Thread by @deus_ex_lasagna

#TheSatanicTemple, an allegedly progressive religion that claims to fight religious overreach, is secretly spending tens of thousands in litigation to target former members after TST's owners were criticized on FB for a pattern of failing to live up to their own professed tenets

It’s not clear how much money TST has spent on the suit so far, where that money has come from, or what membership—if any—was consulted in deciding to devote so many resources to this SLAPP action, but it's lasted more than a year, including re-filing after a judge's dismissal

Tomorrow (June 8), the defendants will submit another, hopefully final, motion to dismiss the case for good.

I’m one of those defendants. Let’s talk about it. This is an extremely long thread, but I have receipts for everything.

Now, the suit is still going, so I can’t go into *everything* wrong with the complaint.

But I CAN point out it exists, that TST has deliberately kept it going despite the judge dismissing the original complaints back in Feb, and repeat/quote what the court documents say so far.

Mostly I want to focus on the most egregious aspects of this suit, but in case you feel like following along in greater detail, one of the other defendants has uploaded the court documents here to get around paywalls
adavidjohnson.com/about/united-f…

Public record is fair game too. That’s important b/c TST’s betrayal of its own values (via this suit’s existence) makes more sense given how they’re legally structured and how they work to obfuscate this.

This suit is a window, legally, into what they really are.

Other members & even whole chapters have left, both before and after us, taking all their social media pages with them. None were ever sued on strained accusations of “hacking.”

But we were, and TST threw in a bundle of even flimsier complaints just to draw it out longer.

We can’t read minds, but we think why this may be is based on the fact that we didn’t just leave quietly, but also talked publicly about some of the other corporations TST’s owners have, and what names are on official documents for them, according to the already-public record.

We’ll come back to this - for now, just keep in mind that TST’s two founders have apparently been willing to sign both their legal names AND their pseudonyms **on the same legal document**, while also using the same name for a for-profit corp as they do their nonprofit “church”

The fact that we can publicly quote court documents is especially cool b/c TST thoughtfully included our statements & so-called “manifestos” as supporting evidence, even though they expose some gaping holes in their argument and raise serious questions about how TST treats people

A)
TST has attempted to prolong the suit at our (and possibly their donors’) expense, not by outlining any real harm or damages done, but by spackling over those holes with allegations about as rigorously supported as Fox News conspiracy theories.

Here’s my favorite example:

So it shouldn’t be a controversial statement, but Facebook owns Facebook pages, and they have a much better ability to detect “hacking” or “cyberpiracy” if it had actually occurred.

We argued that in court, and both FB and the judge agreed with us.

(From TST’s complaint and the judge’s dismissal, respectively)

But TST spent however much money paying a lawyer to argue that they somehow know better, that TST owns whichever Facebook page it puts its name on, and that this issue can’t be resolved just by submitting a ticket to FB corporate (which they ultimately did anyway).

Similarly, using that FB page to draw attention to preexisting press releases, local journalism, and the lived experiences of ex-members around the country is not suddenly “defamation,” as TST also tried and failed to argue; more on that later.

In the initial complaint TST repeatedly alleges—with no evidence, just assertion—that we colluded to build up a “competitor organization”

In itself, the concept of a religion reacting to a schism by spending 000s in federal court is absurd. Not even Baptists would stoop so low.

Now, this is bullshit spun out of whole cloth; they include no evidence besides the accusation itself

b/c there is none

Moreover, there are probably dozens of Satanist groups around the US. AFAIK none of them have ever been sued for being founded or sustained by ex-TST members

Anyway, I’d been scratching my head for a year trying to figure out how they thought they could substantiate the allegation of a “rival organization” in a legal document. I finally found out this last March.

As part of their amended complaint, one of their exhibits is my own FB post trying to process my removal as I understood it

b/c from my end, I had just had my religious community of 6 years ripped away without warning, notice, or any real chance to speak on my behalf within it

And I can’t overstate how darkly amusing it is to see a “religious organization” voluntarily include a post where I accuse it of repeatedly mishandling sexual abuse reports at the local level, reports that I only discovered in the aftermath, by other ex-members coming forward…

Just so TST can focus on this exchange to support their allegation of a rival organization - again, in an actual federal court document:

TST talks a lot about how it values beliefs being informed by available evidence, but that comment is the SOLE basis for the idea that “TST 2: Electric Boogaloo” actually exists and harms them:

a throwaway comment by someone 1400 miles away and who isn’t even a defendant.

If anything makes it clear that this is a SLAPP suit where merits don’t matter, it should be a religion claiming to be threatened by a nigh-40-year-old movie reference.

They put this on the federal record, right next to their tenets about how great they think reason and evidence are.

BTW, keep that last clause in mind — their claim that there is “only one The Satanic Temple” — b/c it’s not really true. And I’m going to come back to why towards the end.

B)
Let’s talk about the shitty way they admit to treating members even without suing them, b/c they also included our side of how we were removed as supporting evidence, and it provides some illuminating context as to how the judge finds some of their claims insufficient.

TST kicked me out (and several others) b/c we had been witnesses to an internal ethics complaint that made the regional leadership look bad, in part b/c it brought to light the mishandling by the same leadership of a complaint about persistent sexual harassment from years earlier

Both complaints had been filed in “the proper channels”—but this time, the fact that the victim wanted to include anyone else for transparency’s sake exposed that the existing leadership only intended “the proper channels” to be a black box by which to make complaints disappear.

All of the witnesses - everyone outside the black box - were removed without any more notice than it took to be accused of forming a rogue faction to bully/undermine leadership.

I will never forget that their notion of an investigation into a rogue faction involved unilaterally removing me - a founding member of TST’s WA chapter over 5 years ago, who created room for dozens of new people looking for a community.

While I was on medical leave.

One person who was removed hadn’t even been CC’d on the ethics complaint, but was dating someone who was.

That was just enough to implicate them as a loose end, apparently, and so that person was removed in the same manner as well.

Local leadership was in such a hurry to disappear the ethics complaint & manage the narrative to remaining members that they didn’t even care that some of the “witnesses” were the admins of TST’s local social media.

A week later, with no direct contact, they still were.

In their amended complaint, TST chose to describe all of this as “organizational failures” and “inflammation of interpersonal conflicts” on our part - either one of which is a hell of a euphemism for the “guilt by association” approach that they actually deployed.

This is why, despite Facebook telling them directly that was not the case, TST alleges we “hacked” their social media. They couldn’t convince FB into agreeing to an ad-hoc notion of hacking, so TST decided to pick a softer target & make us prove it wrong in civil court.

A judge already agreed with us once, and we’ll be pointing it out again: TST's allegations are fatally hedged with speculative and conclusory statements to make up for the lack of supporting evidence.

And the fact that at least one claim so far has been dismissed for TST’s failure to allege they communicated their demands explicitly, makes a lot of sense in light of our removal as it actually occurred - as a cover-up of abusive and negligent leadership.

The farcical, paranoid notion of “The Satanic Temple 2: Electric Boogaloo” is just an expensive, scaled-up version of the story used to justify expelling us: that exposing systemic abuse in a way that can’t be ignored is the act of a “rogue faction” that needs to be suppressed.

Yet, this is the organization that people trust to undo the damage wrought by the religious right.

C)
TST also tried to sue us for defamation, a claim that not only did they fail repeatedly to meet the burden of proof of, but which was dismissed w/ prejudice b/c adjudicating it would have required the court to violate the First Amendment.

One of the required elements of defamation is falsity. If you want to claim defamation you have to show which statements were false and HOW. For that reason it’s repeated that “the truth is an absolute defense against defamation.”

(“Falsity” doesn’t necessarily help when you still need tens of thousands of dollars to be able to afford qualified representation/defense, just to get to the point in the process of establishing facts, but still)

TST never even tried to specify which statements were false, instead trying to summarize all of the statements into a theme and then declaring that theme was false & thus defamatory, skipping straight to claiming damages to its brand.

This little sleight of hand is interesting b/c they went to the trouble of including the statements they claimed were defamatory, but then just didn’t point out how any of it was false.

The closest that TST really gets to any kind of specificity is in their initial complaint, when they argue that explicitly disavowing white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, and cis-heteronormativity constitutes defamation by way of tying TST to “extremist ideologies.”

The date is blacked out here b/c it’s wildly wrong, which is a theme for TST but maybe not intentional here.

In the latest complaint, TST also makes a reference to adding and removing Twitter “administrators”, which anyone who has a Twitter account knows is not how that works.

I also can’t say what the ‘extremist groups’ are - again it’s something unspecified in the complaint. I can only speculate based on the idea that explicitly opposing white supremacy and the rest is an “extremist” position that TST is willing to sue to avoid being affiliated with.

Another reason they were probably banking on vagueness is b/c some of their included examples of “defamatory” statements were direct quotes from Lucien Greaves, such as the time he spoke out in solidarity with Augustus Sol Invictus for being disinvited from a convention in 2017.

(If the name “Augustus Sol Invictus” sounds familiar, it’s b/c he’s a wife-beating neo-nazi and holocaust denier who was a keynote speaker at the “Unite the Right” Charlottesville riot later that same year)

splcenter.org/fighting-hate/…

It’s a lofty spiel about his belief that disinviting a fascist speaker flirts with support for “censorship,” and that fascism is common enough in occultist spaces already that platforming it poses little risk of entrenching it further, when it should be getting debated instead.

That statement is still up on his FB page btw. Obviously, I disagree with him.

But it should also go without saying that a statement from a person is not suddenly defamation *of* that person just b/c they say so.

Other such “defamatory” statements include links to testimonials from former members and even whole chapters as to why they left or were removed, as well as local journalism discussing TST’s mistreatment of the women involved in their Missouri reproductive rights campaign.

If you want to see the articles and posts that were cited as exhibits in the original complaint when defamation was still on the table, see this thread:

https://twitter.com/deus_ex_lasagna/status/1397106230322032647

All of these existed prior to the “hacking.” It had all been public record for years. None of this is defamatory simply for having it pointed out that it exists. But TST was willing to force us to hire a lawyer to avoid a summary judgment loss & point it out officially in court.

The judge threw out the defamation complaint w/ prejudice in February, but not b/c TST refused to show falsity. Rather, defamation failed on First Amendment grounds due to a principle called “ecclesiastical abstention.”

A court would have to investigate a religion’s tenets/doctrines and declare them true, even temporarily, and use that as a benchmark against which statements are gauged as false and thus possible defamation. In other words, a ruling relies on a government-established religion.

You’d think that a group that bases so much of its branding around fighting government favoritism of religion would have foreseen this.

Instead they tried to argue that they are a religion, but also that they’re the exception for which the Constitution shouldn’t be considered.

In hindsight, it is simply incredible to me that this is the organization—and lawyer!—that people trust to beat the religious right at their own game in court.

That this is the organization that people consider to be a champion of the separation of church and state.

D)
The judge dismissed all TST’s original claims in February 2021, but in SLAPPs, remember, merits aren’t the point. So they re-filed to throw in a few new complaints that are about as well-supported as their claim to be harmed by “The Satanic Temple 2: Electric Boogaloo.”

Our defense to this part is still in development, so I won’t dig too hard into it.

But I do want to point out a few things on this new line of attack - their allegation that I specifically have run off with TST’s “trade secrets”

It’s even worse given what was actually going on at the time. TST knew in advance that I was uninvolved with any of the events that led up to our removal, b/c I explicitly told them I was on hiatus for personal health - which is also mentioned in the exhibits they include.

Being served the papers for the lawsuit was not only the first direct communication TST had with me about my removal, but it was also the first time I learned I allegedly had *anything* they might want back.

Something is definitely off about a “religion” that tells you there’s only one copy of a critical document, that it’s a hard copy, and that their only recourse is to try to drag it out of someone in court after having kicked that person out without notice.

And in both WA and by the Economic Espionage Act of 1996, a trade secret is defined as information that produces economic value specifically by NOT being available to other parties.

So when a religion tells you in a newsletter that there are no real compulsory obligations and that people can leave whenever, but also argues in federal court documents that a list of those volunteers’ contact info is somehow a “trade secret,” your BS alarms should be going off.

Like the defamation claim, it’s hard not to see this as something they simply tacked on b/c they thought it would make the suit easier to win, which again stands in interesting contrast to their tenet about beliefs/actions being guided by the best available evidence.

Their notion of “trade secrets” certainly doesn’t show up anywhere in the code of conduct they claim I signed (an unsigned copy of which is also included as an exhibit).

I’ve signed confidentiality clauses for real jobs. There is a WORLD of difference between a proper company who takes the time to define trade secrets and custody before you even set foot onsite

vs a “religion” whose definition is declared retroactively while suing you over them.

There’s another reason this is an extremely worrisome strategy.

With the burden of proof on the defendant, TST can claim the existence of any document that might sound plausible for their org to have, pick whichever current or former member they don’t like at the time...

…& then TST can accuse you of having “exclusive control” of hypothetical documents to force their target into summary judgment or debt defending themselves

Whether such documents even exist would be irrelevant till an expensive trial.

(Like, ya know, they’re doing right now.)

Also, imagine a settlement that conditioned these docs being returned to them.

There’s nothing stopping TST from going, “Well, you gave us SOME documents, but where are the OTHERS that we claimed were there? You’re violating the settlement, you owe us for that now too!”

That’s a very real danger we’re being corralled towards now, all b/c TST has enough resources to keep firing off meritless arguments knowing we’re likely to run out of money long before they and their multiple national fundraisers & T-shirt sales do.

Their gamble is that nobody notices that any due diligence that TST could have done to reinforce their case, or preclude this entire punitive attack, was consciously bypassed in favor of covering up reports of systemic conflict, abuse, and mismanagement.

To reiterate what is already stated in the exhibits they voluntarily included - they kicked us out of TST without any kind of notice and on the basis of a conspiracy theory they took no effort to verify, ostensibly b/c they needed it to sound true to the members who remained.

At the very least, considering everything that TST thought of as “defamation,” there’s no reason not to look at this as a trial run for what TST might do to any of its other (poorer) critics and defectors in the future.

E)
In the US, lawyers are fucking expensive, and so we created a GFM to fund our defense.

gofundme.com/f/legal-fund-f…

TST’s response was to make one themselves, specifically, their founder & public leader admitted, to sabotage people searching for ours; not b/c they need the money.

I’m not going to link to theirs, it’s easy to find.

But I want to hammer in on something in particular about it b/c it also encapsulates the depths to which an ostensibly progressive religion is willing to sink, in the hopes of finally eking out a victory in court.

Their bogus GFM makes a bunch of wildly false claims accusing us of theft, libel, and doxxing members, but they also accuse one of us of brandishing a gun at a process server and then suggest that person should be in jail.

The person involved was not a defendant, actually, but rather the wife of one of the defendants. This is her statement as to what happened when a process server came around the apartment of her & her children:

Conversely, this is how TST presents it in their GFM:

We can’t tell whether it was the server or “Malcolm Jarry”/Cevin Soling who fabricated the story, but it’s certainly entirely consistent to the heart of this entire matter: hyping up a civil complaint with allegations they couldn’t manage to verify, let alone file as crimes

Theoretically, that wouldn’t be necessary if the complaint could stand up on its own merits and didn’t need to be propped up by a fabricated moral outrage to distract people into donating.

Theoretically, a religion that talks about the value of compassion/empathy and sells TST-branded Pride flags wouldn’t need to be told that maybe there’s something off about terrorizing a 5-foot trans woman and then trying to smear her as a threat for defending her family.

They do have a tenet about how they view the struggle for justice as ongoing and necessary. Evidently, that’s theoretical as well...

...or at least it can be suspended at will whenever it’s convenient.

F)
People donate their time, energy, & resources to #TheSatanicTemple under the idea that it’s a religion, fighting for religious freedom on the behalf of people whom that term is typically invoked in America to justify persecuting further.

Based on public financials and newsletter announcements, TST has received hundreds of thousands of dollars off of the hopes of people who believe TST is what it advertises & publicizes itself to be

How many TST faithful even know that this suit exists? How many of them know that there’s a nonzero chance that the donations they put forward, ostensibly for “reproductive rights campaigns,” are going towards suing former members?

TST’s “lawsuit edition” of their newsletter last summer certainly makes no mention of this suit, despite it ostensibly being an update of all the legal campaigns that their donations are going towards. This suit was 2 months underway by then.
app.omnisend.com/view/5ee6ec3c4…

There are over 30 legislatures actively trying to make life more lethal for trans people than it already is.

Are people okay with the strong likelihood that their donations towards “rejecting tyranny” are instead helping weaponize the courts against people with no power at all?

At this point, we’ve spent almost 60k defending ourselves from this suit, and I can say exactly where that money comes from.

Life savings. Tax returns. Covid stimulus. Unemployment. A fair amount of charity, notably from other ex-TST members and chapters across the country.

I had a brief cancer scare a few months back and even though it was fortunately nothing, I still needed a few rounds of tests and a specialist to confirm that it was nothing. That’s a bill in the American healthcare system that I can’t pay *and* afford a lawyer at the same time..

...All b/c the religion whose tenets advocate “striving to act with compassion and empathy” wants this suit to keep going, and is willing to make increasingly flimsy claims to do so b/c its “pursuit of justice” needs to be propped up via threat of bankruptcy.

The friends and family who donate to our defense know what it’s going towards. Do the people who donate to the plaintiff have that same informed consent?

If they don’t, why don’t they know?

G)
The thing is, where TST operations are concerned, informed consent is difficult if not impossible to get, b/c the two owners at the top seem to deliberately make the paper and money trail as obtuse as possible. Which brings me to my last point.

Remember where I said above that TST’s claim that “there is only one The Satanic Temple” isn’t really true?

Check the plaintiff again.

We’re not being sued by “The Satanic Temple, Inc.” (the religion), but rather the separate, for-profit entity, “The United Federation of Churches LLC d/b/a ‘The Satanic Temple’ ”

The two are clearly supposed to be thought of as interchangeable, and in order to do that, UFC claims to use “The Satanic Temple” as a d/b/a, counting on the public to know “The Satanic Temple” is the name of the religion but not realize its legal name was changed a few years ago

Some listings for the nonprofit even still retain the previous name “The Satanic Temple”, making it even less clear

(We’re definitely going to be coming back to that third screenshot, which comes from GoFundMe)

The thing is that both UFC and TST are owned/managed by the same two people - Cevin Soling and Doug Misicko - so whenever a press release saying “TST is suing for X” comes out, there’s no one to contradict the media’s assumption that it’s always the same entity filing these suits

...Which not only reduces the impetus for journalists to follow up on the outcomes of any of the numerous lawsuits already being waged or failed by either UFC or TST Inc...

...but which is also something that Soling and Misicko have been able to ride all the way into being able to claim that UFC is the ACTUAL religion and the aggrieved party when doing something like, say, suing that religion’s former members.

“It’s just the one temple, actually”

That Facebook page they pretended we hacked? TST recovered it over a year ago, apparently by submitting more tickets, and wiped it of all the criticism. This suit shouldn’t *still* exist at all, and we’re arguing as such. But it does, in part b/c of this manufactured confusion.

We’re not the only ones who have been targeted this way - it’s TST’s whole MO to be able to be either a for-profit trademark owner when it wants, or a totally legitimate tax-exempt religion, whichever is more convenient at the time.

@LamarOOH, @netflix, @scottsdaleazgov, and @CityOfBoston might want to swap notes on which TST was actually suing each of them.

b/c with Scottsdale in particular, the for-profit started the lawsuit but it was appealed by the church, so it’s even more convoluted

Who actually owns TST?

Side projects like Reason Alliance, collects $ as a nonprofit, then sends it to the for-profit UFC, but at one point was staffed entirely by pseudonyms, not real people!

maybe @MassAGO & @SecretaryOfMass can explain how this is legal, but it seems weird

Similarly, I don’t know whether it’s ethical or even legal for someone to use a pseudonym to register a trademark with the federal government, but if the @uspto has any thoughts on this, my DMs are open.
uspto.report/TM/90026893/AP…

As an aside, one thing TST submitted as evidence against us for defamation was posting @NotoriousTIB’s story for @voxdotcom about the 2018 split where TST’s use of Daily Stormer lawyer Marc Randazza was the final straw. So, funny to see him still involved
vox.com/2018/8/9/17669…

There, too, the deeper problem was a lack of transparency and accountability of leadership; of which issues they were pursuing; and of how a couple of people at the top were deciding how to use all the resources made possible by tens of thousands of volunteers

#TheSatanicTemple is a powder keg of transparency issues, and it’s hard not to conclude that the brunt of why this suit exists, even as other members or chapters leave and take their social media with them, is that we pointed out the keg was there at all.

Those issues persist in this lawsuit. You can see it right in their GFM. Just like w/ “Reason Alliance,” Cevin all but explicitly states that the money is getting funneled to the for-profit plaintiff...but this time it doesn’t need to be reported, b/c it was donated to the church

We’ve found *dozens* of corporations with Cevin’s name on them - or Malcolm’s. If he’s willing to say on a @gofundme that people’s donations to the “religion” actually go to a corp with a different EIN, where else is it also going, given near-total secrecy?

How does anyone know that their support for “reproductive rights” isn’t also going to the "Alliance for Integrity and Justice", which explicitly exists to target pro-Palestine critics & smear “resistance to ethnic cleansing” as antisemitic?

https://twitter.com/QueerSatanic/status/1393384243758178307

It’s one thing to be worried about doxing when you’re a Satanist minor living with their parents, using a pseudonym to stay safe.

Cevin Soling has a Wikipedia page & gives TED Talks and interviews on Colbert about how public schools need to be abolished.

There are serious questions that people around the country need to be asking about TST’s actual relationship to the public interest, and why there’s such a culture of secrecy around TST that Cevin and Doug were willing to hold up its own public history in court as “defamatory.”

“The struggle for justice is ongoing -” yes, absolutely.

But it is incredibly exhausting to hear so many people rush to defend TST with, “At least they’re doing something!” without being specific as to what it’s doing, how it does it, and what the outcomes have been.

It’s even more exhausting knowing that this reflexively positive narrative coexists with TST’s assault on the lives of my friends and me via the court system, wherein TST demands hundreds of grand+interest in “damages” for showing where that narrative isn’t being wholly honest.

If a religion were legitimately interested in “rebelling against arbitrary authority” it would see the irony in suing its former members on a pile of accusations it pulled out of thin air, & actively avoid it…

…rather than the religion’s owners doubling down & openly threatening appeal after a judge’s dismissal of all their claims.

"If."

Someday, hopefully soon, TST will be held to account for the way that it treats the people who take seriously its tenets of reasoned compassion and skepticism towards institutions of power.

We’re willing and able to talk more about this, and we will in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, we would appreciate any support you can offer, as we struggle to survive this pursuit of justice in the worst year of our lives so far.

gofundme.com/f/legal-fund-f…

linktr.ee/QueerSatanic

(This subthread is a directory of the sections A-G)

https://twitter.com/deus_ex_lasagna/status/1401792979665231875

https://twitter.com/deus_ex_lasagna/status/1401796068237398016

https://twitter.com/deus_ex_lasagna/status/1401797168805998596

https://twitter.com/deus_ex_lasagna/status/1401799358299860993

https://twitter.com/deus_ex_lasagna/status/1401801685425479683

https://twitter.com/deus_ex_lasagna/status/1401802782273794054

https://twitter.com/deus_ex_lasagna/status/1401803533624565768

@ezraklein @rmc031 @SLAPPtaskforce @RebeccaAspen @CarolynBick @Chick_in_Kiev @FAIRmediawatch @AndrewJank @annamerlan @D_Towski @hemantmehta @PZMeyers @joe_laycock @DavidNeiwert @IwriteOK @C_Stroop @AmandaMarcotte @Bernstein @Gwenda

@LeahRemini @MikeRinder @nezumi_ningen @SatansJacuzzi @seasonoftheB @BlackMassAppeal @hailsatanpod @SatanicSH @alli_goldi @TwinTemple @JexBlackmore @Satanatrix @G_O_Satan @SatanicSF @artetak @DrSprankle @order_raven @SatanicPortland @gosatanuk @fedorafuncamp @satanicarkansas

@satanxhousewife @ChurchofSatan

PS - another of the court docs they filed was a corporate disclosure agreement detailing the members of the United Federation of Churches - Doug Misicko and someone named "Calvin Soling."

How is it a disclosure statement if you're just going to use ANOTHER pseudonym, FFS.

PPS - Also, our second motion to dismiss is now up and available to view!
adavidjohnson.files.wordpress.com/2021/06/27-mtn…