More on Rick Ross, my emphasis:

During the early 1990s KATHY TONKIN and her three sons -- Jason, Thysen, and Matthew -- as well as three younger children, attended the Life Tabernacle Church, a Seattle, Washington branch of the United Pentecostal Church International (an evangelical Christian faith). Following an upset with a business partner who was also a Life Tabernacle member, Tonkin reversed many of her religious views and began to withdraw from the congregation, encouraging her sons to do the same. Her three sons, Thysen (16) and Matthew (13), and Jason (18), disagreed and insisted on remaining in the church. As a result, Tonkin ejected the two youngest sons from her home. Matthew went to live with his grandmother (who also lived in the Seattle area). Thysen moved in with another family from the church.

Meanwhile, Jason remained and tried to manage some truce between his mother and the church community he loved. Eventually he failed. His mother ejected him as well from the household, and he too went to live with his grandmother.

This dispute sent in motion a far-reaching chain of events.

Tonkin contacted the local Cult Awareness Network "contact person," Shirley Landa, through a local hotline (Landa had been a co-founder of CAN.) and then through Landa came into contact with a deprogrammer. Although no one at CAN had ever heard of the Life Tabernacle Church, the alleged "expert" to whom Tonkin was referred was a self-styled "Bible-based cult" expert, a manifestly hostile person toward conservative Christianity, and a former convicted jewel thief named Rick Ross. (Ross, a vigorous self-promoter and entrepreneur, had played a significant role in poisoning the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearm’s opinion of David Koresh’s Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. Indeed, he well may have inspired in part the BATF’s ill-conceived raid on the group’s rural compound.)

Deprogrammer Ross, with absolutely no formal training in counseling or psychology and who admitted he knew nothing about the Life Tabernacle Church, was heartily endorsed by Landa as successful at getting persons to leave religions. So Tonkin the mother was put in touch with Ross by phone and retained him to deprogram her three sons.

Ross assembled a "security team" of two, the three traveled from Arizona to Seattle, and they locked the two younger boys in their grandmother’s basement. Tonkin and Ross agreed that the young boys should be abducted first because the third son, Jason, was a legal adult, physically large and athletic and made what one of them called "a more complicated legal situation."

After several days both boys were harangued into renouncing their Pentecostal beliefs. Then the deprogrammers went for Jason.

Ross upped his deprogramming fee, he told Tonkin, because of the risk of legal prosecution. He also added "muscle" to the operation in the form of a karate black belt expert. When Jason returned to his grandmother’s home one evening, they were waiting in the house. They jumped him, wrestled him to the ground, and dragged him into a waiting van, its windows covered by towels taped over to hide what went on inside.

Jason kicked violently to get free, but they restrained him effectively: one man held his torso, another his legs, another his head and shoulders. They handcuffed his wrists, tied his ankles with rope, and gagged him from ear to ear with duct tape. He was finally thrown onto his stomach, his hands crushed beneath him while one of the deprogrammers, weighing 300 pounds, sat on his back. Meanwhile, Jason’s back, legs, and upper body were bruised and sore from being dragged across floors, stairs, and a cement patio into the van.

The deprogrammers drove some hours to an ocean-side cottage. There Jason’s ankle restraints were loosened just enough to permit to walk into the isolated house, with one of his captors holding a nylon strap as a "leash" and another with a tight grip on his handcuffs. By now both his hands were numb from the cuffs’ pressure.

First he was led upstairs, taken into a bathroom, and dumped into a shower stall. He could hear them preparing another room where he was eventually taken.

He could see they had made a prison. Thick nylon straps had been riveted in place over windows in a mesh-like pattern to prevent escape. The room had two doors, but each was guarded. As added insurance against escape. they took Jason’s shoes and installed motion detectors in the room.

Initially Jason demanded that he be permitted to leave and asked Ross if he was going to try to change his mind against his religion, Ross responded, "Yeah, that’s what I’m paid to do." Scott threatened with criminal prosecution but was laughed at. Ross bluntly told him, "You’re not going anywhere and if you give me any problems I’m going to handcuff you to the bed frame, and it’s going to be more uncomfortable than the ride over here."

Swell company you've got there, LWM. Do read the whole description of your illiberal friends.

So Melton and etc., as scoiologists, like to have fun examining pop culture. This is a sin?

The real sin, LWM, is Ross, Ted Patrick and others and kidnapping, falsely imprisoning people, and inciting anti-religious bigotry. That is what Rick Ross does. Scientology has its awful side, but so do mainstream religions. If Scientology is happy to accept support from academics as to their *legal* conduct, so they should be. (Not all that Scientology has done has been legal, and they grossly abuse the tool of litigation.)

To repeat: anti-cult animus is old in America, has killed Mormons, Catholics, Jews and various others. Non-lethal severe persecution has also been rampant. Rick Ross carries on that tradition. Does your contrarianism extend so far as to defending that? He's not much of an expert witness anymore, after the courts came their senses and realized false imprisonment in the name of "cults" is still a crime.