Excerpts from:

Holy Wars: A Mother's fight with a Bellevue Church

Eastside Week

February 9, 1994

By John Colwell

Under the Influence?

A desperate mother had her son kidnapped to destroy his loyalty to a Bellevue church. After three years, two lawsuits, and a Geraldo episode, this family feud has become a pawn in a bigger, even nastier conflict.

Jason Scott knew his mother was not to be trusted. She had steeped off the godly path, arranging the capture and conversion of his younger brothers. Jason remained safe from her, so long as his pastor was near. But one winter day three years ago, when his brother asked for some help moving carpet scraps, the amiable teen-ager dropped his guard and drove right over to his mother's Kirkland house.

Three men jumped the 18-year-old in the driveway. He was cuffed and dragged through the house to a waiting van. "I was headfirst, on my back, going downstairs," 6-foot-plus, 200-pound Jason later told police. "He was
praying in tongues and calling me the devil," his mother says.

The mother, Kathy Tonkin, paid the men thousands of dollars to kidnap her son and wrest control of his mind from the pastor of a fundamentalist Bellevue church. She calls it a cult; she says her boy was brainwashed. That's why he was taken to a secure beach house in Grays Harbour County, where he was to be "deprogrammed." The youth, however, escaped and called police.

Rick Ross, a veteran deprogrammer out of Arizona who was catapulted into the national spotlight during the Waco reckoning, had hired on to help retrieve Jason, mind and body, from the influence of Life Tabernacle Church in Bellevue. With scores of successful conversions to his credit, including those of Jason's younger brothers, Ross was prepared. But Ross never knew how difficult this deprogramming would become.

As soon as Jason found a lax moment to flee his captors and call police, Ross and the abductors found themselves open to criminal prosecution, though it took more than two years for felony kidnapping charges to be filed against them. (Jason stopped short of pressing charges against his mother.)

The trial took place last month in Montesano, the county seat of Grays Harbour County. But even after their airing in court, the issues behind Jason's kidnapping are hardly on their way to being resolved.

Three hours after he was abducted from his mother's home, Jason found himself restrained in the shower of a luxurious beach house as Ocean Shores, according to police reports.

An intensive attempt at deprogramming followed. Jason's mother and his brother Thysen (Jason's younger brother)  joined Ross and the other men in monitoring Jason's every move. Ross challenged the church's and Jason's theology, showing the teen-ager videos about cults, one featuring an admittedly crooked evangelist counting money after a revival.

His family showered him with attention. He got full meals and played ping-pong with Thysen. It took three days before Jason broke into tears, sobbing to his mother.

But in loyalty to his church, his pastor, and what he described as his own beliefs, Jason claimed he feigned emotional collapse, Tonkin thought she had gotten through to her "little boy," but last summer he called her - from his pastor's house - and said it was a fake, he was "praying through" the whole time.

"I put on a big show so I could get out of there," Jason told police. "They thought they cracked me when I burst out in tears. I told my mother I was sorry and that I loved her."

She bought it. "I wanted to show I loved him," says Tonkin, explaining why she rented the $1,200-per-week beach house at Ocean Shores where Jason was confined. "I didn't want a dumpy hotel room. I got Jason's favourite foods, presents. He had the master suite. [With Jacuzzi and television, which the church forbids members to watch.] It was beautiful. I thought we could walk on the beach."

Shortly after Jason's apparent breakdown, the whole group went out for a celebratory dinner. Once in the restaurant, Jason excused himself to go to the bathroom, left the restaurant an called police.

Tonkin was crushed. Jason was the last link to the church. (Pastor) Kern and several carloads of church members went out to Ocean Shores to bring Jason back into the fold.

Tonkin believes that Jason's deprogramming failed, in part, because, unlike his brothers, he now has blood ties to the church. In the spring of 1992, Jason married a devoted church woman who will soon bear his child. If
Jason leaves the church, Tonkin claims, he will lose Kathleen, unless she leaves as well.

"I'm real happy," Jason said early last October. But, he added, "I've got a lot of anger and fear. Sometimes I'm afraid to go home." Jason says he has gone to counsellors and doctors to contend with all he has been through. The last few years of his life have been a "big soap opera," Jason says.

The opera is not over yet. He got a job at a Redmond lumberyard, but on Oct. 19, 1993, he lost it. Jason, who will turn 22 in April, is now working as a window washer.

During 11 years of deprogrammings, Ross says charges in the Jason Scott case were the first filed against him. He remains convinced the suit was the direct result of Scientology's influence on Grays Harbour prosecutors, whom he intends to sue for malicious prosecution.

"They [the Scientologists] are against me," Ross says, "because
deprogramming works."

Witnesses to his work - he has deprogrammed hundreds of people - say the 41-year-old deprogrammer is logical, knows the Bible well, and has the patience to spend days on end at his work.

Where his foes may be fiery orators, Ross portrays himself as completely calm and even-tempered. He tries to come off as objective in the face of partisan, passionate opponents. But in fact, his beliefs are just as strong.

Jason's case riles him; not because he failed to deprogram him, but because he believes that Scientologists are using Jason to get him and his profession.

As coordinator of a Jewish prisoner program and advisor to the Arizona Department of Corrections in the early '80s, Ross monitored the different religions in the prison system. He used his expertise to become a private consultant.

IN February 1991, when Grays Harbour deputy prosecuting attorney Joseph Wheeler signed the kidnapping charges against Ross and his cohorts, Scientology officials took note. Bowles & Moxon, a Los Angeles law firm
retained by the Scientologists, contracted Jason to volunteer their services. They began petitioning Wheeler to press charges against Ross.

Wheeler seemed to have a strong case from the beginning. Ocean Shores detectives provided him with Jason's detailed account of the abduction, as well as handcuffs, duct tape, heavy straps, deprogramming materials,
Ross' phone book, and other evidence of a crime in the beach house.

Rick Ross went on trial in Montesano for felony unlawful imprisonment early this year. On January 18, after a week-long trial, the jury took two hours to acquit him, while his accomplices in the kidnapping pled guilty to
lesser charges. Ross leapt from his chair and thanked each juror. With uncharacteristic emotion, he turned to the courtroom gallery and addressed observers including Jason, his pastor, and others openly hostile toward him.

Hardly. Four days before Ross' acquittal, a civil suit was filed in Seattle's US District Court on behalf of Jason Scott..... Named in a suit as violators of Jason's civil rights are Ross, the three kidnappers, and CAN. Jason's attorneys undoubtedly will cite several civil cases in which targets of deprogramming recovered damages against their abductors, guaranteeing that the holy war Ross set off when he first agreed to kidnap Jason is likely to continue for a long, long time.

Excerpts from:

Cult Fighters' Future in Doubt

Los Angeles Times

01 July 1996

Plagued by numerous lawsuits from religious groups and fighting a $1.1-million judgment against it, the Cult Awareness Network has filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 7 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.

"How we will operate or if we will continue to operate in the short term, I don't know," said Cynthia Kisser, executive director of the 12-year-old organization, known for its aggressive campaigns against
groups it considers to be harmful cults.

Critics have questioned the network's tactics, particularly its relationship to professional "deprogrammers" who use forceful methods to persuade individuals to leave cults or religious groups.

The network does no deprogramming itself, but offers information to people seeking to retrieve friends or family members, links them to deprogrammers and operates support groups for former cult members.

Kisser said the Cult Awareness Network's financial difficulties are the result of a September 1995 verdict in which the organization was ordered to pay $1.1 million to a man who claimed that the network helped his mother wrest him from his church.

A jury awarded Jason Scott of Bellevue, Wash., more than $4 million in damages after finding that there was a conspiracy to deprive him of his civil rights when his mother sought to have him deprogrammed of his religious beliefs. Scott was a member of a conservative Pentecostal church that his mother believed was manipulative and abusive.

Defendants in the case included the Cult Awareness Network, deprogrammer Rick Ross of Tucson and his two assistants.

"The Scott case virtually brought deprogramming to a halt in this country," said religion scholar J. Gordon Melton, head of the Institute for the Study of American Religion at UC Santa Barbara. "What this judgment does . . . is cut the communication lines that allow deprogramming to go forward."

The Cult Awareness Network's appeal in that case is pending in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, but organization officials say a ruling on the appeal will probably not come in time to keep the group from shutting down.

The group had originally filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, asking fortime to reorganize its finances without the threat of lawsuits from creditors.

But Kendrick Moxon, a Los Angeles lawyer who represented Scott in the Washington state case, filed a motion in Bankruptcy Court seeking the dismissal of the group's Chapter 11 reorganization plan, and that
motion was granted last week.

"They had a Chapter 11 plan that they were trying to push through that was going to basically result in Mr. Scott getting less than 1% of his judgment," said attorney Laurie Bartilson, who worked with Moxon in
the Scott case.

Bartilson said she expects the group to be forced to close.

The Cult Awareness Network's Kisser said the group is trying to protect its assets by filing for bankruptcy.

"We are privy to confidential information about thousands of people," she said. "In order to make sure that we were properly representing the constitutional rights of our members, our donors and the families that have called us . . . we felt that we needed to go under the protection of Chapter 7."