Images, News › Activism, Anonymous, celebrity, death, disconnection, Fair Game policy, Florida, Hollywood, L. Ron Hubbard, Lisa McPherson, Los Angeles, Magoo, Mark Bunker, Mark Ebner, protest, psychiatry, Tom Cruise, Tory Christman, TV, United States of America, Wise Beard Man
Published on Monday 17th March 2008
Nearly 300 demonstrators jammed the sidewalks out front on March 15, many of them young computer geeks in plastic Guy Fawkes masks honoring the 16th-century British subversive. Some hid behind party masks and bandanas. They hoisted signs: “Religion is free, Scientology is not,” “They want your money and your sanity,” and, in a reference to a string of mysterious tragedies involving members of Scientology, “How many more must die?”
The torrent of alleged harassment and threats was the underpinning of two church lawsuits filed Tuesday and Wednesday in Pinellas Circuit Court, each seeking to bar Anonymous members from coming within 500 feet of Scientology buildings in Clearwater during a planned protest this weekend.
Tuesday’s suit, a petition for an “injunction for protection against repeat violence,” was denied Wednesday afternoon by Circuit Judge Linda Allan, who ruled the relevant Florida statute does not apply to corporations.
Just hours before Allan ruled, the church filed a separate, nearly identical lawsuit seeking a temporary restraining order. The second suit seeks protection under a different Florida statute. No decision has been made on that suit.
John Sweeney looks back on his meeting with the late Shawn Lonsdale during the making of the famous BBC Panorama documentary “Scientology & Me”.
Luke Lirot, a First Amendment attorney in Clearwater who represented Lonsdale in 2006, said he was “deeply saddened” by the news of his death.
“He was a pretty energetic and driven individual,” Lirot said. “He was intelligent, and I thought he had a firm grasp on his constitutional rights. He was an outspoken critic of the Church of Scientology and had every right to do the things he did, I felt.
“I hope there is a very thorough investigation into the circumstances of his death.”
Shawn Lonsdale, whose one-man crusade against Scientology made him a public enemy of the church, was found dead at his home over the weekend in an apparent suicide. He was 39.
Police discovered Lonsdale’s body at 12:20 p.m. Saturday after neighbors reported a foul odor. They found a garden hose stretched from the exhaust pipe of Lonsdale’s car into a window of his home at 510 N Lincoln Ave., according to Clearwater police spokeswoman Elizabeth Daly-Watts.
Editorials › Andrew Morton, Beck, celebrity, Celebrity Centre, Chick Corea, David Miscavige, death, Europe, Giovanni Ribisi, Great Britain, Hollywood, Isaac Hayes, Jason Lee, Jenna Elfman, John Sweeney, John Travolta, Juliette Lewis, Katie Holmes, Kelly Preston, Kirstie Alley, Lisa Marie Presley, London, Nancy Cartwright, Nicole Kidman, Office of Special Affairs, Panorama, psychiatry, Sea Org, Suppressive Person, Tom Cruise, Victoria Beckham, Will Smith
Published on Thursday 14th February 2008
I was skimming through High Winds when I came across an article winningly headlined ‘Handling Suppression on the Fourth Dynamic’ (by then I had learnt that the ‘fourth dynamic’ meant the whole of mankind). In a tone of unforgiving militancy, it talked of ‘eradicating SPs’, and crowed about how they had ’shut down’ one particular defector who had criticised the movement. ‘Unemployed and abandoned by his family, this squirrel had schemed to make money by hawking his lies in a book. But the Office of Special Affairs had a court declare his book libellous. He has now been forced into bankruptcy…’
