Jury finds Danny Masterson guilty on 2 counts in rape retrial

The "That '70s Show" actor was accused of raping three women.

Meredith Deliso

ABC News

May 31, 2023

A Los Angeles jury has found former "That '70s Show" actor Danny Masterson guilty of two counts of forcible rape in a retrial of a case involving three women.

The third count against Jane Doe 3 has been declared a mistrial.

The jury reached its verdict Wednesday afternoon after deliberating since May 17, over the course of six days total.

Masterson, 47, pleaded not guilty to three counts of felony rape following accusations by three different women, including a former girlfriend. The alleged attacks took place between 2001 and 2003.

He faces up to 30 years to life in prison. A sentencing hearing has been scheduled for Aug. 4.

Masterson was deemed a potential flight risk and was remanded into custody following the verdict. He walked out of the courthouse in handcuffs.

The first trial ended in a mistrial in November 2022, with the jury deadlocked and unable to reach a verdict.

The three alleged victims were members of the Church of Scientology, as is Masterson. All three women said they were initially hesitant to speak to law enforcement because they said church teachings discouraged reporting to police. The women eventually left the church.

One woman claimed the actor shoved a pillow into her face in 2003 while raping her.

Another woman, Jane Doe 3, who was dating Masterson at the time, claimed he raped her in 2001 while she was asleep. She and Jane Doe 2 are also involved in a related civil case against Masterson and the Church of Scientology.

Following the jury's decision, Jane Doe 3 said she was "devastated" by the mistrial on her count.

"I thank the jury for its service, and while I'm encouraged that Danny Masterson will face some criminal punishment, I am devastated that he has dodged criminal accountability for his heinous conduct against me," Jane Doe 3 said in a statement provided through her attorneys, Boies Schiller Flexner. "Despite my disappointment in this outcome, I remain determined to secure justice, including in civil court, where I, along with my co-plaintiffs, will shine a light on how Scientology and other conspirators enabled and sought to cover up Masterson's monstrous behavior."

Jane Doe 2, who is also represented by Boies Schiller Flexner, said she was also disappointed Masterson wasn't convicted on all three counts.

"I am experiencing a complex array of emotions -- relief, exhaustion, strength, sadness -- knowing that my abuser, Danny Masterson, will face accountability for his criminal behavior," Jane Doe 2 said in a statement. "I am disappointed that he was not convicted on all counts, but take great solace in the fact that he, the Church of Scientology and others will have to fully account for their abhorrent actions in civil court."

In opening statements of the new trial in late April, prosecutors said the evidence will show that the women were also drugged -- a detail not mentioned directly during the first trial but which the judge allowed in the retrial. They also introduced a fourth woman who claimed Masterson drugged and raped her in 2000.

The defense, meanwhile, countered that the alleged victims' stories are inconsistent and suggested the women have colluded over time. They also added that Scientology is "not a defendant" in the case.

During closing arguments, Deputy District Attorney Reinhold Mueller told the jury the women were "absolutely wrecked" after having a small amount to drink, and that the "reasonable explanation" is that they were drugged, ABC Los Angeles station KABC reported.

"What happened after they were drugged? They were raped by this man over here, they were raped," Mueller said as he pointed at Masterson.

In his closing argument, defense attorney Philip Cohen told the jury the women may have "tweaked or maneuvered" their stories to bolster their case, and that they may be motivated by "hatred, revenge or money," KABC reported.

Shortly after the jury was dismissed to begin deliberations on May 17, the defense asked for a mistrial -- arguing that prosecutors spent too much of their closing arguments on the alleged drugging of the victims, according to KABC.

Judge Charlaine Olmedo denied the request, citing her ruling that prosecutors could argue the women were drugged because it was "directly relevant to their ability to perceive the events of the charged incidents," KABC reported.

Masterson, who was arrested in 2020, said each of the encounters was consensual. "That '70s Show" was still on the air at the time of all three alleged rapes.

The Church of Scientology previously told ABC News that there's "no policy prohibiting or discouraging members from reporting criminal conduct of Scientologists, or of anyone, to law enforcement. ... Church policy explicitly demands Scientologists abide by all laws of the land."

Actress and notable ex-Scientology member Leah Remini was among those in the courtroom during the trial, telling ABC News she was there to support the "brave" women.

The defense asked to have Remini removed from the courtroom at the beginning of the trial, which the judge denied.

https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/jury-finds-danny-masterson-guilty-2-counts-rape/story

How Tina Turner's Buddhist faith gave her the strength to leave Ike Turner

JONAH VALDEZ
Los Angeles Times
May 24, 2023

While Tina Turner is heralded as an R&B and rock icon, her Buddhist faith was the soul that drove her eventful life and career.

She often credited the religion with helping her find the strength to leave her abusive relationship with Ike Turner in 1976. In the years since, Turner was known to recite Buddhist chants daily, even chanting on national television on Larry King’s CNN show in 1997, a practice she continued until her death on Wednesday, at 83, in her home in Küsnacht, near Zurich, Switzerland, where she had kept her own Buddhist shrine.

As tributes for the “Proud Mary” performer poured in online, many recalled the influence Turner’s faith had on their lives, inspiring them to start practicing Buddhism and some to also leave harmful relationships.

“Tina Turner is the reason I found Buddhism,” tweeted Jessica N. Pabón, a professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at SUNY New Paltz in New York. .

“She was my strength when I left my abuser,” former journalist Laura Keeney wrote while tweeting a Turner obituary, “and she introduced me to Buddhism as a balm for my soul.”

Laura A. Cole tweeted that Turner’s song “What’s Love Got to Do With It” taught her “that I could change my mind and my path on a dime if the life I was living no longer served me or even actively harmed me.”

Cole continued: “SHE introduced me to Buddhism and the peace of meditation.”

Turner was introduced to Buddhism by multiple people throughout the early 1970s. But it was a woman whom Ike Turner had brought to the studio one day who convinced the singer to start practicing. The woman, Valerie Bishop, was a member of the Soka Gakkai community, a form of Nichiren Buddhism, which is active throughout West Los Angeles, near where the Turners lived and recorded music. That was according to Taro Gold, co-author of Turner’s 2020 spiritual memoir, “Happiness Becomes You,” who was interviewed in 2021 by the Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford University.

The Grammy-winning singer, who grew up Baptist, eventually transitioned from reciting “The Lord’s Prayer” to chanting the basic prayer within Nichiren Buddhism, “nam-myoho-renge-kyo,” which translates to devotion to the mystic law of cause and effect. Members of Soka Gakkai customarily chant the prayer twice a day, morning and evening, in part to manifest things in their lives, such as happiness or other goals.

“The more you chant, the more you become liberated, mentally,” Turner said in the 2021 HBO documentary “Tina,” during a scene that featured a voice-over of her reciting Buddhist prayers.

“I started seeing my life — I started really seeing that I had to make a change,” Turner continued in the film, recalling the effect chanting had on her life. “I started to become much more confident. I mean, not even caring what Ike thought about me — becoming less afraid of him.”

Her introduction to Buddhism also came shortly after she attempted suicide by overdosing on Valium, Turner told USA Today in 2020. “Buddhism literally saved my life,” she said.

“When she found her spirituality, when she found Buddhism, that unlocked something inside of her,” “Tina” co-director T.J. Martin said in a 2021 interview with “PBS NewsHour.” “I think that gave her a sense of confidence that she was always searching for.”

While she struggled to regain momentum in her career after leaving Ike Turner, often working in Las Vegas showrooms and on the cabaret circuit, Turner’s constant performing and her faith had “kept her sane,” according to Martin.

And after laboring for nearly a decade, Turner rebounded to what would become a remarkable second act that began in 1984. Her solo album “Private Dancer” spawned the hits “What’s Love Got to Do With It” and “Better Be Good to Me.” She continued to perform and record until 1999, when she released “Twenty Four Seven,” her 10th and final solo album.

Throughout the last decade of her life, Turner was involved in various interfaith projects, such as the recording of a series of spiritual music albums with the Beyond Music project that combines Christian and Buddhist chants.

“When I recorded it, the sound I got back, I was very proud of it,” Turner said during an interview around the release of one of the group’s albums in 2011. “I hope the whole world will hear a prayer that brought me this far, and brought me to being a very happy person.”





https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2023-05-24/tina-turner-buddhism-ike-turner-nichiren

Books: The Sullivanians, The Cult That Hid in Plain Sight on the Upper West Side

Books: The Sullivanians, The Cult That Hid in Plain Sight on the Upper West Side


Anya Schiffrin
West Side Rag
May 28, 2023

My first job as a teenager on the Upper West Side was scooping ice cream at Ferguson’s on West 86th Street at Broadway, which turned out to be owned by EST, a cult whose celebrity followers included Yoko Ono and Diana Ross, according to The New York Times. I knew nothing about cults back then. But I remember that during my childhood, our family had acquaintances with an unusual living arrangement: they shared a large apartment with others who were all in therapy together. Strange, yes, but just how strange, we didn’t know at the time. Our acquaintances were part of the Upper West Side’s very own 1970s cult, with hundreds of people living together in two buildings: one on 314 West 91st Street, the other on 100th and Broadway. Now, a new book, The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune, by Columbia Journalism School professor Alexander Stille, unlocks the secrets of that Upper West Side cult, sometimes known as the “Fourth Wall.”

The Sullivanians provides a startling, very detailed account of the damage wreaked by the group on many, particularly the children of cult members. Stille, who wrote for The New Yorker for many years, spent five years pursuing the Sullivanians, doing dozens of interviews and consulting thousands of pages of court records. His research on cults showed how they often begin as relatively harmless groups, until a powerful leader starts to demand more extreme behavior – such as encouraging men to have multiple affairs or to prey on younger women or girls. A recent New York example: the leader of the NXIVM cult marked his women followers with a brand, until he was arrested and convicted of a series of crimes, including sex trafficking.

The Sullivanian group was cofounded in New York in the 1950s by Saul Newton and his wife Jane Pearce. Pearce had been a student of neo-Freudian psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan, whose name became attached to the group even though he died in 1949 before it formed.

The Sullivanians were professional therapists who came together and performed therapy on each other. They spent summers together in the Hamptons and founded a theater company called the Fourth Wall, initially on 77 East 4th Street.

But as time passed, Newton began to push the idea that families were a destructive force, including families among the Sullivanians. He promoted divorce, free love, and an emphasis on personal growth over family values. Men had wide freedom to pursue sexual relations, while women were subordinated and pressured to send their children to boarding schools, as early as age three. Some ended up in abusive institutions. Yet the group’s leaders kept their own children in private schools in the city, with financing provided by the other cult members.

Below is a lightly edited email interview with Stille about the Sullivanians. Spoiler alert: the last part of the interview explains how the cult disintegrated.

Q: Can you explain how the Sullivanians became a cult? How did it evolve?

STILLE: The Sullivan Institute began as a maverick form of psychotherapy. Its founders, Jane Pearce and Saul Newton, believed that people grew from contact with a variety of other people, so traditional institutions like the nuclear family and monogamous marriage were antithetical to growth. By the 1960s, they were advising them to live in large group apartments on the Upper West Side: men with men and women with women, so that people would not form traditional family units but would have multiple sexual relationships.

Jane Pearce, who was both an M.D. and had extensive psychoanalytic training at the William Alanson White Institute, which Harry Stack Sullivan and other major neo-Freudians had founded in the 1940s, believed this approach was a path to human liberation. Pearce did not intend to found a cult. But her very “directive” form of therapy – telling patients what they should do and isolating them from past family and friends – were techniques straight out of the cult playbook.

Her husband, Saul Newton, (who later divorced Pearce and excluded her from the group), had no formal training in psychotherapy but quickly learned this approach gave him power over his patients. Even in the 1960s, being a Sullivanian patient meant being part of an exclusive community with clear rules that organized people’s lives. It became more cult-like in the 1970s. When members of the group formed a theater company, The Fourth Wall, the leadership realized that it could create a formal membership with people paying dues and undertaking large, collective projects. The theater was a great vehicle for power and control, and the leaders took it over.

Q: What do you think was the most pernicious part of their society?

STILLE: The most pernicious element of the group was the coercive nature of the therapy, therapists taking control over every aspect of their patients’ lives and convincing patients that if they didn’t go along with directives, that they would be kicked out of the group and that their lives would be ruined. Because patients had cut all ties with their families and past friends, the idea of ostracism became terrifying to them.

This meant, for example, that many patients who had small children were convinced to send their kids to boarding school – at ages of five, six, seven – with often catastrophic effect on the children – and the parents. The therapy also undermined people’s sense of self and agency, convincing them that their own natural inclinations and judgment could not be trusted because it had been shaped and corrupted by their terrible families and by a stultifying bourgeois society. Patients grew by doing things that made you anxious and that you resisted doing. So, if a woman didn’t want to have sex with someone, they should [anyway], precisely because you didn’t want to.

Q: Was this a hard book to write?

STILLE: The world of the Sullivanians was deeply private and somewhat hard to break into. At the same time, I found some remarkable people who were generous and open, which allowed me to make serious inroads into that community. I was able to contact and interview a larger swath of the former group members, track down the kids who had been sent away to boarding school. Some people who initially said they didn’t want to be interviewed wrote back six months later and asked if I was still interested in talking with them.

The group created a powerful culture of silence and mafia-like omertà around the group’s life, which is still quite real for many ex-members. Some people responded by saying, “[T]his was the most traumatic period of my life and I don’t want to talk about it.” For others there was quite a bit of guilt and shame around their experience. Many of them told me: “I still don’t quite understand how I could have gone along with all of this, allowed myself to be treated that way.” But a surprising number overcame that resistance and spoke with me with surprising candor. I liked most of the people I met, people who were, almost universally, smart, thoughtful and kind. The central mystery of this project, for me, is how the leadership was able to get so many smart and not-crazy people to turn their lives inside out, in ways that are hard to understand.

Q: How did it end?

STILLE: People who had joined in their early twenties got tired, by their mid-thirties, of having their relationships broken up by therapists who demanded they stop “focusing” on one person and instead maintain multiple relationships. Many left in order to marry and pursue a more traditional family life. There are dozens of ex-Sullivanian married couples.

Women members who joined in their twenties, by their mid-thirties wanted to have children and resented the group’s heavy-handed interference with parent-child relationships. In 1986, a 41-year-old woman named Marice Pappo kidnapped her own child off the street at Broadway and [West] 100th Street because her therapists had denied her access to her infant daughter for six months. She consulted a lawyer who told her that as a mother she had a right to her child and should hire a couple of bodyguards and snatch the child when she went out for a morning walk with her babysitter, who was the adult in charge of looking after the daughter. All this right in front of the building at 2643 Broadway where Marice and about 90 Sullivanians all lived.

This marked a turning point, setting off a legal battle. Two other parents who had left the group also sued for custody of their kids. These battles split the group, led to multiple defections, drained it of economic resources. And, at the same time, the founder, Saul Newton began to suffer from obvious signs of dementia in the late 1980s and died in 1991, the year in which the group formally disbanded and began to sell off its assets.

The Sullivanians: Sex, Pyschotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune, by Alexander Stille, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux June 20.

Anya Schiffrin is a lifelong Upper West Sider and senior lecturer at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.



https://www.westsiderag.com/2023/05/28/books-the-sullivanians-the-cult-that-hid-in-plain-sight-on-the-upper-west-side

CultNEWS101 Articles: 5/30/2023 (Scientology, LDS, Clergy Sexual Abuse)

Scientology, LDS, Clergy Sexual Abuse

Tampa Bay Times: Clearwater sets terms for land swap: Tell us your plans, Scientology.

"For more than a year, as former City Manager Jon Jennings negotiated a major downtown land swap with Scientology leader David Miscavige, City Council members were not privy to the details.

Now that they have learned more, all five of them said in interviews they are not impressed with what's been proposed. They also said they would not be willing to make any trade unless Miscavige discloses his plans for at least 176 downtown parcels purchased since 2017 by limited liability companies managed by Scientology parishioners.

Most of the properties have remained vacant or undeveloped, frustrating the city's efforts to revitalize downtown.

"I need to know more," said council member Lina Teixeira. "What is their plan for the rest of downtown? I've been waiting for a long time, so I want something concrete. Without that, I don't see this as a deal at all."

Mayor Brian Aungst Sr. said he was "very ambivalent" about a land swap. "If we make any kind of deal," he added, "we'd want some kind of guarantee that a lot of these properties that have been purchased are going to be activated."

Any deal involving properties each side might give up in a trade would require council approval, but Jennings led the negotiations with Miscavige until the council fired him on Jan. 5. His successor, City Manager Jennifer Poirrier, said she met with two church officials on Jan. 20 to learn what Miscavige and Jennings had discussed."

The Guardian: The Australian cult that fed children LSD: Guy Pearce on the 'disturbing' true story behind The Clearing

"As soon as he put down the script, Jeffrey Walker knew he wanted to work on the Disney+ series The Clearing. "It was one of those reads that you just couldn't stop thinking about," the show's co-director says. "It affected me emotionally and psychologically."

This might ring as hyperbole if it weren't for the disturbing real-life story behind the script. The new eight-part series, adapted from JP Pomare's novel In the Clearing, is based on the true story of the Family, the cult who operated in the shadows of regional Victoria from the 1960s to the 80s.

Among its various cruelties across two decades, the Family obtained 28 children, mostly through shonky adoptions or as "gifts" from unwed mothers, and housed them in a sprawling property at the secluded Lake Eildon. There they were subject to beatings and starvation, given daily doses of benzodiazepines to keep them docile and forced to begin taking psychedelic drugs, escalating to the point of days-long trips once they turned 14. To look like the "family" they were told they were, the children's hair was bleached blonde and they were dressed in matching outfits.

Those involved in The Clearing are keen to stress that viewers should not expect a to-the-letter retelling of the real-life case (for that, watch the 2019 documentary The Cult of the Family). But the series is still rich with details that echo the facts, like those matching platinum hairdos – a subtly chilling sight – as well as the filming locations, which included Lake Eildon."

CNA: Illinois AG report says nearly 2,000 were victims of clergy sex abuse over 70-year span

"A report published by the Illinois attorney general's office alleges that 451 Catholic clerics and religious brothers sexually abused 1,997 victims within the state's Catholic dioceses over a 70-year period.

The report, published May 23, unveils a comprehensive list of "substantiated child sex abuse" allegations, which the attorney general's office compiled with assistance from each of the six dioceses in Illinois. The report covers allegations from 1950 through 2019.

Investigators from the Attorney General's office reviewed more than 100,000 pages of documents provided by the dioceses related to abuse allegations and policies and procedures on how they dealt with the allegations. They also conducted interviews with diocesan representatives and with numerous victims who made the allegations.

The report notes that each diocese cooperated fully with this investigation, and acknowledged reforms that have been made, but Attorney General Kwame Raoul had harsh words for the Church's leadership in the past."

News, Education, Intervention, Recovery

CultEducationEvents.com

CultMediation.com   

Intervention101.com to help families and friends understand and effectively respond to the complexity of a loved one's cult involvement.

CultRecovery101.com assists group members and their families make the sometimes difficult transition from coercion to renewed individual choice.

CultNEWS101.com news, links, resources.

Facebook

Flipboard

Twitter

Instagram

Cults101.org resources about cults, cultic groups, abusive relationships, movements, religions, political organizations and related topics.

Selection of articles for CultNEWS101 does not mean that Patrick Ryan or Joseph Kelly agree with the content. We provide information from many points of view in order to promote dialogue.

Please forward articles that you think we should add to cultintervention@gmail.com.

CultNEWS101 Articles: 5/31/2023 (Event, Meditation, LDS)

Event, Meditation, LDS

Cheetah House: The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain with Annie Murphy Paul

6/7: 1:00pm

Cheetah House has lectures on special topics in order to provide both Cheetah House members and members of the public greater insight into topics involved with adverse meditation experiences.

Salt Lake Tribune: 'Mormon Land': All about LDS growth - where it's up, down and how many are actually 'active'

"With the COVID-19 pandemic increasingly in the rearview mirror, worldwide membership for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints topped 17 million by the end of 2022, a 1.17% increase from the previous year.

But that growth was hardly wall to wall. Some places grew much faster, some much slower, and some saw their rolls shrink.

There were encouraging signs. Africa, for instance, led the way — again — boasting eight of the 10 nations with the fastest rates of membership growth.

There were troubling stats, too. Ukraine, not surprisingly, saw its Latter-day Saint totals fall as members fled the war-scarred nation, and Russia's ranks — reported for the first time in years — cratered, plunging by nearly 80% since 2017."

Salt Lake Tribune: Pressure builds to investigate LDS Church wealth

"Whistleblower David A. Nielsen is stepping up his push for federal authorities to fully investigate his billion-dollar allegations of financial wrongdoing by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its investment arm, Ensign Peak Advisors.

So far, though, there's little public indication that major investigations are underway.

In a statement issued to The Salt Lake Tribune days after the former Ensign Peak portfolio manager appeared on "60 Minutes," Nielsen's attorney said the IRS and U.S. Department of Justice "must not shrink from the responsibility of enforcing the rule of law" in exploring allegations the church violated its tax-exempt status by amassing upward of $100 billion from investments of tithing funds from members, without spending any of it on charity.

Nielsen has provided enough evidence of church actions in avoiding paying billions in taxes, Atlanta-based lawyer Michael Sullivan said, to warrant deeper government scrutiny."

News, Education, Intervention, Recovery

CultEducationEvents.com

CultMediation.com   

Intervention101.com to help families and friends understand and effectively respond to the complexity of a loved one's cult involvement.

CultRecovery101.com assists group members and their families make the sometimes difficult transition from coercion to renewed individual choice.

CultNEWS101.com news, links, resources.

Facebook

Flipboard

Twitter

Instagram

Cults101.org resources about cults, cultic groups, abusive relationships, movements, religions, political organizations and related topics.

Selection of articles for CultNEWS101 does not mean that Patrick Ryan or Joseph Kelly agree with the content. We provide information from many points of view in order to promote dialogue.

Please forward articles that you think we should add to cultintervention@gmail.com.

Charles Manson cult follower Leslie Van Houten should be paroled, appeals court rules

CBS News
MAY 30, 2023

A California appeals court said Tuesday that Leslie Van Houten, who participated in two killings at the direction of cult leader Charles Manson in 1969, should be let out of prison on parole.

The appellate court's ruling reverses an earlier decision by Gov. Gavin Newsom to reject parole for Van Houten in 2020. She has been recommended for parole five times since 2016. All of those recommendations were rejected by either Newsom or former California Gov. Jerry Brown, with the latest such rejection coming in March of 2022.  

California Attorney General Rob Bonta could ask the California Supreme Court to stop her release. Neither his office nor Newsom's immediately responded to requests for comment on whether they would do so.

Van Houten, now in her 70s, is serving a life sentence for helping Manson and other followers kill Leno LaBianca, a grocer in Los Angeles, and his wife Rosemary. Van Houten was 19 at the time.

Newsom has said that Van Houten still poses a danger to society. In rejecting her parole, he said she offered an inconsistent and inadequate explanation for her involvement with Manson at the time of the killings.

The Second District Court of Appeal in Los Angeles ruled 2-1 to reverse Newsom's decision, writing there is "no evidence to support the Governor's conclusions" about Van Houten's fitness for parole.

The judges took issue with Newsom's claim that Van Houten did not adequately explain how she fell under Manson's influence. At her parole hearings, she discussed at length how her parents' divorce, her drug and alcohol abuse, and a forced illegal abortion led her down a path that left her vulnerable to him.

They also argued against Newsom's suggestion that her past violent acts were a cause for future concern were she to be released.

"Van Houten has shown extraordinary rehabilitative efforts, insight, remorse, realistic parole plans, support from family and friends, favorable institutional reports, and, at the time of the Governor's decision, had received four successive grants of parole," the judges wrote. "Although the Governor states Van Houten's historical factors 'remain salient,' he identifies nothing in the record indicating Van Houten has not successfully addressed those factors through many years of therapy, substance abuse programming, and other efforts."

The dissenting judge argued that there was some evidence Van Houten lacked insight into the heinous killings, and agreed with Newsom that her petition to be released should be denied.

Nancy Tetreault, Van Houten's attorney, said she expects Bonta to ask the state Supreme Court to review the lower court's decision, a process that could take years.

In addition, Bonta will likely request a stay of the appellate court's ruling, Tetreault said. The high court could order Van Houten's release while it decides on whether to grant the stay.

"I will, of course, vigorously oppose any stay," Tetreault said. "And they could let her out during that process."

Van Houten was 19 when she and other cult members stabbed to death the LaBiancas in August 1969. She said they carved up Leno LaBianca's body and smeared the couple's blood on the walls.

The slayings came the day after other Manson followers, not including Van Houten, killed pregnant actress Sharon Tate and four others in violence that spread fear across Los Angeles and captivated the nation.

Van Houten was found suitable for parole after a July 2020 hearing, but her release was blocked by Newsom. She filed an appeal with a trial court, which rejected it. She then sought her release through the appellate courts.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/leslie-van-houten-charles-manson-labianca-murders-parole/

 

How the practice of Nichiren Buddhism sustained Tina Turner for 50 years

The Conversation
Published: May 26, 2023


Author
1. Ralph H. Craig III

PhD Student in Religious Studies, Stanford University


Disclosure statement

Ralph H. Craig III receives funding from Stanford University. He is affiliated with SGI-USA, but he does not represent them in any capacity.


Partners

When Tina Turner, often dubbed the "Queen of Rock 'N' Roll," died at her home in Küsnacht, Switzerland, on May 24, 2023, at the age of 83, media headlines praised both her dynamism as a performer and her many career achievements. What many did not know is that for the past 50 years Turner had practiced Soka Gakkai International Nichiren Buddhism.

Soka Gakkai is a lay Nichiren Buddhist organization that was founded in Japan in 1930. Today, the international organization is known as Soka Gakkai International, or SGI. This form of Buddhism was popularized in the United States through the organization known today as SGI-USA. Turner was introduced to the organization by Valerie Bishop, a woman whom her first husband, musician Ike Turner hired to work in his recording studio.

Turner's Buddhist practice developed initially against the backdrop of her first marriage and continued throughout her solo career. It provided inspiration for some of the final projects of her career.

As a scholar of Buddhism in South Asia and in the U.S., I have closely studied the career of African American artists who practice Buddhism. Tina Turner, in particular, sought to teach Buddhism through her writings and later through her records.

Turner's early religious life

Turner was born on Nov. 26, 1939, and raised in the community of Nutbush, Tennessee. Her family was Baptist and worshipped at both Woodlawn Missionary Baptist Church and Spring Hill Baptist Church. They also sometimes attended a Black Pentecostal church near Knoxville, Tennessee.

As I found while doing research for my forthcoming book, "Dancing in My Dreams: A Spiritual Biography of Tina Turner," Turner's religious influences extended beyond the forms of Afro-Protestant institutional religion. In her memoir "Happiness Becomes You," Turner describes the deep, mystical connection that her grandmother had to nature, which suggests that her grandmother was immersed in the more mystical strands of Black Southern religious culture.

In 1957, she met Ike Turner. After she initially joined his band as vocalist, they eventually formed a musical partnership under the moniker The Ike & Tina Turner Revue.

The duo scored chart success with songs like "A Fool in Love," "River Deep – Mountain High," "Proud Mary" and "Nutbush City Limits." Though publicly successful, in private Ike frequently abused Tina Turner.

Introduction to Buddhism

Turner was introduced to the teachings of Nichiren Buddhism in 1973. Nichiren Buddhism is based on the teachings of Nichiren, a Buddhist monk who lived during the 13th century in Japan. Central to Nichiren's thought was the conviction that the Lotus Sūtra, a Mahayana Buddhist text, was the highest of all the Buddha's teachings.

Nichiren taught that chanting the title of this scripture in the form of the mantralike phrase "Nam-myoho-renge-kyo" was the way for all people to reveal their inherent potential for awakening and attain buddhahood. Further, Nichiren taught that doing this practice would have profound social impact by making the Buddha's highest teachings the basis of society.

Chanting of Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.

How Nichiren Buddhism was popularized

Soka Gakkai members began arriving in the U.S. in the 1950s. As these members spoke primarily Japanese and were geographically spread out, they initially had limited success in their efforts to propagate Nichiren Buddhism in the U.S. That changed in 1960 when, under the leadership of the third Soka Gakkai president, Daisaku Ikeda, an American branch of the organization was formally established.

With his guidance, they spread the basic Nichiren Buddhist practice of chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo before an inscribed scroll called the Gohonzon. They taught that doing this practice would lead to "human revolution," a gradual process of inner transformation and empowerment.

It is the SGI Nichiren Buddhist understanding of personal empowerment and human revolution that seems to have initially attracted Tina Turner. In a 2020 Tricycle Magazine interview, Turner explained: "As I began studying Buddhist teachings and chanting more, it led me to take responsibility for my life and to base my choices on wisdom, courage, and compassion. Not long after I started chanting, I began to see that the power I needed to change my life was already within me."

In the '70s, changing her life meant separating from the Ike & Tina Turner Revue in 1976 and divorcing Ike Turner in 1978.

A resurgence powered by SGI Nichiren Buddhism

After her divorce, Turner struggled as a solo artist before her well-known career resurgence with 1984's "Private Dancer" album. Platinum albums and sold-out global tours followed. Turner credited each success to her Buddhist practice.

Her practice would be chronicled in two autobiographies: the first, "I, Tina," published in 1986; and a second, "My Love Story," published in 2018. Her practice is also represented in the 1993 biographical film "What's Love Got to Do with It?" and on record on the 2009 interfaith album "Beyond: Buddhist and Christian Prayers" and on stage in the musical "Tina: The Tina Turner Musical."

Through all of these projects, Turner made clear that her practice of SGI Nichiren Buddhism sustained her for the past 50 years.



https://theconversation.com/how-the-practice-of-nichiren-buddhism-sustained-tina-turner-for-50-years-206486

US: Chinese agents paid bribes in plot to disrupt anti-communist Falun Gong movement

Michael R. Sisak
National Post
The Associated Press
May 26, 2023

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. authorities have arrested two suspected Chinese government agents in connection with an alleged plot by Beijing to disrupt and ultimately topple the exiled anti-communist Falun Gong spiritual movement.

John Chen and Lin Feng were charged in an indictment unsealed Friday with scheming to revoke a New York-based Falun Gong organization’s tax-exempt status and paying bribes to a undercover officer posing as a U.S. tax agent.

The undercover officer recorded multiple conversations with Chen, and investigators obtained a wire tap to record phone calls in which Chen and Feng discussed instructions they purportedly received from Chinese government officials, prosecutors said.

In one recording, prosecutors said, Chen referred to Chinese government officials as akin to “blood brothers” and, in another, he said Beijing would be “very generous” in rewarding the undercover officer’s help cracking down on Falun Gong’s non-profit status.

Chen, a 70-year-old U.S. citizen, and Feng, a 43-year-old lawful permanent resident, are charged with acting as unregistered agents of a foreign government, bribing a public official and conspiracy to commit international money laundering.

Chen and Feng were both born in China but now live in the Los Angeles area, where they were arrested Friday. Information on an initial court appearance or lawyers who could speak on their behalf was not immediately available.

Messages seeking comment were left with the Chinese Embassy in Washington and with the Falun Gong movement.

China banned the Falun Gong movement in 1999, classifying it as an evil cult and one of the “Five Poisons,” or chief threats to its rule. Since then, Falun Gong practitioners have found refuge at a 400-acre compound called Dragon Springs in upstate New York.

In the U.S., the Falun Gong movement is known mostly for its ties to Shen Yun, a touring performing arts group, and The Epoch Times, a newspaper that has been marketed as an alternative to traditional U.S. media while also coming under fire for amplifying misinformation and conspiracy theories.

The Justice Department has made a series of prosecutions in recent years to disrupt China’s efforts in the U.S. to identify, locate and silence pro-democracy activists and others who are openly critical of Beijing’s policies. Such practices by foreign governments are known as “transnational repression.”

“The Chinese government has yet again attempted, and failed, to target critics of the (People’s Republic of China) here in the United States,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a statement.

The U.S., Garland added, will “continue to investigate, disrupt, and prosecute” China’s efforts to “silence its critics and extend the reaches of its regime onto U.S. soil.”

In seeking to undermine Falun Gong, federal prosecutors allege, Chen and Feng’s urged the Internal Revenue Service to revoke the organization’s non-profit tax status. In a whistleblower complaint to the tax agency in February, Chen described Falun Gong as a “gigantic mega cult” — echoing language China’s government uses to describe the movement.

Chen and Feng then turned to the undercover officer to make sure the IRS acted on the complaint, offering a $50,000 reward — and handing over $5,000 in cash as a down payment — if the tax agency conducted an audit, prosecutors said.

Chen met with the officer at a restaurant north of New York City on May 14, prosecutors said. A few days later, the officer sent Chen a letter on fake IRS letterhead that stated the agency had opened a case on Falun Gong, prosecutors said. Chen relayed the news to Feng in a wire tapped phoned conversation, indicating that he was planning to update Chinese government officials on their progress, prosecutors said.

Chen and Feng’s arrest comes a month after the Justice Department charged two men with establishing a secret police station in New York City on behalf of the Chinese government. Around the same time, federal prosecutors charged about three dozen officers with China’s national police force with using social media to harass dissidents inside the U.S.

In 2020, the Justice Department charged more than a half-dozen people with working on behalf of the Chinese government in a pressure campaign aimed at coercing a New Jersey man wanted by Beijing into returning to China to face charges.

—-

Associated Press reporter Eric Tucker in Washington contributed to this report.



https://nationalpost.com/pmn/news-pmn/us-chinese-agents-paid-bribes-in-plot-to-disrupt-anti-communist-falun-gong-movement

Did Brigham Young have a secret wife? Cemetery search could provide answers

The man in the photograph is Brigham Young, a founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But the face of the woman seated next to him has been scratched out. Brent Herridge is moving ahead with his efforts to try to prove a hypothesis he has about the image: that the woman is a previously unknown wife of the revered church leader. He is now actively looking for the Native American woman's gravesite to prove it.


Ben Winslow
FOX 13
May 23, 2023

SALT LAKE CITY — The man in the photograph is Brigham Young, a founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But the face of the woman seated next to him has been scratched out.

"If you really look at his face... it's the closest thing to a smile that you'll ever see on Brigham," said Brent Herridge, a Utah photographer who appraised the Daguerreotype decades ago that sparked his quest to know more about the mystery woman in it.

Herridge is moving ahead with his efforts to try to prove a hypothesis he has about the image: that the woman is a previously unknown wife of the revered church leader. He is now actively looking for the Native American woman's gravesite to prove it.

The image is known as "Brigham Young and unknown wife." Herridge said at the time, he appraised the image but was also curious about who was in it and had been erased.

"What we found was that nobody — and we looked at all the wives — nobody quite fit what we were looking for," he said. "So we looked outside of the circle and we're lucky enough because of some of the details in the photograph, such as bracelets, and a chain around her neck and the hand... and there was a hand that was damaged."

Herridge believes the woman in question is named Sally Kanosh who lived in one of Brigham Young's homes with some of his other wives and children. But Herridge breaks from fellow historians who insist the image is of someone else. He also believes that Sally Kanosh was not just a servant in the household.

"She, in this photograph, was being married to Brigham Young," he told FOX 13 News.

Herridge points to the hands of the woman in the photograph with the LDS leader and compares it to a photograph in Utah State Historical Archives of Sally Kanosh.

"Her right hand was shingled, and then little finger was so damaged that was cut off," he said, adding there are similarities with bracelets and a chain around the woman's neck.

Historical accounts of Sally Kanosh's life state that she was believed to be Shoshone or Bannock when she was kidnapped as a child by a rival tribe. She was purchased by a Latter-day Saint settler named Charlie Decker.

"Charlie Decker was the younger brother of Clara Decker, who was a wife of Brigham Young. So once he'd purchased her, and he claimed he purchased her because she was being tortured and wanted to stop that," said Dr. Jenny Hale Pulsipher, a professor of early American and Native American history at Brigham Young University. "That's a claim that's made with a lot of these, it's kind of a controversial claim. But several people recorded that same story. He gave her to his sister. And she basically just took her into the family."

Historical records show Sally Kanosh lived part of her life in the Lion House, which stands to this day on Temple Square. She was raised with the Young children, but was considered a servant.

"They gave her an Americanized name, which was Sally, because she, of course, had an Indian name. That's how she came to live with the Young family," said Ellen Jeppson, the president of the International Society of Daughters of Utah Pioneers. "I do know that in the record, she was well loved in the family."

Jeppson said their records show Sally Kanosh lived with the Young family for many years until Brigham Young encountered Chief Kanosh, who offered horses to marry her.

"Brigham Young said, 'If she wants to go, she can go.' Well, Sally said no. This went on for several years, and Brigham Young always said to her, 'If you want to marry him, you can go. It's your decision.' And finally, she did decide to marry Chief Kanosh, and then she left the home," Jeppson said. "That's all I know and all I know that is documented."

Herridge believes there were two Native American girls who grew up in the Young household and their stories have been conflated by other historians and authors. But he said Sally Kanosh did marry Chief Kanosh. Prior to that, he believes, she was married to Brigham Young.

"He wanted the Indigenous people to be part of the greater community that he was trying to establish in '47," he said.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had no comment on Herridge's theory. Dr. Pulsipher said at that time, Brigham Young did try to convince LDS missionaries to marry Native American women.

"It wasn't very successful. He had a hard time talking very many people into entering into those kinds of marriages. Partly because of, you know, widespread cultural prejudice against those kinds of marriages in this time period," she said. "Not only on behalf of the men who might have entered into the marriages, but the women who, sometimes they were polygamous, and their white wives weren't interested in that idea. I'm actually a descendant of one of the very few Shoshone and LDS missionary marriages that took place."

Dr. Pulsipher said there are historical accounts of Brigham Young referencing Sally Kanosh living in his home and she believes there is nothing that would have stopped the church leader from marrying her. But Dr. Pulsipher said she was skeptical it actually happened.

"I need to look at whatever additional evidence he has found and evaluate it," she told FOX 13 News. "But without that? No. It just doesn't seem very likely."

Jeppson said the Daughters of Utah Pioneers is neutral on Herridge's theory, but she adds that Brigham Young's life was well-documented.

"You would think if it had happened, that people would have talked about it and been interested in it," she said. "And I haven't found any research for that."

Sally Kanosh died in 1877. When Brigham Young died in 1878, historical records show he had 56 known wives.

Herridge said he believes historical records do signal Sally Kanosh was married to Brigham Young. When he first presented his theory to a conference of the Utah State Historical Society in 2012, it generated a little buzz and mixed reaction. Some pushed back on the notion, while others acknowledged Brigham Young had a lot of wives.

To prove his hypothesis, Herridge is now looking to find Sally Kanosh and any descendants. He has also enlisted the nonprofit Utah Cold Case Coalition, forensic genealogy and DNA to help.

"I have seen his a lot of his research into this subject, and I believe him. I think he's got it nailed," said Tom Harvey, who works for the coalition.

Herridge is working to find Sally Kanosh's actual grave. In 2019, he obtained permission to use ground penetrating radar in the Kanosh town cemetery in an effort to find her grave. It wasn't where the tombstone indicated. He has since expanded his search to a potential descendant: Talula Young Wood is listed as a daughter of Brigham Young and Clara Decker Young. Herridge said he suspects she was actually a child of Brigham Young and Sally Kanosh.

"We work with unidentified bodies as part of what we do to try to identify them," said Harvey. "It's a little bit older case than we normally work with, but it's the same type of thing. Brent would like to not just depend upon historic research that he's done, but also get the science involved, the DNA involved. And that's one of the places where we can help out."

Once they find the graves, Herridge said he is considering seeking to exhume the bodies to obtain DNA samples. He has one of Brigham Young already from a direct descendant.

"We think we know where Sally might be, and we're going very slow. We're not trying to offend anything," he said. "We realize that exhuming bodies is a very serious thing and we're trying to approach it in a way that's very respectful to everyone yet gets to the truth."

Darren Parry, the chairman of the Northern Band of the Shoshone Nation (the tribe that Sally Kanosh might have belonged to), said they would not support an exhumation.

"Once a Native American has been buried, we don’t ever disturb those sacred grounds. It’s important to us we let them rest," he told FOX 13 News.

As to Herridge's theory, Parry said Sally Kanosh did live in Brigham Young's house for a long time but "I don’t think he would have shied away from taking her as a wife if he did."

Herridge said he would revisit whether to exhume the grave or not once they found where it actually is. Harvey said the Utah Cold Case Coalition would examine if the family trees "at a certain point, come together or don't come together."

As to why Sally Kanosh would have been erased from history if she truly was married to Brigham Young, Herridge believes it was the politics of the time.

"I think polygamy is definitely a piece of that," he said. "I think it was specifically with Sally is that one, Sally was Indigenous. Brigham believed that it was part of the future, but it was a very new thing to engage in a relationship with Native American woman."

Herridge plans to write his own book about Sally Kanosh. Harvey said what they find will add to historical accounts about Brigham Young and his families.

"That's kind of what we hope to do is to bring this person back into the historical record and where she rightly belongs," Harvey said. "We believe the implications of it, I don't know, just expanding the historic knowledge about Brigham Young and his his wives and his his children."

Said Herridge: "I feel that her real story needs to be told."

https://www.fox13now.com/news/local-news/did-brigham-young-have-a-secret-wife-cemetery-search-could-provide-answers

'Mormon Land': All about LDS growth - where it's up, down and how many are actually 'active'

By David Noyce and Peggy Fletcher Stack
Salt Lake Tribume
May 24, 2023

With the COVID-19 pandemic increasingly in the rearview mirror, worldwide membership for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints topped 17 million by the end of 2022, a 1.17% increase from the previous year.

But that growth was hardly wall to wall. Some places grew much faster, some much slower, and some saw their rolls shrink.

There were encouraging signs. Africa, for instance, led the way — again — boasting eight of the 10 nations with the fastest rates of membership growth.

There were troubling stats, too. Ukraine, not surprisingly, saw its Latter-day Saint totals fall as members fled the war-scarred nation, and Russia’s ranks — reported for the first time in years — cratered, plunging by nearly 80% since 2017.



In the United States, Southern states enjoyed the quickest gains, while the Northwest’s numbers continued to slide. And Utah, home to the faith’s headquarters, experienced stunningly anemic growth.

On this week’s show, we dig into these figures — the whats, whys and wherefores — with Matt Martinich, an independent researcher who tracks church movements for the websites cumorah.com and ldschurchgrowth.blogspot.com. We also discuss post-pandemic expansion, how church growth aligns with temple building, and just how many members can be considered “active.”

Listen here:



noyce@sltrib.comFollow @sltribnoyce



pstack@sltrib.comFollow @religiongal





https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2023/05/24/mormon-land-all-about-lds-growth/

Illinois AG report says nearly 2,000 were victims of clergy sex abuse over 70-year span

Tyler Arnold, Kevin J. Jones for CNA

Catholic News

May 23, 2023

A report published by the Illinois attorney general’s office alleges that 451 Catholic clerics and religious brothers sexually abused 1,997 victims within the state’s Catholic dioceses over a 70-year period.

The report, published May 23, unveils a comprehensive list of “substantiated child sex abuse” allegations, which the attorney general’s office compiled with assistance from each of the six dioceses in Illinois. The report covers allegations from 1950 through 2019.

Investigators from the Attorney General’s office reviewed more than 100,000 pages of documents provided by the dioceses related to abuse allegations and policies and procedures on how they dealt with the allegations. They also conducted interviews with diocesan representatives and with numerous victims who made the allegations.

The report notes that each diocese cooperated fully with this investigation, and acknowledged reforms that have been made, but Attorney General Kwame Raoul had harsh words for the Church’s leadership in the past.

“Decades of Catholic leadership decisions and policies have allowed known child sex abusers to hide, often in plain sight,” Attorney General Kwame Raoul said in a statement. “And because the statute of limitations has frequently expired, many survivors of child sex abuse at the hands of Catholic clerics will never see justice in a legal sense.”

“It is my hope that this report will shine light both on those who violated their positions of power and trust to abuse innocent children, and on the men in church leadership who covered up that abuse,” Raoul’s statement continued. “These perpetrators may never be held accountable in a court of law, but by naming them here, the intention is to provide a public accountability and a measure of healing to survivors who have long suffered in silence.”

In total, the report found 275 substantiated abusers in the Archdiocese of Chicago, 69 in the Diocese of Juliet, 51 in the Diocese of Peoria, 43 in the Diocese of Belleville, 32 in the Diocese of Springfield, and 24 in the Diocese of Rockford. The number is higher than 451 because some of the accused priests served in more than one diocese.

The report also alleges that the final number disclosed in the attorney general’s report is much higher than the number disclosed previously by Illinois Catholic dioceses.

Before the attorney general investigation, only two dioceses — the Archdiocese of Chicago and the Diocese of Joliet — posted a list of substantiated sexual abuse on their websites, naming 103 alleged abusers. The report stated that, during the investigation, the dioceses disclosed 334 clerics and religious brothers who allegedly abused minors, which is still lower than the attorney general report of 451.

Cardinal Blase Cupich, archbishop of the Chicago archdiocese, said in a Tuesday statement that much of the discrepancy is because the report included abuse allegations from priests and religious brothers who were under the supervision of a religious order, rather than the diocese itself.

“We have not studied the report in detail but have concerns about data that might be misunderstood or are presented in ways that could be misleading,” Cardinal Cupich said.

Cupich said the 451 names disclosed include all diocesan and religious order priests and include the names already disclosed on the websites of Illinois’ six dioceses.

The dioceses do list religious priests and brothers with allegations found by their orders to be “substantiated.” The 149 names still undisclosed are “mostly religious order members who are not on our site; they are not undisclosed, and they are under the supervision and report to their respective order,” Cupich said.

In response to the report, Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of Springfield noted that there has been a decline in abuse allegations, which suggests that the prevention measures are working.

“The changes our diocese enacted have proven to be effective as we are not aware of a single incident of sexual abuse of a minor by clergy alleged to have occurred in this diocese in nearly 20 years,” he said Tuesday.

The Diocese of Peoria said in a statement that, to the extent of its knowledge, “there is not a single priest of the diocese with a substantiated allegation who is currently in ministry or who has not been reported to authorities.”

Bishop Paprocki added that the report helps Catholics “sustain the vigilance with which we guard against any future threat of abuse.”

“The Attorney General’s inquiry into the history of clergy sexual abuse of minors in this diocese has served as a reminder that some clergy in the Church committed shameful and disgraceful sins against innocent victim-survivors and did damage that simply cannot be undone,” Bishop Paprocki said.

“As bishop of this diocese, I cannot undo the damages of the past, but I have been and continue to be fully committed to ensuring we do all we can to prevent abuse from happening again.”

https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2023/05/23/illinois-ag-report-says-nearly-2000-were-victims-of-clergy-sex-abuse-over-70-year-span/

Pressure builds to investigate LDS Church wealth

David A. Nielsen’s lawyer says the government “must not shrink from the responsibility of enforcing the rule of law.”

Salt Lake Tribune

By Tony Semerad

May 20, 2023

Whistleblower David A. Nielsen is stepping up his push for federal authorities to fully investigate his billion-dollar allegations of financial wrongdoing by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its investment arm, Ensign Peak Advisors.

So far, though, there’s little public indication that major investigations are underway.

In a statement issued to The Salt Lake Tribune days after the former Ensign Peak portfolio manager appeared on “60 Minutes,” Nielsen’s attorney said the IRS and U.S. Department of Justice “must not shrink from the responsibility of enforcing the rule of law” in exploring allegations the church violated its tax-exempt status by amassing upward of $100 billion from investments of tithing funds from members, without spending any of it on charity.

Nielsen has provided enough evidence of church actions in avoiding paying billions in taxes, Atlanta-based lawyer Michael Sullivan said, to warrant deeper government scrutiny.

“Otherwise,” Sullivan said in the release, “a powerful, well-connected organization will be seen as escaping the equal application of our laws.”

He issued the statement after church officials called the “60 Minutes” report “unfortunate,” saying it was based on “unfounded allegations.”

While the Salt Lake City-headquartered faith now disputes Nielsen’s allegation the investment fund was never used for religious, charitable or educational purposes, Sullivan said, when “60 Minutes” challenged church officials to provide documents disproving it, “the church apparently declined.”

The attorney also referred to a settlement filed in February by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in which the church and Ensign Peak agreed to pay $5 million in fines for intentionally hiding nearly $32 billion in past stock holdings under a series of shell companies.

“Why would an organization violate the law and ‘misstate’ — for almost 20 years — facts it was legally required to disclose?” Nielsen’s lawyer wrote. “...The SEC’s action is but the first of many steps in essential government scrutiny, and next are the IRS and the Department of Justice. ... Since ordinary citizens must obey the law, should the IRS and Department of Justice permit politically powerful church organizations to flout the law?”

Nielsen worked as a top manager for Ensign Peak for nine years but resigned shortly before his late 2019 complaint to the IRS. He has since expanded on it in court testimony and in a memo sent to Congress, as well as, the Salt Lake City resident has said, in follow-up interviews with federal investigators.

The “60 Minutes” interview marked Nielsen’s first public comments on his explosive assertions. The business executive said he initially started at Ensign Peak with optimistic visions that he was “going to change the world” by assisting in managing its charitable resources, only to find the reserve account was instead operated as “a clandestine hedge fund” — one that only built wealth, Nielsen insists, and hoarded more than $100 billion while spending nothing on the church’s philanthropic missions.

Nielsen said he decided to speak publicly after giving government authorities “all the professional courtesy.”

“It’s time,” he told “60 Minutes” correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi. “This is just too important to fall through the cracks.”

Few signs the government is investigating

If federal investigators continue to press the matter, they aren’t confirming that publicly.

In response to Tribune inquiries, an IRS spokesperson said the agency can neither confirm or deny anything involving its interactions with whistleblowers. “That is completely protected,” the representative said, “under the ironclad laws that protect us all.”

For his part, Sullivan said in an interview Friday the IRS has confirmed within the past six weeks “that the evidence and analysis submitted on Nielsen’s behalf is under consideration by the appropriate people.”

Officials in the tax division of the Department of Justice did not respond to requests for comment.

The SEC’s public affairs office also did not reply to Tribune inquiries. That agency, tasked with enforcing securities law, said earlier this year it had assigned investigators from its Salt Lake City and Denver offices to the probe that resulted in the $5 million in penalties against Ensign Peak and the church.

It’s unclear, though, if the SEC’s scrutiny continues after February’s settlement.

At the time of the settlement, the Utah-based faith, while expressing “regret” for its filing “mistakes,” said it considers “this matter closed.” Church officials blamed the reporting violations flagged by the SEC on misguided advice from attorneys, saying “we affirm our commitment to comply with the law.”

Sullivan said Friday that blaming church attorneys for the deception was not credible.

“It’s incredibly disingenuous to say that, ‘Well, we were relying on our lawyers in making misstatements for 20 years in violation of the law,’” he said. If that were true, Sullivan added, “the SEC would have prosecuted the lawyers. Those lawyers probably wouldn’t have licenses.”

In calling for a congressional inquiry, Nielsen also submitted a 90-page memo in earlier this year outlining and expanding on his IRS allegations to the U.S. Senate Finance Committee and its Subcommittee on Taxation and IRS Oversight, where it so far appears to have languished.

The offices of committee chairman Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and its ranking Republican member, Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho and a Latter-day Saint, did not respond to Tribune requests for information on the memo’s status or whether the committee planned any official review. Staffers for Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., who heads the panel’s taxation subcommittee, also did not reply to the newspaper’s requests.

Sullivan said he has spoken to Senate staffers on the matter “more than once, but I couldn’t really say more than that.”

In the 13-minute “60 Minutes” segment, a former IRS official, Phil Hackney, said a full-blown investigation of the church’s finances was unlikely.

“The political risk is so great that it comes with real danger,” he said, while adding that “there’s a real risk to the rule of law if the IRS does not come in and enforce those rules.”

Questions about a key ‘bailout’

Sullivan underscored a sense of urgency in his statement. He affirmed Nielsen’s interview in the face of church criticisms and said Sunday’s broadcast brought new “bombshell” admissions that strengthened some of the whistleblower’s key claims.

Among them, he asserted, was an acknowledgment from W. Christopher Waddell, first counselor in the church’s Presiding Bishopric, regarding a $600 million payment from Ensign Peak to “bail out” church-owned insurance company Beneficial Life, which Nielsen and Hackney said appeared to violate rules barring the nonprofit church fund from allocating money to a for-profit firm.

Sullivan said under U.S. law, the payment amounted to a “private benefit” to Beneficial Life’s policyholders, meaning that “Ensign Peak cannot be tax-exempt and thus owes billions in taxes.”

In the broadcast, Waddell said “fortunately the church had the resources to bail out Beneficial Life during the financial crisis” that led to the Great Recession. He characterized another controversial payment from Ensign Peak — $1.4 billion for the City Creek Center mall in downtown Salt Lake City — as “an investment.”

Both, Waddell said, were legal and made as part of Ensign Peak’s function as “the church’s treasury” — an auxiliary, he later added, “providing us with those resources that we need in order to operate as a church.”

Sam Brunson, a popular Latter-day blogger and a tax law professor at Loyola University Chicago, said the legal status of the $600 million payment could hinge on what Waddell meant when he called it a “bailout.”

Waddell made reference at another point to Beneficial Life paying back the money. If the sum were indeed a loan, Brunson said, “it would probably be fine.”

“But if it’s just a transfer of money to a for-profit organization,” Brunson wrote on his By Common Consent blog, “it’s not permissible.”

Another Latter-day Saint scholar, Nathan Oman, a professor at Virginia’s William & Mary Law School, said in a blog post that it was “not surprising” the church was using Ensign Peak to invest in City Creek and Beneficial Life.

“Many of the allegations about Ensign Peak don’t seem to hold much water,” Oman said. “It’s an investment vehicle, and it seems to have made investments.”

Even so, Oman and Brunson also echoed a torrent of comments from Latter-day Saints calling on their church to be more generous with its charitable spending — which the faith says topped $1 billion last year — and more open about its wealth.

“This issue would go away,” Brunson has argued, “if the worldwide church were transparent about its finances, a thing entirely within its power.”

Oman suggested Latter-day Saint leaders “ditch the model of absolute secrecy and just publish some stripped-down, audited, financial disclosures.”

The scholar wrote that by his calculation — gleaned from the “60 Minutes” report that the church collects about $7 billion and year in tithing and spends some $6 billion on operations, with savings of about $150 billion in Ensign Peak — the faith annually spends about 4% of its wealth, which he said was “more or less exactly the rate of a conservatively managed university.”

“I am surprised by that number. I expected it to be smaller,” Oman acknowledged. “... Viewed in another way, the church spends at exactly the rate it needs to spend in order to operate indefinitely.

“... Once people accept that institutions that seek to operate indefinitely must maintain constant reserves and spend relative to those reserves only a small percentage,” he wrote, “there’s not really much to see.”



tsemerad@sltrib.comFollow @tonysemerad




https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2023/05/20/whistleblower-heightens-call/