CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
January 10, 2009 | David Kelly
Church of Scientology critics are accusing Riverside County of kowtowing to the religion and infringing on free speech by passing an ordinance that limits protest outside the church's sprawling complex near Hemet. For the last year, a handful of demonstrators who believe Scientology is an abusive cult have picketed Golden Era Productions, the church's main center for the production and dissemination of videos and tapes. The campus is home to 500 church employees.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
April 14, 1992 | TRACEY KAPLAN, TIMES STAFF WRITER
The Church of Scientology is seeking permission from Los Angeles County to open a boarding school for 250 students on the site of a former juvenile detention camp near Green Valley. The proposal has worried some of the 1,200 residents in the rural community, who voiced concerns about it at a public meeting Monday night. About 40 people attended the meeting. "They're a cult," Kimberly Flores, a 19-year-old Green Valley housewife, said before the meeting.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
November 6, 1986 | KIM MURPHY, Times Staff Writer
The attorney who won a $30-million judgment against the Church of Scientology sued church members Wednesday, claiming that they concocted a scheme to assault him in the courthouse cafeteria and blame the confrontation on him. In the lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, attorney Charles B. O'Reilly alleges that church leaders coaxed a young woman into "assaulting and battering" him in order to file a false criminal complaint against him.
NEWS
July 29, 1997 | From Associated Press
A French appeals court reduced the sentence Monday for a Church of Scientology leader convicted of involuntary homicide in the suicide of a member. The case centered on the March 1988 suicide of Patrice Vic, 31, who jumped out a window. Prosecutors said Vic was under pressure from the church to take a $5,000 "purification treatment," including daily saunas and a diet low in sugar and high in vitamins.
NEWS
January 28, 1986 | ROBERT WELKOS and JOEL SAPPELL, Times Staff Writers
L. Ron Hubbard, the reclusive science fiction writer who founded the controversial Church of Scientology, has died of a stroke, church officials announced Monday night. Hubbard, according to Scientology lawyer Earle Cooley, died in his sleep last Friday on a ranch outside San Luis Obispo, where only a handful of his most trusted aides knew he was living. He was 74. Cooley told a crowd of reporters who had been summoned to Scientology's Los Angeles headquarters that Hubbard was cremated.
NEWS
February 29, 2000 | JOHN-THOR DAHLBURG, TIMES STAFF WRITER
Scientology, the Los Angeles-based religion treated with suspicion and hostility by several Western European governments, is now under siege in France, where an official report has called for disbanding church operations here. A blue-ribbon government panel studying what French officials define as "sects" has concluded that the faith, founded by the late U.S. science fiction writer L.