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Appellate Decision: Leta Schlosser v. Lawrence Wollersheim
Filed 7/16/08 Schlosser v. Wollersheim CA2/2
RAT Race to clean up
Photo: JENNA HAUCK/ PROGRESS
Just like a rat, Gerry Armstrong likes trash – likes picking up trash, that is.
For 20 years Armstrong has been picking up haphazardly discarded trash laying about his neighbourhoods. Candy wrappers, cigarette butts, even dirty diapers. And he’s been doing it while running.
Full article: Chilliwack Progress
Exposed: Scientology’s Holy War
Bruce Livesey On the 30-Year Vendetta Against Gerry Armstrong
The first time I met Gerry Armstrong, I thought he was paranoid. I’d driven down from Vancouver, summer 2007, into the verdant Fraser Valley to Chilliwack, BC, a somnolent, wind-blown town surrounded by jagged mountain ranges. A place as far removed from Tom Cruise, John Travolta and Scientology’s loopiness as one can possibly get. Armstrong and his third wife Caroline live in a walk-up, one-bedroom apartment above a tiny strip mall that’s seen better days.
When I arrived, Armstrong suggested we drive to a nearby park, rather than talk in their apartment. It was a beautiful July day and, except for a couple of stoners milling about out of earshot, the three of us were alone on the manicured grass beside a pond. Now sixty-one, Armstrong is an alarmingly small man, with elfin features, a beaky nose, sallow skin and large limpid blue eyes. The baseball cap he wore to ward off the hot sun made him look even more vulnerable. Amiable, soft-spoken with no trace of aggression, he chose his words with deliberation. Caroline seemed protective of him.
Full article online at Maisonneuve
The following images were published in the hard copy magazine article.
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- The Armstrong kids in Chilliwack ca. 1952
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- Gerry in Chilliwack in his mid-40s, 1993.
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- Gerry and second wife Jocelyn in the Sea Org, 1980
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- Armstrong's wedding aboard the Apollo 1974
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- The Church of Scientology's Holy Trinity
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- The Apollo
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- Church private eye sent to watch Gerry, taken by Armstrong in 1982.
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- Church private eye sent to watch Gerry, taken by Armstrong in 1982.
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- The SP or "Suppressive Person" order issued against Gerry in 1982, complete with stamp from later trial proceedings.
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- Gerry protesting in Brighton, England, 2001.
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- Gerry protesting in Vienna, (sign in German) 2001.
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- Gerry and Caroline in Leipzig, 2002. Credit Tilman Hausherr
Vancouver tailing incident
During the March 15 protest in Vancouver, this guy was the main Scientology photographer, taking photos of the anonymous people and nonanons like me. He seemed to seethe, however, when I took his picture as he was taking mine.
Also see my picket report.
At the April 12 protest, when it was time to leave, I headed out with a couple of friends, who’d been watching my back, to whatever extent it was watched as I’d moved among the crowd. We walked a couple of blocks west on Hastings and turned left and uphill on Seymour.
I was thinking that if you’re on foot, and you think someone is following you, in a city and in certain circumstances, you can turn a corner into a stretch of sidewalk where your pursuer can’t see you for some time, and instead of continuing walking, stop and keep a focus on where the pursuer must come into view. The pursuer will almost automatically be scanning for you, because you’ve been out of view.
Circumstances such as, for example, being pursued by assassins, wouldn’t normally involve stopping to determine if they were after you. In this case, I was really thinking of my two friends. The cult was apparently desperate enough to ID them that they’d follow us. The cult knows who I am and where I go, and probably wouldn’t send anyone to follow me because I’d make him or move so fast.
In any event, my friends kept walking and I stopped and looked back and sure enough, the red shirt guy, cult’s photographer from March 15, came into view and I made instant eye contact with him. He jumped back behind a pole. I whooped at my friends and headed right toward the guy, across Hastings. I saw take off and enter a building, The Harbour Centre, at 555 W. Hastings. The Scientology org is at 401.
I followed him down an escalator moving as quickly as I could with my back pack on. I got my camera out and got a shot of him just getting off the escalator.
All the other shots I took are hopelessly blurred. I caught up with him in a mallway of some kind, and indicated he’d been following me. I tried to engage him to get him to not do these kinds of aggressive things and he told me to piss off. He said that I look like I have AIDS, and then he left, and I didn’t follow. My friends arrived right then, having followed me across Hastings and down the Harbour Centre escalator, and we proceeded on our intended route.
The incident was scary, because our pursuer is a scary guy, and I’m not sure what was accomplished, although I’m glad I made him. Too bad he was so afraid to stop and talk to me because he could have come face to face with my two friends, and talked to them too I suppose. The phrase or charge that I looked like I have AIDS stunned and saddened me because it had been uttered by so many Scientology agents over the years.
From a 1992 letter (for which, by the way, Scientology sought $950,000 in liquidated damages):
Eugene M. Ingram has done such nasty things to so many people in the service of your organization, you and he should be spanked. His terrible charge at the CAN convention that I have AIDS is heartbreaking, not because I have AIDS, which I don’t,but because your pet pit viper personalizes and focuses yourorganization’s institutionalized hatred.
By accusing me of having AIDS, you and Ingram attack not just me, you attack the many people whose lives have been touched by this disease, or for that matter touched by your organization, and you attack yourself.
Another cult heavy Don Cooper used the same words to me as the Vancouver heavy, that I looked like I have AIDS. And Scientology’s Internet agents have mocked up things like this:
I don’t know if Gerry Armstrong (ROXL AMMSTRONG) uses Aspartame but I heard he’s infected with the AIDS virus. I wonder how he got it. Was it from dirty needles shared with other druggees? Or was it from receiving sex through his rectum.
The fact is that in health I have been extremely blessed. I’m a very fit very fast long distance runner. Mainly trails. I have a totally loving wife. I have a totally loving God. And it is absolutely nuts that the Scientologists and their operatives spread around the black PR that I have AIDS or look like I have AIDS in order to hate me enough to follow me or order me followed.
In any event, Vancouver anonymous, keep an eye out for this fellow. And keep each other’s backs. See you tomorrow.
Maisonneuve Issue 27 Spring 2008
Hi everybody.
The Spring edition of Maisonneuve, containing a 10-page feature article entitled “Scientology’s Defier,” is now available across Canada. Chapters, Indigo, Coles bookstores for sure have it, and a few good bookstores in the US too I imagine.
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/?ptick…SOxlAWLCWDM%3d
Maisonneuve doesn’t have the article or even an announcement on its web site yet.
maisonneuve :: eclectic curiosity
It’s timely for the May 10 protest, because the theme for both the article and the protest, as well as my status with Scientology for going on 27 years, is FAIR GAME. I hope to see many of you by the way the 10th of May
There have been instances where Scientology has had its agents buy up certain publications, or steal them, or deface or destroy them, to minimize a story’s potential effects. Maisonneuve, although Canada-wide and pretty prestigious and smart, is a relatively low circulation magazine published only quarterly. The cult could easily buy up the bulk of the copies in any city or market with OSA chump change.
So if you’re near a Chapters, Indigo or Coles, or other bookstores elsewhere I suppose, get a copy. Stop Scientology from stopping this story.
There are some small errors that I’m addressing (it’s a 27-year Vendetta, not really a 30-year one), and the writer Bruce Livesey and I don’t see eye-to-eye on everything (mine are limpid green, not as he writes limpid blue). But the article is historic in Canadian media and in the Scientology problem at this time. It gets into the cult’s gargantuan FAIR GAME campaign against one guy who’s alarmingly short of ordinary, and it cannot but accelerate the resolution of that nasty campaign. The article is a good read, and should give any good person a good reason to reject and oppose Scientology.
Here’s a couple of paragraphs where even the term FAIR GAME appears:
In 1965, Hubbard created the idea of the “Suppressive Person,” or SP. SPs are portrayed as resentful social outcasts and former church members, but in essence an SP is anyone who poses a threat to the church. In 1967, Hubbard wrote: “SP Order [is] fair game.” Anyone the church considered its enemy, he continued, “may be deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist. May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed.” The church even has a quasi-secret police force, known as the Guardian’s Office, which enforces its harsh tactics. In 1968, Hubbard limited the definition of who was “fair game” to exclude outsiders, but since any serious critic is branded as a Suppressive Person, in practice “fair game” remains church policy to this day. A clear demonstration of this fact is an internal Scientology videotape made four years ago, in which Tom Cruise describes the manner in which the church deals with critics or SPs: “confront, shatter, suppression.”
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In a stinging decision, Judge Paul Breckenridge ruled against Scientology. “In addition to violating and abusing its own members’ civil rights,” wrote Breckenridge, “the organization over the years with its ‘Fair Game’ doctrine has harassed and abused those persons not in the Church whom it perceives as enemies. The organization clearly is schizophrenic and paranoid, and this bizarre combination seems to be a reflection of its founder [Hubbard]. The evidence portrays a man who has been virtually a pathological liar when it comes to his history, background, and achievements. The writings and documents in evidence additionally reflect his egoism, greed, avarice, lust for power, and vindictiveness and aggressiveness against persons perceived by him to be disloyal or hostile.”
[…]
When he read the proposed agreement, he was appalled—it was so stringent it would even have prevented him from telling a psychiatrist he’d been a member of the church. Nevertheless, Armstrong claims his lawyer—who was also being harassed by the church—urged him to take the deal anyway. “You have to sign,” Armstrong recalls his attorney saying. “All of these people [the other litigants and former Scientologists] are depending on you to have fair game end for them.
Wow.