03 Sep 2000

cultxpt@primenet.com (Jeff Jacobsen)

About 6:30pm last night I went and talked to one of the stripe cops to try to get an understanding of how the police department handles the picketing here. It was a friendly conversation that didn't really have any conclusion, but I came away with a better understanding of the police viewpoint.

I told him some some of us would be picketing at 7pm and left.

Finally about 7:15 pm (hey, I warned the cops that we were anarchists at heart!) about 8 of us walked over to Flag and started picketing. About 1:30pm Bob and Stacy had picketed Flag a bit and coincidentally there was a wedding going on there, unbeknownst to any of us. The Scientologists complained bitterly about that, that the bride had burst into tears when she saw the picketers there and we had ruined their carefully planned wedding. This made us wonder if the Scientologists include "note: this building is one of the most picketed buildings on earth" in their promotional brochures.

So anyway, we start picketing and it's just so wonderfully quiet there! No handlers, no Van tech, nothing. Just a nice quiet sidewalk. Wonderful.

Down the street a few blocks at the Trust you could just make out some picket signs bobbing around. Aha! So that's where our handlers are! We decided this would be great because it would keep them away from us.

Two other picketers came by but didn't have any signs, so Mark went with them to the Trust to get signs for them, and he videotaped the 6 or so Scientologists led by Mary DeMoss who were circling with their Caberta signs. Before Mark came back to Flag, we had decided to go picket the Sandcastle. So we walked by the Trust and caught the new picketers and Mark and walked down to the Sandcastle.

It was basically uneventful there as well. The staff closed the drapes in the big windows of the restaurant there, and we saw security staff running around like crazy, but that was about all the excitement there was.

By the time we got back from the Sandcastle (about a one hour picket total between both places) the Scientologist picketers were gone.

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.