Well, it looks like we were premature to say that the siege in South Texas had ended. Apparently, it’s just taken a new form.
Yesterday at about 5:30 pm, a San Patricio County deputy sheriff showed up at Marty Rathbun’s house and took him into custody for a Class A misdemeanor arrest warrant. Four hours later, he was released. And now, we’re trying to put together how Scientology managed to get Rathbun thrown in the slammer for something that happened two weeks ago.
At his blog, Rathbun describes the background to the incident, and I also discussed it with him today in a phone call.
If you’ve followed along with the coverage of the Squirrel Busters saga here at the Voice you know that since April, a Scientology goon squad of private investigators and Office of Special Affairs volunteers has had Rathbun’s house under siege. They rented property near him and until recently were planting themselves in front of his house all day, every day, for almost five months.
Why are they doing this? Well, until 2004, Rathbun was the second-highest-ranking executive in the church of Scientology. He left the organization, and then in 2009 began harshly criticizing current church leader David Miscavige at his blog, where Rathbun made it known that he still adheres to the philosophies of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. Over the last two years, many longtime Scientologists have abandoned the official church with the encouragement of Rathbun — many of them have been announcing their own independence on his blog.
This drain of longtime, high-paying members is a crucial threat to Scientology at a time when it is experiencing dwindling membership — membership that it relies on to pay exorbitant prices for services. Rathbun is a serious threat to that business model. And traditionally, Scientology goes after people it considers enemies with vicious personal and legal attacks.
Scientology calls people “squirrels” who dare to practice its rituals and philosophies outside the official church. So its attack on Rathbun took the form of a goon squad that called itself the “Squirrel Busters.” They wore T-shirts with a picture of Rathbun’s head on the body of a squirrel, and with a slash through him. A freelance videographer admitted to the Corpus Christi Caller-Times that the Scientology private investigator running the operation, David Lubow, had informed them that although they were telling the town they were a film crew making a documentary, their real goal was simply to make Rathbun’s life “a living hell.”
Rathbun says that one of the Squirrel Busters is a tall man whose name is apparently Jim Moore. I’m going through old videos and will post a photo of him later when I find a clear shot.
The man Rathbun identified as Jim Moore in one of his videos.
For months now, the Scientologists have been following Rathbun and filming him at his house. Rathbun has maintained that it was a classic operation that was intended to rile him up and get him to provoke an assault. He knows this because in his former post at the highest levels of Scientology, he put together such operations himself. “I helped create Frankenstein’s monster, and now it’s haunting me,” he admitted to me recently.
Rathbun is well aware of what the squad is trying to do, so he’s been hitting back at them with methods like setting sprinklers to rain on them, knowing that it doesn’t reach the level of a legal assualt.
So when he was arrested last night, as you can see in the video, he seems completely dumbfounded. What am I being arrested for? he asks the deputy. When he’s told it’s a Class A misdemeanor assault which includes bodily injury, he asks his wife Monique, who is standing nearby, “Mosey, did you ever see me hurt anybody?”
We’re still piecing together how this arrest happened. Here’s what we know so far.
On September 1, Rathbun says the Squirrel Busters were on the apron of his driveway, making another of their innumerable forays to film and question him. Moore, Rathbun says, was leering at his wife, and he told the man to stop.
“He’s the guy they kept sending in on my wife,” he says, claiming that Moore would show up to question Monique when the Busters squad knew that Rathbun was away from the house. “He’d always manage to get out of there before the sheriff’s deputies showed up.”
But on that day two weeks ago, Rathbun said he was angry to see Moore looking at Monique, and he got aggressive.
“There was a scuffle, but all I did was grab his sunglasses and threw them down on the street. Then I asked him, ‘Do you hear me?’ Tony, they stood around for another hour before they left,” Rathbun says, an indication to him that Moore was not hurt in the scuffle.
For weeks, he adds, Scientology has worked with four local law firms and has been trying to get local law enforcement agencies to look into Rathbun. But months ago Rathbun went public locally with what was going on, and both the Caller-Times and the San Antonio Express-News covered the story — there may have been few people in little Ingleside on the Bay, Texas or in Corpus Christi who didn’t understand at least something about Scientology’s attempt to intimidate Rathbun.
So Scientology apparently went out of town to find a friendly judge. Rathbun learned that his arrest warrant was sworn out by Yolanda Guerrero, a Justice of the Peace in Sinton, Texas. Looking at a map, it’s clear that there’s a much closer Justice of the Peace in nearby Aransas Pass (Charlene Lewis), but Scientology’s operatives went to Guerrero, who apparently hadn’t read the Caller-Times story and knew nothing about Scientology’s involvement.
Rathbun didn’t know about any of that when he arrived at the jail. He says a jail officer laughed when they brought him in. “What are you doing here?” the officer asked him. “The guy had read all the stories and knew all about what was going on,” Rathbun says.
A couple of hours later, Guerrero arrived. “She had to come in and magistrate me out. I guess it’s the equivalent of an arraignment, to set the bail. I tried to argue the case. I told her I’m already in prison, these guys are on me 24/7. She reduced it from $2,000 to $1,000,” Rathbun says.
http://liarcatchers.com/electronic_surveillance.html
He tried to explain to her what was really going on, but she apparently didn’t know the background. “There’s a lot behind this whole thing, I told her. She said that all she knows is that he came in and swore to this. She didn’t know anything about them being outside my house for 150 days,” Rathbun says. He says she mentioned something about a “media reporter,” which tells him that she had apparently bought the Squirrel Busters’ story that they were a film crew.
I left a message with Guerrero’s office, but may not hear back until at least Monday.
I also called David Aken, the San Patricio County attorney who would handle the prosecution of the misdemeanor assault if it were to come to court.
“I have received none of the statements of facts or anything at all,” Aken told me. “What I can tell you is that my office will weigh the totality of the circumstances when we’re deciding whether or not there should be a prosecution.”
Aken said he should receive information on the case on Monday and will know by the end of the week if there is going to be a prosecution.
Rathbun says that when he was being taken away by the deputy, he could see the Squirrel Busters keeping watch in cars nearby. They haven’t left after all, but have apparently now simply shifted their strategy.
“The whole thing was a setup to get me in the can on a Friday night for the weekend,” he says. That plan didn’t work. He was out of the jail by about 9:30 last night, four hours after he was taken into custody.
No doubt, Scientology’s attorneys are now working hard to lobby Aken’s office that Rathbun be sent to prison for “roughing up” Moore.
“America’s got some problems that people don’t know about. The system is so eminently gameable, all you need is money,” Rathbun says.
