May 25, 2025 • 47 mins
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello listeners and or welcome to you this special re
release series of the live talks that I have recorded
at crime Con UK. As we are so close to
the event in London now on the seventh and eighth
of June twenty twenty five, I thought it would be
a great opportunity to re upload the talks that I've
done previously at this event. For those of you that
(00:22):
have been tuning in for a while, these talks might
be familiar to you, but for those who are new
to the show, here is a taste of what you
can expect from crime Con UK across the weekend in London.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
We will also be.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
In Manchester in September and I hope to be doing
a talk at this event too. This year, I am
lucky enough to be on a panel with Laura Richards
no Less talking about coercive control and cult. You can
buy your tickets at crimecon dot co dot uk and
use the code cult cult at the checkout for ten
(00:54):
percent off your tickets. Patrons also receive a fifteen percent
discount code you can contact me for directly. Crime Con UK,
sponsored by True Crime, is the UK's biggest true crime event,
advocating for survivors, victims and policy change in the UK.
(01:14):
I really can't wait for this weekend and I hope
to see you there. I hope you enjoy these re
uploads and get in touch let me know what you
think and if you'll be there for the weekend. Hello everybody,
My name is Casey, host of the Corporal podcast, and
welcome to this year's Crime Con UK. What has allready
proven to be an unforgettable weekend with the awards yesterday,
(01:37):
will no doubt continue to offer once in a lifetime experiences.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
I hope this will be one of them.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Insight and education into the world of true crime. Thank
you to every person who has been involved in making
this event possible, and a massive thank you to Nancy
and her team for having us back here again to
participate in the UK's biggest true crime event. If some
of you have tuned into the Cold War podcasts, have
listened into some of our esteemed guests work, or attended
(02:03):
this talk last year with Elgin Strait, you will know that,
as well as covering the subject of cults, the Cult
Wor podcast looks at advocacy for survivors and victims of cults,
as well as activism education and prevention against cults.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
We also look at the subject of.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Coercive control and authoritarianism in everyday society.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
If you are here today about.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
One person's journey in and out of a cult, you
will hear that, and what you will also find is
a deeper understanding of cults and coercive control, in the
hopes that with each conversation like the one that we
aim to have today, we can help to educate the
wider public and change the misconceptions of those inside cults.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
But enough about our mission.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
It is my absolute honor and privilege to introduce today's speaker,
mister John.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Atak f the.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
Thank you very much.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
So I'm not sure we can do this in a
very short and summarized way, but would you please introduce
yourself to the listeners.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
I'm John Atech. When I was nineteen years old, my
heart was broken and I fell into the Scientology cult.
I was a peripheral member, which is to say I
never worked for them, never a living member, and I
just paid their money and they screweded my mind. It
(03:30):
was a fascinating experience. I realized afterwards when I left
and started helping people who were leaving that almost everybody
that had been involved in this group had been humiliated
and abused, and I wasn't because I'm an artist of
various kinds. They have a policy of dealing with celebrities.
(03:50):
I wasn't earning any money, but I was a painter
and a drummer and a writer, so I was always
handled with kid clubs. And when it came out, I
found out this group had basically eleven members, including the
wife of the creator of Scientology, Mary Sue Hubbard, had
been sent to prison in the United States after she
(04:12):
signed a two hundred page confession a stipulation in evidence
saying that she had been party to kidnapping, false imprisonment, burglary,
breaking and entering, bugging, forgery of government credentials, and theft
of enormous massive government documents. That a similar case in Canada.
(04:33):
There was another one in France. I was startled to
find this out. I thought I was involved in a
therapy group with sort of spiritual pretensions that in the
sort of increasing harshness of the management and Scientology. The
funny thing is I left having done twenty five of
the twenty seven available levels to turn myself into a superhuman,
(04:56):
which somehow didn't happen. But when I left, I still
absolutely believed. And I left because I believed, because I
thought it the Mother cult had gone wrong. And so
I was about three months I'd set myself at the
center of the UK independent scientology movement, and during that
time people started giving me stuff about Ron Hubbard and
(05:18):
I realized he as a con artist and a liar,
and that began the next part of my process, which
was I can'd go to somebody say, well, he claims
he was a war hero, he was crippled and blinded
at the end of World War Two, and yet here
in this other place he says that on the twenty
fifth of July nineteen forty five, less than three weeks
before the war ended, he beat up three petty officers
(05:40):
in Los Angeles, and the scientologist I remember this particular
conversations woman looked at me and said, well, that's easy enough.
He had two bodies, and that prognitive dissonance that you
know where the stronger the evidence you present, the more
willing the person is to believe the stupid thing they believe.
(06:01):
I became fascinated by that, so then spent about seven
years finding out how to talk to somebody who's fanatical.
How to sit down in room with somebody, one case
where the guy had actually finished a scientology course that
morning and was over the moon about what he'd done,
and how to do that without being coersive, you know,
(06:24):
without kidnapping anybody as Mary Sue Hubbard had done, or
falsely imprisoning them with Mary Sue Hubbard had done. How
to have the door open, be able to talk to somebody,
knowing that if you put one foot wrong, if you
said one thing wrong, they'd be out of the door.
And for about four or five years in the early
nineties I did that. I'd talked with people who've been involved.
(06:47):
I'd published What's now Let's sell these people a piece
of Blue Sky, which is the only history of the
scientology movement. In fact, I think it may be the
only history of any post Second World War group. That's
how much academic intro there is in the thousands of groups,
just unbelievable. I also became involved with Russell Miller, who
was at Sunday Times. We did a series of cover
(07:09):
pieces about Scientology, and that he had my manuscript, which
I hadn't been able to find a publisher for Oddly enough,
I've got eleven letters from publishers saying we'd love to
publish this, but we wouldn't make any money if we did,
because they'll sue us. So in fact, Nevill Spearman was
the head of Neville. Spearman wrote to me himself, and
I had this image of this guy in a savile
(07:31):
rose suit, sitting there in age seventeen, very deplat, and
he'd sold one hundred and eight thousand copies of The
Mind Benders by my friend Pirl Vospa some years before.
And then he explained that there wouldn't be any profit
in it, and he signed himself off. You know, seventy
year old guy Saul rose Suit, death to the evil cult.
So there was a certain amount of feeling there. Russell
(07:55):
used my manuscript and built upon it. I was his
researcher for eighteen months. He produced a book which I
think possibly has the best title of any book ever.
It's called Baar Faced Messiah, and it remains the biography
of run Ubard. As yet, scientology has not put out
a version to compete with it. So I found myself inundated.
(08:21):
When I left. Hundreds of people came to me people
will contacting me from all over the world, and I'm
sort of going, no, I'm a painter, that's what they
do for a living. And tens of calls every day,
no emails, none of that, thankfully, but lots of people
who were evidently highly distressed by their involvement. So whatever
(08:44):
the scientology group set about, you know how terrible people
such as I am, I have the honor of being
labeled a suppressive person and this is according to RUNNERB.
But my intention is to kill all life, So feel
lucky if you get out of rum. And that kind
(09:06):
of morphed into So how did this work? How is
it that I know eight medical doctors in the UK,
three dentists, one NASA physicist who are all absolutely crazy
about scientology. How did this get into their heads? We
all know that people who joined cults are weak, vulnerable, unintelligent, stupid.
(09:28):
It's pretty obvious really looking at me up here. So
I'm sort of going, how does that work? And so
then it was a matter of understanding the psychology. What
is being I think erroneously called coercive control because the
word coercion means force, intimidational threat. None of those three
things is necessary to exploit somebody and get them to
(09:50):
do your bidding, to go against their own better interests.
And a part of that is by giving them a
different identity, getting them to identify with something outside of themselves.
And that can be a good thing. Identify with a
charity and do good work. But you can also identify
with your nation, which, when we come to think about,
(10:12):
is imaginary. It's not actually a real thing where sixty
five million people in Britain all get together and do
something other than they let Boris Johnson, but all mine
of states. It's something we imagine. When I talk to
Americans who tell me they're patriotic, I often find that
they're only actually patriotic to walk towards their fellow Republicans
(10:36):
or Trump supporters. You know, they'd be quite happy to
pitch the Democrats into the sea. And I fear that
the same is true the Democrats. I know. You know,
it's an equal opportunities situation. So I studied the psychology,
the social psychology of what I will call exploitative persuasion.
(10:57):
People call it mind control, brainwashing, sought reform. There are
all sorts of terms for it, and some of them
are really too melodramatic for me to want to use
it's there are lots of words. Here is the word hypnosis.
Then everybody knows what it is, and yet it's very
rare to meet somebody who actually knows what it is.
(11:19):
There are people who can do it and they don't
necessarily know what it is. So if I'm going to
talk about that process, I'll talk about guided imagination, which is,
according to the Opposite Handbook of Hypnosis, a complete definition
of hypnosis. If you can catch somebody's imagination and guide it,
then you can direct their behavior to a certain extent.
(11:42):
I've got way beyond what you asked me, not for
the first time.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
So as we are here at Crime con UK and
we're talking about what has been described as a criminal organization,
what has been organization, what has been described as a
what is self labeled as a church and a religion,
and which also the state recognizes as a church at
(12:09):
a religion.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
When we talk.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
About some of the criminality that comes with scientology, some
of you may recognize the term fair game or gang
stalking and harassment and some of the things that come
with or consequences of leaving.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
A cult or a high control group.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
And Scientology is notorious for using these tactics. You have
been subjected to some of these tactics a little bit.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
Yeah. I've been followed by private detectives wherever I've traveled
in the world. In the US, that was a bit
scary because they have guns. My house was broken into
twice with nothing taken for two years. There was a
guy across the street from me, and he'd hired a
(13:02):
room so he could set a camera up to record
all the comings and goings at my house. I found
this out when in nineteen ninety three, the head of
Scientology's investigation department defected. She came to see me in
a last attempt after eighteen months of trying to get
at me with all sorts of stupid pranks, and you know,
(13:25):
put you to the police at the drop of a hat.
And you had the fire brigade call up and said
you had it complained about your house. Would you like
us to come around and make sure it's safe. Just
everything and anything people with placards outside my house. So
she came to me, and basically what had happened was
that a young woman had decided she wanted to leave,
(13:47):
and she gone to the Christian bookshop in East Grinstead,
where I lived at the time, and said, jaunted. And
so they called me and I went along as John aysack.
So that wasn't very helpful, and I said, we need
to call the police and get your stuff from the
house where you're lodging. Scientologist's house. We need that, I said,
we will need that. I called the police. Police were
(14:09):
well aware of these situations. They came along. I went
to a neighbour's house. This is ninety three, this is
before cell phones. I went to one of her neighbour's
houses to use the phone. When I looked up, the
police car had gone. She told them it's fine, you
can leave, and another car had pulled up with four
people in it. Two guys got out and stood on
the lawn outside the house, one with a tape recorder microphone,
(14:32):
shaking out in front of me, in front of him
because I am extraordinarily dangerous, as you can see. And
I said to him, as I would say to any
of them, Look, if you change your mind, if you
have any problems, just give me a call. And the
next day one of the women he had gone into
the house, called me up and said, you said you
talk to my husband if he needed, will you talk
(14:54):
to me? So yeah, sure. She came around for three hours,
and she claimed that she was very, very low level
scientologist and she needed to leave and all of this,
and we talked for three hours and the next day
and she came back. Somebody who had recently left I
had brought along who said, you're a head of investigation,
and she said, yes, sir. And she then talked about
(15:15):
the terrible lives of her children in scientology, how one
of them had lost all of his teeth as an
infant because she'd followed run Hubbard's instruction to use barley formula,
which is basically, instead of milk of any kind, you
give the baby barley syrup. You know, a corn syrup,
so a sweet and corn syrup. And this child had
(15:36):
lost all of his milk teeth. There were many other
things that she told me, but one of them was
that there were five agents. She had one in training,
and she had four in my life, including the guy
who was driving me around, including two women by coincidence,
their husbands had MS and they'd been pushed out of
scientology because scientology is utterly opposed to anybody who's ill
(16:02):
or disabled sadly, well like a good thing actually, for
real or disabled, that is a good thing, definitely. And
these women both came to me and said, well, we've
been chucked out. And I spent a year with each
of them doing everything I could, you know, to make
sure the housing was all right too. And then one
of them saw an affidavit against me saying that my
(16:25):
only intention standing up against Scientology was because I wanted
them to give me two million pounds. That's the first
time i'd heard that. It would have been nice two
million pounds. And the other one she had a crisis
of conscience because one of her friends left Scientology and said, oh,
I know John Mats, he's all right actually, and she went, oh,
(16:46):
for a year, I've been calling him up with questions
and I've been recording the answers to give to the
Office of Special Affairs as it's called in Scientology. So
possibly the worst thing was that they put together a
booklet about me that was distributed to all of the
(17:08):
houses in East Grinstead, and with that and they set
up a rumor campaign accused me of being a rapist,
of attempted murder, of child molesting, of heroin addiction, and
as yet I don't think go as far as I know,
I've never been in the same rum as any heroine.
But there you go. It's very addictive, you know, and
(17:30):
of being a drug dealer, and you know, so this
this is called fair game. Once you were no longer
a scientologist, you can be decared fair game, which means
any scientologists can do anything they want to you with
any punishment of any type. It's also considered criminal in
scientology to report a fellow scientologists to the police, which
(17:53):
I hadn't fully understood as a member. And so it
meant that if somebody came round and burned my house
down and old time toolos you they'd done it, then
they wouldn't be reported to the police, they'd actually be
pattered on the back. So yeah, that's that's the kind
of and that was there was ten core cases that
were sued in New York cases here. Ultimately I was
(18:15):
bankrupted because it couldn't pay the lawyers, had no other
debts and they lost my house and all of this
kind of thing all very traumatic.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
So fair gaming goes both ways. But of course, a
billion dollar organization that has the power and the influence
and the lawyers and the colluding of certain police departments
probably all over the world, means that it really isn't
the option to fair game in return as a as
(18:49):
an individual without those resources.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
Yeah, about forty thousand of them with two billion dollars
and one of me with one pound fifty. It was
a slightly unfair contest. And yeah, as you say that,
it just comes down on you. The idea is to
silence you. And you know, I had meetings along the
(19:12):
way where I was One of the offers that was
made to me was that they would buy paintings from
me for the rest of my life if I'd just
been a little And I do have a tape recording
of that, and I was a little rude, I'm afraid
to say.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
With the various books that you have published contributed to,
there is a more recent one which I've just finished reading.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
It's called Opening Our Minds.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
It's an I would say, it's an introduction to coercive
control or exploited to persuasion, and it is a great
way to understand the different systems that exis in typical
society that we might not be aware of. That also
(20:04):
can be applied to things like scientology. Could you please
give a little bit more information about Opening Our Minds,
which is available at the bookstore.
Speaker 3 (20:13):
For a sign bookstore. Then then it's going like hotcakes.
I didn't, in fact leave go and buy it now, No,
hang on, yes. I In twenty fifteen, I helped to
start the Open Minds Foundation, which is a US tax
exempt charity, and I worked with them for four years.
(20:36):
During that time, the idea was to you know, I'd
come to this point where I realized that all of
these things that I was studying, you know, I studied sales, advertising, terrorism, gangs,
human trafficking, pedophile agreement. Wherever I looked, I was seeing
the same behaviors. So the way of recruiting somebody, the
(21:00):
Al Qaeda recruiting manual reads virtually the same as the
Moon is recruiting manual. And so the thought was, Okay,
this is happening throughout our society. And I came down
to a very simple idea, which is, you know, first
we talk about totalitarian or totalist cults, cults that completely
(21:21):
control your life. That's sort of going, well, does it
matter if they completely control life? The idea that they're
controlling your life at all seems to me a bad thing,
and so I shifted to the word authoritarian, meaning somebody
who believes that they are God's gift or even God
(21:43):
him or herself on earth, and they should be followed,
they should be listened to. Their will is true. Whatever
they say is not an alternative fact, but a real fact,
even when disproved. These are authoritarians, and the extreme examples
(22:03):
Musolini hit the Stalin Mazadon are extreme examples. I believe
that we live in an authoritarian society, that our school
system is authoritarian. It is more mildly authoritarian than it
was when I went to school and could be flogged
for saying something wrong, which did happen a couple of times,
(22:26):
a lot less often than it should have done, I imagine,
But I wasn't court always, you know. But I think
that there's a shift because at the other end of
the authoritarian spectrum is the person who says, well, I
don't know, you know, Tony Blair says it's right, so
it must be right, or you know, some authority says it.
(22:50):
And whenever we accept something that we do not understand,
whenever we accept somebody else's opinion as truth, we come
into this strange place where we no longer have control
over ourselves. We've given it up if we've ever actually
acquired it. He was asked to documentary maker. He just
(23:11):
had this long series of questions that he asked in
and he said, do you see we have free will?
And I'd not really thought about it in those terms,
and I said, no, I don't believe we do have
free will, but I think we can get it. And
that's still my opinion that we have to be careful.
We have to understand how these things are done if
(23:34):
we are not to be vulnerable to them. We also
have to understand that we are vulnerable. That people who
are absolutely sure that they never be stupid enough are
the easiest picking they really are. I had a friend
who was saying, I'd never be stupid enough to join
(23:54):
a cult. I said, and yet you smoke twenty cigarettes
a day.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
So this is all in opening our mind all of
it except the story about the cigarettes.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
That's not in there. That's personal and you're the only
people who've heard it.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
The really interesting thing for me about Opening Our Minds
is that when I first started the podcast, if any
of you have listened to or know that I just
had absolutely nothing in my mind about what is a cult.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Maybe I still don't.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
I don't know, And through my own education, I've come
to realize that as John has said, that the systems
and models that we can recognize in other parts of
our society, in other parts of our lives that we
don't think that we are influenced by, they do exist
and they are there. But when you think about cults,
(25:09):
or you think about coercive control, or you think about authoritarianism,
these are scary words that are pejorative, that may seem
like too academic, or how do I begin to educate
myself and learn about these things? And opening our minds
is almost like it's like a beginner's a beginner's book
into the subject. It's friendly, it's easy to read, it's informative,
(25:33):
it gives it gives timelines and historical context to things
like commercialization as we know it today, where did it
come from?
Speaker 2 (25:41):
But it's not it's not too much.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
So I feel like if anybody has an interest in
learning more about this subject without having to watch really
difficult material in documentaries, in films, exploitative pieces of media
that really take advantage of individuals and their vulnerabilities and
their stories. Opening our minds is a good place to start.
(26:05):
And I feel like that was a great sales pitch.
Speaker 3 (26:07):
That was very good, indeed, and I will be giving
you a percentage, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
So it is down in the bookstore, and we will
be doing some well, John will be doing some signings
and I will come down with some cult vot bookmarks,
just so I can you know, profit off of John's work.
But I just wanted to ask if anybody in the
audience had any questions before we before we round up today.
Speaker 3 (26:31):
Yes, she's quadering. I've heard about sons of lebroncies, the
pros in the climate of the littologyology perous is any true?
Speaker 1 (26:41):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (26:41):
There were a great great many celebrities involved. Tom Cruise,
John Travolta, Kirsty Ally was Chick Corea, and of course
there are other groups. The Phoenix Brothers, River and Maquim
grew up and the Children of God, the Williams Sisters,
the great tennis players drew up in the Jova's Witnesses,
(27:04):
as did the Jacqson Five. Tina Turner, the now late
Great Tina Turner, was a member of a group called
Nicheren Shosu Japanese.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Group, Orlando Bloom two, Orlando Bloom as well.
Speaker 3 (27:18):
So and for me is a kind of perverse thought.
People are going, well, these people are successful, therefore I'll
try and do what it is they're doing. But often
as not, they were successful and were then recruited, and
there was Scientology actually produces only ever produced one person
who was meant to have supernatural powers, a man called
(27:39):
Ingo Swan who did remote viewing and came up with
Uri Gala or Uri Geller as some people called him.
I think is much better. Who's a con man who
works for Mossad according to his own more recent admissions.
But this guy, Ingo Swan said he could do this
remote viewing. I mean, Darren Brown does it better. But
(28:01):
and when challenged, and we did get into a little
bit of a firefight on the internet in nineties, said
that actually he had all of these abilities before he
got to scientology. So even then, you know, I don't
think he did have any abilities. I think he was
full of.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Is that answering the question anybody anybody else? Yes?
Speaker 2 (28:26):
When you decided to initially meet there were they trying
to initially compeat to YouTube return and at what weight
did that?
Speaker 4 (28:34):
Then the Cartons just time to read for Harasma and
trying to There.
Speaker 3 (28:41):
Were a flood of departures. Probably when I left in
nineteen eighty three, there were perhaps thirty thousand members around
the world. I mean, they claim millions, but it's not true.
I've seen the internal figures, and about half of us left,
(29:01):
and half of that half just walked and didn't want
anything more to do with it. But the rest of
us created this independent movement which persists and is now
you I would say that the Mother Cult is probably
down to about twenty thousand members now. They're really reduced,
but they got people like Nancy Cartwright, the voice of
(29:22):
Bart Simpson, who recently said that she's given them twenty
one million dollars, so they've got plenty of money to
harass me, which is you know, and they are a
religion after all, so they should be allowed to burn
witches and stone people to death, you know, come on,
so right, So yeah, they What happened was that those
(29:45):
few of us and around the world there were less
than ten who stood up and said this is dishonest
and it's dishonorable. We were attacked and were right from
day one, and it was a shameful thing, especially as
we were coming away, because we thought it was a
good thing and wanted to help people. But this kind
(30:07):
of what I didn't know at that time. I thought
Hubbard was gone. I left because I though Hubbard was gone,
and in fact he was very much still there and
suffering from dementia, which you know, so the last three
years of his life, things got crazy and crazier in
the group, and they just became I mean, their current leader,
David miss Gabbage at that time said that he was
going to be tough and ruthless, and tough I can
(30:31):
understand ruthless, having no mercy. And they're a religion kind
of well like kind of the Aztec religion, you know,
where they rip people's hearts out, or the Thuggies where
you strangle people, different flavors of religion.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
Ryan, yes, yes.
Speaker 5 (30:48):
You mentioned how after you they are and Starry speaking
up that there's all these parse accusations of you beat
a rapist, a head ofphile, even a heroin at it.
I'm curious in wondering why is there so much passion
going after you? Yet, you know, with the celebrities and
recently there is that one ful month the smily.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
Show Danny Masterson, how he has been in charged.
Speaker 5 (31:14):
With three but yet there's been a protection and keeping
him safe. Now, I'm just trying to understand the reasoning
that they have so much zeal and goosel to go
after you, but yet they keep.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
That guy safe.
Speaker 3 (31:29):
Yeah, Danny Masterson has been found guilty on two counts
and faces thirty years in prison. It will be sentenced
I think in August. There is Meanwhile, the judge, Judge
or Maida, gave a ruling saying that his attorneys have
been passing material to Scientology's attorneys, which is an offense,
of course, because this is it's a criminal case. And
(31:53):
what came up in the first trial was declared mistrial.
But the second trial the judge decided to admit evidence
about Scientology's attempts to quiet the witnesses. So these offenses
go back to I think two thousand and two, the
first one, and these women and there were four of
(32:15):
them in all who complained and there may have been others,
were told by Scientology, Nope, you mustn't go to the police,
you mustn't do this. So there's now a civil case
swallowing that. I think there's something about the protection of reputation.
Part of it is that Danny Masterson is rich and celebrated,
(32:37):
and so rather than making taking the sensible course of
action because they knew he was guilty, had they've had
these reports for twenty years, they didn't protect these women.
And the rapes were horrific, you know, there were drug
rapes among them, and very forceful, damaging assaults on these women.
Yet scientology protected them. And it's that sense of well,
(33:02):
we're protecting our own, we're protecting the people who give
us money. Anybody that complains, you know, even people are
making perfectly simple rational criticisms will be attacked. For me,
I did this from nineteen eighty three to the beginning
(33:23):
of nineteen ninety six, and by that time I just
couldn't take anymore. That the year that I lost my
court cases, there was a review of the British, sorry,
the English and Welsh system, whereby the Lord Justice said,
it is the case in English justice. He didn't include
the wealth, it is the case in English justice that
(33:45):
he with the deepest pockets wins. And finding myself in
that situation, what's the point, you know? I don't have
any funding. I've had to earn money to do this
and live on charity. Why am I doing this with
my life? Also, my health had collapsed in my marriage
had collapsed, I lost my five bedroom house, and so
(34:09):
I walked away from it. And when I came back
in twenty thirteen, it was because I've been talking to
some people and I realized that in this one case,
this woman had left scientology sixteen years before, and she
was still thinking as a scientologist. She didn't think of
herself as a scientologist, she didn't use the words they use,
(34:31):
but all of her beliefs were still caught within this
and in fact she asked me a question. Australian journalists
begged me to talk with her, and I kind of went, OK,
I really don't do this anymore. Steve and he was
just a really nice guy, which among journalists isn't necessarily
the case in my experience, but he was a really
(34:54):
salt and so I told her. I took with her
and she said to me, John, is reality really in agreement?
Which is one of Hubbard's bizarre notions. You know, we
all agree it's there, so it's there. And I said, yes,
if you're the hypnotist. But otherwise, no, we are all
(35:16):
able to determine our own sense of what the world
is and what's happening. And it won't make that much
difference thinking it. Otherwise, the wall and the ceiling will
still be there. The next week, when I talk with her,
she said, I've used centered laundry conditioner. Now nobody in
this room knows what that means, but I knew what
(35:37):
it meant. She'd been in the Sea Organization, the Central
Group of Scientology, and she'd done what is called the
hygiene hat, the training and hygiene where you are told
you may not use any centered products, no centered soap,
no shampoo, no anything. Because Hubbard was cent phobic, so
rajniche as well. Oddly enough, had people sniffing at the
door where you could go in see and no perfume
(35:59):
and stuff that. So she, seventeen years or whatever after
leaving Scientology, had been able to break a rule, and
I went, there must be hundreds of thousands of people
in the world who caught in this. I told it
with a guy who was twenty years housebound because Hubbard
had declared him a suppressive person, and he thought he
(36:20):
didn't want to hurt people, so he stayed home. It
took one afternoon to sort that out because nobody had
given him the information he needed about Hubbard. And he
week later wrote to me said, I've got a job,
you know, twenty years house bound. So I came back
and I thought, you know, I started writing for Tony
(36:41):
or Taker's Underground Bunker, which is an incredible source on scientology,
brilliant journalist, former editor of the Village Voice, and I
wrote about how to unpick the thought reform process, you
know that is, And you know I found that when
I went to the States and worked with was then
(37:02):
the Cult Awareness Network, before Scientology took them over. That
people would say, look, we deal with two thousand different groups.
We deal with Hindu, Muslim, seek Christian, Jewish, Pagan, all
sorts of grips. But scientology is it's a different thing.
It's so much more invasive. So you know, where transcendental
(37:27):
meditation has two procedures, neither of them very good for you,
I would say, in the long run, two procedures, scientology
has two thousand. And Hubbard picked up every last trick
from Little Hypnotic Books, so you have his library. Dan
(37:49):
in East Grinstead sat help. He used to have his
books in it, and a friend of mine who was
a professor of theology, started writing down what the titles were,
and he couldn't didn't finish, and he went back a
few weeks later and they cleared the shelves because the
books were pulp fiction, science fiction, cheap books about hypnosis
and books about magic and Alistair Crowley, and they were
(38:12):
still on display. You know how he was, how he
did his stuff.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
Oh, any sort to make sure I'm not missing anybody?
Speaker 3 (38:22):
Yes, yes, Well do you think it isn't a bit
the actually innate people and cheap.
Speaker 4 (38:30):
On the wind.
Speaker 3 (38:33):
It's a very good question. It's usually some change of circumstance.
I mean, in my case, it was, you know, the
girl I'd been living with for fifteen months decided she
was going to run off with my friends to New Zealand.
And that was a little bit alarming for me because
I'm very eutistical and people shouldn't do that to me.
(38:55):
But it can be just you know, moving town, getting
a new job. First year of university is the most
susceptible period because you've got all of that infatuation that
comes with being a teenager. You know, you've got all
of these new emotions to attach to things, so you
are very vulnerable when somebody comes up and goes, hey,
you're really good looking, you should get into my cult.
(39:20):
The other time of great vulnerability is after people retire,
So the Laruchees, the followers of London LaRouche right when
political cult, they will look through the obituary columns and
they'll call on people who are widowed to get them
into the movement and pass over some money. So it's
(39:42):
really at moments of transition and change that were most vulnerable,
and perhaps more so when we're distressed and the system
or our family or our friends are failing us, you
know that they're not able to deal with with how
we feel. And I'm frankly when I was ninety and
I'm not surprised that nobody could deal with it. But
(40:02):
I did talk to a doctor, I did talk to
a psychiatrist. I knew I was not a patient. And
I talked to an Anglican priest. I said, what's this
scientology thing? And all three of them don't know which,
considering there'd been a major government report three years before
that was all over from pages is incredible. I feel
(40:23):
particularly you know, I was not a practicing Christian, but
as an Anglican minister, didn't say I'll get back to you.
I'll find out. So not having the recognition of what
these groups are and feeling that you know your normal
support systems aren't working, that makes you particularly vulnerable.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
Thank you, Kirsty.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
We've got a couple of minutes left, so I'm going
to do this question and then this question, and then
we'll all head down to the bookshop. Okay, oh, Eljie,
did you have one as well?
Speaker 2 (40:54):
Okay, yes, they're all.
Speaker 3 (40:58):
Heading down to the bookshop now, climbing to finnacility a
big about in some theory to do like button bout.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
I just wondered how much did he give? Not the
sync And I'm not serious, I think you might.
Speaker 3 (41:16):
Well, what good are we thinking about?
Speaker 2 (41:18):
David miss Gavage, the leader of Tom Cruise.
Speaker 3 (41:20):
Tom Cruise, Oh sorry, Tom Cruise is Yeah, he's kind
of embedded let a remedy. In her book, Troublemaker talks
about going and having going into his kitchen and seeing
him going to an eight year old screaming fit with
his assistant because the cookie dough wasn't ready for him
to put the cutter on. So I think Tom Cruise
(41:41):
is a person with difficulties. We know he has dyslexia,
and it suggested that he couldn't read and write when
he was recruited. But it even if we looked at
the leader, David miss Gavage, he was thirteen pretty much
when his parents dumped him in it. He was seventeen
minus started working with Hubbard. He seems to be a
(42:02):
hugely malevolent human being, and go on sue me, which
they will. He won't come into court. He won't come
into court. He's avoided any court appearance for years because
people might ask him questions under oath. But I think
that Miss Gabbage is a victim of it. I think
Hubbard himself was a victim of it. He was a
(42:25):
very sick human being. He very likely had temporal lobe epilepsy,
judging by his behavior. He was certainly manic and depressive,
paranoid and always ill, you know, which is one of
the amazing things, because he said, well, illness, that's just
you thinking the wrong thoughts, isn't it. And yet he
was nigh unto death at least once a year from
(42:48):
things that had happened to him.
Speaker 2 (42:50):
Yes, I goes to the lists where do.
Speaker 5 (42:53):
You need shall.
Speaker 3 (42:57):
Possibly in Happy Valley, which is where they keep I
can find people, it says David, miss Gavage's wife, who's
been how long she's been missing for now it's about
ten years. Yeah, and she just was gone no contact Elgin.
Speaker 4 (43:17):
I have one kind one quish as Casey mentioned, I
was sort of guest last year. I'd walk in cole
eats on. I don't think the other type of conversation.
But as a result of that, I've spoken with a
lot of people, particularly so we first generation was like
joy and sometimes leave what Virtually all of them, I
would say, have the exact same experience that you mentioned
(43:38):
of a sort of reach step like Okay, we're gonna
do We're gonna try and fix with the cold cop
wrong and then it's not them to get stuck in
that stab what some of them may get and they
did out in it. Wee I've started seeing like ablest
of the body sees pretty conning you seeing how that's
against that. I think it's coming to people that tried
out make sets of unknown their lives. That for us comment,
(44:01):
that's a good question yes, I know that in the
US border there is the people case clear due to
rock and sea.
Speaker 3 (44:14):
Yes, that is.
Speaker 4 (44:16):
Do you have any sense of whether I bet can
be possibles?
Speaker 2 (44:19):
Well, good question, great question.
Speaker 4 (44:21):
Yeah, I just will be at that point.
Speaker 3 (44:26):
It should be. The difficulty is that we're getting into
the tort of undue influence, which is usually about wills.
It's usually somebody dying and leaving their money to yeah,
the housekeeper who looked after from the last week of
their life or something. But theoretically that could be applied.
There is a situation with their cruise ship, the Free
(44:49):
Wins that because there are British citizens on board, they
actually need to have special papers to be there. You
can't be crew on a ship and they don't have them,
and that may open a door. The terrible thing is
that we're dealing we're often dealing with human trafficking, and
I'm sure you did. Two of the moon is that
(45:11):
people will be moved to another country so that they
can't be you know, rescued, but also they're moved without
their they will. I've talked with Mike Rinda, the probably
the most celebrated ex scientologist at the moment, who wrote
a wonderful book called A Billion Years, and he said
(45:34):
he was six when his parents got in. He was
eighteen when he arrived on Hubbard's ship in nineteen seventy three,
and he was there to do a management training course
to go back to Sydney and run the organization. And
when he said this, they said, no, we've got your passport.
You work here now. Your organization has swapped you for
some courses, and so yeah, that commonplace. I think it
(45:59):
will take you a civil rights law firm like say
Lee Day. I worked with them many years ago who
had the Japanese prison war case and other things. So
it'll take people very determined. The problem is our legal
aid system having collapsed utterly under the current administration. You
can't get the money to pay the lawyers anymore. And
(46:21):
I think that's that. You know, that's a terrible thing.
There should be some legal fund where you know, there's
a class action, there are a number of victims, but
we don't have that.
Speaker 1 (46:31):
Well, thank you all so much for joining us today.
This is John Atack.
Speaker 2 (46:38):
My name is Casey from the Cult Bolt podcast.
Speaker 1 (46:41):
I also just wanted to give a really really quick
shout out to say that John has a YouTube channel
John Atach Family and Friends. You can go and check
out all sorts of amazing interviews with really interesting guests
like me. And then you have Elgin Street's podcast, The
Falling Out Podcast, and then also Ryan Anthony Hernandez. He
has a podcast called The Truth that Heals Podcasts, and
(47:02):
I suggest that you all go and check out everybody's
amazing work. Thank you all so much for joining us
today and we will talk to you at the bar,
at the book signing, anywhere you can find us.
Speaker 2 (47:13):
Thank you so much, thank you, thank you, thank
Hello listeners and or welcome to you this special re
release series of the live talks that I have recorded
at crime Con UK. As we are so close to
the event in London now on the seventh and eighth
of June twenty twenty five, I thought it would be
a great opportunity to re upload the talks that I've
done previously at this event. For those of you that
(00:22):
have been tuning in for a while, these talks might
be familiar to you, but for those who are new
to the show, here is a taste of what you
can expect from crime Con UK across the weekend in London.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
We will also be.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
In Manchester in September and I hope to be doing
a talk at this event too. This year, I am
lucky enough to be on a panel with Laura Richards
no Less talking about coercive control and cult. You can
buy your tickets at crimecon dot co dot uk and
use the code cult cult at the checkout for ten
(00:54):
percent off your tickets. Patrons also receive a fifteen percent
discount code you can contact me for directly. Crime Con UK,
sponsored by True Crime, is the UK's biggest true crime event,
advocating for survivors, victims and policy change in the UK.
(01:14):
I really can't wait for this weekend and I hope
to see you there. I hope you enjoy these re
uploads and get in touch let me know what you
think and if you'll be there for the weekend. Hello everybody,
My name is Casey, host of the Corporal podcast, and
welcome to this year's Crime Con UK. What has allready
proven to be an unforgettable weekend with the awards yesterday,
(01:37):
will no doubt continue to offer once in a lifetime experiences.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
I hope this will be one of them.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Insight and education into the world of true crime. Thank
you to every person who has been involved in making
this event possible, and a massive thank you to Nancy
and her team for having us back here again to
participate in the UK's biggest true crime event. If some
of you have tuned into the Cold War podcasts, have
listened into some of our esteemed guests work, or attended
(02:03):
this talk last year with Elgin Strait, you will know that,
as well as covering the subject of cults, the Cult
Wor podcast looks at advocacy for survivors and victims of cults,
as well as activism education and prevention against cults.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
We also look at the subject of.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Coercive control and authoritarianism in everyday society.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
If you are here today about.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
One person's journey in and out of a cult, you
will hear that, and what you will also find is
a deeper understanding of cults and coercive control, in the
hopes that with each conversation like the one that we
aim to have today, we can help to educate the
wider public and change the misconceptions of those inside cults.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
But enough about our mission.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
It is my absolute honor and privilege to introduce today's speaker,
mister John.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Atak f the.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
Thank you very much.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
So I'm not sure we can do this in a
very short and summarized way, but would you please introduce
yourself to the listeners.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
I'm John Atech. When I was nineteen years old, my
heart was broken and I fell into the Scientology cult.
I was a peripheral member, which is to say I
never worked for them, never a living member, and I
just paid their money and they screweded my mind. It
(03:30):
was a fascinating experience. I realized afterwards when I left
and started helping people who were leaving that almost everybody
that had been involved in this group had been humiliated
and abused, and I wasn't because I'm an artist of
various kinds. They have a policy of dealing with celebrities.
(03:50):
I wasn't earning any money, but I was a painter
and a drummer and a writer, so I was always
handled with kid clubs. And when it came out, I
found out this group had basically eleven members, including the
wife of the creator of Scientology, Mary Sue Hubbard, had
been sent to prison in the United States after she
(04:12):
signed a two hundred page confession a stipulation in evidence
saying that she had been party to kidnapping, false imprisonment, burglary,
breaking and entering, bugging, forgery of government credentials, and theft
of enormous massive government documents. That a similar case in Canada.
(04:33):
There was another one in France. I was startled to
find this out. I thought I was involved in a
therapy group with sort of spiritual pretensions that in the
sort of increasing harshness of the management and Scientology. The
funny thing is I left having done twenty five of
the twenty seven available levels to turn myself into a superhuman,
(04:56):
which somehow didn't happen. But when I left, I still
absolutely believed. And I left because I believed, because I
thought it the Mother cult had gone wrong. And so
I was about three months I'd set myself at the
center of the UK independent scientology movement, and during that
time people started giving me stuff about Ron Hubbard and
(05:18):
I realized he as a con artist and a liar,
and that began the next part of my process, which
was I can'd go to somebody say, well, he claims
he was a war hero, he was crippled and blinded
at the end of World War Two, and yet here
in this other place he says that on the twenty
fifth of July nineteen forty five, less than three weeks
before the war ended, he beat up three petty officers
(05:40):
in Los Angeles, and the scientologist I remember this particular
conversations woman looked at me and said, well, that's easy enough.
He had two bodies, and that prognitive dissonance that you
know where the stronger the evidence you present, the more
willing the person is to believe the stupid thing they believe.
(06:01):
I became fascinated by that, so then spent about seven
years finding out how to talk to somebody who's fanatical.
How to sit down in room with somebody, one case
where the guy had actually finished a scientology course that
morning and was over the moon about what he'd done,
and how to do that without being coersive, you know,
(06:24):
without kidnapping anybody as Mary Sue Hubbard had done, or
falsely imprisoning them with Mary Sue Hubbard had done. How
to have the door open, be able to talk to somebody,
knowing that if you put one foot wrong, if you
said one thing wrong, they'd be out of the door.
And for about four or five years in the early
nineties I did that. I'd talked with people who've been involved.
(06:47):
I'd published What's now Let's sell these people a piece
of Blue Sky, which is the only history of the
scientology movement. In fact, I think it may be the
only history of any post Second World War group. That's
how much academic intro there is in the thousands of groups,
just unbelievable. I also became involved with Russell Miller, who
was at Sunday Times. We did a series of cover
(07:09):
pieces about Scientology, and that he had my manuscript, which
I hadn't been able to find a publisher for Oddly enough,
I've got eleven letters from publishers saying we'd love to
publish this, but we wouldn't make any money if we did,
because they'll sue us. So in fact, Nevill Spearman was
the head of Neville. Spearman wrote to me himself, and
I had this image of this guy in a savile
(07:31):
rose suit, sitting there in age seventeen, very deplat, and
he'd sold one hundred and eight thousand copies of The
Mind Benders by my friend Pirl Vospa some years before.
And then he explained that there wouldn't be any profit
in it, and he signed himself off. You know, seventy
year old guy Saul rose Suit, death to the evil cult.
So there was a certain amount of feeling there. Russell
(07:55):
used my manuscript and built upon it. I was his
researcher for eighteen months. He produced a book which I
think possibly has the best title of any book ever.
It's called Baar Faced Messiah, and it remains the biography
of run Ubard. As yet, scientology has not put out
a version to compete with it. So I found myself inundated.
(08:21):
When I left. Hundreds of people came to me people
will contacting me from all over the world, and I'm
sort of going, no, I'm a painter, that's what they
do for a living. And tens of calls every day,
no emails, none of that, thankfully, but lots of people
who were evidently highly distressed by their involvement. So whatever
(08:44):
the scientology group set about, you know how terrible people
such as I am, I have the honor of being
labeled a suppressive person and this is according to RUNNERB.
But my intention is to kill all life, So feel
lucky if you get out of rum. And that kind
(09:06):
of morphed into So how did this work? How is
it that I know eight medical doctors in the UK,
three dentists, one NASA physicist who are all absolutely crazy
about scientology. How did this get into their heads? We
all know that people who joined cults are weak, vulnerable, unintelligent, stupid.
(09:28):
It's pretty obvious really looking at me up here. So
I'm sort of going, how does that work? And so
then it was a matter of understanding the psychology. What
is being I think erroneously called coercive control because the
word coercion means force, intimidational threat. None of those three
things is necessary to exploit somebody and get them to
(09:50):
do your bidding, to go against their own better interests.
And a part of that is by giving them a
different identity, getting them to identify with something outside of themselves.
And that can be a good thing. Identify with a
charity and do good work. But you can also identify
with your nation, which, when we come to think about,
(10:12):
is imaginary. It's not actually a real thing where sixty
five million people in Britain all get together and do
something other than they let Boris Johnson, but all mine
of states. It's something we imagine. When I talk to
Americans who tell me they're patriotic, I often find that
they're only actually patriotic to walk towards their fellow Republicans
(10:36):
or Trump supporters. You know, they'd be quite happy to
pitch the Democrats into the sea. And I fear that
the same is true the Democrats. I know. You know,
it's an equal opportunities situation. So I studied the psychology,
the social psychology of what I will call exploitative persuasion.
(10:57):
People call it mind control, brainwashing, sought reform. There are
all sorts of terms for it, and some of them
are really too melodramatic for me to want to use
it's there are lots of words. Here is the word hypnosis.
Then everybody knows what it is, and yet it's very
rare to meet somebody who actually knows what it is.
(11:19):
There are people who can do it and they don't
necessarily know what it is. So if I'm going to
talk about that process, I'll talk about guided imagination, which is,
according to the Opposite Handbook of Hypnosis, a complete definition
of hypnosis. If you can catch somebody's imagination and guide it,
then you can direct their behavior to a certain extent.
(11:42):
I've got way beyond what you asked me, not for
the first time.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
So as we are here at Crime con UK and
we're talking about what has been described as a criminal organization,
what has been organization, what has been described as a
what is self labeled as a church and a religion,
and which also the state recognizes as a church at
(12:09):
a religion.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
When we talk.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
About some of the criminality that comes with scientology, some
of you may recognize the term fair game or gang
stalking and harassment and some of the things that come
with or consequences of leaving.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
A cult or a high control group.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
And Scientology is notorious for using these tactics. You have
been subjected to some of these tactics a little bit.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
Yeah. I've been followed by private detectives wherever I've traveled
in the world. In the US, that was a bit
scary because they have guns. My house was broken into
twice with nothing taken for two years. There was a
guy across the street from me, and he'd hired a
(13:02):
room so he could set a camera up to record
all the comings and goings at my house. I found
this out when in nineteen ninety three, the head of
Scientology's investigation department defected. She came to see me in
a last attempt after eighteen months of trying to get
at me with all sorts of stupid pranks, and you know,
(13:25):
put you to the police at the drop of a hat.
And you had the fire brigade call up and said
you had it complained about your house. Would you like
us to come around and make sure it's safe. Just
everything and anything people with placards outside my house. So
she came to me, and basically what had happened was
that a young woman had decided she wanted to leave,
(13:47):
and she gone to the Christian bookshop in East Grinstead,
where I lived at the time, and said, jaunted. And
so they called me and I went along as John aysack.
So that wasn't very helpful, and I said, we need
to call the police and get your stuff from the
house where you're lodging. Scientologist's house. We need that, I said,
we will need that. I called the police. Police were
(14:09):
well aware of these situations. They came along. I went
to a neighbour's house. This is ninety three, this is
before cell phones. I went to one of her neighbour's
houses to use the phone. When I looked up, the
police car had gone. She told them it's fine, you
can leave, and another car had pulled up with four
people in it. Two guys got out and stood on
the lawn outside the house, one with a tape recorder microphone,
(14:32):
shaking out in front of me, in front of him
because I am extraordinarily dangerous, as you can see. And
I said to him, as I would say to any
of them, Look, if you change your mind, if you
have any problems, just give me a call. And the
next day one of the women he had gone into
the house, called me up and said, you said you
talk to my husband if he needed, will you talk
(14:54):
to me? So yeah, sure. She came around for three hours,
and she claimed that she was very, very low level
scientologist and she needed to leave and all of this,
and we talked for three hours and the next day
and she came back. Somebody who had recently left I
had brought along who said, you're a head of investigation,
and she said, yes, sir. And she then talked about
(15:15):
the terrible lives of her children in scientology, how one
of them had lost all of his teeth as an
infant because she'd followed run Hubbard's instruction to use barley formula,
which is basically, instead of milk of any kind, you
give the baby barley syrup. You know, a corn syrup,
so a sweet and corn syrup. And this child had
(15:36):
lost all of his milk teeth. There were many other
things that she told me, but one of them was
that there were five agents. She had one in training,
and she had four in my life, including the guy
who was driving me around, including two women by coincidence,
their husbands had MS and they'd been pushed out of
scientology because scientology is utterly opposed to anybody who's ill
(16:02):
or disabled sadly, well like a good thing actually, for
real or disabled, that is a good thing, definitely. And
these women both came to me and said, well, we've
been chucked out. And I spent a year with each
of them doing everything I could, you know, to make
sure the housing was all right too. And then one
of them saw an affidavit against me saying that my
(16:25):
only intention standing up against Scientology was because I wanted
them to give me two million pounds. That's the first
time i'd heard that. It would have been nice two
million pounds. And the other one she had a crisis
of conscience because one of her friends left Scientology and said, oh,
I know John Mats, he's all right actually, and she went, oh,
(16:46):
for a year, I've been calling him up with questions
and I've been recording the answers to give to the
Office of Special Affairs as it's called in Scientology. So
possibly the worst thing was that they put together a
booklet about me that was distributed to all of the
(17:08):
houses in East Grinstead, and with that and they set
up a rumor campaign accused me of being a rapist,
of attempted murder, of child molesting, of heroin addiction, and
as yet I don't think go as far as I know,
I've never been in the same rum as any heroine.
But there you go. It's very addictive, you know, and
(17:30):
of being a drug dealer, and you know, so this
this is called fair game. Once you were no longer
a scientologist, you can be decared fair game, which means
any scientologists can do anything they want to you with
any punishment of any type. It's also considered criminal in
scientology to report a fellow scientologists to the police, which
(17:53):
I hadn't fully understood as a member. And so it
meant that if somebody came round and burned my house
down and old time toolos you they'd done it, then
they wouldn't be reported to the police, they'd actually be
pattered on the back. So yeah, that's that's the kind
of and that was there was ten core cases that
were sued in New York cases here. Ultimately I was
(18:15):
bankrupted because it couldn't pay the lawyers, had no other
debts and they lost my house and all of this
kind of thing all very traumatic.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
So fair gaming goes both ways. But of course, a
billion dollar organization that has the power and the influence
and the lawyers and the colluding of certain police departments
probably all over the world, means that it really isn't
the option to fair game in return as a as
(18:49):
an individual without those resources.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
Yeah, about forty thousand of them with two billion dollars
and one of me with one pound fifty. It was
a slightly unfair contest. And yeah, as you say that,
it just comes down on you. The idea is to
silence you. And you know, I had meetings along the
(19:12):
way where I was One of the offers that was
made to me was that they would buy paintings from
me for the rest of my life if I'd just
been a little And I do have a tape recording
of that, and I was a little rude, I'm afraid
to say.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
With the various books that you have published contributed to,
there is a more recent one which I've just finished reading.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
It's called Opening Our Minds.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
It's an I would say, it's an introduction to coercive
control or exploited to persuasion, and it is a great
way to understand the different systems that exis in typical
society that we might not be aware of. That also
(20:04):
can be applied to things like scientology. Could you please
give a little bit more information about Opening Our Minds,
which is available at the bookstore.
Speaker 3 (20:13):
For a sign bookstore. Then then it's going like hotcakes.
I didn't, in fact leave go and buy it now, No,
hang on, yes. I In twenty fifteen, I helped to
start the Open Minds Foundation, which is a US tax
exempt charity, and I worked with them for four years.
(20:36):
During that time, the idea was to you know, I'd
come to this point where I realized that all of
these things that I was studying, you know, I studied sales, advertising, terrorism, gangs,
human trafficking, pedophile agreement. Wherever I looked, I was seeing
the same behaviors. So the way of recruiting somebody, the
(21:00):
Al Qaeda recruiting manual reads virtually the same as the
Moon is recruiting manual. And so the thought was, Okay,
this is happening throughout our society. And I came down
to a very simple idea, which is, you know, first
we talk about totalitarian or totalist cults, cults that completely
(21:21):
control your life. That's sort of going, well, does it
matter if they completely control life? The idea that they're
controlling your life at all seems to me a bad thing,
and so I shifted to the word authoritarian, meaning somebody
who believes that they are God's gift or even God
(21:43):
him or herself on earth, and they should be followed,
they should be listened to. Their will is true. Whatever
they say is not an alternative fact, but a real fact,
even when disproved. These are authoritarians, and the extreme examples
(22:03):
Musolini hit the Stalin Mazadon are extreme examples. I believe
that we live in an authoritarian society, that our school
system is authoritarian. It is more mildly authoritarian than it
was when I went to school and could be flogged
for saying something wrong, which did happen a couple of times,
(22:26):
a lot less often than it should have done, I imagine,
But I wasn't court always, you know. But I think
that there's a shift because at the other end of
the authoritarian spectrum is the person who says, well, I
don't know, you know, Tony Blair says it's right, so
it must be right, or you know, some authority says it.
(22:50):
And whenever we accept something that we do not understand,
whenever we accept somebody else's opinion as truth, we come
into this strange place where we no longer have control
over ourselves. We've given it up if we've ever actually
acquired it. He was asked to documentary maker. He just
(23:11):
had this long series of questions that he asked in
and he said, do you see we have free will?
And I'd not really thought about it in those terms,
and I said, no, I don't believe we do have
free will, but I think we can get it. And
that's still my opinion that we have to be careful.
We have to understand how these things are done if
(23:34):
we are not to be vulnerable to them. We also
have to understand that we are vulnerable. That people who
are absolutely sure that they never be stupid enough are
the easiest picking they really are. I had a friend
who was saying, I'd never be stupid enough to join
(23:54):
a cult. I said, and yet you smoke twenty cigarettes
a day.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
So this is all in opening our mind all of
it except the story about the cigarettes.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
That's not in there. That's personal and you're the only
people who've heard it.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
The really interesting thing for me about Opening Our Minds
is that when I first started the podcast, if any
of you have listened to or know that I just
had absolutely nothing in my mind about what is a cult.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Maybe I still don't.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
I don't know, And through my own education, I've come
to realize that as John has said, that the systems
and models that we can recognize in other parts of
our society, in other parts of our lives that we
don't think that we are influenced by, they do exist
and they are there. But when you think about cults,
(25:09):
or you think about coercive control, or you think about authoritarianism,
these are scary words that are pejorative, that may seem
like too academic, or how do I begin to educate
myself and learn about these things? And opening our minds
is almost like it's like a beginner's a beginner's book
into the subject. It's friendly, it's easy to read, it's informative,
(25:33):
it gives it gives timelines and historical context to things
like commercialization as we know it today, where did it
come from?
Speaker 2 (25:41):
But it's not it's not too much.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
So I feel like if anybody has an interest in
learning more about this subject without having to watch really
difficult material in documentaries, in films, exploitative pieces of media
that really take advantage of individuals and their vulnerabilities and
their stories. Opening our minds is a good place to start.
(26:05):
And I feel like that was a great sales pitch.
Speaker 3 (26:07):
That was very good, indeed, and I will be giving
you a percentage, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
So it is down in the bookstore, and we will
be doing some well, John will be doing some signings
and I will come down with some cult vot bookmarks,
just so I can you know, profit off of John's work.
But I just wanted to ask if anybody in the
audience had any questions before we before we round up today.
Speaker 3 (26:31):
Yes, she's quadering. I've heard about sons of lebroncies, the
pros in the climate of the littologyology perous is any true?
Speaker 1 (26:41):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (26:41):
There were a great great many celebrities involved. Tom Cruise,
John Travolta, Kirsty Ally was Chick Corea, and of course
there are other groups. The Phoenix Brothers, River and Maquim
grew up and the Children of God, the Williams Sisters,
the great tennis players drew up in the Jova's Witnesses,
(27:04):
as did the Jacqson Five. Tina Turner, the now late
Great Tina Turner, was a member of a group called
Nicheren Shosu Japanese.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Group, Orlando Bloom two, Orlando Bloom as well.
Speaker 3 (27:18):
So and for me is a kind of perverse thought.
People are going, well, these people are successful, therefore I'll
try and do what it is they're doing. But often
as not, they were successful and were then recruited, and
there was Scientology actually produces only ever produced one person
who was meant to have supernatural powers, a man called
(27:39):
Ingo Swan who did remote viewing and came up with
Uri Gala or Uri Geller as some people called him.
I think is much better. Who's a con man who
works for Mossad according to his own more recent admissions.
But this guy, Ingo Swan said he could do this
remote viewing. I mean, Darren Brown does it better. But
(28:01):
and when challenged, and we did get into a little
bit of a firefight on the internet in nineties, said
that actually he had all of these abilities before he
got to scientology. So even then, you know, I don't
think he did have any abilities. I think he was
full of.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Is that answering the question anybody anybody else? Yes?
Speaker 2 (28:26):
When you decided to initially meet there were they trying
to initially compeat to YouTube return and at what weight
did that?
Speaker 4 (28:34):
Then the Cartons just time to read for Harasma and
trying to There.
Speaker 3 (28:41):
Were a flood of departures. Probably when I left in
nineteen eighty three, there were perhaps thirty thousand members around
the world. I mean, they claim millions, but it's not true.
I've seen the internal figures, and about half of us left,
(29:01):
and half of that half just walked and didn't want
anything more to do with it. But the rest of
us created this independent movement which persists and is now
you I would say that the Mother Cult is probably
down to about twenty thousand members now. They're really reduced,
but they got people like Nancy Cartwright, the voice of
(29:22):
Bart Simpson, who recently said that she's given them twenty
one million dollars, so they've got plenty of money to
harass me, which is you know, and they are a
religion after all, so they should be allowed to burn
witches and stone people to death, you know, come on,
so right, So yeah, they What happened was that those
(29:45):
few of us and around the world there were less
than ten who stood up and said this is dishonest
and it's dishonorable. We were attacked and were right from
day one, and it was a shameful thing, especially as
we were coming away, because we thought it was a
good thing and wanted to help people. But this kind
(30:07):
of what I didn't know at that time. I thought
Hubbard was gone. I left because I though Hubbard was gone,
and in fact he was very much still there and
suffering from dementia, which you know, so the last three
years of his life, things got crazy and crazier in
the group, and they just became I mean, their current leader,
David miss Gabbage at that time said that he was
going to be tough and ruthless, and tough I can
(30:31):
understand ruthless, having no mercy. And they're a religion kind
of well like kind of the Aztec religion, you know,
where they rip people's hearts out, or the Thuggies where
you strangle people, different flavors of religion.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
Ryan, yes, yes.
Speaker 5 (30:48):
You mentioned how after you they are and Starry speaking
up that there's all these parse accusations of you beat
a rapist, a head ofphile, even a heroin at it.
I'm curious in wondering why is there so much passion
going after you? Yet, you know, with the celebrities and
recently there is that one ful month the smily.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
Show Danny Masterson, how he has been in charged.
Speaker 5 (31:14):
With three but yet there's been a protection and keeping
him safe. Now, I'm just trying to understand the reasoning
that they have so much zeal and goosel to go
after you, but yet they keep.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
That guy safe.
Speaker 3 (31:29):
Yeah, Danny Masterson has been found guilty on two counts
and faces thirty years in prison. It will be sentenced
I think in August. There is Meanwhile, the judge, Judge
or Maida, gave a ruling saying that his attorneys have
been passing material to Scientology's attorneys, which is an offense,
of course, because this is it's a criminal case. And
(31:53):
what came up in the first trial was declared mistrial.
But the second trial the judge decided to admit evidence
about Scientology's attempts to quiet the witnesses. So these offenses
go back to I think two thousand and two, the
first one, and these women and there were four of
(32:15):
them in all who complained and there may have been others,
were told by Scientology, Nope, you mustn't go to the police,
you mustn't do this. So there's now a civil case
swallowing that. I think there's something about the protection of reputation.
Part of it is that Danny Masterson is rich and celebrated,
(32:37):
and so rather than making taking the sensible course of
action because they knew he was guilty, had they've had
these reports for twenty years, they didn't protect these women.
And the rapes were horrific, you know, there were drug
rapes among them, and very forceful, damaging assaults on these women.
Yet scientology protected them. And it's that sense of well,
(33:02):
we're protecting our own, we're protecting the people who give
us money. Anybody that complains, you know, even people are
making perfectly simple rational criticisms will be attacked. For me,
I did this from nineteen eighty three to the beginning
(33:23):
of nineteen ninety six, and by that time I just
couldn't take anymore. That the year that I lost my
court cases, there was a review of the British, sorry,
the English and Welsh system, whereby the Lord Justice said,
it is the case in English justice. He didn't include
the wealth, it is the case in English justice that
(33:45):
he with the deepest pockets wins. And finding myself in
that situation, what's the point, you know? I don't have
any funding. I've had to earn money to do this
and live on charity. Why am I doing this with
my life? Also, my health had collapsed in my marriage
had collapsed, I lost my five bedroom house, and so
(34:09):
I walked away from it. And when I came back
in twenty thirteen, it was because I've been talking to
some people and I realized that in this one case,
this woman had left scientology sixteen years before, and she
was still thinking as a scientologist. She didn't think of
herself as a scientologist, she didn't use the words they use,
(34:31):
but all of her beliefs were still caught within this
and in fact she asked me a question. Australian journalists
begged me to talk with her, and I kind of went, OK,
I really don't do this anymore. Steve and he was
just a really nice guy, which among journalists isn't necessarily
the case in my experience, but he was a really
(34:54):
salt and so I told her. I took with her
and she said to me, John, is reality really in agreement?
Which is one of Hubbard's bizarre notions. You know, we
all agree it's there, so it's there. And I said, yes,
if you're the hypnotist. But otherwise, no, we are all
(35:16):
able to determine our own sense of what the world
is and what's happening. And it won't make that much
difference thinking it. Otherwise, the wall and the ceiling will
still be there. The next week, when I talk with her,
she said, I've used centered laundry conditioner. Now nobody in
this room knows what that means, but I knew what
(35:37):
it meant. She'd been in the Sea Organization, the Central
Group of Scientology, and she'd done what is called the
hygiene hat, the training and hygiene where you are told
you may not use any centered products, no centered soap,
no shampoo, no anything. Because Hubbard was cent phobic, so
rajniche as well. Oddly enough, had people sniffing at the
door where you could go in see and no perfume
(35:59):
and stuff that. So she, seventeen years or whatever after
leaving Scientology, had been able to break a rule, and
I went, there must be hundreds of thousands of people
in the world who caught in this. I told it
with a guy who was twenty years housebound because Hubbard
had declared him a suppressive person, and he thought he
(36:20):
didn't want to hurt people, so he stayed home. It
took one afternoon to sort that out because nobody had
given him the information he needed about Hubbard. And he
week later wrote to me said, I've got a job,
you know, twenty years house bound. So I came back
and I thought, you know, I started writing for Tony
(36:41):
or Taker's Underground Bunker, which is an incredible source on scientology,
brilliant journalist, former editor of the Village Voice, and I
wrote about how to unpick the thought reform process, you
know that is, And you know I found that when
I went to the States and worked with was then
(37:02):
the Cult Awareness Network, before Scientology took them over. That
people would say, look, we deal with two thousand different groups.
We deal with Hindu, Muslim, seek Christian, Jewish, Pagan, all
sorts of grips. But scientology is it's a different thing.
It's so much more invasive. So you know, where transcendental
(37:27):
meditation has two procedures, neither of them very good for you,
I would say, in the long run, two procedures, scientology
has two thousand. And Hubbard picked up every last trick
from Little Hypnotic Books, so you have his library. Dan
(37:49):
in East Grinstead sat help. He used to have his
books in it, and a friend of mine who was
a professor of theology, started writing down what the titles were,
and he couldn't didn't finish, and he went back a
few weeks later and they cleared the shelves because the
books were pulp fiction, science fiction, cheap books about hypnosis
and books about magic and Alistair Crowley, and they were
(38:12):
still on display. You know how he was, how he
did his stuff.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
Oh, any sort to make sure I'm not missing anybody?
Speaker 3 (38:22):
Yes, yes, Well do you think it isn't a bit
the actually innate people and cheap.
Speaker 4 (38:30):
On the wind.
Speaker 3 (38:33):
It's a very good question. It's usually some change of circumstance.
I mean, in my case, it was, you know, the
girl I'd been living with for fifteen months decided she
was going to run off with my friends to New Zealand.
And that was a little bit alarming for me because
I'm very eutistical and people shouldn't do that to me.
(38:55):
But it can be just you know, moving town, getting
a new job. First year of university is the most
susceptible period because you've got all of that infatuation that
comes with being a teenager. You know, you've got all
of these new emotions to attach to things, so you
are very vulnerable when somebody comes up and goes, hey,
you're really good looking, you should get into my cult.
(39:20):
The other time of great vulnerability is after people retire,
So the Laruchees, the followers of London LaRouche right when
political cult, they will look through the obituary columns and
they'll call on people who are widowed to get them
into the movement and pass over some money. So it's
(39:42):
really at moments of transition and change that were most vulnerable,
and perhaps more so when we're distressed and the system
or our family or our friends are failing us, you
know that they're not able to deal with with how
we feel. And I'm frankly when I was ninety and
I'm not surprised that nobody could deal with it. But
(40:02):
I did talk to a doctor, I did talk to
a psychiatrist. I knew I was not a patient. And
I talked to an Anglican priest. I said, what's this
scientology thing? And all three of them don't know which,
considering there'd been a major government report three years before
that was all over from pages is incredible. I feel
(40:23):
particularly you know, I was not a practicing Christian, but
as an Anglican minister, didn't say I'll get back to you.
I'll find out. So not having the recognition of what
these groups are and feeling that you know your normal
support systems aren't working, that makes you particularly vulnerable.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
Thank you, Kirsty.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
We've got a couple of minutes left, so I'm going
to do this question and then this question, and then
we'll all head down to the bookshop. Okay, oh, Eljie,
did you have one as well?
Speaker 2 (40:54):
Okay, yes, they're all.
Speaker 3 (40:58):
Heading down to the bookshop now, climbing to finnacility a
big about in some theory to do like button bout.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
I just wondered how much did he give? Not the
sync And I'm not serious, I think you might.
Speaker 3 (41:16):
Well, what good are we thinking about?
Speaker 2 (41:18):
David miss Gavage, the leader of Tom Cruise.
Speaker 3 (41:20):
Tom Cruise, Oh sorry, Tom Cruise is Yeah, he's kind
of embedded let a remedy. In her book, Troublemaker talks
about going and having going into his kitchen and seeing
him going to an eight year old screaming fit with
his assistant because the cookie dough wasn't ready for him
to put the cutter on. So I think Tom Cruise
(41:41):
is a person with difficulties. We know he has dyslexia,
and it suggested that he couldn't read and write when
he was recruited. But it even if we looked at
the leader, David miss Gavage, he was thirteen pretty much
when his parents dumped him in it. He was seventeen
minus started working with Hubbard. He seems to be a
(42:02):
hugely malevolent human being, and go on sue me, which
they will. He won't come into court. He won't come
into court. He's avoided any court appearance for years because
people might ask him questions under oath. But I think
that Miss Gabbage is a victim of it. I think
Hubbard himself was a victim of it. He was a
(42:25):
very sick human being. He very likely had temporal lobe epilepsy,
judging by his behavior. He was certainly manic and depressive,
paranoid and always ill, you know, which is one of
the amazing things, because he said, well, illness, that's just
you thinking the wrong thoughts, isn't it. And yet he
was nigh unto death at least once a year from
(42:48):
things that had happened to him.
Speaker 2 (42:50):
Yes, I goes to the lists where do.
Speaker 5 (42:53):
You need shall.
Speaker 3 (42:57):
Possibly in Happy Valley, which is where they keep I
can find people, it says David, miss Gavage's wife, who's
been how long she's been missing for now it's about
ten years. Yeah, and she just was gone no contact Elgin.
Speaker 4 (43:17):
I have one kind one quish as Casey mentioned, I
was sort of guest last year. I'd walk in cole
eats on. I don't think the other type of conversation.
But as a result of that, I've spoken with a
lot of people, particularly so we first generation was like
joy and sometimes leave what Virtually all of them, I
would say, have the exact same experience that you mentioned
(43:38):
of a sort of reach step like Okay, we're gonna
do We're gonna try and fix with the cold cop
wrong and then it's not them to get stuck in
that stab what some of them may get and they
did out in it. Wee I've started seeing like ablest
of the body sees pretty conning you seeing how that's
against that. I think it's coming to people that tried
out make sets of unknown their lives. That for us comment,
(44:01):
that's a good question yes, I know that in the
US border there is the people case clear due to
rock and sea.
Speaker 3 (44:14):
Yes, that is.
Speaker 4 (44:16):
Do you have any sense of whether I bet can
be possibles?
Speaker 2 (44:19):
Well, good question, great question.
Speaker 4 (44:21):
Yeah, I just will be at that point.
Speaker 3 (44:26):
It should be. The difficulty is that we're getting into
the tort of undue influence, which is usually about wills.
It's usually somebody dying and leaving their money to yeah,
the housekeeper who looked after from the last week of
their life or something. But theoretically that could be applied.
There is a situation with their cruise ship, the Free
(44:49):
Wins that because there are British citizens on board, they
actually need to have special papers to be there. You
can't be crew on a ship and they don't have them,
and that may open a door. The terrible thing is
that we're dealing we're often dealing with human trafficking, and
I'm sure you did. Two of the moon is that
(45:11):
people will be moved to another country so that they
can't be you know, rescued, but also they're moved without
their they will. I've talked with Mike Rinda, the probably
the most celebrated ex scientologist at the moment, who wrote
a wonderful book called A Billion Years, and he said
(45:34):
he was six when his parents got in. He was
eighteen when he arrived on Hubbard's ship in nineteen seventy three,
and he was there to do a management training course
to go back to Sydney and run the organization. And
when he said this, they said, no, we've got your passport.
You work here now. Your organization has swapped you for
some courses, and so yeah, that commonplace. I think it
(45:59):
will take you a civil rights law firm like say
Lee Day. I worked with them many years ago who
had the Japanese prison war case and other things. So
it'll take people very determined. The problem is our legal
aid system having collapsed utterly under the current administration. You
can't get the money to pay the lawyers anymore. And
(46:21):
I think that's that. You know, that's a terrible thing.
There should be some legal fund where you know, there's
a class action, there are a number of victims, but
we don't have that.
Speaker 1 (46:31):
Well, thank you all so much for joining us today.
This is John Atack.
Speaker 2 (46:38):
My name is Casey from the Cult Bolt podcast.
Speaker 1 (46:41):
I also just wanted to give a really really quick
shout out to say that John has a YouTube channel
John Atach Family and Friends. You can go and check
out all sorts of amazing interviews with really interesting guests
like me. And then you have Elgin Street's podcast, The
Falling Out Podcast, and then also Ryan Anthony Hernandez. He
has a podcast called The Truth that Heals Podcasts, and
(47:02):
I suggest that you all go and check out everybody's
amazing work. Thank you all so much for joining us
today and we will talk to you at the bar,
at the book signing, anywhere you can find us.
Speaker 2 (47:13):
Thank you so much, thank you, thank you, thank
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Gregg Rosenthal and a rotating crew of elite NFL Media co-hosts, including Patrick Claybon, Colleen Wolfe, Steve Wyche, Nick Shook and Jourdan Rodrigue of The Athletic get you caught up daily on all the NFL news and analysis you need to be smarter and funnier than your friends.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com