Hollywood Reporter: Scientology Anti-Drug Program: Fabricated Court Orders Suggest Attempt to Silence Critics
Nearly a decade after Scientology prompted a high-profile internet protest movement — sparked when the church attempted to remove a damaging YouTube video of member Tom Cruise speaking about the religion — comes the discovery of a new covert campaign to subvert online criticism of the organization’s social work. A series of forged court orders were submitted to Google (and possibly to Yahoo and Bing as well) in 2016 in an attempt to convince the search giant to expunge links to written objections to Scientology’s controversial anti-drug program Narconon. The U.S. Department of Justice declined to comment when asked whether it is investigating the issue, which involves the bogus signatures of judges from multiple states…
The fabricated court orders were brought to THR’s attention by Eugene Volokh, a noted UCLA legal scholar who specializes in free speech and religious freedom law. He discovered them while researching online content removal requests in a digital Harvard archive of takedown legal notices, provided in part by Google.
Murky and unknown agents appear to be doing something illegal once again. This time the allegation is that an unnamed party, or parties, is forging court orders in an attempt to clean up the toxic reputation of Narconon by getting Google and other search engines to deindex search results that are critical of the controversial “drug treatment” program. David Miscavige is the licensor of Narconon. Has he been made aware of this activity?
This is great investigative work on the part of UCLA’s Dr. Eugene Volokh and excellent reporting by the Hollywood Reporter.
Examples of the Narconon forgeries provided to me by Dr. Volokh:
