Scientology Ruthlessly Harassed Reporters (including Me) For Decades. Biden VP Contender Karen Bass’s Statements About The Cult Just Don’t Add Up.

“...This new Church of Scientology is an exciting moment... If we really want to change the world...we have to treat all people with the respect they are due as human beings and we must fight against oppression wherever we may find it. That is why the words are exciting of your founder, L. Ron Hubbard...The Church of Scientology I know has made a difference because your creed is a universal creed, and one that speaks to people everywhere. I look forward to helping you bring about the difference for everyone in the city [Los Angeles], the golden state of California, and from here the nation, and from the nation the world.”

— Karen Bass, at the 2010 dedication of Scientology’s remodeled Los Angeles headquarters

Bass was right about one thing: Scientology founder Hubbard’s words were “exciting.” Here’s a small sampling of his written doctrines and policies from the 1960s and 70s, which staffers were required to follow—then and always:

“The only way you can control people is to lie to them....Scientologists are trained to lie and never defend, always attack (and generate money)....MAKE MONEY. MAKE MORE MONEY. MAKE OTHER PEOPLE PRODUCE SO AS TO MAKE MORE MONEY... [Church critics] 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... Start feeding lurid, blood sex crime actual evidence on the attackers to the press. Don’t ever tamely submit to an investigation of us... Beware of attorneys who tell you not to sue... The purpose of the suit is to harass and discourage rather than to win... If attacked on some vulnerable point by anyone or anything or any organization, always find or manufacture enough threat against them to cause them to sue for peace....We’re playing for blood, the stake is EARTH.”

By now it should be clear that U.S. Congresswoman Karen Bass, a leading contender for Joe Biden’s VP pick, didn’t know the first thing about Scientology or its founder when she waxed so poetic in 2010, or else she had her reasons for ignoring the truth. (Hubbard’s words have been in articles, books and news broadcasts for decades.) She praised the group again in 2012 and in 2013, with proclamations for its activities in “human rights” education.

And she is misleading the public about it right now.

Through the decades, the church has duped a number of politicians into being “useful idiots” for their grand designs. And ignorance about Scientology can be very embarrassing. In 1991, I reported that Illinois Governor Jim Edgar, noting that Scientology's founder "has solved the aberrations of the human mind," had proclaimed March 13th "L. Ron Hubbard Day." (He rescinded the proclamation later that month, once he learned who Hubbard really was.) But, to my knowledge, no elected official who has praised Hubbard and Scientology has ever been as close as Bass is to running for the country’s vice presidency, and, if the 77-year-old Biden wins—a heartbeat away from the presidency itself.

She continues to openly lobby to be on Biden’s ticket, despite a video of the 2010 speech which was brought to light recently by the Daily Caller, a right-wing media outlet. (Equally problematic is that, as recently as 2016, Bass was praising another ruthless leader, Fidel Castro—seemingly ignorant, at best, and certainly tone deaf to the issues. More on that later.)

Scientologists are pretty good at brainwashing people. Did they get to Bass? Not likely. Perhaps Bass received campaign contributions over the years from Scientologists that inspired her to say something positive about the cult? It needs to be asked, and probed. (From 2004-2010, she was a California state assembly member, and has been a member of the U.S. House of Representatives since 2013. She was born, raised, schooled and—as far as I can tell from her short website biography—has always lived in L.A., one of the two de facto headquarters of Scientology.)

Or maybe she was simply too busy in 2010 and 2012 and 2013 to do a five-minute Google search before using her prestige and influence as an elected official to publicly sanction the group—no doubt helping attract new members into an organization that has been shown to be the antithesis of treating “all people with the respect they are due as human beings.” [Neither the church nor Congresswoman Bass immediately responded to my request for interviews for this story; if they do, I’ll post their responses.]

Also troubling, Bass apparently didn’t do that five-minute Google on Saturday, before releasing a brief statement on Twitter that reads, in part: “Since then [her 2010 speech], published first-hand accounts in books, interviews and documentaries have exposed this group. Everyone is now aware of the allegations against Scientology.”

Huh? There’s not a word in her statement about what she now thinks about the church. Why is that? Moreover, seasoned reporters as far back as the 1970s have exposed the church, often at great personal peril. And Bass surely must know that responsible media outlets would never have published or aired their pre-2010 exposés of the church without having “first-hand accounts.” Bass’s position is a bit like saying, “I didn’t know Charlie Manson was a bad guy; I thought he was a strong family man.” Everything the congresswoman needed to learn about the church was a matter of public record, always a mere fingertip press away, and she should have known it.

In 1986—a quarter-century before Bass’s cut-off date—I wrote a lengthy Forbes magazine exposé called “The Prophet and Profits of Scientology.” It laid out how Hubbard was clearly insane, and how he viciously abused his acolytes—many of whom provided such “first-hand accounts” in sworn court affidavits and in interviews with Forbes. Among them: Don Larson, who served as the church’s $25-per-week “finance ethics officer.” In that role, Larson claimed he alone brought nearly 300 recalcitrant Scientologists to “Rehabilitation Project Forces” at church centers around the world over a period of 14 months, until his own detention and departure in 1983.

“I was the hatchet man,” he told us. “I was responsible for all sorts of Gestapo-type stuff.” In these detention programs, staff members would be coerced into performing hard labor, eating leftovers out of buckets and sleeping on floors. One of the church’s main detention centers, known as “The Hole,” was on a 700-acre compound roughly a 90-minute drive from Bass’s current office in L.A., and had been exposed by insiders and written about extensively by journalists for decades.

An “Editor’s Comment” that ran with the 1986 story addressed the subject of first-hand witnesses. It read: “How credible are they? The issue has been raised. Here's Judge Paul Breckenridge Jr., Superior Court of California, who presided over one Scientology lawsuit: ‘In all critical and important matters, their testimony was precise, accurate, and rang true... Each of these persons literally gave years of his or her respective life... Each has manifested a waste and loss or frustration which is incapable of description. Each... is still bound by the knowledge that the Church has in its possession his or her most inner thoughts and confessions, all recorded in... security files of the organization, and that the Church or its minions is fully capable of intimidation or other physical or psychological abuse if it suits their ends.’”

So much for “your creed is a universal creed,” as Bass proclaimed.

The 1986 Forbes story also revealed how Hubbard apparently looted the church of enough money to have been on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans—had he not died earlier that year under mysterious circumstances. (He had gone underground for several years to a ranch outside L.A. until his death, in large part to hide from an IRS criminal probe.) Around the time we published, the church retained at least one private eye, who made bizarre calls to Forbes staffers. They also threatened to sue, but didn’t.

Five years later, in 1991—Bass at the time was running a community-based social justice coalition in Los Angeles—I wrote a cover story in Time magazine titled “The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power... Ruined lives. Lost fortunes, Federal crimes. Scientology poses as a religion but really is a ruthless global scam — and aiming for the mainstream.” [It was published in the May 6th editions, but is misdated on Time’s website as June 24th.]

The story was based on court documents and more than 150 interviews conducted over seven months. [Church officials, however, had refused requests for interviews.] It included numerous “first-hand accounts” from victims—former staff members, insiders, and others. Here’s one excerpt, for example:

Boston attorney Michael Flynn, who helped Scientology victims from 1979 to 1987, personally endured 14 frivolous lawsuits, all of them dismissed. Another lawyer, Joseph Yanny, believes the church "has so subverted justice and the judicial system that it should be barred from seeking equity in any court." He should know: Yanny represented the cult until 1987, when, he says, he was asked to help church officials steal medical records to blackmail an opposing attorney (who was allegedly beaten up instead). Since Yanny quit representing the church, he has been the target of death threats, burglaries, lawsuits and other harassment.

Another first-hand account came from William Franks, a former chairman of the board of the church. He told us that a Hollywood celebrity (who served as an unofficial Scientology spokesman) feared that if he defected from the church, details of his private sexual life would be made public. “If you leave, they immediately start digging up everything," said Franks.

For Time’s international editions, a sidebar was included with the cover story that was titled “Pushing Beyond the U.S.— Scientology Makes Its Presence Felt in Europe and Canada.” It showed how the church’s minions were wreaking havoc in one country after another (Canada; France; Germany; Italy; Spain)—costing governments considerable effort and money to try and stop them.

This was back when Time was Time (in terms of global influence and readership), and Scientology declared war in response. The church sued and also ran a $3 million daily ad campaign for two weeks in USA Today attacking the articles, as well as Time generally and historically. An 80-page booklet charged that we were “serving an evil hidden agenda.” The ad campaign culminated in a 28-page booklet inserted into the newspaper [briefly excerpted here] that even attacked Eli Lilly, the maker of Prozac depression medicine. Why? The church is fervently opposed to psychiatry and psychiatric medicine, and works hard to keep mentally-ill members from getting treatment from licensed professionals.

(Bass might be interested in that topic, considering that during the 1990s—a time when she ran the L.A. social justice group—she worked hard addressing the city’s drug and gang-violence epidemic. She also spent nearly a decade as a physician assistant and served as a medical instructor at the University of Southern California. Currently, she serves on several U.S. House committees, including chairing the subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organizations. I don’t know her views on psychiatry or meds.)

The church also filed a $416 million libel suit against us. Given the organization’s extensive resources, it stretched into a ten-year legal battle. (The church lost on summary judgment in federal court in New York, and also lost before an appellate court. The church then took it to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to take their case.) After Readers’ Digest decided to run a condensed version of the main story in virtually all of its editions—reaching about 100 million readers around the world—the church sued the Digest in multiple countries to try (unsuccessfully, of course) to stop them.

The church was sadistic in its attempts to intimidate me. As I wrote in another sidebar called “The Scientologists and Me,” at least ten attorneys and six private detectives were unleashed by Scientology and its followers in an effort to threaten, harass and discredit me. Some of them pried into my family history, and made inquiries into my health. Many years later, after he defected from the cult, Marty Rathbun—long one of Scientology’s highest-ranking officials and lead “enforcer”—apologized and told me they’d spent about $25 million on their legal and intelligence-gathering efforts against me and the magazine. (That’s about $45 million in today’s money). Rathbun said an apartment was rented on my block in New York City to use as a base for their spying operations. I wasn’t surprised. After all, as Ted Gunderson, a former head of the FBI's office in [Bass’s] Los Angeles, had told Time: “In my opinion the church has one of the most effective intelligence operations in the U.S., rivaling even that of the FBI."

Despite the the Time story and legal case garnering a ton of media attention for well over a decade, plus all the other exposés from other major media outlets prior to 2010, could Bass perhaps have truly not known any of this? Again, maybe she was too busy. But could she not have been aware of a 24-part blockbuster series in 1990 in the Los Angeles Times, her hometown paper? That series was huge news, only in part because of the church’s harassment of Joel Sappell and Bob Welkos, who spent five years probing the church before they penned the articles.

Of course, nothing approaches the harassment suffered by brave journalist Paulette Cooper, who wrote a critical book called “The Scandal of Scientology” in 1971. As I noted two decades later, this led to a Scientology plot (called Operation Freak-Out) whose goal, according to church documents, was "to get P.C. incarcerated in a mental institution or jail." It almost worked: by impersonating Cooper, Scientologists got her indicted in 1973 for threatening to bomb the church. Paulette also endured 19 lawsuits by the church, but was finally exonerated in 1977 after FBI raids on the church offices in Los Angeles and Washington uncovered documents from the bomb scheme. No Scientologists were ever tried in the matter.

Documents the FBI seized in those raids also showed that Scientologists had infiltrated, burglarized and wiretapped more than 100 private and government agencies in attempts to block their investigations. Eleven top Scientologists, including Hubbard's wife, were sent to prison in the early 1980s for the scheme.

Here are some additional groundbreaking and courageous exposés of the church that came out before 2010, the year of Bass’s speech:

1981: “Scientology: The Sickness Spreads” (Readers’ Digest’s prolific Eugene Methvin)

1985: “Who Are The Scientologists?” (Washington Post editorial board) Excerpt: “Members of the ‘church’ have engaged in vicious and serious harassment of persons and organizations who investigate or speak out against the group, such as the St. Louis Post Dispatch, the Los Angeles Times, Readers' Digest, the Boston Globe, the St. Petersburg Times, Forbes Magazine, the American Medical Association, the Better Business Bureau and the American Psychiatric Association. Many individuals, including a federal judge, were also targeted.”

1988-89: Numerous investigative pieces by Steve Koff of the St. Petersburg Times, who was on the Scientology ‘beat’ for the newspaper (in part because nearby Clearwater, Florida, is the cult’s #2 headquarters.)

1992: An exposé by ABC News Nightline, plus the first-ever interview with David Miscavige, the church’s venomous leader since Hubbard’s death.

1995: Tony Ortega, editor of the Village Voice, begins a quarter century of investigative stories. (e.g. The Underground Bunker blog; a 2015 book titled “The Unbreakable Miss Lovely: How the Church of Scientology tried to destroy Paulette Cooper.”)

1997: Doug Frantz’s special investigative report in the New York Times about “Scientology’s Puzzling Journey From Tax Rebel to Tax Exempt.” Doug revealed that the church hired spooks to dig into the private lives of IRS officials and to conduct surveillance operations to uncover potential vulnerabilities. One of the private eyes told the Times that he had taken documents from an IRS conference and sent them to church officials, and created a phony news bureau in Washington to gather information on church critics.

1997: “CAN: The Cult Awareness Network” (CBS News’ 60 Minutes) Note: This disturbing segment, produced for Lesley Stahl by Rich Bonin and team, showed how Scientology bankrupted and then took over the country’s leading cult-information support group.

2009: A multi-part, trailblazing series in the St. Petersburg Times (by Tom Tobin and Joe Childs) that led to many additional stories over the next four years revealing life inside the church.

Undoubtedly, my list is missing other notable works, for which I apologize. But apparently Bass wasn’t aware of any of them, or didn’t care.

Critical books by former members? “Messiah or Madman” (Bent Corydon, 1987); “A Piece of Blue Sky” (John Atack, 1990); “Testimony: The Autobiography of Margery Wakefield” (1996).

As for post-2010—the period Bass is hanging onto by her fingernails—she might be alluding in her Twitter statement to these projects:

“Beyond Belief: My Secret life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape” (Jenna Miscavige Hill, niece of the church’s boss, 2013)

“Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief,” a 2013 book by investigative reporter Larry Wright, as well as a 2015 documentary based on the book by Alex Gibney.)

“Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology” (Leah Remini, 2015); as well as “Scientology and the Aftermath,” a documentary TV series than ran from 2016 to 2019.

“Ruthless: Scientology, My Son David Miscavige, and Me” (Ron Miscavige, 2016)

In her tweet on Saturday, Bass also tried to extinguish her Scientology problem by maintaining that in her 2010 speech she “spoke to what I think all of us believe in—respect for one another’s views, to treat all people with respect, and to fight oppression wherever we find it. I found an area of agreement in their beliefs...” Indeed, the church has long tried to portray itself as oppressed, even as it does the oppressing.

Finally, and this is a real stretch: let’s imagine that Bass didn’t know how bad they were until certain “allegations” (as she calls them) about Scientology emerged after her 2010 speech and 2012 and 2013 proclamations. Why did she not come forward in recent years and explain or retract her words, rather than wait until she was outed last week? That would have been the responsible thing to do, and it demonstrates poor judgment on her part, as well as a disregard for those who may have joined the cult after hearing her speak.

It’s hard to understand not doing a modicum of due diligence to educate oneself before speaking on behalf of any organization. So either there’s something she’s not telling us or she didn’t think it was important to educate herself before putting herself out there as a supporter of the church. This is serious, and what she is saying doesn’t add up. It bears closer scrutiny.

Unfortunately, this appears to be consistent behavior for her. In 2016, following the death of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, she stated, “The passing of the comandante en jefe is a great loss to the people of Cuba.” There is no shortage of elected officials in Florida who are now cringing (or worse) over her proclamation. "I disagree with the congresswoman's comments on Cuba,” Democrat Donna Shahala, one of the U.S. Congress members representing South Florida (and a former Secretary of Health and Human Services under Bill Clinton), told Politico in late June. “I invite people to come to Miami where we can educate them on the tyrannical dictatorship that has decimated Cuba for 60 years.” A month later, Bass walked back the praise, and on “Meet The Press” last Sunday she stated “Lesson learned.”

As Fabiola Santiago, a Cuban refugee and longtime Miami Herald columnist wrote yesterday: “If you’re Cuban or Cuban American in Miami, this is what you’re hearing: ‘Comandante en jefe, ordene.’ Commander in chief, at your service. They were the infamous words Cubans used when surrendering to the whims of a dictator who executed dissenters, destroyed lives and the economy and left this world with blood on his hands....Never once have I heard her [Bass] raise her eloquent activist voice on behalf of the oppressed on the island.”

Castro’s dying wish, at least according to his brother Raul, was to not be immortalized with statues (and that no streets or buildings should be named after him) to avoid the development of a “cult of personality” in Cuba. Lafayette Ronald Hubbard never expressed such a wish for himself.

_{—Richard Behar can be reached at rbehar@forbes.com}