Word: synanon
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Cults such as Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, Scientology, Synanon, Hare Krishna and Children of God offer a refuge from the storms of the world. They purport to know the truth of existence, which members promise is available to anyone willing to submit to the discipline of the sect...
Still, what happened to Paul Morantz is only the latest in a series of curious misfortunes that have befallen people who have challenged Synanon in court, in print or on the air. Among the other victims...
...Phillip Ritter, a Berkeley, Calif, accountant, who last year won (but later lost) custody of his child from his Syna-non-member wife, was jumped by two men outside his home on Sept. 21 and severely beaten. "It was the usual Synanon method of operation," says Jack Hurst, a friend and ex-president of Synanon who quit the group in 1976. "The short hair, the baseball bats, the doctored license plates." Ritter is currently in hiding...
...Patricia Lynch, a producer for NBC, filmed a report on Synanon activities that was aired last June. Later, she says, two men with close-cropped hair and carrying tape recorders and cameras turned up at her Manhattan apartment building, asking tenants about her habits and the layout of her apartment. Since then, she has been shadowed by two men with shaved heads who told her they were from the Synanon Committee for Responsible American Media (SCRAM). She quotes one of them as saying: "The goal of SCRAM is to get your life...
...President Elton Rule and Chairman Leonard Goldenson were asked by Synanon representatives at the network's annual meeting last May whether the network had considered hiring bodyguards for them and their wives. Synanon and its founder, Charles Dederich, have filed a $42 million slander suit against ABC and its station in San Francisco, KGO-TV, over several KGO news reports on Synanon...