assimilate".

It even seemed a little naive. A simplistic diagram showed how their key elements for growth - others included taxation, superannuation and decentralisation - coupled with legislation and strong leadership, could swirl New Zealand back to the heyday of the 1950s.

But a few lines in the section on defence gave a little away about what was to underpin their political drive. They wanted New Zealand to apologise for opposing the Iraq war and having an anti-American attitude and to rebuild the Armed Forces.

The Exclusive Brethren were emerging as a force of the religious right, and they wanted more than just prosperity for New Zealand.

Why did a sect whose beliefs preclude them from fighting want to support a war? And why, if they couldn't vote, were they about to so desperately try to influence elections?

The Exclusive Brethren believe in "The Rapture" - that those who are Christian and alive at a particular time will be swept into the next life. Those who are not pure will be left behind.

Historically, that has meant their theology led them away from politics. Those who have studied the Exclusive Brethren believe there may have been a change in their eschatology, or beliefs about the end of the world.

Peter Lineham, associate professor of history at Massey University, says their leaders have come to believe that the return of Jesus is delayed because George Bush is doing God's will in bringing the Muslims to heel.

"So they have come, in some sense, to believe in a delay of the rapture at this time, and that it is their obligation during this delay to protect the world and their interests," Lineham says.

Marion Maddox, a senior lecturer in religious studies at Victoria University and author of God Under Howard: The Rise of the Religious Right in Australian Politics, says the recent push to get former members to return to the group - another Hales initiative - also points to a belief that political intervention, while economically advantageous, also has the effect of helping keep the end of the world at bay so that as many as possible can rejoin.

But those outside the Exclusive Brethren have become some of its most vocal opponents.

Take Vincent Field. He isn't against the Exclusive Brethren because of their political viewpoints. In fact, he doesn't know exactly what they are. And he isn't against them because of their secretive attempts to influence elections.

He's against them because he believes they have a sinister side, because they break up families just like they broke up his.

He spent 3 years in a custody dispute between his excommunicated parents and his Exclusive Brethren grandparents and decided to speak publicly about the sect for the first time because of his concerns about their involvement in politics.

"Your average Exclusive is a good person," he says. "It is the leaders that condone [the breaking up of families] and it is the leaders that are getting into all this political stuff. It is the leaders I have something against."

Many former Exclusive Brethren recite a similar mantra. Still connected to the sect by family members - parents, brothers, sisters, wives, husbands and children - they don't want to hurt the individuals, or even the Exclusive Brethren itself. It is the leadership they don't like.

Vincent sees an organisation driven by money, anchoring people to it through their family, through their financial security, and through their very core beliefs.

"I don't know what these leaders are up to," he says. "But I can't see any good coming from it."

Vincent and many others are pleased for the outside scrutiny the Exclusive Brethren have brought on themselves through their political foray and hope it will bring about some kind of split or change of regime in the organisation, enabling them to at least see their families again.

Although the scrutiny here has driven the Exclusive Brethren away from calling on Don Brash, their push in Sweden - not an Exclusive Brethren stronghold - shows yet again the strength of their resolve.

Members here would not be drawn on whether their foray into New Zealand politics was a failure and whether the subsequent vilification was worth all the bother.

Yet again, by pushing, it was possible to get a nodded response that the negative reaction to their involvement actually justified it more than ever. Nodded agreement that the Exclusive Brethren think they might have lost a battle, not the war.

Exclusive Brethren members in New Zealand would not respond to the Weekend Herald.

Posted by Perry at 05:16 PM

Behind the Brotherhood: In praise of the Brethren way

The New Zealand Herald
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10405884

Saturday October 14, 2006
By Patrick Gower

Greg Mason is the owner of a pump and valve company in an industrial park near Mangere. He is also said to be the leader, or at the very least one of the leaders, of New Zealand's flock of Exclusive Brethren.

Mason has gone to ground since appearing as part of the "secretive seven" Exclusive Brethren businessmen in their infamous press conference to explain the reasons behind their funding of anti-Labour and Green election advertising.

But a rare insight into the family life of the man was seen before the political storm when a television camera was allowed into his house before the television documentary Leaving the Exclusive Brethren.

It showed Mason, his wife Josie and their four children leading a fairly Kiwi family life in a home that lives by Exclusive Brethren principles, such as no television or computers. The children performed a cover of Robbie Williams' song Angels using drums, a keyboard and microphone, while the husband and wife read on the couch. The parents talked about taking their children out of the mainstream education system for the Exclusive Brethren Westmount school network because of their different beliefs. Josie Mason: "We don't go in for adult fiction books. Novels, we don't really like them reading novels."

University is forbidden under their beliefs. Greg Mason said although it was valuable "we feel that for a Christian they cause a narrowing of the mind and a questioning of God's truths for us".

A young woman, Sophie talked of how she did not miss television because she had never had it: "I don't want to do it because it is a sin."

And a young man, Joel, talked about having friends outside the Exclusive Brethren: "To have friends outside the church goes against my conscience because you sort of feel like you are almost betraying the church."

Josie Mason described a life like that of an ordinary, non-working housewife: preparing meals, getting the kids off to school and helping with homework.

Greg Mason said men and women were equal before God but said they found there was a divinely set order of God, man, woman which Josie Mason agreed was "100 per cent correct".

"I'm happy being third in line," she said. "I don't feel suppressed. I don't feel as if, hey, I can't do anything without my husband waving a big stick. It's a really happy relationship."

Greg Mason also spoke of his pain at having family members leave the Exclusive Brethren.

Mason refused to comment when contacted by the Weekend Herald, saying simply, "The media are not our friends".

Posted by Perry at 05:11 PM

Son caught in Exclusive Brethren tug-of-love

The New Zealand Herald
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10405886

Saturday October 14, 2006
By Patrick Gower

As a boy in the Exclusive Brethren, Vincent Field thought his father was the devil's work.

His parents had been excommunicated by the sect, and Vincent was being held by his Exclusive Brethren grandparents in one of this country's highest-profile custody disputes, which went all the way to Parliament through National MP Nick Smith.

The 3-year dispute ended in 1993 when 12-year-old Vincent and his younger siblings were returned to parents Stan and Julia Field.

And today Vincent, 25, is best of mates with his father and as far as he can be from the Exclusive Brethren's beliefs.

Speaking publicly for the first time, Vincent said he was angry about the sect's attempts to influence politics in New Zealand and other countries.

"It pisses me off that they are still kicking people out and breaking up families," he told the Weekend Herald.

"I have experienced first hand what that is like, and it bloody hurts. It is the leaders who condone it, and it is the leaders who are getting into all this political stuff. It is the leaders I have something against."

The Field dispute began at Christmas 1989 when the Nelson-based parents were having marital problems that led to them being "withdrawn from" and leaving the children with grandparents Geoff and Letitia Hickmott in Rangiora while they sorted things out.

They never got back with the sect and didn't get the children back either.

They had to resort to the Family Court, and the case went on to the High Court, as well as being raised in Parliament by Mr Smith, who criticised the Exclusive Brethren and delays in the family court system.

Vincent said he could remember the night before the children were to be returned to their parents after a final failed appeal by the grandparents to keep them.

His grandfather received a telephone call from the church's leader, the "Elect Vessel" or "Man of God", Australian John Hales.

"Grandpa got off the phone and said: 'Beloved Mr Hales says we don't need to worry because the Lord is going to take care of them and they will have a car accident'.

"I was just forming this picture of my parents dying and Grandpa was saying 'don't worry', even though it was his own daughter. It was like, 'what the hell?'. We were supposed to take some consolation from it."

During the separation, he had been led to believe his parents were evil, that they were partying alcoholics, "that it would be all doom and gloom if we returned - that they were evil".

He remembers presents from his parents being left unopened.

Even on the day they were to be returned to their parents, Vincent said, a plan was hatched by his Exclusive Brethren family members to lock the children in a bathroom, then usher them out a window and across a neighbour's fence.

He can remember police officers being involved, then being reunited with his parents and thinking they were not so bad after all.

Vincent says the Exclusive Brethren hired a private investigator to spy on his parents "to get something on them to use in the [Family Court] case".

The Field family eventually fled to Perth, claiming continued harassment by the sect.

The marriage did not survive. Julia now lives in New Zealand with the other children, Roberta and Carlton.

Mr Smith and a member of the Exclusive Brethren reached an out-of-court settlement in a defamation suit.

The sect always argued the matter was between the children's parents and grandparents, and did not concern the sect itself.

Vincent said he had seen his grandfather only once or twice in the past 14 years, including after his grandmother's death, even though they were not allowed to go to her funeral.

Vincent is now learning the plastering trade from his father and has decided to give religion a miss.

He has got his "head right" after a few years of ups and downs but still gets tripped up, continuing to refer to John Hales as "Mr Hales", something he says is testimony to the "brainwashing" he endured.

"I'll tell people like my girlfriend or mates stuff that went on when I was a kid, and they barely believe it."

Vincent has never received an apology from the sect, and some bitter memories will not fade, such as that involving a drill he was given as a present by an Exclusive Brethren uncle during the separation.

"I loved that drill and I wrote to him when we were back with the parents asking him if he could send it to me. He wrote back and said it was only a present for you while you were in the fellowship of the Brethren. That's the Exclusive Brethren for you."

The Hickmott family declined to comment.

Posted by Perry at 04:59 PM

The Dominion Christian Centre.

[Canadian Television - CTV W-FIVE Oct 28 at 7pm ET & Sunday Oct 29 at 1pm ET]

A W-FIVE investigation delves into the world of a Hamilton-based church revealing how its psychological hold on members has literally torn families apart. Airing Saturday, October 28 at 7 p.m. (check local listings), the full-hour episode brings viewers an exclusive inside look at this extreme religious group and the families affected by The Dominion Christian Centre.

Reporter Alan Fryer and the W-FIVE team talk to a family who has lost their daughter to the church and reveals how the family now stands accused of her kidnapping. Fryer also talks with the daughter --Mirella Brun del Re tells her version of events for the first time with shocking revelations about her feelings for her family.

In an exclusive interview, W-FIVE talks to Peter Rigo, the radical pastor of the DCC, who explains that the church is a place for those who want to live the word of Christ 24/7--anyone not willing to toe that line is invited to hit the road. But dozens of families who met with W-FIVE paint a different picture, calling the DCC a destructive cult that is ruining people's lives.

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/show/CTVShows/20030924/wfive-default-link/20060830

Posted by Perry at 04:52 PM

Trial highlights Canadian cult link

More than 70 Solar Temple members died in ritual murders and suicide blazes

Toronto Star
Oct. 25, 2006.
SEAN GORDON, QUEBEC BUREAU CHIEF

MONTREAL—The chilling ritual known within the Order of the Solar Temple as "transit to Sirius" — a distant star where members of the doomsday cult believed they would live eternally once their souls were cleansed by flames — was first practised in the Laurentian hills north of Montreal.

It was a frigid October morning in 1994, and after fire crews tamed a raging blaze at a condo in the cottage-country town of Morin Heights, Que., they made a sickening discovery: five bodies, including that of a baby.

More than a decade later, a conductor who once taught at the University of Toronto and directed the Canadian Opera Company's orchestra is facing a second trial for his alleged role in a rash of deaths in Quebec, France and Switzerland.

Michel Tabachnik, a 62-year-old Franco-Swiss conductor and composer, is alleged to have intimate ties to the Order of the Solar Temple, a shadowy international cult that shot to prominence in the mid-1990s after dozens of its adherents died in several waves of mass suicide.

The classically educated conductor, who has worked with several leading European musicians, spent much of the 1980s and early 1990s in Canada, shuttling between his job as artistic director of the Orchestre Jeunesse du Quebec and guest-conducting with the Opera de Montreal, the Quebec Symphony Orchestra, the U of T, and the Canadian Opera Company.

Yesterday Tabachnik was led into a courtroom in Grenoble, France, to start a trial that's expected to last two weeks.

He has maintained his innocence since he was first detained in 1996 and was acquitted on charges of "criminal association" with the cult's leaders at his first trial in 2001. French prosecutors appealed the verdict and an appellate court ordered the second trial.

If convicted, he could face up to 10 years in prison.

A former cult member recalls that Tabachnik was often in the company of Luc Jouret, a charismatic Swiss homeopath and a leading member of the group, and was also a close friend of Joseph Di Mambio, the cult's self-proclaimed leader.

Tabachnik has admitted his friendship with the two men dates back to 1977, but denies ever being a member of the cult, let alone a high-ranking one.

"I saw (Tabachnik) often at conferences, Jouret and he would give private presentations to groups of 30, 60, 80 business people, Luc had decided to branch out beyond OST ... I didn't like the guy, you either have good chemistry with someone or you don't. He just froze me," said Hermann Delorme, who left the group in 1993 and chronicled his time in the Solar Temple orbit in a 1996 book.

Delorme doubts he was ever considered a full member of the cult — the admission criteria were left to the whim of the leadership, and he never paid the hefty dues charged to others.

But Delorme, who now lives a quiet life in Quebec's Eastern Townships, recalls his three years in the Order's midst as "fun, traumatic, horrendous; a tremendous experience of which I don't regret a single minute."

Those kinds of recollections are jarring for relatives of cult victims, who have formed an association in France and retained a Geneva lawyer to pursue Tabachnik and others.

Tabachnik is the only person to go before the courts in connection with the deaths, which have never been fully explained thanks to a series of botched police investigations.

The Morin Heights fire was set by Swiss-born cult members Jerry and Colette Genoud, who each took a handful of barbiturates before setting the timer on a gasoline bomb that would incinerate their condo.

Days before, they had participated in the ritual murder of two fellow cult members and their 3-month-old baby, said to be considered "the anti-Christ."

Within hours of the Morin Heights fire, similar blazes were set in a pair of Swiss towns. Rescue workers recovered 53 calcified bodies, many showing signs of a violent end. More than 70 cult members would die in similar circumstances over a three-year period.

On Dec. 23, 1995, investigators happened upon a gruesome scene in the French Alps, where 16 bodies — including four children — had been arrayed in a star formation in a remote clearing. All had been shot.

The last mass death, in 1997, involved five cult members who perished in a house fire in St. Casimir, a bucolic community that sits in the farmland between Montreal and Quebec City.

Police investigating that incident uncovered a list of more than 500 cult members, a document they allege included Tabachnik's name.

With files from Associated Press

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1161726632690&call_pageid=968332188492&col=968793972154&t=TS_Home

Posted by Perry at 04:45 PM

October 25, 2006

Un condamné à mort exécuté/Cult Leader Executed

[The English translation that follows was performed by Google Language. It is not 100% accurate and is only included to assist researchers.]

Aux États-Unis, un ancien membre d'une branche dissidente des mormons a été exécuté en Ohio.

Jeffrey Lundgren, 56 ans, avait été condamné en 1989 pour l'assassinat d'un couple de fidèles et de leurs trois enfants, qui le considéraient comme un gourou.

Le condamné à mort a été exécuté par injection létale à Lucasville. Il s'agit du 46e condamné exécuté cette année aux États-Unis.

Lundgren était devenu guide spirituel en 1984 et donnait des cours sur la Bible. À la tête d'un petit groupe de fidèles, il avait interprété une supposée vision comme étant une invitation à tuer un certain nombre des membres de son groupe.

Le chef spirituel a été arrêté quand un membre de la secte a dénoncé l'affaire à la police.

http://lcn.canoe.com/lcn/infos/lemonde/archives/2006/10/20061025-102916.html

CULT LEADER EXECUTED

In the United States, the execution of a former member of a dissenting branch of the Mormons was carried out in Ohio. Jeffrey Lundgren, 56 years, had been condemned in 1989 for the assassination of a couple and their three children, who regarded him as a prophet. Execution was carried out by lethal injection in Lucasville, Ohio. It is about the 46th execution carried out this year in the United States. Lundgren had become spiritual guide in 1984 and gave courses on the Bible. As the head of a small group of faithful, he had interpreted one supposed vision as being an invitation to kill a certain number of the members of its group. The spiritual chief was stopped when a member of the sect denounced the business with the police force.

Posted by Perry at 01:00 PM

Cult Leader Executed

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Maggi Martin
The Plain Dealer
http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/news/1161765403260920.xml&coll=2

Lucasville, Ohio -- Jeffrey Lundgren, the self-professed prophet who killed five people in what he said was a sacrifice demanded by a higher power, died by lethal injection Tuesday in a death demanded by the state.

Lundgren walked the 17 steps to the death chamber without the well- worn Bible that he used to control his cult, which formed after he broke from the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

As a dozen people watched from the other side of a glass wall, Lundgren issued a 15-second statement that mentioned fellow cult member Kathryn Johnson, his second wife.

"I want to profess my love for God, my family, my children and my beloved Kathryn," he said while staring at the ceiling. "I am because you are."

Moments after the lethal combination of three drugs was injected into his beefy arms, Lundgren heaved a big sigh, his eyes fluttered, and then he was still. Minutes later, at 10:26 a.m., he was pronounced dead.

He died more gently than his victims. Dennis and Cheryl Avery and their daughters, Trina, 15, Becky, 13, and Karen, 7, were led one by one past a buzzing chain saw to a muddy pit, where they were bound with duct tape, shot and dumped into a common grave.

Lundgren claimed that the 1989 slayings were commanded by God.

Among those witnessing the execution was U.S. Rep. Steven LaTourette, who served as Lake County's prosecutor at the time of the slayings. LaTourette said the killings were a cowardly act committed to silence those who began to doubt Lundgren's status as a deity.

"Even after 16 years, I still can't get the vision out of my head of 7-year-old Karen Avery," LaTourette said.

"As we removed the parents from the pit, we all said we didn't want there to be children."

Other witnesses included Cheryl Avery's younger brother, Donald Bailey of Missouri. In an act of defiance, he walked up close to the death chamber's glass window to ensure that Lundgren knew he was there.

"He got what he deserved," said Bailey, who said the family has suffered depression and nightmares from the horror.

In a written statement, Bailey said he was convinced that Lundgren would kill again if he were released from prison.

"There is only one sure way to make sure this never happens again: To be sure his life is forfeited for the terrible deeds he has done. The memories of his victims and the welfare of society and demands of justice all dictate this final act of cleansing," Bailey wrote. "My only regret is that he has but one life to give."

After the execution, prison officials said Lundgren had been so certain that he would win a delay that he napped much of the morning. His lawyers were not present when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to accept his last appeal a little more than an hour before the scheduled 10 a.m. execution. Gov. Bob Taft denied Lundgren's request for clemency.

Lundgren had hoped to stay his execution while courts considered a lawsuit arguing that the state's method of execution, lethal injection, is cruel. A U.S. District Court judge stayed the execution last week so that Lundgren could join the lawsuit, but a three-judge panel from the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision Monday night.

The once haughty prophet who surrounded himself with loyal followers died with no family members or friends among the witnesses. With no one claiming his body, Lundgren will be buried in a simple ceremony in a prison grave in Chillicothe. Other convicts will serve as pallbearers.

The Avery family was buried years ago in the rolling hills of Missouri. A Missouri church community raised thousands of dollars to pay for the burial and to launch a children's charity so that the memory of Trina, Rebecca and Karen Avery would not end in a muddy pit in Kirtland.

Posted by Perry at 12:51 PM

October 24, 2006

Sexual assault chief concern in Bountiful

Globe and Mail

23/10/06
Canadian Press

VICTORIA — The possibility of children being sexually exploited or abused in the community of Bountiful is of more concern than the issue of polygamy, B.C. Attorney General Wally Oppal said Monday.

But Mr. Oppal also said he is not ignoring the fact polygamy charges may be available to Crown prosecutors for some members in the southeastern B.C. community.

“The fundamental issue here is sexual exploitation of children, sexual abuse of children and sexual assaults — if all that is taking place,” Mr. Oppal told reporters.

“That is more important than anything else. I'm not ignoring the fact there may be polygamy charges available there but it's much more important I think we can all agree, that we prevent any child abuse.”
The B.C. Criminal Justice Branch has started a charge assessment review after receiving an RCMP report.

A separate federal Justice Department report says Canada is violating international human rights obligations by allowing polygamy to persist in the community.

Mr. Oppal said lawyers in the criminal justice branch continue to examine the hefty RCMP report concerning the polygamist community to determine whether charges will be laid.

The provincial branch began its charge assessment review late last month after getting an RCMP report.

Police spent months investigating alleged misconduct by some residents of the small town.

In the federal report, the author said “polygamy is a violation of international law” and “Canada has an obligation as a matter of international law to take all appropriate steps.”

While polygamy is illegal in Canada, the practice has been going on in Bountiful for many decades. The adherents are members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

The breakaway Mormon sect teaches that men must have at least three wives to achieve eternal salvation.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20061023.wbountiful23/BNStory/National/home

Posted by Perry at 11:52 AM

October 23, 2006

Doomsday cult leader Tabachnik back in court/OTS: le procès en appel de Michel Tabachnik s'ouvre mardi

[French version follows]

October 23, 2006
AFP http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/storypage.aspx?StoryId=53979

GRENOBLE, France - Franco-Swiss conductor Michel Tabachnik is due to go back on trial in France on Tuesday, four years after he was acquitted of conspiring to brainwash 74 members of the Solar Temple doomsday cult into accepting death by occult ritual.

The 64-year-old musician is now being charged with "criminal conspiracy" in relation to 16 of those cult members, three of them children, whose charred bodies were discovered in the French Alps in 1995.

On June 25, 2001, French judges cleared Tabachnik of the brainwashing charges due to lack of evidence. But prosecutors, which had accused him of playing a key role in convincing cult members willingly to go to their deaths, lodged an appeal.

The new court case, in the southwestern city of Grenoble, was expected to last two weeks.

The Solar Temple gained worldwide notoriety between 1994 and 1997, when the burnt bodies of 74 of its members were found in remote woodland clearings in Switzerland, Canada and then France.

Several of the dead had been shot in the head or asphyxiated in what were apparently ritual murders, although some are thought to have been willing participants in mass suicides.

Among the dead were the two founders of the sect, Luc Jouret and Jo Di Mambro. The two men allegedly milked followers of their money and convinced them that they must die by burning in order to attain bliss in the afterworld.

During his trial in 2001, Tabachnik admitted to belonging to the Order of the Solar Temple.

But he denied charges that his writings -- inspired by a mixture of occult, New Age and Rosicrucian theories -- had prepared the way for the cult members' deaths.

Central to the prosecution's case in 2001 was the charge that Tabachnik had taken part in meetings of the Solar Temple, held in France in July and September 1994, at which he "announced the winding-up of the group and the conclusion of its mission".

The judges concluded Tabachnik could have made the announcement to help Jouret and Di Mambro paint the subsequent murders as a spiritual ritual. But the conductor could just as easily have called for the sect to be wound up because his own philosophy had evolved, as expressed in tracts he had written at the time, they ruled.

Born in Geneva in 1942, Tabachnik studied under French conductor Pierre Boulez and earned a reputation for his interpretation of contemporary music, holding orchestral posts in Canada, Portugal and France.

Lundi, 23/10/2006
OTS: le procès en appel de Michel Tabachnik s'ouvre mardi

Le procès en appel du chef d'orchestre Michel Tabachnik, poursuivi pour »association de malfaiteurs» après la mort de 16 adeptes de l'Ordre du temple solaire (OTS) en 1995 dans le Vercors, s'ouvre mardi à Grenoble pour deux semaines.

Le 22 décembre 1995, dans une forêt du Vercors, les corps calcinés de 16 personnes avaient été découverts sur un bûcher, tuées par balles et quatre armes retrouvées sur place. Trois enfants d'adeptes se trouvaient parmi les victimes, ainsi qu'Edith et Patrick Vuarnet, l'épouse et le fils cadet de l'ancien champion de ski, Jean Vuarnet.

Entre octobre 1994 et décembre 1995, des »tueries suicides» de membres de l'OTS ont fait 68 morts en Suisse, en France et au Canada, dont le gourou de la secte, Jo Di Mambro, et le »rabatteur», le docteur Luc Jouret.

En avril 2001, après neuf jours de procès, le chef d'orchestre franco-suisse Michel Tabachnik, 61 ans, avait été relaxé au bénéfice du doute par le tribunal correctionnel de Grenoble. Mais le parquet avait fait appel.

En première instance, le procureur avait requis cinq ans de prison contre M. Tabachnik, lui reprochant d'avoir, par ses écrits ésotériqu