Two-thirds of donation money for Satanic veterans’ memorial in Belle Plaine remains largely unaccounted for, federal court documents reveal
“If you gave $1,000 to The Satanic Temple, how would you know where it ended up?”
As we’ve talked about before, that is a much more complicated question than most people realize, but we recently got some help understanding what is standard operating procedure for the finances of the world’s most prominent Satanic organization.
It came in the form of a single invoice.
There’s a lot going on here, so we’ve marked it up in Green, Red, Magenta, Dark Blue, Yellow, and Light Blue highlights to make it more clear as we go through it.
Let’s try to explain what’s going and why it’s so important, especially what it says about The Satanic Temple and its owners Doug “Lucien Greaves” Misicko and Cevin “Malcolm Jarry” Soling.
First, where does this invoice come from?
This is only available to the public because of its inclusion as page 93 of Dk. 84-1 in Satanic Temple, The v. Belle Plaine, City of (0:19-cv-01122). If you’re at a desktop, you may want to have that open in another tab so you can follow along for yourself.
We’ll let The Satanic Temple summarize the case for themselves:
The Satanic Temple, Inc. (“TST”) sued the City of Belle Plaine
on allegations of speech suppression, religious discrimination, and promissory estoppel. The City opened a public forum in its park to accommodate a Christian monument, granted TST a right to participate, but closed the forum to exclude TST’s Display.The District Court dismissed several claims at the pleading stage, ostensibly “without prejudice.” But the District Court denied every mechanism to revive the claims. On timeliness grounds, a magistrate denied leave to amend and refused leave to nonsuit the surviving claim. TST refiled the claims as a separate lawsuit, but the District Judge dismissed it because, it found, the Magistrate’s order was a de facto dismissal with prejudice. The District Judge also announced an intention to sanction TST’s attorneys for doing what is necessary to preserve TST’s right of review.
The Satanic Temple Inc.’s brief filed to U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit
And here’s the city of Belle Plaine:
This case is about two resolutions passed by Belle Plaine. The Enacting Resolution created a limited public forum in the City Park. Months later, the Rescinding Resolution ended the limited public forum. This closure was consistent with the Enacting resolution, in which Belle Plaine expressly reserved the right to close the limited public forum. While it existed, Belle Plaine issued two permits under the Enacting Resolution. A director of the Temple received one of the permits. A local club received the other permit.
But unlike the local permit holder, the Temple did not place its display in the City Park while the opportunity existed.
City of Belle Plaine’s brief filed to U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit
The Rescinding Resolution applied equally to all. It closed the limited public forum for all. Belle Plaine’s resolutions did not violate any constitutional rights. Nor did the resolutions violate RLUIPA. Further, the permit Belle Plaine granted did not constitute a promise that must be enforced to avoid injustice under the doctrine of promissory estoppel. The district court correctly ruled in Belle Plaine’s favor on all claims and correctly dismissed the second lawsuit that the Temple filed later based on the same two resolutions and the same permit.
Even in court documents, the name “Doug Misicko” is redacted, so we can’t guarantee that’s the name used for the blacked out region we highlighted green.
But, Misicko is the government name of a man who regularly uses the pseudonyms “Doug Mesner” and “Lucien Greaves”, including official documents.
Ultimately under extensive questioning as “Lucien Greaves” and answering questions about if The Satanic Temple paid “Doug Mesner” a $4,000 fee for services, Doug Misicko admits, “It doesn’t matter either way. It was — it was a 4,000 dollar payment to — to me.”
To most people, the fact that Lucien Greaves was talking about himself in the third person while being deposed (while under a pseudonym) would be a red flag.
But fans of The Satanic Temple are made of sterner stuff.
Of course, there’s always more, and it’s always worse. So far all we’ve addressed is who was receiving money: Doug Misicko.
But moving to the magenta: where did that money come from?
Ultimately, this is an easy question to answer. An IndieGoGo (originally Generosity.com) fundraiser for a veterans monument in Belle Plaine.
Proximately it gets extraordinarily difficult.
The archived screenshot on the right is from June 10, 2017. Notice how it says the total was raised by “283 people in 1 month“. Even if it counted “1 month” as up to “two months minus one day”, that would still be referencing a campaign start date no earlier than April 10, 2017.
Well, in red at the top right, that invoice says it was sent April 2, 2017.
So Doug Misicko figured to pay himself $4,000 before any money came or they knew how it would be needed.
We can actually compare revenue and expenses a little bit because Reason Alliance filed a Form 990-EZ with the IRS for the 2017 calendar year. It describes its total program expenses as going to “encourage reasoning”—while also claiming Doug Misicko got no compensation.
Yes, we know. This is convoluted and involves reading a lot of boring paperwork.
What’s not confusing: The Satanic Temple hides their finances, shuffles money between various corporations without clear restrictions on its use, and the owners use pseudonyms while paying themselves.
In our attempts to be precise, we often talk about “Reason Alliance Ltd.” and “United Federation of Churches LLC” as distinct entities. The former is nonprofit, the latter is for-profit.
But, that is not how The Satanic Temple’s owners treat those entities or their money. For example, this check that is paid to the order of “Reason Alliance Ltd c/o The Satanic Temple”.
Going back to reference the invoice at the top, the purple highlight should be easy.
It’s not.
“64 Bridge Street, Salem, MA 01970”, housed both Reason Alliance Ltd. and United Federation of Churches LLC at that time, plus more since. The most notable of these is 64 Bridge LLC, a for-profit business owned solely by Cevin Soling that does business as the Salem Art Gallery and presumably collects the money from the admissions to come in and see what’s inside the shared headquarters.
Even literally, there’s no distance between them, but this is also true with their money.
Later on, “Lucien Greaves” will just say that either he or Cevin Soling (“Malcolm”) are around enough to get all the mail for all the orgs that take mail at 64 Bridge Street, and they decide what to do with it.
Solely or jointly responsible for all of these for-profits, nonprofits, and of their money, Lucien Geaves says “it really makes no — no difference to me” who officially applies for what since “we were clearly sending our application on behalf of the Satanic Temple either way.”
Giving his deposition as “Malcolm Jarry”, Cevin Soling explained that “Reason Alliance is a nonprofit whose mission is to promote tenets of The Satanic Temple.”
If it’s tactically useful and easier to get insurance with their nonprofit instead of for-profit UFC LLC, then they do that.
There will be people who say, “So what? All businesses/churches/etc. do this”
Mmhmm, the ones defrauding people and cheating on taxes, do this. But not all of them.
So, Doug Misicko got paid $4,000.
He got paid $4,000 that ultimately came from people giving to a fundraiser they believed was intended to create a Veterans’ Monument in Belle Plaine, but money was directly given to an IndieGoGo campaign under the name “Lucien Greaves”, a trademark of UFC LLC, and raised it for Reason Alliance. But we can’t really say that’s where it went.
On sworn testimony, the two men who own and officially control all the money say they don’t know where it went, either. More generally, they don’t seem to treat Reason Alliance and United Federation of Churches (dba “The Satanic Temple”) as distinct. That shows up in how they talk about it, how they received their $100 reimbursement from the city, and the main invoice we’re examining.
But we’re not done, because the invoice also says “Spectacle Films Inc.” (bottom center, light blue)
Again, it is not a secret that in 2012/13, “The Satanic Temple” was a prank film documentary. Cevin Soling and Doug Misicko stuck with it while David Guinan moved on.
What the hell is “The Satanic Temple”? — Ep. 2: Spectacle Films Inc
When asked about this, Cevin Soling says it must have been a mistake:
And I must have taken an existing document that must have been in the footer of the document, and it should have been deleted. So it’s there erroneously.
(For the sake of brevity, we’re skipping a line of questioning about a gap in the records The Satanic Temple provided Belle Plaine between the dates of March 2, 2017, and April 13, 2017. The date on this invoice, April 2, 2017, falls in between those two dates, but this is complicated enough already beyond noting the invoice preceded the work and the fundraising.)
The excuse Cevin Soling gives is that he was just assisting Lucien Greaves with drafting that invoice, and somehow Soling made an error.
Soling also notarized the application for the monument despite Doug Misicko signing it ̷L̷u̷c̷i̷e̷n̷ ̷G̷r̷e̷a̷v̷e̷s̷ “Doug Mesner”, up above, remember.
Sloppy guy, that one.
So you go back and read that again, Cevin Soling either lies about Spectacle Films’ relationship to Reason Alliance/The Satanic Temple, unless you believe that was an honest error or Soling adheres to the strictest, present-tense standards of “have a relationship”.
If so, Doug Misicko tries to pull the same trick when asked a direct question.
“Does the Satanic Temple have a relationship with Spectacle Films?” Belle Plaine’s lawyer asks.
“No,” Lucien Greaves answers.
But curiously, perhaps because unlike Soling, he doesn’t realize it, Misicko does not react as though that invoice is an error.
Unless the full deposition is hiding elsewhere in the docket—and it may be!—we can’t know what immediately follows there because it cuts off.
So, for people who are deeply, deeply invested in The Satanic Temple for their emotional well-being and identity, we know what their reaction is going to be to all of this information.
In the past, when confronted with the knowledge that Lucien Greaves was utilizing the general fund of the for-profit United Federation of Churches as needed to “stay afloat”, TSTers seized on Greaves’ assurance that he never took more than $2,000 per month and hadn’t for a couple months.
Some may even point to these invoices from a month apart to say, “See! It’s only $2,000 each time. What? As hard as Lucien works, you don’t think he deserves to be able to afford to eat?”
But this very much misunderstands what the problem is.
When Doug Misicko—and Cevin Soling—get deposed by professional attorneys, they are jerks and make a bad impression, sure, but they also are evasive at best and can only generously be said to give misleading or forgetful answers rather than outright lies.
Longtime followers (and haters) of this account will note that we often ask the question, “Where is the money going?“
It turns out The Satanic Temple has very good reason to react to that question with silence, projection, hostility, technically accurate statements, and lies. In short, they take great pains to make sure no one but them is able to follow the money and the path it goes on its way into their pockets.
Look at all the work that went into one invoice. Look at all of the misdirection in identities, shell companies, shared funds. And that’s before getting into the gap in dates where TST just pretended there was no communication around the time that Doug Misicko decided to give himself $4,000 out of whatever fundraising money came in.
Damning as it is, this is just what The Satanic Temple turned over. What was in the stuff they didn’t turn over for discovery?
Or yeah, maybe they just went totally silent for a while as a coincidence, and if so, would you be interested in purchasing a bridge?
Look, if Doug Misicko and Cevin Soling wrote into their budgets for The Satanic Temple that “Lucien Greaves” would be paid $5,000 per month for his work across all corporations, we would still oppose TST because we fundamentally oppose the way they are structured and how they squander resources. But at least in terms of distribution of compensation, specifically itemizing $5,000 a month would still be standard and above-board, especially for someone in the Boston metro area.
Instead, the story is that Lucien Greaves doesn’t take any money for his labors—at least no more needed than business expenses and to stay afloat.
Just take their word for it.
Except the thing is, when you do decide to do more than take their word for it, it all falls apart.
“The Satanic Temple paid $4,000 to Chris Andres?” the Belle Plaine attorney asks.
“Yes,” Doug Misicko, as “Lucien Greaves” but discussing “Doug Mesner” as if he’s a separate person, answers.
For sycophants of The Satanic Temple, this is enough.
“Asked and answered!” they would say. “Lucien Greaves just told you where the charity money for a veterans’ monument went. Stop bullying the figurehead and co-owner of our religion and get a life.”
If you were to rely on the Temple to tell you what’s going on, that’s where it would end, too.
But, lawyers and courts, they like getting to the bottom of things.
And at bottom, The Satanic Temple is absolutely rotten. This comes up again and again as TST goes to court, although you wouldn’t know it if you relied on them to keep you up to date.
Despite promising that “more information about this will be forthcoming,” a May 2021 email seems to be the last time The Satanic Temple talked about the case at all—including not updating members that TST lost and the judge forced TST to pay court fees to Belle Plaine for its bad conduct.
Truly, if you relied exclusively on TST for info about itself, you would know less than nothing.
We only know about all of this because the city of Belle Plaine referenced it in their appellate brief response after the Temple appealed this twice-stupid abortion of a lawsuit, and we were able to follow the citations in the docket.
One case! One project! Back when The Satanic Temple was a lot smaller and with less money.
This is a lot of stuff marked up, but try to take it in parts.
The Satanic Temple raised $12,673 for a Veterans’ Monument in Belle Plaine.
They paid the designer $1,000 but claimed it was $4,000 till they got caught.
They paid the fabricator $3,600 but he did 75 hours of unpaid labor to meet his budget, and the Temple didn’t offer to increase his compensation accordingly.
Yes, Lucien Greaves paid himself $4,000, and did it three days after the permit was approved supposedly for “services rendered”.
This is why Belle Plaine is asking, “What is the hourly rate for those services?“
But the lawyers for the city had to catch them to admit all this stuff because they weren’t offering it up.
And hey, where’d the rest of the fundraiser money go—$4,073?
This is not how a supposed nonprofit that wants you to trust it with hundreds of thousands of dollars every quarter should act. Indeed, this is a terrible way for an organization (or “constellation of affiliates”) to act if it wanted its nonprofit exemption to survive the scrutiny of the IRS.
You may not be surprised to learn that the IRS has some pretty strong feelings on the extent to which a nonprofit’s earnings can benefit private individuals. It’s hard to say that they’d be satisfied with the kind of answers that Doug and Cevin offered freely and then confronted with evidence while under deposition.
For anyone who feels like playing the home edition, have a look at the IRS’ documentation on how it defines private benefit in context of the earnings of 501c3 organizations.
Take a few minutes to look once again at the deposition of Doug and Cevin. Look at these two guys who are consistently unable to say directly, except apparently by accident, what is actually happening to thousands of dollars in fundraising when the receipts are put in front of them—and by extension, hundreds of thousands of dollars in fundraising now. Look at how these two guys are perfectly content to admit that whatever’s happening with that money, it happens within the context of organizations that depending on what is most convenient at that moment, are either interchangeable or don’t have any relationship with each other.
In reality, these for-profit and non-profit organizations that hide and obfuscate all of their finances are owned and governed by the same two guys, operated out of the same physical location, with some corporations sharing the same operating names and website as well.
Then ask yourself if either of these two guys can really be said to be benefiting from this arrangement only incidentally at most, or if the IRS has good reasons for its rules about self-dealing.
There is one more element to this whole fiasco that’s not significant in the grand scheme of things, but still says an awful lot.
Of the $12,673 that TST raised, $1,000 came from someone promised their name on a plaque on the “Baphomet with Children” monument. You can see this still in the listing of possible rewards on the IndieGoGo campaign site. This person was the only one who gave at that level.
We’ve had it indirectly confirmed that, no, this person did not end up getting that reward. We also have found no images or references contradicting that purported info. There really is no end to TST’s grift.
But one day, there will be.