Unsealed court documents reveal a massive sex abuse cover up inside the Mormon Church. And The Church of Scientology is desperate to prevent the public from learning about their dirtiest secrets – but it may be too late. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: Unsealed court documents reveal a massive sex abuse cover up inside the Mormon church. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins joins me to talk about that and many other issues. Six years of sex abuse for a five year old, the Mormon church was told this is going on and what do they do with that material?
Farron Cousins: Uh, nothing. They did absolutely nothing with it. And this is just one of many instances.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: Now that we’re finding out. But this particular story is so disturbing, because not only was the father molesting his five year old daughter, eventually his wife got pregnant again. And then when the, the baby turned six weeks old, he began sexually assaulting that baby as well.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. All, all of this, all this story is it’s just a way in to talk to you and everybody about how dysfunctional, now I call ’em a cult. People can get mad at me. It’s a cult. I mean, if you really look behind this, the fact that these folks even got a tax right off to be a church is as ridiculous as the Scientologist getting a right off like that. But it’s a church of latter day saints. You had a, a, a man who was being treated as a pornography addict, goes to the Bishop, says Mr. Bishop, I have been molesting my, my, my five year old child. Spills the beans. The, the, the Bishop then goes to the lawyers, the national lawyers, not the local lawyers, but the lawyers who are calling all the shots and the lawyers says, whatever you do, don’t tell the police. Whatever you do, don’t report this to child welfare, where they can go in there and save that baby. That is the most disgusting. And you know what, when this case develops, they need to sue that lawyer right along with the church. That, that’s it’s, and, and, and he’s part of it. And from the other side, the church needs to sue that lawyer for malpractice, because this is blowing up like crazy right now.
Farron Cousins: It is. And, and what the church did was they had set up a tip line for their, you know, clergy members or even their regular members to report sexual abuse. So I mean, they knew the problem was bad enough that what they did was they set up this tip line. They said, hey, if you hear anything, you call the tip line. You don’t call the police, like you said. You don’t call authorities or DCF. Call the, call this tip line for us here and we’ll, we’ll handle it. Don’t worry about it.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. You know, you and I have done this story before about what the tip line is all about. The tip line is keeping it quiet. It’s like what you see universities doing right now.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: College uni, colleges, universities all over this country, when a woman is raped, they take ’em first to a committee and that person then has to sign off to where I’m going to live with what the committee decides. It’s worse than arbitration because here you have the university that’s running the program. That’s the same thing that’s happening here. And you know, for, and, and first of all, there is no clergy, there’s no clergy privilege in Arizona. There’s about 20 states in the union that same thing. There’s no clergy privilege. So first of all, the lawyer committed malpractice, they need to be sued and they certainly need to be brought into this lawsuit as a necessary party.
Farron Cousins: Right. And, and another thing about the tip line that was really shocking in this massive report that’s come out was that they revealed that at the end of every single workday, the tip line workers were instructed, take all the records you took from that day, destroy them.
Mike Papantonio: Mm-hmm.
Farron Cousins: You do not keep anything. So basically at the end of the day, every day, it’s a clean slate. There’s no record of who you talked to. There’s no record of what was reported to you. There is nothing. And unfortunately this leads the people who call the tip line to think, okay, I did what I’m supposed to do. They’re gonna handle it. This guy’s gonna go to jail for a long time. I’m good to go.
Mike Papantonio: If this was just one story, we, we, we’d be reporting it, but this is bigger than one story.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: They turned off 12,000 pages in a West Virginia lawsuit that is OMG kind of material because it shows you that the infrastructure of the Mormon church not only covered it up, but what they would do is they’d make it disappear and not, I mean like you’re talking, they destroyed documents. And the tip line is simply the way, it’s a hook. Get this person into the, to the church, handling the problem and we’re gonna make it go away. This story has just started. A matter of fact, you know, we handle these kinds of abuse cases. We’re getting calls from all over the country, primarily Mormons that are saying, hey, this happened to me too. This is, this is the beginning. And I promise you I’ll bring in any law firm that’s given that church the advice not to report this, I’ll bring ’em in as a necessary party. Part of a RICO if I have to.
Mike Papantonio: The Church of Scientology is desperate to prevent the public from learning about their dirtiest secrets and there are a lot of them. Every time I look at a Scientology story, my first reaction is A, what in the world are we doing giving them a tax break for a cult? It is a cult of crazy people. That’s what we have here. So what do they, what’s their latest thing now?
Farron Cousins: You’ve got Danny Masterson who most people recognize from That ’70s Show, couple years ago was arrested. Multiple women accused him of rape. So he is awaiting charges. But the Church of Scientology says, well, hold up now, because the women who have accused him were also in Scientology. They’re no longer in Scientology. And we have a very strict policy that says, if you accuse anybody of anything, you have to go to our arbitrators.
Mike Papantonio: Mm-hmm.
Farron Cousins: So you cannot sue him in court. You cannot file these criminal charges. You have to go to basically the, the judge of Scientology
Mike Papantonio: Arbitration.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. We want you to come before our judge because that’s what you signed up for. And let me tell you something. If the Supreme Court allows this, it busts open the idea of arbitration. Arbitration is already taking away people’s rights. But if SCOTUS says, yeah, you know, you signed that, we’re gonna allow the, we’re gonna allow the, the Scientology judges to determine what happens here.
Farron Cousins: That, that is absolutely terrifying because as you pointed out, we, we already have other countries, actually Russia led the way on this.
Mike Papantonio: Mm-hmm.
Farron Cousins: Saying we’re not gonna recognize you as an actual religion anymore.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: Because you’re, you’re not legitimate. There’s nothing religious about you. This is, as Russia defined it, this is a cult.
Mike Papantonio: It’s absolutely cult. Well, I mean, let’s call it what it is. You had L. Ron Hubbard, which the guy was, he was pursued all over the world for fraud, wire, wire fraud, every kind of fraud you can imagine. L. Ron Hubbard had to live his life on a ship. That his ship was his headquarters where he signed, where sailed all, all around the world because he was a fraud. And you know what I think is most interesting is the headquarters, the biggest headquarters is Hemet, California. They, you know, if you look at all, why did you go to California? Well, because we thought we could get a lot of people in our cult in California. That seems to be true. As I look at this story, they the, did you see the thing with the e-meter? The, the.
Farron Cousins: I, I’m familiar with those. It’s, it’s.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. The, the e-meter is this electric testing with the, that they bring in people like, Leah Remini, you know, she has the TV show.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: She, she left the cult. She’s the one that’s exposing the cult for all the crazies that are out there. But, but the e-meter is a way that they would, they would put you with an e-meter and you would have an auditor and the auditor tests your skin. And the auditor then makes up ideas of what you’re thinking about. You’re thinking about leaving Scientology. You’re thinking about this. And these people are so impressionable when they’re tested that they walk out of there thinking, oh my God, I have all of these problems. And then if the e-meter doesn’t go well, then they put ’em in the hole. The hole is a place where they, it’s, it’s a place of punishment where they keep ’em there until they come around and be a good Scientologist.
Farron Cousins: Well, you know, people love to compare the, the US government to big brother from 1984. But this, what you’re describing here is literally from 1984.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: Putting people in these little torture chambers until they believe the things that they are supposed to believe. And, and it goes far beyond just this Danny Masterson rape case with the Church of Scientology.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: There’s some great law firms out there that are representing victims, who claim that they were recruited as children, trafficked, basically.
Mike Papantonio: Trafficked. Yeah.
Farron Cousins: And, and forced to work slave labor on some of these, you know, the boats that you’re talking about, getting into engine tanks without any protective gear and scrubbing it at six years old.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. Farron, I had to learn a lot about ’em because we, we, clients would call us one, one in particular, one client called, she had, St. Clearwater, Florida they have a big Scientology organization and she was held captive. Could not leave the building. Her family couldn’t get her out of there. Her lawyers couldn’t get her out of there. Held captive. And you know, the truth is part of being held captive is they take all the person’s assets, too. They tell the person, you may not communicate with anybody who is not part of us, our Scientology organization. That happened to this woman. All of her assets were stolen from her. She was put in this confinement in place right there in St. Petersburg. And what they would do is they, they actually have monitors that follow these people around, even on the grounds, they have locked doors, places they can’t go. They have internet filtering. They have telephone filtering. And so the point is ,who in the hell says, yeah, this is a good idea? Apparently, California. It is the home and this epicenter for the Scientologist. I’m, I’m looking for the case. I, I’m, I’m simply looking for the case to bust these people up in a big way. And I, we may be onto one right now.
