“Bitter Winter” serializes a historical study about anti-cultism and its illegal activities, written by an eminent sociologist and a financial expert in 2000.
by Anson D. Shupe (†) and Susan E. Darnell
Note: In 2000, the late American sociologist Anson D. Shupe and his colleague Susan E. Darnell, an expert in financial records, presented at the yearly meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (Houston, Texas, October 21, 2000), the paper “CAN, We Hardly Knew Ye: Sex, Drugs, Deprogrammers’ Kickbacks, and Corporate Crime in the (old) Cult Awareness Network,” and authorized CESNUR to publish it together with dozens of documents. The paper (whose material was later used for the book by Shupe and Darnell “Agents of Discord: Deprogramming, Pseudo-Science, and the American Anticult Movement,” London: Routledge) is of historical importance for the history of the anti-cult movement and this is the reason “Bitter Winter” is republishing it as a series. We publish it in its original form, which obviously does not take into account further developments concerning Jason Scott, Rick Ross, and the Cult Awareness Network. CESNUR also published an answer by the late Herbert Rosedale, of the American Family Foundation.
Article 1 of 10.
![On the opposite sides of the debate: Anson D. Shupe (1948–2015), left, and Herbert Rosedale (1932–2002), right.](https://bitterwinter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/BITTER-WINTER-14.jpg)
![On the opposite sides of the debate: Anson D. Shupe (1948–2015), left, and Herbert Rosedale (1932–2002), right.](https://bitterwinter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/BITTER-WINTER-14.jpg)
On October 23, 1996, at 9:30 AM, the Cult Awareness Network (CAN), a Chicago-based national anticult organization claiming to be purely a tax-exempt informational clearinghouse on new religions, closed its doors amid bankruptcy proceedings and its assets were auctioned off. The precipitating, but not lone, event that hastened its demise was a civil suit brought against both CAN and a trio of coercive deprogrammers who unsuccessfully tried to remove a legal adult, Jason Scott, from a United Pentecostal congregation. Scott was violently abducted, physically abused, and forcibly detained at a remote Washington State location for almost a week. While CAN was meanwhile suffering many other lawsuits for alleged deprivation of the civil rights of members of minority religions, the Scott case became its Waterloo.
The jury was quite clear in its decision to award compensatory and punitive damages to Scott. It awarded Jason Scott $875,000 in compensatory damages, and punitive damages in the amount of $1,000,000 against CAN, $2,500,000 against deprogrammer Rick Ross, and $250,000 each against Ross’ two accomplices.
CAN’s primary activity, this case and others have revealed, was to provide false and/or inflammatory opinion in the guise of “information” about minority religions to the media and other inquires. All or virtually all such “information” was derogatory, consistent with CAN’s goals of “educating” the public that various new religious movements (NRMs) are “destructive cults,” that all of the members thereof are “cult victims,” are “brainwashed,” and are therefore at risk, possibly needing “rescue.”
The jury’s decision, under the definitions provided in Washington law, was that CAN was truly an organized hate campaign. CAN described its activities in a euphemistic manner to make its activities seem less outrageous from a civil liberties perspective. The reason CAN ever became involved in the Scott lawsuit was that, consistent with its organizational pattern, it served as a conduit for referrals to coercive deprogrammers (later termed by CAN “exit counselors”) who would, for a fee, abduct and during detention harangue family members into religious apostasy.
In a curt note to the defendants who tried to appeal the verdict, including self-proclaimed Bible-based “cult expert” Rick Ross, who had thoroughly botched the Jason Scott deprogramming, United States District Judge John C. Coughenour concluded: “Finally, the court notes each of the defendants’ seeming incapability of appreciating the maliciousness of their conduct towards Mr. Scott. Rather, throughout the entire course of this litigation, they have attempted to portray themselves as victims of Mr. Scott’s counsel’s alleged agenda. Thus, the large award given by the jury against both CAN and Mr. Ross seems reasonably necessary to enforce the jury’s determination on the oppressiveness of the defendants’ actions and deter similar conduct in the future.”
![Deprogrammer Rick Ross. Credits.](https://bitterwinter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/BITTER-WINTER-1-10.jpg)
![Deprogrammer Rick Ross. Credits.](https://bitterwinter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/BITTER-WINTER-1-10.jpg)
In this paper we do not rehash the Scott case, which was entangled in legal minutiae and appeals, nor do we chronicle the last days of CAN as it struggled frantically with a bankruptcy court to prevent its records and files from becoming public. [“Bitter Winter” note: later, Scott reconciled with his mother and hired an anti-cult attorney who quickly settled with Ross; by that time, however, CAN was gone]. Instead, based primarily on the latter sources we present new evidence that CAN indeed illustrated the three levels of malfeasance recognized by criminologists:
1. street crime—direct, physical tactics of assaulting others (or their property) for personal gain.
2. white collar crime—insiders misappropriating or stealing from the organization’s resources for their own enrichment.
3. corporate crime—performance of illegal, harmful criminal behavior as standard operating policy for administrators.
The second two levels are known in sociology as types of elite deviance, and that constitutes the thrust of our argument: CAN was a corporate criminal scheme involving (at times in its referred deprogrammings) illegal drug usage, conspiring to violate civil liberties, and sexual assault/harassment in the name of “counseling.”
Our purpose is to shed new light on a highly visible, late twentieth century counter social movement with ostensibly humanitarian intentions, to extend sociological/historical understanding of the cult-anticult controversy that has preoccupied the attention of many scholars, and to encourage criminologists’ further interest in matters usually taken up by sociologists of religion.
One of us (Shupe) has followed the anti-cult movement (ACM) since the mid-1970s (its literature, its leadership, its various organizational structures), backtracked through interviews and documents to its inception and founders in the early 1970s, and monitored its development both in the United States and abroad. He has analyzed the ACM repeatedly during the past quarter century and even solicited self-analyses of their participation by ACM activists.
One of us (Darnell) manages a multimillion-dollar credit union and has the necessary acumen to decipher organizational financial records (ledgers, disbursements, audits, etc.). This expertise became important when in the late 1990s we obtained, following a purchase from CAN’s bankruptcy trustee, access to approximately 400 boxes of records once owned by CAN. Of these, 32 boxes include CAN’s financial records, from canceled checks to deposit slips to internal and external audits. While we have substantial evidence that some records were deliberately destroyed before the court seized the documents, enough remain to point to financial irregularities in CAN.