Prime Time Replay:
Attorney Ford Greene
on fighting cults in the courts
MsgId: *live_science(1)
Date: Thu May 15 19:58:16 EDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_with_Ford_Greene At: 152.163.205.9
Good evening and welcome to Live Science. Our special guest this evening, here in our Tiburon studio, is attorney, deprogrammer, and former cult member, Ford Greene. I'm your host, Omni Editor at Large Dr. Keith Harary. As always, we'll identify ourselves by our initials: KH for Keith Harary and FG for Ford Greene.
MsgId: *live_science(2)
Date: Thu May 15 20:01:13 EDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_with_Ford_Greene At: 152.163.205.9
KH: Welcome to Omni, Ford Greene. To start, this evening, I'd like to ask you about your personal background. How did you decide to become an attorney? Did this decision have anything to do with your interest in cults?
MsgId: *live_science(3)
Date: Thu May 15 20:04:29 EDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_with_Ford_Greene At: 152.163.205.9
FG: The reason I became an attorney was because I had a firsthand awareness based on my being indoctrinated by the Moonies that cults are institutionalized systems of evil. Therefore, I felt compelled as a human being to proactively do what I could to bring sunlight on such evil. I was particularly horrified by the fact that this evil was being perpetrated in the name of God and under cover of the Constitutional protections given to freedom of religion.
MsgId: *live_science(4)
Date: Thu May 15 20:05:49 EDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_with_Ford_Greene At: 152.163.205.9
FG: Therefore, I knew the issues involved were profound and sensitive and understood that in order to raise and address those issues the forum for either would be the legislature or the judiciary. At that point, either way, I knew I had to be a lawyer in order to play.
MsgId: *live_science(5)
Date: Thu May 15 20:06:44 EDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_with_Ford_Greene At: 152.163.205.9
KH: When you call cults "institutionalized systems of evil," there are certainly those who would take issue with such a position.
MsgId: *live_science(6)
Date: Thu May 15 20:08:17 EDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_with_Ford_Greene At: 152.163.205.9
FG: For more than 20 years, there has been a raging controversy that has taken place in the hearts and lives of both Americans and people of other countries fighting in the courts, lobbying in the legislature, and expending millions of dollars on advertising to make the following point:
MsgId: *live_science(7)
Date: Thu May 15 20:12:55 EDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_with_Ford_Greene At: 152.163.205.9
FG: That point has and still is: Cult leaders are heroes, not psychopaths; members are freely exercising religion as opposed to being suckered, dominated, brainwashed, and exploited by cult leaders. The other part is that the real evil in the circumstance were the deprogrammers. Cult propaganda made deprogramming mean kidnapping, assaulting, brutalizing, and coercing the cult member into quitting the cult. Cult apologists said that the reason deprogramees all said similar things about their cult experience was due to the fact that the deprogrammers were the "real brainwashers". Without knowledgeable expose' this strategy was hard to beat . . .
MsgId: *live_science(8)
Date: Thu May 15 20:14:29 EDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_with_Ford_Greene At: 152.163.205.9
FG: I am personally proud that based on my experience and good fortune I was able to beat that ideological point before the California Supreme Court in a case entitled Molko vs. The Moonies.
MsgId: *live_science(9)
Date: Thu May 15 20:17:08 EDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_with_Ford_Greene At: 152.163.205.9
KH: How did the points that you just listed have any play in the Molko litigation?
MsgId: *live_science(10)
Date: Thu May 15 20:25:07 EDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_with_Ford_Greene At: 152.163.205.9
FG: David Molko had been forceably kidnapped by his parents and successfully deprogrammed by understanding and reading Chapter 22 of Lifton's book: Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. In that factual paradigm, is the essence of the controversy. The only reason why the parents in this case had to kidnap their children (David was not the only one involved. The other plaintiff was Tracy Leal.) was because the depth of the indoctrination was such that the children believed their parents' love was the vehicle for Satan . . .
MsgId: *live_science(11)
Date: Thu May 15 20:25:29 EDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_with_Ford_Greene At: 152.163.205.9
FG: Therefore, any trust that David or Tracy had for their parents was satanically induced because of David and Tracy's own defects of character. That is the type of thinking that provides the first cause that resulted in the disasters in Jonestown, Waco, Antelope, with the Sarin on the Japanese subways, and with Heaven's Gate. The emotions going into the Molko case were immense.
MsgId: *live_science(12)
Date: Thu May 15 20:27:36 EDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_with_Ford_Greene At: 152.163.205.9
KH: I'd like to hear more about the case, but I feel compelled to state that when you appear to be in support of kidnapping cult members this is blatantly illegal. Many people who do not support cults also do not support such tactics. Don't you worry about becoming the very thing you are supposedly fighting against?
MsgId: *live_science(13)
Date: Thu May 15 20:29:23 EDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_with_Ford_Greene At: 152.163.205.9
FG: That is a critical point. The most important part of the point is your question whether by recapturing and deprogramming a person who has been deceptively recruited into a cult I am advocating what I condemn. The answer is no, and these are my reasons why . . .
MsgId: *live_science(14)
Date: Thu May 15 20:36:50 EDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_with_Ford_Greene At: 152.163.205.9
FG: First, freedom of thought is antecedent to the intelligent exercise of every other form of freedom. Kidnapping and deprogramming are justified in order to prevent mass suicide or mass murder. Certainly, as a general rule, kidnapping is a felony and a serious crime. However, when compared to mass death triggered by the command of a leader exercising death-level control, kidnapping is not so bad. This is what the law calls a defense of necessity or choice of the lesser of two evils. That defense is established when as a matter of social policy, the harm to be avoided can only be so avoided by breaking the letter of the literal language of the criminal law . . .
MsgId: *live_science(15)
Date: Thu May 15 20:37:12 EDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_with_Ford_Greene At: 152.163.205.9
FG: In addition, there cannot be available, any less onerous or restrictive ways of preventing the greater harm. I have successfully used this defense resulting in the acquittal of deprogrammers, Robert Whelan and Robert Brandyberry.
MsgId: *live_science(16)
Date: Thu May 15 20:39:51 EDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_with_Ford_Greene At: 152.163.205.9
FG: This theory of exposing brainwashing that I used in Brandyberry successfully, and that I used successfully in Molko was the same. As luck would have it, the very day the trial started in Brandyberry, the California Supreme Court handed down its decision in Molko, October 17th 1988.
MsgId: *live_science(17)
Date: Thu May 15 20:41:49 EDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_with_Ford_Greene At: 152.163.205.9
FG: My theory is this: In order to exercise an intelligent and informed and voluntary consent, an individual always needs at least two things. He needs the raw brainpower to acurately evaluate information. The other thing he needs is sufficient, accurate information to consider. When both are not present at the same time, the result is not a constitutionally effective consent.
MsgId: *live_science(18)
Date: Thu May 15 20:43:47 EDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_with_Ford_Greene At: 152.163.205.9
FG: Cult groups engage in deceptive recruitment practices. When the individual's capacity to think is high, the cult fails to disclose its true nature, intentions and plans for the individual. Cults mislead the individual by manipulating his need for trust, warmth, belonging, and security to be the agent of his own undoing.
MsgId: *live_science(19)
Date: Thu May 15 20:45:52 EDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_with_Ford_Greene At: 152.163.205.9
FG: When he can think, cults lie to him. He trusts the lie and places himself more deeply in the cult's midst. Once captured, although not realizing it, the individual becomes subject to the imposition of brainwashing techniques without either his knowledge or consent. The brainwashing tactics undermine his ability to reason and impair his capacity to consent.
MsgId: *live_science(20)
Date: Thu May 15 20:48:18 EDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_with_Ford_Greene At: 152.163.205.9
FG: After his capacity to think has been hammered, it does not matter how much he learns about the cult because he no longer can process that data. Therefore, whenever there is induction by deceit and consolidation of membership by the imposition of undue influence, there is no religious liberty. What there is is a fraud of the most massive proportions perpetrated in the name of God and annexing the First Amendment protections.
MsgId: *live_science(21)
Date: Thu May 15 20:49:10 EDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_with_Ford_Greene At: 152.163.205.9
KH: Did the California Supreme Court accept this theory? In other words, what specifically did Molko accomplish?
MsgId: *live_science(22)
Date: Thu May 15 20:52:31 EDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_with_Ford_Greene At: 152.163.205.9
FG: Yes. The Court held that there is no First Amendment immunity or protection from being accountable for the consequences of deceptive and coercive conduct. Since, when Molko was inducted into the Moonies, no direct physical force was used, Molko also held that as a matter of law the use or threat of physical force was not necessarily required for the successful imposition of a brainwashing scheme. It held that brainwashing can take place on the basis of trust, with a total absence of direct physical force. This is what cult groups and their apologists and attorneys have not been able to swallow.
MsgId: *live_science(23)
Date: Thu May 15 20:54:38 EDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_with_Ford_Greene At: 152.163.205.9
KH: And yet, Ford, there are still deprogrammers being prosecuted for using the kind of tactics you have described. What's more, it seems that cults are still enjoying wide protections under the First Amendment. Is there such a thing as a legal definition of a cult? Or are they still legally covered as religions -- which they would, indeed argue, is their actual nature?
MsgId: *live_science(24)
Date: Thu May 15 21:00:07 EDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_with_Ford_Greene At: 152.163.205.9
FG: There is not a legal definition of a cult, nor should there be. In this country, as citizens, we enjoy the right to believe whatever we choose no matter how outlandish such beliefs may appear to someone else. Were there to be a legal definition of a cult, my opinion is such a definition would unconstitutionally restrict that absolutely protected freedom of belief . . .
MsgId: *live_science(25)
Date: Thu May 15 21:00:28 EDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_with_Ford_Greene At: 152.163.205.9
FG: What I look to is not whether to label a group a cult, but to investigate their practices, to investigate their ideology, to investigate the methods of control exercised by the leader and the disparity in benefits between the leader and those who follow him. This I believe is the constitutional approach because otherwise you could believe in child sacrifice and then do it. Nobody would say that actual baby killing is a constitutionally protected activity. I say the right to believe in such baby killing is legitimate but carrying it out is not. Thus, religions in our country do not deserve the free ride they get not having to pay taxes and abuse us citizens and take their tax-exempt dollars to pay for high-priced lawyers to squelch our cries for justice.
MsgId: *live_science(26)
Date: Thu May 15 21:01:49 EDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_with_Ford_Greene At: 152.163.205.9
KH: Thank you Ford Greene for a controversial look at your views and experiences pertaining to the cult phenomenon. We're out of time, so we'll need to sign off shortly.
MsgId: *live_science(27)
Date: Thu May 15 21:03:40 EDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_with_Ford_Greene At: 152.163.205.9
FG: Thank you for the most unusual and in-depth interview I've had. Everything that I have said is based on my own firsthand experience. I've thought about it a lot and greatly appreciate the opportunity to disseminate what I consider to be very important views.
MsgId: *live_science(28)
Date: Thu May 15 21:07:43 EDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_with_Ford_Greene At: 152.163.205.9
KH: Thank you also to our hosts here at Omni and to our viewing audience. This is Omni Editor at Large, Keith Harary, wishing you all a good night for Live Science. Please join us again tomorrow night for a rare, in-depth discussion with Patricia Ryan, daughter of the late Congressman Leo J. Ryan, who was assassinated on the orders of Jim Jones when he investigated Jonestown. We invite you to also check out our ongoing series on cults here in the Live Science section. Good night for Live Science!
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