Reasons R. Kieninger Was Included In Stelle’s Temporary Injunction

 

    The Stelle Group’s attorney told the court that Kieninger should be added to the Court’s Temporary Injunction, which was already in force against the three women who made up the Stelle Committee for Truth, because there was probably collusion between Kieninger and the three women to provide a means for him to correspond with donors to his program. Guitard claimed that Kieninger used the Committee for Truth to “steal” TSG’s mailing list and TSG’s Donor Tracking List to send out a letter that also provided an address for recipients to be able to contact Kieninger.

    The real facts are as follows: Karen Robertson was attending TSG business meetings where “evidence” of all Kieninger’s faults were being touted by the Trustees. There were items being presented that didn’t add up in Karen’s mind and so she decided to visit Kieninger to verify what she was hearing from the Trustees. After a series of such visits, she began to see the plot being developed by the Trustees. She also was able to read a secret strategy document considered by the Trustees as their plan for deceiving the donors. After the November 1986 STELLE LETTER containing the “A New chapter” article was sent out by the Trustees, Karen was outraged at the official instruction to TSG office personnel to minimize information given to people who wrote or telephoned about the changes in the organization and about Richard’s depart­ure. Karen worked in TSG headquarters every day, and she overheard people who had telephoned being told that Kieninger’s address and phone number were unknown, and he could not be contacted. She later asked Kieninger what he was telling people on the mailing list who wrote to him. He replied that all personal mail sent to him at the TSG address was being confiscated on the pre­text that such correspondence was corporate property. Karen asked Kieninger if he would answer mail sent to him. Kieninger answered that he always had and always will. Karen wanted to be sure that Kieninger would indeed reply to his correspondence before she stuck out her neck by protesting to the Trustees the withholding of his mail by TSG. Kieninger agreed that he would answer any of his mail that she might be able to free up. Karen suggested to Kieninger that he himself send a letter of complaint to the president of TSG regarding the withholding of his mail arid the answering of his mail by secretaries of the corporation (which Kieninger did). Meanwhile, Karen challenged the presi­dent of TSG about his order to keep Kieninger from receiving mail addressed to him, but to no avail. Karen realized by then that the Trustees intended to continue to isolate Kieninger from his supporters while defaming him at every opportunity. The Trustees controlled all information going to the 8,500 people on the mailing list, and they did not want Kieninger countering their statements with the truth. Karen and Betty Van Dyck and Marge Haines were all disturbed by the Trustees’ gross deception of the corporation’s supporters and they decided that someone had to tell their fellow donors what was really happening. The inclusion in their committee’s letter of an address where Kieninger could be written was done without his knowledge or consent. Karen delivered to Kieninger a flood of letters from concerned and confused readers of his book that had been sent to her postal box. Kieninger then realized what had happened, and he responded to the letters sent him by his supporters, detailing the facts of his forced resignation.

    The Court agreed with Guitard’s assertion that Kieninger should be enjoined from communicating with any person on TSG’s mailing list, even if such persons wrote to him at the address supplied by the Committee for Truth, because such communications were tainted by the “stealing” of the list by the three women. However, the Court ruled that Kieninger could communicate with anyone he had known or whose address he could find by conventional means other than TSG’s mailing list. The mailing list was originated and maintained by Kieninger to send out a newsletter informing the buyers of his book of the progress being made by the communities he founded based on his philosophy.

    Three women are being sued by TSG Trustees for their activities as the “Stelle Committee for Truth” whereby they told their fellow donors, who were not in Dallas and Stelle, that they were not being given the same story and all the facts about Kieninger’s departure. The position taken by the Trustees in order to justify to the local participants their actions against Kieninger was being supported by their distribution of a confidential package of written materials only to local participants. This package consisted of a Special Communication from the Lemurian Fellowship dated 1968, and a theory presented by two members when they quit in 1982 called Tasks Unfulfilled. Both of these papers had been repudiated by the Trustees personally, but were being promoted now as evidence of Kieninger’s fraudulence. (In the early days of TSG, all members were required to be students of the Lemurian Fellowship in order to receive intensive philosophical instruction. The Fellowship was happy to be provided with so many receptive new students, and a workable relationship had existed between TSG and LF for more than a year when the president of LF told Kieninger that changes would have to be made because even though TSG members were paying for the lesson materials from LF, their cash gifts and tithes were going only to TSG. The president, Mr. Dennis, told Kieninger, “The Fellowship is doing all this work but you’re getting all the gravy!” The LF sent letters to TSG members stating that they would have to choose between being students of LF or members of TSG. Every TSG member quit LF. Subsequently, LF sent their Special Communication to the members of TSG in order to dissuade them from having anything to do with Kieninger or TSG. The members, of course, saw through this ploy except for two people who quit TSG then. Tasks Unfulfilled, written by the Greenlee sisters when they quit TSG in 1982, was an attempt to show that TSG wasn’t the success it could be because Kieninger didn’t pursue the many clues given him by the Brotherhoods in a timely manner and with the penetrative insight he should have mustered. This theory was then regarded as laughable by all the Trustees.) However, in 1986 they were promoting the same papers as grave proof of Kieninger’s fraudulence and incompetence. To this the Trustees added charges that Kieninger manipulated young women in the group to gain sexual favors for himself and that he set up the Philadelphia Fund on the basis of a fraud—the Trustees claiming that Kieninger confessed there never was an island to be purchased.

    The Trustees wanted to be sure no one would give credence to Kieninger’s side where it would matter (i.e. to the local participants whose support the Trustees needed). The Trustees strove to undermine Kieninger in their take­over, but they did not want to endanger the income donated to TSG by spreading the same propaganda to the outside where interpretation probably could not be properly guided. In a confidential Stelle Group Trustee Position Paper of May, 1986, the Trustees stated, “The question is, what degree of information do we release? For a damage control of 1/2 to 5% of our support base, why jeopardize the remainder when there appears to be no effective way to communi­cate the reasons and details of this change?” Early in October 1986, TSG Trustees formulated a secret strategy plan to conceal the truth surrounding Kieninger’s forced departure and his criticism of the Trustees for spending a huge amount of the group’s donated funds (totaling about 50% by mid-1987) for the salaries of the three highly-paid administrators who were also Trustees rather than on programs that Kieninger felt the donors would have wanted. The Trustees’ stated purpose in their concealment of information from the donors was to minimize the expected losses in contributions.

    This same October 1986 paper, which was sent to Kieninger at that time by an anonymous source, contains an Impact Analysis which projected the result of Kieninger’s departure. In the “Economic Considerations section, the Trustees stated that, “Based upon experience, there is likely to be some public react­ion to these changes. It is unlikely that everyone on our mailing list or who supports us is going to like the changes, and we can see this reflected in our own members. Central Strategy No. 1: We need to be prepared to experience a 15% to 20% reduction in income across the board.” In the “Public Relations” section of the Trustees’ Impact Analysis, they state, “Each of our Publics represents a different market with distinctively different values and informa­tion needs. Each one needs to be treated according to their information needs. In the area of information dissemination, we should be market driven.” The Trustees formulated a plan to present Kieninger’s departure in the context that he was “passing the torch’ to them. The November 1986 STELLE GROUP LETTER contained a Trustee-dictated article called “A New Chapter” in which the only so-called quote ascribed to Kieninger as his departing farewell (which he did not make) was given as, “I am confident that the torch is being passed into many capable hands.” There was no public statement of the problems or charges imputed by the Trustees as cause for Kieninger’s forced resignation. The public stance was that all is well and Kieninger is moving on to other work.

    In this same Impact Analysis, it was planned to withhold information from donors to the Philadelphia Fund of TSG, then release information later as a “point of philosophy.” Yet the Trustees laid out in another section of the paper a plan to revoke the $70,000 fund—hardly a mere ‘‘point of philosophy.’’ In the Trustees’s “Contingency Plan for Possible Loss of Financial Support” dated Nov. 10, 1986, it was proposed: “If we decide to request that donations made to the Phila. Fund be reassigned to operating expenses or to education or to some aspect of our existing budget by whatever name, then this resource could handle a sizeable downturn until we moved to a new location.” People donated that money in trust to purchase land, not to cover operating costs and Trustees’ salaries in a downturn.

    All these secret documents and plans predate the letter of the Committee for Truth in December 1986 and, unknown to the Trustees, were being leaked to some of the women who later formed the committee. Karen raised these matters and complained in business meetings of the Dallas members about the coverup being perpetrated by the Trustees and their unethical position of withholding from donors the charges against Kieninger that everyone locally had been provided. After two months of being ignored, the three women who comprise the Committee for Truth wrote the members here of their plan to inform the donors on their own, and several days later sent out their letter using names copied from the TSG mailing list. The Committee for Truth sought to get the Trustees to make their claims against Kieninger public and to give the donors an address where they could write to Kieninger to get his viewpoint as well. After the Nov. 86 STELLE GROUP LETTER had been sent out, recipients who phoned or wrote TSG offices were given evasive, biased responses and were led to believe there was no way to contact Kieninger. TSG was implementing a policy of opening and answering personal mail addressed to Kieninger even though Kieninger had specifically requested that his mail be forwarded to him. Meanwhile the Trustees were trying to pressure Kieninger to move out of the state.

 

 

 

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