Panic
Cult-hunting has its own body count. Forcible deprogramming was itself a kidnapping. The Satanic Panic of the 1980s convicted innocent people on evidence that did not survive scrutiny, and the FBI's own 1992 review found no corroboration for the claims driving it. Recovered-memory therapy collapsed in the same years brainwashing testimony was thrown out of court. This facet runs the full length of the archive, in parallel, because the search for hidden coercion has repeatedly produced the thing it was looking for.
Part of Cults
30 moments in this segment.
- - Bigamy Raid on a 1954 newspaper page. A black and white press photograph headed BIGAMY RAID, from the 12 August 1954 edition of the Nome Nugget. Prosecutions of plural marriage drew heavy coverage in the years after the 1953 state raid on Short Creek, an operation that turned public opinion against the authorities who ordered it.
- - Japanese parents organise against the Principle Movement. A 1967 newspaper image of the national parents' association formed in Japan to oppose the Unification Church's Principle Movement. Parents' groups of this kind were the seed of the organised opposition that followed.
- - Leader of the Dutch Unified Family at the centre. Verheyen, leader of the Dutch Unified Family, photographed at the group's centre in front of a framed portrait during a kidnapping case brought against the organisation in April 1975. Disputes between families and new movements drove the deprogramming conflicts of the decade.
- - Dutch television and the courts over a Scientology broadcast. A Dutch press photograph from 5 November 1980, made around a court ruling that allowed a VARA consumer programme to continue after a broadcast about the practices of the Church of Scientology. Litigation against broadcasters was a routine response to coverage.
- - Campaign poster against Scientology in Lower Saxony. A poster issued by the Junge Union in Lower Saxony reading 'Stoppt Scientology! Rettet unsere Demokratie!', illustrated with dripping blood. German party-political campaigning against the organisation was at its loudest in the 1990s.
- - Picket at the Supreme Court on the anniversary. A demonstrator outside the United States Supreme Court on 19 April 2000, seven years to the day after the fire at Mount Carmel. Dispute over the federal handling of the siege continued in the courts and in Congress long afterwards.
- - Anti-Scientology protest in Seattle. Demonstrators outside a Scientology building in Seattle on 10 February 2008, the first coordinated day of the online-organised campaign known as Project Chanology. Pickets took place in dozens of cities the same day.
- - Placard at a Minneapolis picket. A protester's sign at a February 2008 demonstration against the Church of Scientology in Minneapolis, directing readers to a long-running critics' website. It was one of scores of simultaneous pickets held that day.
- - Salvation Ahead, Pay At Counter. A hand-lettered sign at the same Minneapolis demonstration, aimed at the fees charged for courses and auditing. Cost was the critics' most persistent line of attack.
- - Placard about the Sea Organization at a London protest. A sign at a London protest in February 2008 repeating an allegation, made in a sworn affidavit by a former member, that women in Scientology's Sea Organization were pressured into ending pregnancies. The church has consistently denied it.
- - Protest outside the New York org. Demonstrators outside the Church of Scientology building in New York on 15 March 2008, one of the monthly protests organised that year. Campaigns against a group are part of the record, not a footnote to it.
- - Hand-made cult sign at a Toronto protest. A hand-lettered sign at a Toronto protest on 15 March 2008. Applying the word in the street was the object of the exercise; the organisation rejects it and has litigated over its use.
- - Critics watch a protest arrive in Toronto. Long-standing critics of Scientology look on as masked demonstrators reach the Toronto org in June 2008. The 2008 protests brought an older generation of critics together with an online one.
- - Anonymous at San Francisco Pride. Masked demonstrators from Anonymous in the San Francisco Pride parade in June 2008, protesting the Church of Scientology. Chanology pickets frequently joined marches already taking place.
- - Picket at the San Francisco building. Protesters outside the entrance of the Church of Scientology's San Francisco premises in September 2008.
- - Masked demonstrators at a Washington protest. Protesters at a demonstration against the Church of Scientology in Washington, D.C. on 13 September 2008. Monthly pickets continued in the city for years after the campaign began that February.
- - Two signs outside a Scientology mission in Virginia. Protesters outside the Scientology mission in Richmond, Virginia in April 2009. One placard repeats allegations about the Sea Organization; the other applies the word cult, which the church rejects.
- - District council notice outside the Berlin headquarters. A poster erected by the Charlottenburg district council in front of the German headquarters of the Church of Scientology on Otto-Suhr-Allee, Berlin, in 2009. German authorities have long treated the organisation as a commercial and political body rather than a religion.
- - Chalk message on a Washington sidewalk. A chalked slogan on the pavement outside a Scientology building in Washington, D.C. in October 2009, referring to allegations about children in the Sea Organization. Chalk left a message that could be photographed and then washed away.
- - Masked demonstrator in Washington. A protester holds up a placard during an Anonymous demonstration against the Church of Scientology in Washington, DC, in April 2010, two years into the campaign known as Project Chanology.
- - Masked protesters on Abbey Street, Dublin. Demonstrators in Guy Fawkes masks outside Scientology premises in Dublin on 19 March 2011. The mask, taken from a comic and its film adaptation, became the standard face covering of the Anonymous protests and a way of protesting anonymously against an organisation known for litigation.
- - Out of prison after eighteen years. Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley Jr. and Jason Baldwin left prison on 19 August 2011 after entering Alford pleas. Prosecutors had told the 1994 jury the killings of three eight-year-old boys were part of a satanic ritual. An Alford plea is not an exoneration: the three remain legally convicted while asserting innocence.
- - Anatomy of a panic. A newspaper documentary on how accusations at a California preschool in 1983 spread nationally. Expert review found the children's interviews improper, coercive and directive. The trials ran seven years and cost about fifteen million dollars, the longest and most expensive criminal proceedings in American history at the time.
- - Thirty years after the preschool case. A local report revisiting the McMartin preschool prosecutions. Arrests came on 22 March 1984 on 115 counts, later expanded to 321; two trials ran from 1987 to 1990 and produced no convictions. The defendants were acquitted private citizens and are not named here.
- - Eighteen years, ten of them alone. Damien Echols describes the years he spent imprisoned, including a decade in solitary confinement, after a conviction that rested on the prosecution's satanic-ritual theory. DNA testing in 2007 found none of the genetic material recovered at the scene attributable to any of the three convicted men.
- - An apology in Gapyeong. Lee Man-hee, founder of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, apologised publicly on 2 March 2020 as South Korea linked much of its February caseload to a congregation in Daegu. He was later acquitted of the epidemic-obstruction charges by the Suwon District Court in January 2021, and convicted of embezzlement instead.
- - Seoul sues the church. The mayor of Seoul announced legal action against the church's leadership in March 2020 over the spread of the virus. The state pursued the epidemic allegation and lost: the January 2021 acquittal on those charges was affirmed by the Supreme Court in 2022.
- - What the church actually teaches. A Korean newspaper explains the church's doctrine, its recruitment through personal contacts, and why its meeting practices spread infection quickly. It is called a cult chiefly by rival Korean Protestant churches, which is a theological competitor's designation rather than a finding.
- - A platform bans the movement. Facebook announced a ban on QAnon content across its platforms in October 2020. The movement has no leader present to obey and no premises; researchers describe it as a decentralised network whose followers generate their own variants from cryptic posts.
- - When the milieu is an algorithm. A computer scientist explains how recommendation systems carried conspiracy movements from fringe boards into general use. Every classical model of coercive control presumes a group, a leader and a place; this is the open question of what happens when there is none of that.
