Is Scientology breaking the law?

Allegations of fraud by Scientology

Excerpted from http://www.scientology-lies.com/re.cgi?http://www.xs4all.nl/~kspaink/mpoulter/sods/cjl.html . Please see that page for the full text.

Emphasis added in red . Editorial comments, when added, are in purple .

An ex-Scientologist describes his involvement in Scientology as a teenager

Back in 1975, I spent about six months in Scientology.

The first problem I had was basically staying awake while studying for 8-12 hours. I would start to get sleepy, and naturally yawn a few times until one of the instructors would notice, say something about a misunderstood word, and toss a dictionary my way. Eventually I became a little annoyed with this women's behavior and pointed out that yawning was a natural physiological reaction due to lack of circulation while sitting in a room for hours on end. The instructor then indicated that I needed word auditing so that I could better grasp the English language and understand the course material. I pointed out that my reading ability was tested at the level of a college sophomore (I was a high school junior at the time). But she pulled rank on me, and had me kicked out of class and enrolled into a word auditing session.

The kicker came when the sales department (or whatever they called it) indicated that the word auditing was going to cost an extra $1500.00 (the person performing the auditing was a student himself, who paid for a word auditing course, and was basically doing this for free to become a word auditor). I went to talk to Peter, my appointed snake-oil salesman, and protested that I was here for Dianetic training, not word auditing, and that I was under the impression that the auditing was free. He laughed and remarked that "nothing was free in Scientology." I then indicated that I was tricked, and I wanted out entirely, and a refund to boot (refunds were part of the contract at the time). He relented and let me back into the Dianetic classes where I once again spent long hours, reading, yawning, and looking up words.

This page was last updated on May 8, 1999.