Karin Spaink left this world on May 8, 2026. 

Most of what is being written about her now will rightly emphasize her legal victories against Scientology.

In 1995 the Church of Scientology raided XS4ALL, the Dutch internet provider, seized servers, and sued Karin and twenty other defendants for posting the Fishman Affidavit.

She fought the case for ten years, through appeal after appeal, and in 2005 the Dutch Supreme Court closed the matter in her favor when Scientology withdrew its final appeal days before the ruling.

The Court of Appeal had already found, in 2003, that Scientology was an organization that tries to undermine democracy, and that Karin had every right to quote from its texts in her exposé. That ruling stands. It is one of the cleanest legal defeats Scientology ever suffered anywhere in the world, and
Karin is the reason it exists.

But that is not what I want to write about today.

I want to write about a Dutch journalist with multiple sclerosis who, in November 1995, gave a lecture at an Amsterdam conference called Doors of Perception about something nobody else was talking about yet — what it meant to be part of a community on the internet. She spoke about a Dutch newsgroup called nl.misc, and about how its regulars had, when she was hospitalized that summer with a hemorrhage, sent her flowers and postcards and three of them she had never met came to visit her.

She used that experience to argue something simple and, at the time, strange: that text was enough. That virtual sympathy was real sympathy.

That there was nothing imaginary about the connections people formed in plain text across thousands of miles, because the only test of a person’s truthfulness in any medium is whether their story holds together over time, and that test applied online exactly as it applied in the world.

Then, near the end of the lecture, she explained why she was about to be sued. Scientology had raided XS4ALL two months earlier. A hundred Dutch citizens had put up Fishman Affidavit pages in response, in a coordinated act of mass civil disobedience, and Karin’s was one of them.

She closed the lecture with a sentence I have always loved: “They still believe they are fighting single persons and single institutions. We, on the other hand, know that they are facing a net-community. And I, I am having a real net life.”

Karin’s blog contains her classic essay Doors of Perception. It is short, and it is funny, and it has held up for thirty years. 

Karin was a free-speech absolutist with a sense of humor. A woman in a wheelchair who built one of the first organized online resistances to Scientology and, in doing so, helped invent what we now take for granted as the digital public square.

She wrote for Het Parool from 1992 to 2022 — thirty years of column work. She advised the OSCE on internet freedom. She edited Follow the Money. She criticized New Age writers who told the chronically ill that their diseases were their own fault, and she did it with anger that was earned and prose that did not waste a word. She lived with multiple sclerosis from 1986 until this week. Forty years.

I met Karin once in Amsterdam in the 1990s, during one of my trips there when I was working for Philips. She had a powerful personal presence — the kind that does not depend on volume or stature, but on the unmistakable sense that the person across from you is paying complete attention and means exactly what she says.

I knew of her Scientology work then, though I did not yet know how far it would go or how long she would carry it. What I remember is the directness. Karin did not waste your time and did not waste her own. In a city of cafés and long conversations, she was the rarest kind of presence: someone fully there.

I talked with Karin over the years on Scientology matters, and I felt for her the gratitude that one investigator feels for another who has gone before and made the path passable. I drew inspiration from her work and determination. 

The Fishman Affidavit cases in the United States ended badly for the people who fought them. The Fishman Affidavit case in The Netherlands ended in a precedent that has protected Dutch internet speech for two decades.

Same affidavit, same plaintiff, different outcome — because Karin was on the other side of the courtroom, and because she did not stop, and because the judges in The Hague were prepared to write down what other courts had not been willing to say out loud.

Karin Spaink made it happen on the world stage.

Scientology lost twice in The Netherlands and appealed to the Supreme Court. Days before the ruling, Scientology withdrew the appeal because it knew it would lose to Karin Spaink, and the loss would be permanent.