1. I am over the age of 18 and am a resident of Cape Town, South Africa. I have personal knowledge of the facts stated in this declaration. As to any statements which I have included in this declaration which are based upon information and belief, I firmly believe such statements to be true, and I have no reason to believe otherwise. If I were to be called as a witness, I would be competent, willing and able to testify to what I state herein without reservation.
2. I was involved in the Church of Scientology from approximately March 1990, to August 1994. During this time I participated in a number of religious courses in Scientology in Cape Town. I was briefly a staff member of the Church of Scientology in Cape Town, but I never held any corporate position with any Scientology Church.
3. On August 21, 1995, Robert Penny asked me to become a member of the board of directors of an organization named FACTNet, and I agreed before I knew very much about the organization itself. My purpose in joining was to research and promote dialogue in the field of psychological, coercive tactics in all areas of life. However, I resigned on October 10, 1995 after I had discovered the direction FACTNet was heading, which was toward inflaming hatred, which could lead to violence against the Church of Scientology.
4. For the past five years, I have worked as a research librarian at the University of Cape Town. I have access to the Internet through the University computers and, in or about July 1994, while I was still a Scientologist, I started participating in discussions on a Usenet newsgroup called "alt.religion.scientology" (a.r.s), which is a newsgroup consisting mainly of critics of the Church of Scientology. Many of the critics who are posting on a.r.s are apostates who were expelled from the Church of Scientology many years ago. I read the postings of these apostates and in many cases I communicated with them on a one-on-one basis through e-mail. After reading many of these postings, I decided to leave the Church.
5. Based on my personal contact with the individuals I encountered on a.r.s., I can state that many of them are obsessed with, and spend a lot of their time disseminating falsehoods about, Scientology. They have little or no regard for the truth; they just want to portray Scientology in the most derogatory light possible. Other than myself, most of the apostates of the Church of Scientology who are posting on a.r.s. have been out of the Church for many years, in some cases decades, and they are devoid of any current first hand factual information. Thus, nearly all the information posted about the Church on this newsgroup by these people is stale, outdated and distorted. It consists largely of rumor, innuendo, and hate-filled accusations against the Church and Scientologists.
6. When I first began reading the postings of these former Scientologists on a.r.s. I questioned the truthfulness of what I was reading as it did not match my personal experiences and what I had seen with my own eyes. At that time, however, I was not examining the motives of individuals who were making the negative statements. After weeks and weeks of this, I eventually became upset and disillusioned with the Church of Scientology over what I had read on a.r.s. I even began to repeat some of these allegations myself even though I had no reason to believe they were true and I certainly had no experiences matching these claimed by other apostates.
7. On approximately August 18, 1995 I began to communicate with an individual named Bob Penny through e-mail. Penny lives in Colorado in the United States and is a member of the board of FACTNet. I originally started communicating with him after he read my postings on the a.r.s. newsgroup on the Internet, and he contacted me via e-mail. On August 21, 1995, he asked me to become a member of the board of directors of FACTNet. I accepted.
8. I have since come to realize that FACTNet's only real purpose is to destroy Scientology. The main active members of FACTNet are Lawrence Wollersheim, Bob Penny, and Arnie Lerma. There are also FACTNet volunteers Vaughn and Stacy Young, Joe Harrington and Jeff Jacobsen. All the members and volunteers mentioned above (except for Jeff who was not a Scientologist) are apostates who have been out of the Church of Scientology for many years and thus do not really know what is happening in it. As will be covered more fully later on, Wollersheim controls FACTNet and uses others to do his bidding. He is also the only person to have made any money from FACTNet.
9. I resigned my position as a FACTNet board member on October 10, 1995, after realizing that the hatred being spread on the Internet was progressing to the level of physical violence directed toward the Church of Scientology and I could not in good conscience be a part of that.
10. For example, one a.r.s. poster by the name of "Henry" -- whose real name is Rob Clark -- is being investigated by the police over a posting in which he advocated bombing Churches of Scientology. I strongly disagree with physical violence or even the threat of physical violence. "Henry" is among the types of individuals that FACTNet has been attracting as followers and supporters, practically to the exclusion of everyone else.
11. Another example of the impact of violence on FACTNet, and vice versa, is the experience I had with Malcolm Nothling, an acquaintance of mine from Cape Town. Nothling is a litigant against the Church of Scientology who is also facing criminal charges of attempted murder involving a shooting incident that occurred in 1994.
12. During our conversations, Nothling made it clear that he was working with Gerald Armstrong, who was a former president of FACTNet, and with Lawrence Wollersheim, the real person in charge of FACTNet, to obtain negative information against the Church. Nothling said that both Armstrong and Wollersheim planned to testify against the Church when Nothling's case came to trial. I have first hand knowledge that Wollersheim sent documents to Nothling for use in the case as part of FACTNet giving Nothling support.
13. Through the Internet, I learned that Armstrong was now under a permanent injunction in the United States and had been ordered to pay the Church $300,000 for breach of contract and could no longer testify for Nothling in his case.
14. On October 9th, 1995, Nothling informed me that he had received a telephone call in Johannesburg. He stated that the caller was male and spoke with a Zimbabwean accent. The caller said that based on the results of the hearing in the Armstrong case in the United States, a Scientology Church (he did not specify which Church) was going to be bombed within the next ten days. Nothling told me that the caller asked Nothling if he wished to help with the planning of the operation. Nothling stated that the caller planned to hire a mercenary to do the bombing of the Church.
15. Nothling said that he took the caller seriously. I told him that he should contact the police but he did not want to as they would just think that he was a madman. During the conversation Nothling began berating me for being too soft. He said that I should relay the information about the bomb threat to the Internet which I did. At this point I felt that the situation was out of control and violence could occur and so did not want to have anything to do with the consequences of what might happen. There was a lot of hate being whipped up against Scientology by the inflammatory postings on the Internet by FACTNet. This was creating an atmosphere in which violence could occur and in some cases was being urged (such as in the bomb threats against the Church). This, along with the fact that FACTNet was supporting Nothling, with whom I no longer wished to be associated, compelled me to resign my position on the board.
16. After I resigned from FACTNet, I received a message from Lawrence Wollersheim dated October 11, 1995. Wollersheim made it clear that he wanted to distance FACTNet from Malcolm Nothling because of Nothling's paramilitary friends. Since FACTNet had supported Nothling from the beginning in a suit which he had filed against the Church of Scientology and vice versa, Wollersheim's attempt at distancing FACTNet from Nothling was purely cosmetic.
17. Although FACTNet purports to be an "educational, non-profit" organization, I learned through my association with FACTNet that their only activity is to attack Scientology through litigation and the spreading of inflammatory information about the Church of Scientology through a computerized bulletin board service and through the Internet.
18. FACTNet occasionally makes an effort to claim that they concern themselves with educating the public about mind control groups, but as a member of the Board of Directors of FACTNet I can honestly state that more than 99% of what FACTNet does involves attacking the Church of Scientology in an effort to destroy it. On August 17, 1995, I was sent an e-mail from Bob Penny which included a copy of a description of the activities of FACTNet which were submitted to the IRS when FACTNet applied for Tax exemption and to the various insurance companies to which FACTNet applied for insurance coverage. In this e-mail, Penny told me that there were "problems" with what was written in the statement and that it had been written by Lawrence Wollersheim. One of the "problems" was that FACTNet is engaged exclusively in attacking Scientology, which I know first hand from my time as a member of the board. What FACTNet is doing is vilifying the Church on the Internet and advocating the destruction of its trade secrets and copyrights. Being a board member I was in close touch with Wollersheim, Penny and others involved with FACTNet and our whole work centered on implementing ways in which to attack the Church of Scientology or work on raising funds ostensibly to cover the costs of the lawsuit brought by the Church for copyright infringement.
19. Wollersheim bought an insurance policy for FACTNet about a year ago for coverage of up to a million dollars. I became aware of this plan through my e-mail communication with him and other members of FACTNet. I learned from Wollersheim that he procured the coverage because he was expecting to, and hoping to, get sued. Based on the information Wollersheim disclosed, such as his copying and dissemination of the Fishman declaration with the Church's copyrighted upper level materials (which are considered trade secrets and are religious scriptures only available to parishioners who have advanced their spiritual training to a certain point) it is apparent that Wollersheim had been planning to get sued from the beginning and that his efforts to get an insurance carrier were part of the plan to fund litigation with the Church and make money on the side by requesting funds from the members. Insurance funding also means that funding would be available for Scientology "litigation consultants" such as Vaughn Young, who is a FACTNet volunteer insider. I also have knowledge through e-mail sent to me or through a.r.s. postings that FACTNet raised money supposedly for its litigation with the Church of Scientology while at the same time it had an insurance policy which specifically covered the litigation. In one posting to a.r.s. dated September 18, 1995, Wollersheim solicited donations to FACTNet saying that he needed another $15,000 by September 31, 1995, part of which was for the legal costs related to the raid. This appeared strange to me knowing that he already had insurance paying his legal costs.
20. As a FACTNet director, I attempted to get copies of the balance sheets, any audits, or other financial information on FACTNet to satisfy myself that everything was above board with the organization. I had read information posted on a.r.s, suggesting that Larry Wollersheim was using FACTNet for his own personal financial benefit and that the whole organization was set up as a scam. I realized that I had dived into this organization without knowing anything about their finances. In trying to get the financial information about FACTNet, I spoke with Wollersheim and pointed out to him that there were allegations that FACTNet is a scam and I suggested that FACTNet publish a financial statement. Nothing ever came of this. I never was given any financial documents.
21. I began to get e-mail from people who had contributed large amounts of money to FACTNet and I became more concerned about what was happening with the funds. One contributor to FACTNet, by the name of Taneli Huuskonen sent me an e-mail message on September 20, 1995, stating that she had sent $4,500 to FACTNet. She asked that $2,000 of this be transferred to Dennis Erhlich personally, to whom Taneli had sent some other smaller checks. Dennis Erlich is known to me from the Internet. He had posted "upper level" copyrighted materials on the Internet and continued to do so after repeated warnings from the Church of Scientology's attorney. Erlich was then sued and a raid was carried out on his premises to retrieve the materials he had been duplicating.
22. Another contributor to FACTNet, a person by the name of Brent Stone, sent me an e-mail on September 21, 1995, stating that he was getting really worried because he had sent checks of $200 and $1OO to FACTNet and had sent another online contribution of $700 with no response back from FACTNet. He pointed out that this was not an insignificant amount of money and wanted to get confirmation that it had been received. As I could not get access to the FACTNet financial records, which were under Wollersheim's control, I could not give Mr. Stone any information.
23. Wollersheim avoided my questions for two weeks. Eventually he came up with the excuse that the financial records were taken in the raid on FACTNet, At that time I thought that something funny was going on as it did not seem realistic that no back up had been made of the financial records. I never did get any of this financial data from FACTNet even though I was a member of the board. I could never verify how much money Wollersheim is making from FACTNet. I was told that Jan Merrill, the Treasurer for FACTNet, is having to start from scratch with the records. Because of the way I was being put off about getting accurate financial information, I believe that something is wrong with how the money collected by FACTNet is being handled and where it goes.
24. During the time that I was a member of the FACTNet board, I was informed by a FACTNet insider by the name of Joe Harrington that he had founded "an independent church" in November 1994, called the United Free Zone Fellowship (UFZF). I knew that Harrington was considered by Wollersheim to be one Of the trusted FACTNet volunteers.
25. The purpose of forming UFZF was two-fold: (1) to obtain a legal advantage under United States law and (2) to set up a Church to take advantage of and invalidate the Church's copyrighted materials.
26. Harrington thought that the copyright infringements and trade secret violations committed by various defendants against RTC needed to be addressed as if they were exercises of religious expression of individuals leaving the Church of Scientology. He acted to set up a separate church which was not a church at all. It had no parishioners, no assets, and only a few ministers who were ordained for show, just to position the litigation as a church v. church to defeat trade secret and copyright claims.
27. I also learned that Harrington had ordained Arnie Lerma, and Dennis Erlich, both of whom were later sued by the Church of Scientology for copyright and trade secret violations. As Harrington set his phony church up as a means of gaining use of the trade secrets and copyrighted materials of the Church of Scientology in the future, this was clearly a means of trying to circumvent the copyright laws of the United States.
28. I realized that the UFZF had become part of the overall plans of Wollersheim and FACTNet to destroy the trade secrets and copyrights of the Church when I was sent an e-mail message from Wollersheim on October 11, 1995. In this message to FACTNet insiders, Wollersheim instructed us to brief members of the free zone about the jeopardy that the trade secrets and copyrights were in after the first ruling in Denver Federal Court. Wollersheim instructed us to give out information to the free zoners as to how beneficial it would be to them to have all the restrictions removed from the usage of the trade secret and copyrighted materials. He said to "start people thinking about the new version of Scientology."
29. Through my association with FACTNet, I also learned that two of the members of the board were closely linked to well known hate groups. One board member, Arnie Lerma, sent me an e-mail message on September 4, 1995, in which he stated that he had spoken at the 40th anniversary convention of Liberty Lobby. He went on to tell me that he did not want us (FACTNet) to promote his relationship with Liberty Lobby's Willis Carto. He explained that Willis Carto and the "patriot" movement in the United States have given FACTNet their full support. At the time I did not understand why he did not wish to have this connection promoted but I have since learned that Liberty Lobby is a right wing extremist organization which is one of the most active anti-semitic organizations in the United States and Willis Carto, the head of Liberty Lobby, has been said by the Anti-Defamation League to be the most important anti-semite in the United States. Carto is known as the most powerful figure in the movement which says that the Holocaust did not exist and he finances a number of anti-semitic and neo-NAZI organizations. The same type of extremist intolerance is evident in the anti-Scientology activities of FACTNet.
30. Through my dealings with Lawrence Wollersheim and Arnie Lerma, it has become very clear to me that their true intention is to destroy Scientology and that FACTNet was set up for this purpose. The distribution of Scientology's copyrighted and trade secret materials on the Internet is a key element of their plan. Wollersheim's and Lerma's rationale as they have communicated to me is that if people see these upper level materials posted on the Internet, then they will not be willing to pay the donation fees to the Church for these materials and it will deprive the Church of its rights to the materials for those who do want to honestly study the upper level religious scriptures.
31. An example of FACTNet's furtherance of this plan was the posting by Arnie Lerma of a declaration by Steven Fishman, which attacked the Church's upper level materials, on the Internet on August 1, 1995. Lerma was subsequently sued by the Church for copyright infringement and trade secret misappropriation. On August 1, 1995, FACTNet's systems operator, Bob Penny, posted the following statement on the Internet for Lawrence Wollersheim:
"The full Board of Directors of FACTNet stands behind its fellow Board member, Arnie Lerma, who acted in accordance with our organizational purposes in distributing the legally obtained court record called the Fishman affidavit."32. I am aware, based on the e-mail I've had with Arnie Lerma, that Lerma was trying to figure out how to post the upper level materials in a way that would get around it being a copyright violation and Lerma acknowledged that he was aware these materials are confidential and that they are copyrighted."I estimate that FACTNet and a corps of emergency volunteers needs to immediately begin putting up 100- 1000 times more Fishman affidavit type public records on Scientology into world wide distribution on the Internet."
33. Although Wollersheim had gotten Lerma to distribute the Fishman declaration with the upper level materials attached, Lerma was also personally intent on posting the upper level materials and he told me that it was part of his agenda to go after the Church of Scientology.
34. Another example of FACTNet's true agenda was made clear in an e-mail sent to me by Wollersheim on October 11, 1995, in which he stated that the Church of Scientology was going to be forced to pay a very high price for the court order they had obtained ordering the seizure of the FACTNet materials containing copyright violations. That high price, according to Wollersheim was that he would see to it the Church was going to lose all trade secret and copyright protection for Church's upper level materials.
35. As part of his plan to destroy the trade secret and copyright protection of the Church's materials, Wollersheim concocted a scheme of creating negative publicity for the Church on the Internet by having several FACTNet supporters do postings falsely promoting the line that Scientology is anti-Christian or is linked to black magic. He communicated this plan to me in e-mail messages and told me that he wanted to keep the Church busy defending these false allegations so that they could not properly defend themselves on the copyright and trade secret issue. He instructed me to coordinate a FACTNet volunteer team to promote dialog around the Fishman documents, linking them to a occultism, black magic and Nazism. I did this, and Joe Harrington and Vaughn Young participated. I stopped doing it when I became aware that those were false and unfair links designed only to inflame hatred against Scientology.
36. In approximately February 1995, Wollersheim had sold several CDs containing a copy of his FACTNet computerized archive. One of the copies of the FACTNet archive in CDs was sold to Malcolm Nothling who told me that he had paid Wollersheim 300 rand for it. I was told by Wollersheim that another copy had been sold to someone in Germany.
37. On August 1, 1995, prior to my becoming a member of the FACTNet board, Lerma sent me by e-mail a copy of the Fishman declaration with copies of the confidential "upper level" Church scriptures attached. He had received an e-mail from Wollersheim telling him to e-mail a copy of the Fishman declaration to me for me to give to Malcolm Nothling. Lerma added the Fishman declaration with the upper level materials to the e-mail and sent the package to me. Wollersheim stated that he wanted Nothling to use the Fishman declaration in his civil suit against the Church. I did this at Wollersheim's request and later deleted the declaration and e-mail from my computer to avoid getting caught for copyright violations.
38. On about August 1, 1995, Lerma posted the Fishman declarations with the Church's upper level documents attached. Following this, Lerma and Wollersheim were sued by the Church and their premises raided pursuant to court order to seize the copyrighted materials which they had been duplicating.
39. Providing Nothling with confidential Church materials for exposure in his civil suit against the Church is a typical example of Wollersheim using FACTNet as a vehicle to attempt to destroy trade secrets and copyrights of the Church. It is also typical of Wollersheim to get others to do the actual copying and distribution of these materials, while he remains in the background, the way he did with Nothling and Lerma.
4O. On August 23, 1995, following the court-ordered seizure of Church copyrighted materials which had been in the possession of Wollersheim and Penny in Colorado, I posted a press release by FACTNet on the Internet which was a plea for funds to help FACTNet. The press release was not written by me but was e-mailed to me by Penny before the seizure, with the request that I side-check it. After the raid I went ahead and posted it to the Internet on FACTNet's behalf. The press release included the following statements:
"If you have a credit card handy, FACTNet is set up to receive your tax-deductible donation quickly and SECURELY."41. I have never been informed as to how much money was received by FACTNet in response to this press release, nor have I seen any evidence that FACTNet has an "Early Warning System." However it is my understanding that the intent of the above statement was to (a) solicit funds to pay for the legal costs to defend FACTNet on the copyright action; and (b) encourage Internet posters to continue posting the Church's upper level materials as they could be secure in knowing that they would be "warned" by the "Early Warning System" if there were plans to bring suit against them for violating the Church's copyrights and violating the copyright laws of their respective countries, although I have no idea how FACTNet would have any way of knowing what the Church might do or when....
"If you can afford to contribute $100, we will place you on FACTNet's Early Warning System and notify you personally by e-mail of emerging threats to your First Amendment freedoms."
42. I have been informed that Wollersheim is claiming that Bob Penny is not sufficiently lucid (due to his multiple sclerosis) to revise the computer hard drive and system for FACTNet since the seizing of the computers by the Marshals during the raid. Wollersheim even claimed that Penny has difficulty putting sentences together. In fact, Wollersheim is claiming that the system is ruined since Penny can do nothing. I know that this is a complete lie as I have received e-mail from Penny on October 5, 1995 and he was quite lucid and discussed how he had to set up the computer three times already and he might have to do it a fourth time. This is hardly an individual who is suffering so much that he is not lucid and Penny is hardly unable to put sentences together. I personally believe that Penny has been misled by Wollersheim.
43. I want to say the Church has treated me very well throughout the time period of my discussions with the Church and its representatives, especially considering the way I treated it recently. Throughout, I have had the option to have my own legal counsel, but I have declined as it was and is not needed. I am merely resigning from FACTNet because it is an organization which is headed in a direction I do not want to travel. I am receiving no monetary compensation from the Church for executing this declaration, nor did I ask for any.
I declare under perjury under the laws of the United States of America, that the foregoing is true and correct.
Executed this _______ [handwritten 25th] day of October 1995 at Cape Town,
South Africa.
[Signed]
_________________
Kim Baker