When Chrissie Carnell Bixler and several other women joined the Church of Scientology they could not have reasonably been expected to foresee the possibility of their being drugged and raped by a male celebrity Scientologist.

Nor could these women have reasonably foreseen the possibility of the Church viciously retaliating against them when they wanted to report being raped and assaulted to the Los Angeles Police Department. The women never expected that Scientology, which promotes itself as “the most ethical group on the planet” would protect their rapist and act to cover up his crimes.

And yet this is exactly what several women have said Scientology celebrity Danny Masterson and the Church of Scientology did to them. We believe the women — and so did the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office. This is why Scientologist Danny Masterson was arrested and now stands charged with three felony counts of forcible rape. If convicted, Masterson is looking at a sentence of 45-to-life.

Masterson is free on a $3.3 million dollar bond. His criminal defense attorney Thomas Mesereau is expected to enter a not guilty plea on Masterson’s behalf later this month at his arraignment. Masterson is not expected to appear. The actor has filed the necessary papers to not appear at matters related to his criminal trial except when ordered to do so by the court.

The criminal case  against Danny Masterson is explosive and alleges multiple sexual assaults in which Masterson drugged his victims and used a handgun to threaten one of his victims. The Church of Scientology and its leader David Miscavige are implicated for their alleged role in covering up Masterson’s rapes and pressuring his victims to not report their rapes to the LAPD.

Prior to the criminal charges being filed in 2019, former Scientologist Chrissie Carnell Bixler and  other “Jane Doe” plaintiffs filed a civil lawsuit against Masterson in Los Angeles Superior Court (Case 19STCV29458 – Bixler et al v. Church of Scientology et al).

The Bixler lawsuit alleges that Masterson, Scientlology, and its agents engaged in witness tampering; wiretapping; harassment; invasion of privacy; defamation, and other serious charges in order to harass and intimidate the women into dropping their lawsuit.

The Church of Scientology responded to the lawsuit by seeking to compel Masterson’s victims into a sham proceeding it calls “religious arbitration.” Scientology’s arbitration is the Cult’s opportunity for a second bite at Fair Game in which it may subject its already traumatized victims to a capracious and demented star chamber ruled over by three biased Scientology arbitrators.

The women signed the required four basic unsconsciousable contracts of adhesion when they first became members of the Church of Scientology. One of these contracts calls for religious arbitration if any disputes arise. The named defendants Church of Scientology and the Religious Technology Center have asserted these contracts and filed a motion to compel the plaintiffs into Scientology’s sham arbitration.

There is no need to make a prediction here because we already know the outcome of the arbitration: The women will lose and Scientology will win. The arbitration has been predetermined and can have no other outcome under Scientology’s rules: The fix is in. The arbitration will be a fraudulent affair as are most things in the Church of Scientology.

The court in Knepp v. Credit Acceptance Corp on what arbitration has become in America:

When introduced as a method to control soil erosion, kudzu’ was hailed as an asset to agriculture, but it has become a creeping monster. Arbitration was innocuous when limited to negotiated commercial contracts, but it developed sinister characteristics when it became ubiquitous. — Knepp v. Credit Acceptance Corp:  229 B.R. 821, 828 (Bankr. N.D. Ala. 1999)

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Steven Kleifield’s Bizarre Ruling

                Judge Steven Kleifield

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Steven Kleifield’s issued a bizzare ruling last week in which he ordered Chrissie Carnell Bixler and the Jane Doe plaintiffs suing Scientologist Danny Masterson to submit to arbitration conducted by Scientology arbitrators.

We call Judge Kleifield’s ruling bizarre because Danny Masterson, a defendant in the lawsuit, has been charged with three felony counts of forcible rape by the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office. In the criminal case, the women suing Masterson in civil court were granted a restraining order against Masterson from the Los Angeles Criminal Court.

Judge Kleifield took no judicial cognizance of the restraining order which, in part, ordered defendant Masterson, an avid gun enthusiast, to surrender all of his firearms to the court. Instead, Kleifield has allowed Danny Masterson to participate in the arbitration. We consider Judge Kleifield’s failure to protect the plaintiffs and take notice of the restraing order to be gross negligence on his part.

Given the criminal charges against Danny Masterson, a Scientology arbitration would have to function as a pseudo-criminal trial in order to “arbitrate” multiple felony rape charges that are inextricably linked to the civil lawsuit which alleges stalking in violation of Civ. Code § 1708.7, (2) physical invasion of privacy in violation of Civ. Code § 1708.8, (3) constructive invasion of privacy in violation of Civ. Code § 1708.8, (4) intentional infliction of emotional distress, and (5) loss of consortium.

This places the Church of Scientology into wholly uncharted territory in which it expects what? Public Scientologists without any legal training to arbitrate such serious legal matters under the direction of its equally inexperienced and so-called International Justice Chief Mike Ellis?

Scientology’s Justice Chief Mike Ellis did not complete high school. He does not have a law degree. He has no certification or formal training as an arbitrator. All these Scientologists know, and all they have been taught, is that Suppressive Persons (SP’s) — and Masterson’s victims are classed as SP’s by Scientology — are not entitled to the protections of Scientology’s justice procedures. L. Ron Hubbard wrote:

Suppressive persons or groups relinquish their rights as Scientologists by their very actions and may not receive the benefits of the Codes of the Church. — HCO POLICY LETTER OF 23 DECEMBER 1965RB, Revised 8 January 1991. SUPPRESSIVE ACTS,
SUPPRESSION OF SCIENTOLOGY AND SCIENTOLOGISTS

By Hubbard’s own decree, SP’s “may not receive the benefits of the Codes of the Church.” This includes the Justice Codes of the Church. Therefore, Scientology arbitrators must act in an inherently unjust manner towards the women Judge Kleifield ordered into arbitration.

Hubbard wrote that it was a suppressive act to take legal action against a Scientologist in civil or criminal court:

Delivering up the person of a Scientologist without justifiable defense or lawful protest to the demands of civil or criminal law. — op cit

The Scientology arbitrators will act according to Hubbard’s words and treat the women without any sense of justice or fairness. This, then, is the stupidity of Judge Kleifield: He has thrown the women  into what is simply another version of Scientology Fair Game — and he did so while utterly ignoring Scientology’s contracts of adhesion and unconscionability.

The US Federal Arbitration Act (FAA)

In America, the FAA is the secular analog of religious protections in which numerous and often outrageous protections are granted to corporations and busineses. As Katherine V.W. Stone and Alexander J.S. Colvin wrote in their 2015 paper The Arbitration Epidemic:

By delegating dispute resolution to arbitration, the Court now permits corporations to write the rules that will govern their relationships with their workers and customers and design the procedures used to interpret and apply those rules when disputes arise. Moreover, the Court permits corporations to couple mandatory arbitration with a ban on class actions, thereby preventing consumers or employees from joining together to challenge systemic corporate wrongdoing. As one judge opined, these trends give corporations a “get out of jail free” card for all potential transgressions. These trends are undermining decades of progress in consumer and labor rights.

Stone and Colvin’s description of arbitration sounds very much like the description of church goverance in America, i.e. it is a law unto itself and is virtually untouchable by the courts.

In his paper Litigating Religion, Michael A. Helfand observes the way in which secular arbitration morphed into an essentially unkillable legal monster called religious arbitration:

Under public law, the church autonomy doctrine affords deference to internal religious adjudication by church courts, preventing U.S. courts from intervening in matters of religious “discipline, or of faith, or ecclesiastical rule, custom, or law.”

Similarly, when fashioned as arbitration awards, private law insulates the decisions rendered by religious arbitration panels from judicial review since “[a] court cannot examine the merits of an arbitration award and substitute its judgment for that of the arbitrator simply because it believes its interpretation would be the better one.”

In these two ways, both public law and private law provide alternative forums for parties to litigate religion, insulating religious adjudication from judicial review of the merits…

To be sure, the relationship between religious tribunals and U.S. courts is more than an institutional curiosity; the existence of such alternative forums for litigating religion has long factored into Supreme Court decisions addressing the non-justiciability of religious questions under the Establishment Clause.

In fact, in its initial iterations of the church autonomy doctrine, the Supreme Court conditioned judicial abstention from cases turning on religious doctrine or practice on the existence of “church judicatories” already tasked with resolution of the dispute:

[W]henever the questions of discipline, or of faith, or ecclesiastical rule, custom, or law have been decided by the highest of these church judicatories to which the matter has been carried, the legal tribunals must accept such decisions as final, and as binding on them, in their application to the case before them.

In this way, the Establishment Clause has served as a deference principle – and not simply as a principle of judicial abstention – where the Court’s willingness to dismiss such cases has been predicated on the importance of shuttling the litigation of religion to church courts created by the given religious community.

The union of Scientology and the US Federal Arbitration Act has become a marriage made in hell. The decisions of secular arbitration are almost always accepted by courts and are practically impossible to appeal. Scientology has that in its favor.

And even if a decision is made by Scientology’s arbitrators that is blantantly outrageous, Scientology can fall back on US law in which courts cannot challenge religious tribunals no matter how arbitrary, cruel, and capricious they may be. From UCLA law lecturer Jeff Dasteel:

The Supreme Court made clear that courts must accept the decisions of religious tribunals even if they are arbitrary:

We have concluded that, whether or not there is room for “marginal civil court review” under the narrow rubrics of “fraud” or “collusion” when church tribunals act in bad faith for secular purposes, no “arbitrariness” exception — in the sense of an inquiry whether the decisions of the highest ecclesiastical tribunal of a hierarchical church complied with church laws and regulations — is consistent with the constitutional mandate that civil courts are bound to accept the decisions of the highest judicatories of a religious organization of hierarchical polity on matters of discipline, faith, internal organization, or ecclesiastical rule, custom, or law.

The Supreme Court reasoned “it is the essence of religious faith that ecclesiastical decisions are reached and are to be accepted as matters of faith, whether or not rational or measurable by objective criteria. Constitutional concepts of due process, involving secular notions of ‘fundamental fairness’ or impermissible objectives, are therefore hardly relevant to such matters of ecclesiastical cognizance.” cite: Milivojevich, 426 U.S. at 713.

Scientology’s paranoia is seen by its having shielded itself behind the dual layers of secular arbitration law and religious protections. This allows the Scientology Cult to make a complete farce of arbitration and subject its victims to a kangaroo court in which they may not have a lawyer present, no recordings may be made, and the rules of secular courts do not have to be used.

Even after people have escaped or resigned from Scientology, the Cult still wants to use whatever means it can to crucify them. Hatred and revenge is at the core of the Church of Scientology. Hence, arbitration is just another form of Fair Game Scientology uses to escape from accountability and justice for its own actions while using the procedure to subject its victims to a psychologically brutal travesty of justice.

Religious Protections + Federal Arbitration Law = A grave injustice in which religious groups strip individual members of every possible legal and civil right they have. Religions in America have increasingly turned to arbitration to butress their already existing religious protections.

We consider that the answer in the Danny Masterson case is for Masterson to be convicted in a criminal trial and sentenced to 45-to-life for multiple forced rapes. A conviction tells the Church of Scientology that all of its protections can be annihilated by criminal charges and by convictions in criminal courts.

The prosecution has an exceedingly strong case against criminal defendant Danny Masterson. We covered this in a previous post:  Court Reporting: Our Notes on Scientologist Danny Masterson’s Court Hearing of October 19, 2020.

Based upon the decades of historical evidence, there has never been any pushback from the Church of Scientology against its members that commit crimes. If anything, Scientology takes a cut of the proceeds of financial crimes and covers up and protects the rapists and child molesters in its membership.

However, this is all coming to an end. We predict that 2021 will be an exceptionally bad year for the Church of Scientology because its own members have committed criminal acts for which there is no protection against the law.

Criminal trials and sentencing for several Scientologists are calendared for 2021. Tony Ortega assiduously tracks these dates at The Underground Bunker:

Full Court Press: What we’re watching at the Underground Bunker

Criminal prosecutions:
— Danny Masterson charged for raping three women: Masterson’s demurrer denied Oct 19, arraignment delayed to Jan 6.

— Jay and Jeff Spina, Medicare fraud: Jay’s sentencing delayed for ‘Fatico’ hearing on Jan 19.
— Hanan and Rizza Islam and other family members, Medi-Cal fraud: Next pretrial conference set for Jan 12 in Los Angeles

Civil litigation:
— Luis and Rocio Garcia v. Scientology: Oral arguments were heard on July 30 at the Eleventh Circuit
— Valerie Haney v. Scientology: Forced to ‘religious arbitration.’ Petition for writ of mandate denied Oct 22 by Cal 2nd Appellate District. Petition for review by state supreme court denied Dec 11.
— Chrissie Bixler et al. v. Scientology and Danny Masterson: Dec 30, Judge Kleifield granted Scientology’s motions to compel arbitration; Jan 29, Masterson’s request to stay discovery pending the criminal case
— Matt and Kathy Feschbach tax debt: Eleventh Circuit ruled on Sept 9 that Feshbachs can’t discharge IRS debt in bankruptcy. Nov 18: Feshbachs indicated they will enter into consent judgment to pay the debt.
— Brian Statler Sr v. City of Inglewood: Second amended complaint filed, trial set for Nov 9, 2021.

Judge Kleifield’s ruling to compel arbitration in Bixler et al v. Church of Scientology et al:

Jeff Dasteel’s paper Religious Arbitration Agreements in Contracts of Adhesion. Dasteel’s paper alludes to the Garcia case.