From newtimesla.com
http://www.newtimesla.com/issues/2000-12-21/feature.html/page1.html
Brained
Mentally impaired Raul Lopez was $1.7 million richer as the result of
an accident settlement -- until he joined the Church of Scientology.
By Ron Russell
The ostrich eggs should have been a tip-off. But Raul Lopez wasn't worried,
even though he had paid $30,000 for two of them. The eggs were going to
make him rich. After all, his lawyer, Brent Jones, whom he trusted more
than his own mother, had convinced him. Jones came highly regarded as a
member of the Church of Scientology, the Los Angeles-based church in which
Lopez had invested his hope of getting cured of irreversible brain trauma
resulting from an auto accident. Never mind that medical experts had
concluded that little could be done about his nervous tremor and inability
to reason and interact with others the way he did before a big-rig crossed
the center line of a Ventura County highway and slammed head-on into his
pickup truck in 1985. Without exception, doctors advised him to adapt to
his limitations and move on with his life.
But that was before Lopez, 34, stumbled upon a Scientology booth at a
Ventura County flea market. The Scientologists, he concluded, had what he
wanted. "They were going to make me whole again," he recalls once
believing, referring to the technology as well as the expensive training
known as auditing that are the mainstays of Scientology's late founder,
science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard. According to attorneys Dan Leipold
and Ford Greene, Lopez also had something the Scientologists wanted: $1.7
million that was their client's share of the court settlement stemming from
the accident.
As part of a potentially explosive case wending its way toward trial in Los
Angeles superior court -- in which L.A. Police Commission President Gerald
Chaleff is among the battery of lawyers representing the church -- Lopez's
attorneys contend that the church and individuals associated with it
swindled their brain-damaged client out of up to $1.3 million. "They picked
him clean, and we have the documentation to prove it," Leipold says.
For their part, Scientology lawyers deny that there was any wrongdoing,
portraying Lopez as a willing participant during years of involvement in
the church. Robert Amidon, a Burbank attorney who is among the legal team
representing the church, calls Lopez's claim "bogus," characterizing the
case (scheduled for trial next May) as an attack on religious expression:
"It's as if Lopez [were Catholic and] were to say, "Please stop all
confessionals in the Catholic Church because it hurts my brain to listen to
the priest.'"
Regardless of the outcome, the case provides a rare glimpse into the
controversial church's internal operations and associated commercial
enterprises, including alleged hardball tactics it is accused of employing
to promote Hubbard's teachings for maximum profit. Critics, including
former members, have long asserted that Scientology
resembles a sprawling collection of business enterprises more than a
religion and say it is controlled by an unincorporated paramilitary-like
organization known as the Sea Organization, or Sea Org. "It's a seamless
structure that has made the enterprise of Scientology and its individual
components almost impregnable and immune from liability judgments," says
Leipold, who has frequently battled the church in court. "We think this
case is going to make that abundantly clear."Leaving aside its structure
and practice, which have prompted attempts at governmental intervention in
France and Germany, Scientology beliefs have also fueled controversy.
Founded by Hubbard in 1952, Scientology teaches that people are immortal
spiritual beings, called thetans, who were banished to earth some 75
million years ago by an evil galactic ruler named Xenu. A pulp fiction
writer who had served in the Navy, Hubbard hit it big in 1950 by coming up
with the concept of Dianetics, which he dubbed a modern science of mental
health. Dianetics remains at the core of Scientology practice. One of its
staples is a simplified lie detector called an E-meter, which is supposed
to measure electrical changes in the skin while subjects discuss intimate
details of their lives. Scientologists swear by it, among them actors John
Travolta, Tom Cruise, and Kirstie Alley, jazzman Chick Corea, and soul
singer Isaac Hayes. Hubbard believed that unhappiness sprang from mental
aberrations, called engrams, and that counseling sessions with the E-meter
could help get rid of them. Scientologists refer to the extensive (and
expensive) process of clearing the mind in order for this to occur as
"auditing."
But it was another kind of auditing in the 1970s, conducted by the Internal
Revenue Service, that raised suspicions that the church has had trouble
dispelling. The IRS accused Hubbard of skimming millions of dollars from
the church, laundering it through dummy corporations, and stashing it in
Swiss bank accounts. What's more, FBI raids on Scientology offices in Los
Angeles and Washington, D.C., uncovered plans to take over parts of the
federal government. Hubbard died before the case was adjudicated, but his
wife and 10 other former church leaders, whom Scientology leaders have
since portrayed as a rogue group within the church infrastructure, went to
prison in the early 1980s after they were convicted of stealing government
documents to cover up church activities. Since then, the church has been
embroiled in numerous lawsuits, usually brought by former members claiming
abuses, and has spent millions of dollars defending itself, often
successfully.
What makes the Lopez case different to most, his lawyers contend, is that
not only did Lopez exhibit diminished capacity during years of surrendering
huge sums to the church and its affiliated entities, but that his
Scientology handlers were well aware of his condition after having obtained
copies of his medical and psychiatric records. One psychiatrist who
examined Lopez after he was injured and reexamined him last year found that
he was "damaged [by the accident] intellectually, damaged interpersonally,
and damaged with regard to his emotionality." Dr. Leonard Diamond's report,
a copy of which was obtained by New Times, concluded that the auditing
Lopez received from the church provided "absolutely no benefit," adding,
"In fact, the data strongly point to the fact that these experiences have
served to create additional disturbance so that [Lopez] has reached a point
at which he is barely functioning." Contends Greene, Lopez's lawyer, "With
Raul, it was like shooting fish in a barrel.... In a sense, [the
Scientologists] passed him around the way the Hell's Angels might pass
around a teenage girl."
-------------------
By all accounts, Raul Lopez should be dead.
After viewing what was left of his mangled pickup truck following the
horrible early-morning collision in August 1985, which left him disabled,
even his mother has a hard time reconciling how he survived. "[The truck]
looked like a smashed soda can ready to recycle," Alicia Lopez recalls.
"That it never exploded was some kind of miracle." It took an emergency
crew using the jaws of life more than an hour to extricate the unconscious
Lopez from the wreckage.
At the time, Lopez was 19 and had the world on a string. After graduating
from Channel Islands High School in Oxnard the previous year, he had spent
six months in naval training in San Diego, and had just enlisted in the
U.S. Navy Reserves at nearby Port Hueneme. With rugged good looks, he was
popular and studious in high school, lettering in basketball and playing
drums in the marching band. His career ambition was to be an architect or
an engineer. But first, family members say, Lopez wanted to satisfy a
long-held fascination with ships and the military. After coming home from
San Diego, he took a job with a company that services swimming pools in
order to save money for college in the fall.
Lopez doesn't remember the accident. His last precrash recollection is
driving en route to an appointment to clean a pool near the community of
Fillmore. The accident happened in an instant. The big-rig's 18-year-old
driver, who wasn't seriously injured, dozed off momentarily, long enough
for his truck to veer onto the wrong side of county Route 126 and into
Lopez's path. Lopez's recovery was long and grueling. He spent seven months
in hospitals before being released to begin physical therapy to help him
walk again.
While undergoing therapy in the summer of 1987 he hobbled into the swap
meet held at a former outdoor movie theater near Oxnard, where for the
first time he encountered Scientologists. Using a cane to get around, he
stopped to rest in front of a booth advertising Dianetics. A woman
attending the booth struck up a conversation, and Lopez accepted her offer
to receive a free personality test. A few days later, he was contacted by
Jim Hamre, a local Scientology registrar, whom he says told him the test
results indicated that Scientology principles could, indeed, help him with
his mental and emotional distress, as well as get rid of his tremor. Hamre
signed him up for a bundle of Scientology services, including auditing.
"They told me they had what I needed; that if I followed the program I
could be cured of the tremor, and I could be my old self again, which is
all I ever wanted," says Lopez, echoing a main contention of his lawsuit.
During Hamre's visit, the registrar made repeated inquiries as to how much
money Lopez had in the bank, how much interest it earned, and how Lopez
could gain access to it, Lopez says. Although he was aware that he
possessed a large sum of money, Lopez says, he had left the details of his
finances to his mother. Alicia Lopez's name was listed jointly with that of
her son on each of their several bank accounts. Her signature was not
required in order for Raul Lopez to obtain funds from the joint accounts.
Alicia Lopez says she became curious as to why her son began asking her, up
to five times a day, how much money he had. But she says she thought little
of it until the week after Hamre's visit, when Raul let it slip that he had
given money to the Church of Scientology. When she asked him how much, he
implied the amount was $3,000. "I really hit the roof," she recalls. "I
said, "Raul, those people can't do anything for you. They're just out after
your money.' In the end I thought, oh well, his losing $3,000 wasn't the
end of the world."
But during an emotional confrontation in his parents' living room several
days later, Raul Lopez acknowledged that he had really given the
Scientologists $30,000.
The next day, Alicia Lopez stormed into the church's Buenaventura Mission
in Oxnard and, accusing Hamre and others of taking advantage of her son's
vulnerable mental state, angrily demanded that the money be returned.
Church representatives refunded about $28,500 and let Raul Lopez know they
never wanted to see him again. Leipold, the Lopez attorney, contends that
the people from the church knew from the outset that their new recruit was
a millionaire. And, Leipold contends, church officials were also well aware
of his client's condition, having with Lopez's cooperation obtained his
medical and psychiatric records.
That Lopez had ever been permitted to manage his newfound riches without
supervision was the result of a separate injustice, his attorneys say.
Following the accident, Alicia Lopez had turned to a lawyer named Michael
Haley to prosecute the personal injury lawsuit on her son's behalf. Haley
obtained the opinions of several medical experts, including Dr. Charles
Fretheim, a neuropsychologist, who concluded that Lopez was incompetent to
act responsibly on his own behalf. Fretheim strongly recommended that a
conservator be appointed. Yet Lopez and his mother say that Haley never
discussed the doctor's recommendation with them, and never pressed for the
appointment of a conservator. Thus, when Lopez's personal injury claim was
settled for $2.5 million, there was no mechanism in place to prevent him
from accessing the funds, even though family members say he was not
competent to manage money. Haley was later disbarred, and a judge
ultimately appointed Alicia Lopez as conservator.
But the lawsuit contends that Raul Lopez was without a conservator at the
time Alicia Lopez marched out of the Scientology mission, cashier's check
in hand, believing that she had succeeded in snatching him away from
financial predators. Not until many months later did she learn that within
weeks of giving him back the money and booting him out of the church,
Scientologists were again on his trail. Without her knowledge, they had
once more persuaded Raul Lopez to buy expensive church literature, courses,
and auditing as his best chance of regaining his pre-accident mental and
emotional condition. Only this time, the lawsuit maintains, church
officials told him that the only way they would allow him to return to
Scientology was if he kept it secret from his family. Lopez cut off all
meaningful contact with his parents and sister, convinced that they were
"suppressive," the term Scientologists use to describe outsiders deemed to
be opposed to Hubbard's teachings. His mother says her son "drifted off in
his own direction, gradually separating himself from us almost entirely....
He would talk to us but it was on a superficial level, and he let us know
that any discussion about Scientology was off-limits." She and her husband,
Elaiser Lopez (a quiet retired ranch worker who defers to his wife in
speaking publicly about their son), say they didn't learn until 1997 that
Raul's assets were depleted. "He finally came to me one day and said, "Mom,
there's no more money in the bank.'"
-------------------
In the intervening years, Leipold and Greene claim, their client was
"systematically looted" of his wealth at the hands of the church and
individuals associated with it. Between 1987 and 1996, their complaint
says, Raul Lopez spent nearly $600,000 for Scientology products and
services that can be documented. Much of the money went to pay for months
of auditing sessions at Oxnard, which took place up to six times a week,
before he was passed up the bridge for more advanced auditing at both the
church's Celebrity Centre International in Hollywood and at its sprawling
Flag Service Organization (commonly referred to within the church as Flag
Land Base) in Clearwater, Florida. He says he passed out during auditing on
at least three occasions and that each time church representatives
attributed it to personal inadequacies that they said only pointed up the
need for more intense auditing. In addition, the lawyers contend that their
brain-impaired client forked over hundreds of thousands of dollars to
people connected with the church for other purposes.
"They isolated him from his family and took control of every aspect of his
life," says Leipold. "They squeezed him until there was nothing left."
Lopez relates how on several occasions church representatives escorted him
to an Oxnard bank and waited in the car after instructing him to go inside
and withdraw huge sums -- ranging from $10,000 to $50,000 at a time -- in
the form of cashier's checks, which he would then hand over to them. "Some
of the money was for loans [to other Scientologists], and some of it was
for what they said I owed," says Lopez. "I can't tell you what all it was
for. I know I never got much of the [lent] money back."
Whenever Lopez needed legal advice, people from the church sent him to a
Scientology lawyer, the lawsuit contends. They arranged for his taxes to be
prepared by a Scientology tax preparer. They even arranged to have his
auditor -- the Scientologist in charge of his expensive indoctrination
sessions -- move into his Oxnard house with him for 18 months. In
hindsight, he says, he knows this "was just to keep an eye on me...They
really had me under their control. I know that now. But at the time I was
thinking they were going to help me." Lopez describes his years inside the
church as a time when he "shut everybody and everything else" out of his
life, submitting to the exhortation from church officials that people
outside the church weren't good associates because they would distract him
from achieving his goal.
That control, he says, extended to his interest in women. He says his
Scientology handlers dismissed his inability to relate to women as an
indication of difficulties with them in a past life, even suggesting that
perhaps in an earlier life he had been a rapist. "I met this one girl who
worked at a yogurt shop, and I really wanted to ask her out and I know she
would have gone out with me...but [my Scientology associates] said she
wasn't good for me, and so I didn't try to pursue anything," he says.
Meanwhile, the suit says, church officials encouraged him to refinance both
a three-bedroom home and a condominium that he had owned "free and clear,"
each time persuading him to use the proceeds for Scientology-related
purposes. (He was later forced to sell each property at a loss.) "If [the
money] wasn't for something that they said I needed, then it was for
someone else," Lopez recalls. "You're taught that it's your duty and
responsibility to help a fellow Scientologist in need." One such person was
an Oxnard man whom Lopez met through Hamre in 1993. At Hamre's urging,
Lopez says, he lent the man $50,000. The man defaulted after one payment
and never repaid the loan, Lopez says.
If Lopez trusted his Scientology colleagues, it was in no small part
because he had come to believe their continual reminders that
Scientologists "were the most ethical people on the planet." He says he
kept believing that, even as he watched his nest egg disappear.
In 1991, for example, he says Hamre introduced him to Michael Zetner, a
Scientologist who along with two other church members, Robert and Toli
Cefail, persuaded him to invest in a company that they pitched as having
great investment potential. The firm, RC&A Group, purports to install pay
phones in jails to be used by inmates. RC&A is a Scientologist-owned and
-operated company licensed by the World Institute of Scientology
Enterprises, or WISE, a religious corporation with headquarters at the
church's Clearwater operational base. Church critics say it is merely
another entrepreneurial extension of the church, pointing out that RC&A
pays WISE 10 percent of its gross receipts as a licensing fee. Lopez
invested $300,000 in RC&A. His lawsuit contends that he was led to believe
he would earn a payout of $754,000 within several years.
There were three contracts, each containing details that Lopez says he
found hopelessly indecipherable. When he expressed the desire to have a
lawyer review the contracts on his behalf, he says Zetner and Hamre
encouraged him to let a nonattorney Scientologist examine them instead. At
their behest, he says, he took the contracts to a Scientologist ethics
officer, who apparently found the language not quite to his liking in at
least one of the documents. The officer's advice: The contract should
specify that WISE -- the same Scientology entity linked financially with
RC&A -- should resolve any disputes.
It didn't take long for disputes to develop. Weeks dragged into months, and
the expected payments from the telephones he had bought as part of the RC&A
deal failed to materialize. As the arbitration involving WISE turned into a
royal runaround, Lopez says he began to privately have second thoughts
about Scientology, even while holding out hope that somehow the investment
would prove a winner. Still, he was irritated that his complaints to WISE
were going nowhere while fellow church members were encouraging him to hang
in there, reminding him that as a Scientologist it would be improper for
him to take complaints against fellow members to court.
When Lopez continued to complain, church officials in 1993 finally referred
him to a lawyer. Not surprisingly, his attorneys now say, that lawyer,
Brent Jones, a Scientologist, advised Lopez that it was in his best
interest to rely on the WISE arbitration procedure. (RC&A eventually
refunded Lopez's $300,000 principal, but attorney Leipold says that in
failing to live up to its contract to pay his client more than double his
investment, the entire RC&A experience "amounted to a huge money-shuffling
exercise.... In RC&A, the enterprise of Scientology appeared to be giving
him money back when in reality they were hitting him up for that same money
as fast as it was coming in.") But Jones' involvement with Lopez didn't end
with his RC&A advice. In the summer of 1994, Jones approached Lopez with a
business pitch of his own. Jones was involved in breeding and selling
ostriches and invited Lopez to join him. "He said it was a big chance for
me to make a lot of money and that I ought to act real quick if I didn't
want to miss out," Lopez recalls. He paid the $30,000 for the two ostrich
eggs, which were to be incubated on Jones' property near Ojai.
The deal turned sour quickly. Lopez says that when he went to the property
to see his ostrich eggs, Jones told him that he couldn't say for sure which
of several eggs belonged to Lopez. After the eggs hatched, Lopez again
visited, wanting to see his ostriches. Yet, of the several birds there, he
says, Jones was unable to tell him which were his, but assured him that
there was nothing to worry about. At Jones' request, Lopez says he even
built an enclosure for the ostriches on Jones' property, using his own
funds. But not long after the enclosure was completed in late 1994, Lopez's
brief and befuddling ostrich-farming venture came to an abrupt halt. "I
went out to [the farm] one day, and [Jones] tells me, "Your ostriches
died.' That was it. I never even got to know which ones were mine."
Jones, who is now associated with a company called Affinity Food Products,
declined to be interviewed for this article. Similarly, Kurt Weiland, a
high-ranking official within the church's Office of Special Affairs and a
frequent Scientology media spokesman, also declined to comment. In fact,
following a recent hearing before L.A. superior court judge Susan
Bryant-Deason at which lawyers for the church argued unsuccessfully to have
the Lopez lawsuit dismissed, Weiland abruptly interrupted lawyer Mark
Givens as he talked with New Times. He then ordered Givens and three other
attorneys representing the church to leave the hallway outside the
courtroom as a reporter sought to interview them. Hamre also declined to be
interviewed, referring questions to Amidon, the attorney representing the
Buenaventura Mission. Amidon expressed reluctance to discuss the case,
suggesting that the reporter submit a list of written questions, to which
he would respond after talking to his clients.
However, Amidon didn't hesitate to take a swipe at Lopez's attorneys,
Leipold, of Santa Ana, and Greene, of San Anselmo near San Francisco,
saying they "like to think of themselves as cult busters," adding, "They
seek that kind of notoriety." And in what may have been a hint as to how he
intends to defend Hamre and the mission, he suggested that if there is a
villain in the Lopez matter, it may be Alicia Lopez. "She's admitted to
taking her son's money and using it for herself," he says, referring to a
declaration related to the conservatorship by Alicia Lopez on file in
Ventura County Superior Court. But in that declaration, a copy of which was
obtained by New Times, Alicia Lopez asserts that the money she spent from
her son's one-time fortune was for his benefit. Noting that her son had no
medical insurance at the time of the accident, she says she put aside
$200,000 of the settlement as reserve in the event that he incurred
additional medical expense.
She acknowledges that she used another $100,000 of the settlement as a down
payment on a $384,000 home whose title listed her, her husband, and Raul as
joint owners. She says that when her son later recovered enough to begin
driving a car again, she and her husband were concerned about possible
liability if he should become involved in an auto accident. Raul
subsequently signed a quit claim deed transferring ownership of the house
to his parents "to protect the residence," Alicia Lopez asserts in the
declaration. In an interview attended by her son at the parents' home in
Oxnard, Alicia Lopez said that "the idea that I would take advantage of my
son is ridiculous," to which Raul Lopez added, "Absolutely ridiculous."
-------------------
On the Scientology side, the legal team involved in the case has a familiar
look. Several of the lawyers are longtime Scientologists, including
Kendrick Moxon, representing the church's Celebrity
Centre International, and Steven L. Hayes, the lawyer for the Cefails and
RC&A Group. It was Hayes who, a few years ago, showed up unexpectedly in a
Chicago courtroom to purchase -- for $20,000 -- the logo, files, and phone
number of the religion's former chief nemesis, the Cult Awareness Network,
whose assets were auctioned off after litigation led by Moxon forced the
group into bankruptcy. The original CAN gained notoriety for sounding the
alarm about what it considered to be dangerous cults, including Scientology.
Nowadays, the new CAN, which operates out of the Taft Building at the
southeast corner of the famous intersection of Hollywood and Vine, is a
propaganda arm of the church.
The team also includes several prominent outside attorneys, including
Amidon, whose office is in Burbank; New York constitutional law expert Eric
Leiberman; Gregory Long of the Los Angeles firm Sheppard, Mullin, Richter &
Hampton, which represents WISE, and, perhaps most notably, Chaleff, the
police commission president, who represents the church's Flag Land Base. It
is an impressive assemblage of legal firepower that critics say fits a
pattern. "The church not only pays for what it considers to be top-notch
lawyers, there's a public relations aspect to it," says Frank Oliver, a
former high-ranking Scientologist who quit the church, and who now works at
the Lisa McPherson Trust in Clearwater. The trust, which has become a locus
of Scientology opposition, is named for a young woman who died on church
premises in 1995. Critics contend she had been held against her will at the
church compound in Florida for 17 days, which church officials deny.
Although the death was ultimately ruled accidental, McPherson's estate has
filed a wrongful death claim against the church that is still pending. Says
Oliver, "The church hires big-time lawyers to give it credibility, to try
and paint Scientology to look like Mom and apple pie."
Chaleff is an experienced hand at representing the church. He was on board
during the watershed legal battles that stemmed from a lawsuit brought by
former church member Lawrence Wallersheim, who won a multimillion dollar
judgment against Scientology in the late '70s and spent years trying to
collect. Wallersheim, who remains an outspoken critic, went on to cofound
F.A.C.T.NET, Inc. (which stands for Fight Against Coercive Tactics
Network), a Colorado-based Web site providing information about cults and
mind control. In 1995, the church sued F.A.C.T.NET for copyright
infringement after it published hundreds of Hubbard documents that the
church did not want circulated. The case, which reportedly cost the parties
a combined $7 million in legal fees, was settled last year when the firm
agreed to stop publishing Hubbard's works.
Hubbard, who died in 1986, wrote prolifically, leaving more than 550
written works, nearly 3,000 hours of taped lectures, and more than 100
instructional films. Most of his work, including the best-seller Dianetics:
The Modern Science of Mental Health are public. But in the 1960s he began
generating material that he instructed be kept secret. Hubbard wrote eight
levels of the secret materials, referred to as the Operating Thetan (OT)
materials or Advanced Technology, during a 20-year span. Followers deemed
spiritually and ethically fit to study the information pay dearly for the
privilege, from a few thousand dollars for OT 1 materials to tens of
thousands of dollars for all eight levels. After Hubbard's death, his
estate licensed Advanced Technology to a Scientology organization called
the Religious Technology Center.
The church takes extraordinary steps to keep the materials secret, and
moves quickly when items it believes have been stolen surface outside its
control. That was apparently the case earlier this year, sources say, when
the church called in Chaleff to try to wrest away certain Scientology
documents that turned up in the special collections department of UCLA's
Charles Young Research Library. The disputed materials include five boxes
of papers and internal church documents, many of them authored by Hubbard,
that were given to the university by an anonymous donor in 1973. Four other
boxes of documents were added to the collection later.
UCLA library officials declined to discuss the matter, saying they had been
instructed by university legal counsel Patricia Jasper not to comment
publicly. Jasper did not return phone calls. Sources tell New Times that
Chaleff, on behalf of the church, met with Jasper twice last August to
request that the documents be handed over to the church. During a second
meeting, these sources say, he was accompanied by Neil Levin, who heads the
Church of Scientology California, and who expressed the view that the only
way the materials could have come into the university's possession was if
they had been stolen. However, UCLA refused to surrender them, citing their
value to scholars and saying there was no evidence of theft. Since then,
sources say, extra precautions have been taken to secure the documents,
housed in the basement of the campus' main research library. Among other
things, librarians have been instructed to devote increased scrutiny to
anyone requesting to view them.
-------------------
After his ordeal, Raul Lopez can't imagine what could attract anyone to
Hubbard's musings. He says that the only thing he has to show for his
Scientology experience is "an empty checkbook." He has had a few small
jobs, such as detailing cars and delivering pizza, but has not been able to
sustain them. The tremor makes it hard for him to hold a pencil or shake
hands. He often feels confused, agitated, and depressed, he says.
Although he has an overwhelming desire to meet people his age and find a
girlfriend, new relationships outside the family have been next to
impossible since the accident. "Raul's a loner," Alicia Lopez says. "It's
not by choice; it's just that he has trouble relating to people, which
frustrates him a lot, because he's trying as hard as he can."
His retreat from the uncertain world around him is a six-acre spread near
the Ventura County community of Somis, which he refers to as his ranchito.
It is the only asset that has survived from when times were flush. While
separated from his family, he built a barn on the property and lived in it
for a time. With the family's help, the barn has been converted to a house.
Raul sleeps at the ranch and spends most of his days with his parents, upon
whom he relies for more than moral support. A $488-a-month disability check
is his only ostensible income. "Raul's been hurt badly," says his mother.
"I want [the church] to give him back his money. But more than that, I wish
he could just forget about what they did to him."
http://www.newtimesla.com/issues/2000-12-21/feature.html/page1.html
Originally published by New Times Los Angeles December 21, 2000
2000 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved.
The name "Scientology" ® is trademarked to the "Church" of Scientology organization. Neither this web page, nor this web site, nor any of the individuals mentioned herein assisting to educate the public about the dangers of the Scientology organization are members of or representitives of the Scientology organization.
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