Be Glad You
Lost, Julie
By Dan Garvin more
9 November 2003
Source:
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.religion.scientology/msg/71f514f4e97f2423
In the summer of
1985, I had been in OSA Int for less than a year. I was in
charge of external computerization for OSA, which meant I got to
go all over the place setting up and taking care of anything
that had a CPU and wasn't inside OSA Int. Up in Portland,
Oregon, the "Christo Trial" was getting going. There was already
a Trial Unit of OSA Int, OSA US, local DSA and other staff and
some volunteers. Some attorneys were also in Portland
—
Earle
Cooley was the main one I dealt with.
Miscavige was there, as
were Marty Rathbun,
Mike Sutter, Lynn Farny,
Ken Long,
Karen
Hollander, and many other names you'd recognize. Many famous
SPs
were there too. Somebody got a nice picture once of Gerry
Armstrong flipping the bird at the camera as he was leaving the
courtroom.
The Christo Trial was a damages suit by
Julie Christofferson
against the Church in Portland for, IIRC, fraud and emotional
distress and a number of related torts. By that time she was
Julie Titchbourne, but we still called the case Christo in
OSA.
After a while, I was called up from LA. There were two or three
condominiums in the same building in downtown Portland, near the
courthouse. One was Earle Cooley's; one was the work and
research area for the OSA Int execs and senior Legal personnel;
I think there was a third one for the ASI/RTC personnel (at that
time, Miscavige was still calling himself ED ASI, although he
was just as much the boss of everything as he is now, at least
as far as OSA was concerned). These condos were fairly
luxurious. The lesser beings worked in the Trial Unit at the
Celebrity Centre. I got to work in the OSA Int Condo, although I
slept in a hotel some distance away.
The reason I was brought up is that they wanted transcripts
of the proceedings loaded into computers on a daily basis so
they could be searched by Cooley, Farny, Long, et al. At first,
so I was told by one of the attorneys (probably Tim Bowles), we
were not even supposed to have been given the transcripts. Only
the attorneys were allowed to have them, for some reason. So our
attorneys of course violated this order and gave the transcripts
to me and to other personnel. But I got pretty crappy copies. I
had miniature duplicates of the
INCOMM computers set up in the
condo. They were made by a company called WICAT, and they had a
Unix-like proprietary operating system. We had one or two OCR –
optical character recognition – machines set up. In those days,
OCRing was pretty primitive (or prohibitively expensive), and
these could only handle certain fonts, which had to be in very
good condition. So the crappy and illicit copies we were getting
had to be mostly typed in by hand, and for that there were about
a half dozen personnel who had been doing that type of thing in
LA.
Later they got permission to let us have copies of the
transcripts, and the quality improved vastly. The other typists
were sent home and I was pretty much running the whole computer
show. I could OCR and correct everything by myself. We had huge
rack-mount tape drives with twelve- or fourteen-inch reels, each
holding 10 MB of data. I used these for backups and to transfer
the data up to the computer in Earle Cooley's condo. The
information was loaded into a database that INCOMM called FAST,
which was like SIR, or Source Information Retrieval, which is
all the LRH issues (of all kinds, and advices too for those
authorized) in a searchable database. FAST was the same system
exactly, but for non-LRH material. OSA was inputting all the
documents in all legal cases, and later added just about
everything else as well. When a case was going on, everybody
would rush to get it into FAST as soon as possible so the legal
vultures could pick it over for anything they could use to win
points the next day in court.
The Christofferson case is a fascinating story, but one I don't know
very well. What's relevant to this post is, we lost. The jury
awarded Julie Titchbourne something like $30 million. Nothing
like this had ever happened before (so I was told and believed).
The loss would set a precedent and all the other "frivolous"
deep-pocket lawsuits against Scientology churches would fall
like dominoes in favor of the enemy. We were crushed. I had not
been in the courtroom once the whole time I was there, but I
came down to hear the decision – and share in the victory. When
I heard the award against us, I literally did not know what to
do. I thought it was the end of the world, or pretty close. It
was impossible and unthinkable. Our religion could be shut down
by ambulance-chasing attorneys and professional victims. I
wandered out of the courtroom in a daze. I went down to a park
in town and just walked around. Everything seemed surreal. But I
realized we would not just cave in. We would appeal. We would
fight with every ounce of our strength, and when that was gone,
we would still fight on. I started to feel a little better. All
the same, it was unbelievable. After all, RTC and ASI were
running things directly, and if anybody would make sure LRH
legal tech was standardly applied, they would
— and still we
lost. Man, there must be some heavy-duty corruption going on
behind the scenes, to create such a miscarriage of justice!
Well, we'd find that, too, and somehow we'd win. We had to. The
survival of the world depended on it.
So I got tired of moping and headed back to the condo. The
execs and OSA guys were there; I don't remember which ones but
probably most of the ones who normally worked or attended
conferences there. Nobody was saying much; it looked like
everybody else hadn't finished moping yet. So I took a hint and
resumed moping. Every once in a while somebody would wonder what
the hell we were going to do, or what went wrong, and speculate
about how bad it was going to be. After a while, the
CO OSA
Int,
Mike Sutter,
spoke up. He said (paraphrasing), "I don't care if she thinks she won. That bitch is never going to see one single
cent. I'll kill her first. I don't care if I get the chair —
it's worth it. It's just one lifetime."
I froze. I wasn't moving much to begin with, but I froze
solid. I didn't want to breathe. I forgot all about our
immediate problems. My CO had just said he was going to murder
Julie Titchbourne. He was absolutely serious. I was in shock.
Sure, she deserved to die — all SPs
did. But you can't actually do that that sort of thing.
My thoughts raced. Please, I thought, please, somebody say
something that will make this stop. I was trying to think what I
could say. If I said the wrong thing, or said it the wrong way,
I'd be out of there that night and getting sec checked the next
day. But this was madness!
There was not a sound in the room. It seemed like ten minutes
but was probably only one. Finally Miscavige spoke up. Here's
what he didn't say: He didn't say, "Sutter, you're fucking
crazy, we don't kill people!" He didn't say, "You're joking,
right?" He didn't explain that Julie's estate would still get
the money or that killing a plaintiff would be a hundred times
worse for the Church than paying her even the whole $30 million.
He just said, "No, this is what we're going to do." And then
launched what within a day or two became the Portland Crusade.
The Crusade, along with a lot of flanking actions and,
according to Cooley, his own research in the database I'd put
together for him, worked, and the Judge, Londer, eventually
threw out the decision. Julie would have had to start from
scratch, with much tighter restrictions on what was admissible
as evidence. I guess they just gave up.
Julie deserved that money, or at least some compensation for
being screwed over by Scientology. I'm sorry for my part in
stopping her from getting paid. But, then again, if the Crusade
and everything had failed and she had won in the end, I wonder
if Sutter would ultimately have made good on his promise to
murder her. Even if the estate still collected Julie's money, it
sure would have made other plaintiffs think twice about their
own cases. It may be that Julie's loss is the only reason she is
alive today.
One thing I am absolutely certain of: When Mike Sutter said
he would kill her, he meant it, absolutely and literally. He
certainly was not reprimanded or corrected at the time by anyone
for suggesting this, and if any action was taken against him
later, it was nothing I ever heard about – nor did anybody ever
pull me aside and say, "You know we would never actually do
that, right?" or some such. In fact, a few months later he was
promoted to RTC. He was still in RTC as late as 1995 or so. I
don't know if he has been seen in the last few years. That could
mean a number of things. He could just have a post that never
requires him to leave the Gold Base, or he could have gone to
the RPF, or he could have been transferred somewhere else on
some secret post or mission. Or, for all I know, he could have
gone off to do the Hit Man Full Hat and Apprenticeship.
Hubbard's
Code of Honor says, near as I can recall, "Your
honor and integrity are more important than your physical body."
Also, the third and fourth dynamics (the group Scientology, and
all mankind) are more important than anyone's first dynamic
(self — an SP's life or the life of whatever hero murdered the
SP). To the average Scientologist and perhaps the average SO
member, this interpretation of those ideals may sound extreme,
even beyond extreme. As one nears the top of the ladder, though,
I think they're pretty typical. What may not be typical is the
willingness to actually go through with it, mainly because the
repercussions on Scientology would be far worse than the
consequences of not committing the murder.
Lurkers, those of you still in the
COS — this is a glimpse at
a side of RTC that you don't hear about at the International
Events. Next time you're watching David Miscavige spewing his
glib, formulaic PR at you, try remembering that this is a man to
whom murdering a plaintiff was apparently just another option,
one that he ultimately rejected in favor of a better one, but
one he seemed to have no fundamental objections to.
Dan Garvin |