Peddling
While Singer’s “coercive persuasion” theory has been debunked, for some years beforehand she was able to peddle it from court to court. It has been estimated that in their heyday, she and colleague Richard Ofshe earned hundreds of thousands of dollars as “expert” witnesses.
And while Singer’s methodology as a “scientist” has been rejected, she has nevertheless received many additional hundreds of thousands of dollars in research grants from the NIMH. For one study, she received $212,968 in NIMH funds over a four-year period. Hundreds of thousands more were granted through other entities, such as the Wright Institute, Rochester University and the Langley-Porter Neuro-psychiatric Institute.
It was from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s that Singer published the majority of her anti-religious papers containing the theory that presented a veneer of justification to the violent “deprogramming” activities of Steven Hassan and such felons as Ted Patrick, Galen Kelly and others.
Singer’s slipshod accounting methods and her failure to keep others appraised of her activities were questioned by Philip Sapir of the W.T. Grant Foundation.
Sapir stated, “I assure that if you can write 55 pages of application material to the NIMH, you can squeeze out five or ten pages for us, telling us where you are in your research (that we are supporting), and what you promise to do, during the extended period of time, i.e., something a little more than the 6 1/2-line paragraph in your letter. I am sorry to take you away from your work, but that’s the way it is.”
“Junk Science”
The Stangel case, described at the start of this article, in which sociologist Richard Ofshe’s self-styled expertise was used in an unsuccessful defense, illustrates the kaleidoscopic careers of these “authorities” in mind-control, coercive persuasion, repressed memory and now false confessions.
Fringe theories, otherwise labeled “junk science in the courtroom” by lawyer and writer Peter W. Huber, lend themselves to being easily renamed and hawked as something else.
While Singer and Ofshe sold their theories to whoever would buy, and while West engaged in “mind-control” projects to turn people into mindless robots who followed orders without question, an anti-religious protege of all three, Steven Hassan, applied their work to violent deprogrammings.
One of Hassan’s victims, Arthur Roselle, then a member of the Unification Church, was kidnapped by Hassan in Michigan. Roselle, who is today 47 years old and a banker, stated in a sworn declaration:
“When I first tried to escape from my kidnappers, they seized my arms and threw me down to the floor. This caused me to hit the tile floor with my chin and cheek. As a result, I received a cut on the inside of my lower lip and bruises on my chin and right cheek bone. My hands and feet were then tied and I was carried into a small room and placed on a cot. Professional deprogrammers Steven Hassan and Ellen Lloyd then began working in shifts to forcibly deprogram me away from my chosen religious beliefs.
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