Memorandum

Memorandum

Subject: Brainwashing Rob Jr.

Date:

According to the case, The parents allege that Rob Jr. was tricked into attending some meetings. One night about a year ago, Rob Jr. was getting ready to return home after one of their youth meetings. The organizer of the youth retreat, Tom Marsden, allegedly made numerous excuses for keeping Rob there. It reached a pinnacle when Tom told Rob Jr., "If you leave, you will be thrown into the eternal fires of Hell, and you will not be allowed back." Rob Jr. acquiesced and remained. The next day Tom had Rob Jr. write a letter to his parents telling them that he was planning to stay with the Church, as they were his "new" family. Rob Jr. was also told to demand money from his parents to cover his expenses.

Rob Jr. remained with the church for a period of roughly six months. Rob Sr. and Bunny arranged to meet with Rob Jr. to give him his money for that month and pulled him into the car and brought him home. They had to watch him carefully for about two weeks, but he finally came out of the "brainwashing."

There have been hundreds of court cases involving controversial new religions over the past several decades, since they came into prominence in the late 1960s (Richardson, 1995b; Bromley and Robbins, 1993). Many of the cases involved some claim that participation in such groups was coerced and destructive. The evidentiary theory is sometimes referred to as "brainwashing" or "mind control," popularized notions sometimes associated with what some have claimed is a new psychological syndrome - "destructive cultism" (Shapiro, 1977; Clark, 1978). Supposedly "cult" recruiters use this powerful psychotechnology to recruit unsuspecting youth, who then evidence "destructive cultism" in their behaviors (but see Richardson and Kilbourne, 1983 and Richardson, 1993).

Early in the court cases involving such ideas there was a willingness to accept the claims that brainwashing and mind control were being used, sometimes with apparent quite dramatic effects. Such evidence seemed relevant to cases involving the "cult problem," and it was often offered by a professional mental health specialist such as a psychologist of psychiatrist, usually with little effective rebuttal testimony http://www.cesnur.org/testi/daubert.htm - Anchor-6296.

Initially, such evidence was used to undergird requests for conservatorships, to assist in obtaining court orders sanctioning "deprogramming" of participants (Anthony and Robbins, 1995). Later, accusations of "brainwashing" and mind control" supported civil action claims of intentional infliction of emotional distress or false imprisonment. And, some deprogrammers who were charged with kidnapping in criminal actions or with false imprisonment in civil actions used brainwashing notions to underpin their "necessity" defenses (Anthony, 1990; Richardson, 1995) http://www.cesnur.org/testi/daubert.htm - Anchor-37516. After about two decades of such brainwashing based claims and defenses generally being accepted, such evidence became more problematic, as those being negatively affected by the acceptance of such evidence tried to rebut it, or even have it disallowed completely (Anthony and Robbins, 1995).

This previous history of the use of brainwashing based testimony was developed under ...