29 Jul 2000

cultxpt@primenet.com (Jeff Jacobsen)

Last night about 11 of us picketed the Ft. Harrison Hotel from about 7:45pm to 9:15pm.

This picket was much quieter than last time since the Scientologists were apparently ordered not to yell and scream at us just inches from our faces for the entire time as happened previously. A smaller group simply stood against the entrance and taunted us.

The new method of attempting to "handle" the picket was to have their vans come by every few minutes and load or unload people. As people would walk to or from the hotel a group of Scientologists (or as someone told me, PI's) would try to block the sidewalk by making a human corridor to the van. The FUNNY thing about this was that most of the people coming and going in the vans were THE SAME FEW PEOPLE!!!

Moxon was there and seemed to be directing who got on the vans next. Has he been demoted to doorman?

The police were there in force again and actually blocked the right lane of the street so the vans could park on the street to unload instead of right on the sidewalk as they normally do. However, despite being told to do otherwise, the van drivers kept trying to drive right up onto the street, thus blocking most of the sidewalk. So the goal seemed to be to restrict the sidewalk as much as possible for us picketers.

Dennis Clark was there toward the end but even he stood aside and just watched us. No Gum Tech this night.

When we went to the Trust to get some water and do a live feed to the net, a few Scientologists came and picketed both entrances to the Trust. The cops came over and kept an eye on things again. All the picket signs said "Fascist Central" and appeared to be photocopies.

One interesting thing that did happen was that toward the end I went back out with the autopsy photos and tried to get the picketers to look at them. bob had done that previously but I don't know if anyone actually looked at them then. Ian Shillington finally came over to me and said he'd look at them but he needed to take them from me so he could keep moving while picketing, and he'd look at them while picketing. I said no way (a Scientologist, Lynn Farny, had stolen from me previously) and just held them out so he could view them. Although the lighting was poor, he did look at them as did the other picketers and the 2 Scientology videographers there. I didn't show them most of the photos because some are simply body organs and some are full body shots. But they seemed to actually be looking intently.

After they finished looking they went right back to their rants about "how much is Bob paying you?" and such nonsense.

When a Scientology staffer used a syringe to force a mixture of aspirin, Benadryl and orange juice into McPherson's throat while others held her down, it was "spiritual sustenance," the church argues.